preaching is never exercised in vain? It may be also said that some of Mr. Grubb’s qualifications are hereditary. By birth he is an Irishman (he comes from Tipperary), and his mother was an eminent Quakeress, and extensively useful in her day. It was a sermon from her that was the instrument, humanly speaking, in the conversion of one of the most respected of our open-air preachers in London at the present day. We take much from those to whom we owe our being. Why should we not also inherit some of their excellences? The question may be asked though not answered here. But to return to Mr. Grubb. The last time I heard him he had a truly magnificent congregation at the Agricultural Hall, Islington. Mr. Thain Davidson’s well meant effort to attract outsiders, and to keep up a large Sunday-afternoon service, now that the novelty of the thing has passed away, seems as successful as ever. He and his people have lately moved into the new hall, a most commodious building, and right well do they fill it. It will be much to be regretted if this scheme fall through for want of funds. It appears much good has resulted from it. Not a week passes but cases occur in which it has been shown how awakening have been the addresses delivered. A service that only lasts an hour is a desideratum. No one could have listened to Mr. Grubb without feeling how his kind of address is pre-eminently adapted to encourage and stimulate the religious life, to arrest the attention of the impenitent, and to touch especially the hearts of the young. Mr. Grubb takes no text, preaches no formal sermon, aims at no rhetorical flight, does not strike you as being very intellectual, or very original, or very learned. It may be that he is all three—it certainly is not for me to say that he is not—but whether he be so or not, it is clear that he judges and judges rightly that, at the Agricultural Hall on a Sunday afternoon what is wanted is not the glare of the rhetorician, not the learning of the divine, not the elaborate argument of the trained logician, not the fancy of the poet, not the dramatic action of the elocutionist, but the tender beseeching of one who, saved by Divine mercy himself, and assured of all its fulness and omnipotence, would force a similar boon on all around. It was thus he preached on Sunday afternoon. He seemed to speak out of the depth of a holy love, in language very simple, abounding with the commonest, and, as some might think, most worn of Scripture quotations, yet with a pathos that, as it came from the heart, at once reached the hearts of all his hearers. A more homely or plainer-looking man than Mr. Grubb you don’t often see. As he stood there, with his sunburnt, honest face, with his suit of sober black and grey, with his rustic air, you felt that his power (for there was not a single unattentive hearer) was such as a Whitefield or a Wesley wielded, and which has never been exerted in our world in vain.