In the pulpit he was calm and fluent. _That_, he rightly considered, ought not to be the scene for attempting intellectual display. He took care, therefore, that there should be nothing in his sermons to arrest the _understanding_, or unprofitably occupy it; addressing himself entirely to the feelings and fancy of his cultivated audience, in frequently interesting and even charming imaginative compositions. On the occasion I am speaking of, he took for his text a fearful passage of Scripture, 2 Cor. iv. 3,--"_But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost._" If any words were calculated to startle such a congregation as was arrayed before Mr. Velvet, out of their guilty and fatal apathy, were not these? Ought not their minister to have looked round him and trembled? So one would have thought; but "_dear_ Mr. Velvet" knew his mission and his flock better. He presented them with an elegant description of heaven, with its crystal battlements, its jasper walls, its buildings of pure gold, its foundations of precious stones; its balmy air, its sounds of mysterious melody, its overflowing fulness of everlasting happiness--amid which friends, parted upon earth by the cruel stroke of death, recognize and are reunited to each other, never more to pronounce the agonizing word "adieu!" And would his dear hearers be content to lose all this--content to _enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season_? Forbid it, eternal mercy!--But lest a strain like this should disturb or distress his hearers, he took the opportunity to enforce and illustrate the consolatory truth that-- "Religion never was design'd To _make our pleasures less_;"