‘The toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe.’ Here is a peer, and there his tailor. Here Lady Clara de Vere kills a weary hour, and there is the poor girl who sat up all night to stitch her ladyship’s costly robe. Here is a blasphemer come to laugh, there a saint to pray. Can these dry bones live? Can the preacher touch the heart of this listening mass? Breathed on by a spell more potent than his own, will it in its anguish and agony exclaim, What must we do to be saved? You think how this multitude would have melted beneath the consecrated genius of a Chalmers, or a Parsons, or a Melville, or an Irving,—and look to see the same torrent of human emotions here. Ah, you are mistaken—Mr. Spurgeon has not the power to wield ‘all thoughts, all passions, all delights.’ It is not in him to ‘shake the arsenal, and fulmine over Greece.’ In the very midst of his fiercest declamation, you will find his audience untouched; so coarse is the colouring, and clumsy the description, you can sit calm and unmoved through it all—and all the while the haughty beauty by your side will fan herself with a languor Charles Matthews in ‘Used Up’ might envy. Look at the preacher;—the riddle is solved. You see at once that he is not the man to soar, and soaring bear his audience, trembling and enraptured, with him in his heavenward flight. Isaiah, the son of Amos, when he received his divine commission, exclaimed, ‘Woe is me, for I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips!’ but the popular minister of New Park Street Chapel has no such trembling forebodings; no thought of his own unworthiness, no fear that he is trespassing on sacred ground, or that he is attempting a task beyond his powers, impedes the utterance of his fluent tongue. Not a trace of the scholarship, or reading, or severe thought, or God-sent genius, or of that doubt in which there lives more faith than in half the creeds, will you find in the whole of his harangue.