Well, the service has been begun. The congregation has joined in praise; and now it is hushed and still, while in accents feeble at first, but gradually becoming louder and more distinct, the preacher prays. The liturgy of the English Church is beautiful and touching, but it is cold and unvarying. It does not, with its eternal sameness, answer to the shifting moods of the human soul. Such prayers as those of Binney do. They bear you with them. Your inward eye opens and refines. Earth grows more distant, and heaven more near. For once you become awe-struck and devout. For once there comes a cloud between you and the world and the battle of life. You are on the mount, and breathe a purer air. Your heart has been touched, and you are ready for the preacher and his discourse. At first you hardly hear it. The great man before you seems nervous, awkward, as a raw student. He runs his fingers through his scanty hairs. He takes out half a dozen pocket-kerchiefs and blows his nose. Being asthmatic, you are compelled to cough, and you have immediately the preacher stopping, to turn on you a withering glance. But at length you catch, like a gleam of sunshine in a November fog, a fine thought in fine language. Your attention is riveted. What you hear is fresh and original, very different to the common run of pulpit discourses. The preacher warms, his eye sparkles, his voice becomes loud, his action energetic. You listen to powerful reasoning and passionate appeal. Binney has been compared to Coleridge. I don’t think the comparison good. He is far more like Carlyle. The latter, a Christian, with a good digestion, would preach precisely as Binney. Binney is a Christian Carlyle, with the same poetry and power, the same faculty of realizing great and sterling thoughts; but with a light upon his way and in his heart which Carlyle has never known. I have said Binney is not the kind of man born in great cities. You see that in his physical frame; it is also evident in his mental character. Everything about him is free and independent. Whatever he is, he is no narrow-hearted sectarian, shut up in his own creed, having no sympathies outside his own church. I take it that he sees also a certain kind of goodness in the world; that he does not feel ‘What a wretched land is this That yields us no supplies;’ that he thinks life is to be enjoyed, and that genius, and wit, and beauty, are far from sinful in themselves. The result is, Binney’s experience of life is greater than that of most ministers, and he keeps abreast of the age. He studies to understand its thought, to answer its questionings, to lead it up to God.