I fancy, sometimes, Mr. Binney imagines that he has now made his position, and that, therefore, less exertion is required on his part than formerly. A weaker man would have sunk into the idol of a coterie long before this. A minister is never safe. Popularity is often a fatal boon. Some men it withers up at once. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about our subject has yet to be said. Though the popular pastor of a popular London congregation, he is still plain Thomas Binney—still without the very questionable honour of an American D.D. appended to his name. THE REV. BALDWIN BROWN, B.A. The pulpit is an old institution—next to the theatre, perhaps the oldest we have. To almost every generation of men on this small isle set in the silver sea it has revealed all that it has had to communicate relative to this world or the next. ‘Thanks to the aid of the temporal arm,’ writes Thierry of Edbald, King of Kent, ‘the faith of Christ arose once more, never again to be extinguished, on both banks of the Thames.’ Before that the pulpit had been introduced, and it remained powerful when England, at a monarch’s nod, forcibly dissolved the spiritual union she had so soon contracted and so long maintained with Rome. To the Protestants the pulpit was more essential than to the Catholics. To the Protestants who dissented from the Established Church it became more important still. Without it they were nothing. Dissenting vitality depends upon the pulpit. If that be weak and cold, unable to get at the heart and to act upon the passions of the multitude, Dissent melts like snow beneath the warm breath of the south. If it be otherwise, Dissent flourishes and grows strong. The history of sects is the history of individuals. Whitfield, Wesley are instances. In the Church of England it is otherwise. That has a status independent of the pulpit. Without any particular individual, it has a service elaborate and solemn and complete, and more attractive than from its eternal monotony, in spite of Puseyite natural attempts to the contrary, one would imagine would be the case. Yet it is becoming confessed the Dissenting pulpit has ceased to be what it was. I own I hardly understand why. Tom Moore tells in his diary that no exercise of talent brings so immediate a result as oratory. I believe every one who has ever got upon his legs will say the same thing, and where can the orator have a wider field than in the pulpit? At the best, the senate or the bar have nothing of equal interest. I believe the difficulty may be partly explained in two ways. In the first place, the pulpit is too much a repetition of creeds and theologies that are becoming extinct; and in the second place, there is a dead weight in the pews which masters the pulpit, and deadens its intellectual life. I believe many a minister says things in private conversation that he has not courage enough to utter in the pulpit, and that when he tries to do