"The Sermons of Paley were chiefly a posthumous publication. They were preached to, as they were written for, a country congregation; they are therefore divested of studied ornament of style, and elaboration of argument. But they bear the peculiar impress of the author's own powerful and unsophisticated mind; and for strength of conception, and clearness and sometimes vigour of expression, it may be questioned whether many in them have been ever surpassed. They are not, strictly speaking, eloquent; but there is a force, as well us a novelty of treatment, in many of them, that put them above all comparison. They are familiar without coarseness, and terse without obscurity. Their main charm may be said to consist in the simplicity and strength with which religious and moral truths are handled; the uncompromising and straightforward manner in which human frailties and sins are exposed; the kindliness of exhortation to repentance and godliness of living; the power, purity, and comfort of the Gospel-dispensation; and, above all, the perfect absence of fanaticism, of an overheated fancy, and of a persecuting spirit. But these qualities, which so eminently distinguish the _writer_, ought in some degree to possess the _reader_, of the sermons in question. For the kindly _reception_ of the scriptural truths enforced by Paley, there must be nothing ascetic, nothing morose, nothing self-willed and intolerant, in the mind of him who sets himself in right earnest to the task of their perusal. In like manner, all highly wrought, impassioned, and uncontrollable emotions, which carry the infatuated understanding into a wide and wild sea of doubt and distraction, must be absent from the reader. It cannot be dissembled that, when read with a proper spirit, we rise from the perusal of Paley's Sermons not less convinced of the necessity of putting a guard upon the unruliness of our passions, than of living in peace, goodwill, and brotherly love with all mankind." Among the remainder in the first volume (in all 16,) is Bishop Horne's _Life a Journey_, upon that touching line in Psalm cxix.-- "I am a stranger upon the earth." How beautifully are the consolations of our blessed religion set forth in the imagery of the subsequent extract:--