The last time I heard the Doctor he was preaching about the Chinese. He told us, what most of us knew well before, that China was a very large country, that it had a wall eighteen hundred miles long, that Confucius lived three or four hundred years before Christ; but there was one thing he did not tell us—that the Chinese call a man of talk, and swagger, and rhodomontade, a paper tiger. But perhaps the Doctor was wise, as comparisons are odious. After all, that such a man, with his fulsome eulogies and violent invective, should have come to be a power, is a melancholy fact—a fact indicating that Dissent will have to undergo a very formidable purifying process before men of taste, and intellect, and learning will be found willing to join its ranks. THE REV. THOMAS T. LYNCH. The one great want of the metropolitan pulpit is men abreast of the age, who can sympathize with its pulsation, can respond to its wants, can permeate it with a living faith. The majority of the men in the pulpit cease to be such when they get there. Of the human heart, as it is fevered with passion, or boils over with desire, they know nothing. They see men under a mask. Smith does not talk to his minister as he does to Brown; with Brown he is facetious—occasionally a little loose—and, after a good dinner and a bottle of wine, speaks in terms almost of approval of fashionable follies. The minister comes in and the conversation is changed—allusions are made to the ‘Evangelical Magazine’—the Missionary Society is referred to—something is said of Sunday Schools, and the world for a time is dropped. Smith, junior, acts in a similar way. Before his minister he assumes a virtue, if he have it not—is sedate—quiet, anything, in short, but what his intimates find him to be. It seems to be the condition of the pulpit that it shall see life under a mask; and as to thought, that does not move in the regular time-worn ruts, that is condemned at once. It is not the thought of the pulpit, and it therefore must be false. It may be born of vigorous intellect; it may have been nursed by years of severe thought; to get at it, the thinker may have sacrificed many an early friendship—many a cherished association—many a sacred tie; but, nevertheless, the pulpit would blast it with its stern anathemas, and pronounces it a crime. Occasionally, a man in the pulpit can act differently. Some few years back, when Professor Scott, then of University College, London, now of Owen’s College, Manchester, was in town, it seemed as if an honest attempt was made to meet and win to Christianity the philosophy that was genuine and earnest and religious, though it squared with the creed of no church, and took for its textbook the living heart of man rather than the written Word. In our time the same thing is attempted. The man who has had the courage to make the attempt—and to whom honour should be given for it—is the Rev. Thomas Lynch.