4. The lightest sins to be shunned. 5. The difference in the falls of good and bad. 6. The fleeting nature of joy here on earth. 7. The signs of Christ’s coming in judgment. Sermon XV.—Mysteries contained in the Gospel. 1. Why Christ elected only three of His disciples. 2. Why He led them into a mountain apart. 3. Of the nature of the Transfiguration. 4. Why Moses and Elias appeared. 5. Why they spoke of the passion. 6. Why the cloud overshadowed the vision. 7. Why the disciples were bidden to be silent respecting the vision. 8. How the Father is well pleased in the Son. 9. The order of events in the Transfiguration. These sermons of Matthias Faber, and indeed most of the sermons of great preachers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are very simple in construction. The system of dividing into a great number of heads, and then subdividing, had been cast aside by the Catholic preachers at the Reformation, as unprofitable. But Protestant orators continued the baneful practice. It prevailed till lately in England, and is common still in Scotland. Dr. Neale remarks, “One would think, to read some of the essays written on the subject, that the construction of a sermon was like a law of the Medes and Persians. Look at Mr. Simeon’s one-and-twenty tedious volumes of ‘Horæ Homileticæ.’ The worthy man evidently considered this the greatest system of divinity which English theology had ever produced. And of what does it consist? of several thousand sermons treated exactly in the same ways, in obedience to precisely the same laws, and of much about the same length. Claude’s Essay had laid down certain rules, and Simeon’s Discourses were their exemplification.… The preacher opens with a short view of the circumstances under which the text was spoken. This is a very convenient exordium, because it fills two or three pages with but little trouble. The clergyman has only to put Scripture language into his own, and he is fairly launched in his sermon without any effort. Another almost equally easy method of opening is to be found in drawing a contrast between the person or thing of which the passage in hand speaks, and that to which the writer may wish to allude. And it has this special advantage; that if he is unlucky in finding much likeness between the two, he is sure to discover a good deal of _un_-likeness, and either treatment will supply a good number of words. Thus, as every one knows, come the heads,—a most important part in this style of discourse. Taking Mr. Simeon as a pattern, we shall find that they cannot be less than two, nor more than four; though, indeed, there are not wanting those who have greatly extravagated beyond the superior limit, as the Puritan divine’s ‘And now, to be brief, I would observe eighteenthly, that—’ so and so, may suffice to prove. Then come all the minutiæ of subdivisions and underdivisions (little heads, as the charity