Just so preaches Dr. Campbell. In the pulpit he has it all his own way. You cannot contradict him. You cannot even intimate dissent; and he harangues with the air of a judge. Evidently the congregation has been dragooned into what it is, for the preacher gives no sign of intelligence or vigour. He takes a text and preaches from it. The divisions of the sermon are the sentences of the text, and he talks in the most desultory manner imaginable. The oratory belongs to the deadly-lively school, and consists of mild common-places, pumped out with a ferocity reminding one of the stern Puritans of the olden time, but rather out of place in the Tabernacle in which the Doctor reigns supreme, and which we suppose is licensed for public worship, according to Act of Parliament. Moderate your expectations if you go there. Dr. Campbell has been far too busy a man to master the thought and aspect and characteristics of our age. Of what man in England, in London, in the nineteenth century, is aiming at, he seems to have but a remote idea. So blind is he that, if he wants a heathen, he puts on his spectacles and reads you an account of one out of some old Missionary Magazine. Nor does the Doctor atone for this by the beauty of his style and the perspicuity of his tone. His voice is husky and, at times, inaudible; his manner, bad. Sheridan had a bad voice, so had Fox, so had Burke; but these men were orators, nevertheless. Dr. Campbell is not one, and never was one. He builds up no lofty structure. He bears you on no unfaltering wing far, ‘Far above this lower world, Up where eternal ages roll.’ He overflows with no brilliant eloquence, and burns with no celestial fire. He never ascends into the region of beauty and splendour, and life and light. His is not the magic art to take you from step to step along the Christian path, till your soul heaves, and you exclaim, ‘It is good to be here!’ On the contrary, he leaves you flat and cold and dull. He amplifies, and waves his right arm, and quotes texts, and repeats a feeble sentence emphatically; but that is all; he makes no progress. In going from Edinburgh to Stirling, by water, you are carried backwards and forwards, by the winding of the stream, in the most remarkable manner. You see Stirling long before you approach. You keep going, and yet you don’t seem going on. Dr. Campbell winds just in the same way. You have talk without effect; action without progress; words without thought.