A WRITER in Blackwood, in reviewing the poems of Bishop Corbet, of facetious memory, insists that the church has been more distinguished for wit and humor, than any other of the learned professions. This may not hold true in these refined days, and especially with us, where the strength of a man's principles is apt to be measured by the length of his face, and where a large portion of the community seem to think that 'To laugh were want of goodness, and grimace.' But it was not so in the time of Corbet, of South, of Swift, and of Sterne. Even in the present day, the name of Sydney Smith is identical with a grin, and evangelical old Rowland Hill himself could not keep down the busy devil of fun within him. But these are only exceptions. The taste of the age has declared itself, rightly enough, perhaps, against the mixture of things sacred and jocose; and the clergyman who is so unfortunate as to possess a fund of wit, must seek some other field for its display than the desk, happy if he be allowed to indulge it even in private, without a brotherly hint from that benevolent class of individuals, whose chief business in life is to attend to the foibles of their neighbors. To the student, however, it is a treat, to turn aside from the staid formality and correct dulness of the present age, to the times when it was permitted to a man to follow the bent of his genius, however devious; when illiterate audiences, more filled with the spirit of faith than with that of criticism, were as much edified by their preacher's jokes as by his homilies; and when even the good man, dreaming as little as Shakspeare himself that his tragi-comedy would fall under the ban of posterity, went on, firing off alternately the heavy ordnance of learned denunciation, and the lighter artillery of jest and jibe, at the head of the conscience-stricken sinner. Our business, however, is not with the English worthies of this school, with whose merits and defects we are sufficiently familiar, but to introduce the reader to another genius of the same stamp, who flourished at Vienna, where he held no less a station than that of preacher at the emperor's court. PATER ABRAHAM A SANCTA CLARA, if we regard only his quaintness, his queerness, his bad puns, and his jokes, lugged in, like Sancho's proverbs, in season and out of season, was a lineal descendant of those worthy travelling friars, whom Schiller has immortalized by the Capuchin's Sermon, in the introduction to Wallenstein. But in learning, in fervor, in rough and rude but stirring eloquence, he is far above the herd of hedge-preachers. 'Though it appear a little out of fashion,' there is much that is sterling in him. Few court preachers ever spake so freely and fearlessly, or applied the lash of satire so unsparingly to every rank and condition. Had he lived in a more refined age, when cultivation might have chastened without destroying his fancy, he would have stood high among popular orators.