If a royal personage were present, some compliment was expected to be paid by the preacher to his august hearer, at the opening of the sermon. Some of the greatest preachers have injured their reputation by indulging in unmerited flatteries. Chaussemer, a Jacobite, preaching after the famous passage of the Rhine, before Louis XIV. in Holy Week, when according to custom, the king washed the feet of some poor folk, used these words, “The haughty waves of the Rhine, which you, Sire, have passed as rapidly as they themselves are rapid, shall one day be dried up; but these drops of water, which your royal hands have sprinkled over the feet of the poor, shall ever be treasured before the throne of God.” Noble was the commencement of a sermon of Father Seraphim, when preaching before the same monarch. “Sire!” he began, “I am not ignorant of the fact that custom requires me to address to you a compliment; I pray your Majesty to excuse me; I have searched my Bible for a compliment,—I have found none.” I cannot omit here the really magnificent exordium of a preacher, who, in his matter and style, belonged to the seventeenth century, but who flourished in the eighteenth—I allude to Jacques Brydaine, born in 1701. He had been a mission-preacher in the country, when he was suddenly called to preach at St. Sulpice, before the aristocracy of Paris. The humble country parson, on mounting the pulpit, saw that the church was filled with courtiers, nobles, bishops, and persons of the highest rank. He had been instructed in the necessity of acknowledging their presence by a compliment. But listen to the man of God. “At the sight of an audience so strange to me, my brethren, it seems that I ought to open my mouth to ask your favour in behalf of a poor missionary, deficient in all the talents you require, when he comes before you to speak of your welfare. But far from it, to-day I feel a different sentiment; and though I may be humbled, do not think for one moment that I am troubled by the miserable anxieties of vanity;—as though, forsooth, I were preaching myself. God forbid that a minister of Heaven should ever think it necessary to excuse himself before such as you! Be you who you may, you are but like me, sinners before the judgment-seat of God. It is then only because I stand before your God and my God, that I am constrained now to beat my breast. Hitherto I have published the righteous dealings of the Most High in thatched temples. I have preached the rigours of penitence to unhappy ones, the majority of whom were destitute of bread. I have announced to the good inhabitants of the fields, the most awful truths of religion. Wretched one that I am, what have I done! I have saddened the poor, the best friends of my God; I have carried terror and pain into the simple and faithful souls which I should have sympathized with and consoled.