“The Lord said to Joshua, ‘Moses My servant is dead: now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give them’ (Joshua i. 2). Joshua is by interpretation a Saviour, and is the same as Jesus. As he, after conquering Amalek, brought the people into the land of promise, and divided the land between them; so has Christ come to overcome the devil, and to introduce Christians daily into His Church through the Baptismal stream, and finally to lead them into glory. Moses could not bring them in, for the Father saith unto the Son, ‘Moses My servant is dead.’ The ceremonies of the law are made of none effect, ‘now, therefore, arise’ from the bosom of the Father, enter the earth in human form, expel the devils: ‘go over this Jordan,’ drink of the brook of Thy Passion in the way, ‘Thou, and all this people,’ for by the way by which goes the head, by that must the members go, and where leads the general, there must follow the soldiers, ‘and go unto the land which I do give them’—the land of the living, to which Christ ascends and we follow; to which neither law nor prophets, no nor Moses, could introduce us, but only our Joshua, our Jesus, the Son of God.”

I have not yet spoken of the text, except to mention Maillard as having preached on the same throughout a season of Lent. Some of the earlier mediæval preachers delighted in selecting strange texts, and even went so far as to take them from other books than Holy Scripture. Indeed Stephen Langton composed a sermon, still preserved in the British Museum, and published in Biographia Britannica Literaria, on the text:—

which was a dancing-song. Maillard also did the same thing when he preached in Thoulouse, singing at the top of his voice as a text the ballad “Bergeronnette Savoisienne.”

Peter of Celles took a stanza from a hymn, and his example has been followed by others. Hartung preached from the words, “It fell, it fell, it fell,” occurring in the parable of the sower.

Texts have sometimes been selected with remarkable felicity. I have room for two instances only.

In the reign of King James I., a clergyman was to preach before the Vice Chancellor at Cambridge, who was a very drowsy person. He took his text from the twenty-fourth chapter of St. Matthew, “What, can ye not watch one hour?” and in the course of his sermon very often repeated these words, which as often roused the vice-chancellor from his nap, and so irritated him, that he complained to the bishop. The bishop sent for the young man, that he might hear what he had to say for himself in extenuation of the offence; and so well pleased was he with the preacher’s defence, that he recommended him to be one of the select preachers before the King. On the occasion of his occupying the pulpit before James (First of England and Sixth of Scotland), he took for his text James i. 6, “Waver not,” from the translation then in use. This somewhat startled the King, for it touched him on a weak point; but he loved a joke, and was so well pleased with the preacher’s wit, that he appointed him one of his own chaplains. After this the bishop ordered the young man to preach again before his university, and make his peace with the vice-chancellor. He did so, and took for his text, “Whereas I said before, ‘What, can ye not watch one hour?’ and it gave offence; I say now unto you, ‘Sleep on, and take your rest.’” And so left the university. The other story is less known. A Capuchin having to preach one day in a church at—I believe—Lyons, slipped on the steps into the pulpit, and fell on his head. The Franciscan garb is scanty, and the congregation were startled by the apparition of a couple of bare and brawny legs protruded through the banisters. The unlucky preacher however picked himself up with great rapidity, and stationing himself in the pulpit, before the general titter had subsided, gave out his text, selected with great readiness from the gospel for the day—“Tell the vision to no man.”

Next to the text in a sermon comes the exordium.

If a royal personage were present, some compliment was expected to be paid by the preacher to his august hearer, at the opening of the sermon. Some of the greatest preachers have injured their reputation by indulging in unmerited flatteries. Chaussemer, a Jacobite, preaching after the famous passage of the Rhine, before Louis XIV. in Holy Week, when according to custom, the king washed the feet of some poor folk, used these words, “The haughty waves of the Rhine, which you, Sire, have passed as rapidly as they themselves are rapid, shall one day be dried up; but these drops of water, which your royal hands have sprinkled over the feet of the poor, shall ever be treasured before the throne of God.” Noble was the commencement of a sermon of Father Seraphim, when preaching before the same monarch. “Sire!” he began, “I am not ignorant of the fact that custom requires me to address to you a compliment; I pray your Majesty to excuse me; I have searched my Bible for a compliment,—I have found none.” I cannot omit here the really magnificent exordium of a preacher, who, in his matter and style, belonged to the seventeenth century, but who flourished in the eighteenth—I allude to Jacques Brydaine, born in 1701. He had been a mission-preacher in the country, when he was suddenly called to preach at St. Sulpice, before the aristocracy of Paris. The humble country parson, on mounting the pulpit, saw that the church was filled with courtiers, nobles, bishops, and persons of the highest rank. He had been instructed in the necessity of acknowledging their presence by a compliment. But listen to the man of God.

“At the sight of an audience so strange to me, my brethren, it seems that I ought to open my mouth to ask your favour in behalf of a poor missionary, deficient in all the talents you require, when he comes before you to speak of your welfare. But far from it, to-day I feel a different sentiment; and though I may be humbled, do not think for one moment that I am troubled by the miserable anxieties of vanity;—as though, forsooth, I were preaching myself. God forbid that a minister of Heaven should ever think it necessary to excuse himself before such as you! Be you who you may, you are but like me, sinners before the judgment-seat of God. It is then only because I stand before your God and my God, that I am constrained now to beat my breast. Hitherto I have published the righteous dealings of the Most High in thatched temples. I have preached the rigours of penitence to unhappy ones, the majority of whom were destitute of bread. I have announced to the good inhabitants of the fields, the most awful truths of religion. Wretched one that I am, what have I done! I have saddened the poor, the best friends of my God; I have carried terror and pain into the simple and faithful souls which I should have sympathized with and consoled.

“But here, here, where my eyes rest only on the great, the rich, the oppressors of suffering humanity, the bold and hardened in sin; ah! here only is it, here in the midst of these many scandals, that the word of God should be uttered with the voice of thunder; here is it that I must hold up before you, on one hand the death which threatens you, on the other, my great God who will judge you all. I hold at this moment your sentence in my hand. Tremble then before me, you proud and scornful men who listen to me. Listen when I speak of your ungrateful abuse of every means of grace, the necessity of salvation, the certainty of death, the uncertainty of that hour so terrible to you, final impenitence, the last judgment, the small number of the elect, hell, and above all eternity! Eternity! behold the subjects on which I shall speak, subjects which I should have reserved for you alone. Ah! what need I your suffrages, which may, perchance, damn me without saving you? God Himself will move you, whilst I, His unworthy minister, speak; for I have acquired a long experience of His mercies. It is He, and He alone, who in a few moments will stir the depths of your consciences.”

Passing from the exordium to the subject: that which is so tedious in modern sermons is the want of variety in the matter. There are a stock of subjects of very limited range upon which changes are rung, but these subjects are so few that the changes are small in number. Many years ago I was staying with a relation in holy orders, after a tour through different watering-places, and I mentioned to him the curious fact, that on three consecutive Sundays, in different churches, I had heard sermons on Felix waiting for a more convenient season. Having mentioned this, I forgot the circumstance. Five years after I was in a cathedral town, and went to one of the churches there, on a Sunday morning. To my surprise I saw my relation sail up the nave in rustling silk, preceded by the verger, escorting him to the pulpit. As he passed my pew, our eyes met. He was as surprised to see me as I was to see him, as he was only a visitor like myself. I noticed signs of agitation in his countenance, and that he was some time before he delivered his text, which was upon Zaccheus in the sycamore-tree.

After service I waited for him, and on our meeting, his first words were, “You wretched fellow! You put me terribly out; I had Felix trembling in my pocket ready for delivery; but when I saw you, our conversation five years ago flashed across me, and I had to change the sermon in the pulpit.” But this was not all. Next Saturday I was at the other end of England, staying with a country parson, and I related this incident. My host pulled a long face, broke out into a profuse perspiration, and said,—“I am really very sorry, but I had prepared Felix for to-morrow, and what is more, I do not see my way towards changing the subject.”

The remarkable part of this anecdote is, that the moral application was similar in all these discourses. Now, the sermons of the divines of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries seldom offended in this manner. Matthias Faber published three enormous volumes of sermons for every Sunday in the year, containing some fifteen discourses for each, and they are perfectly varied in matter and in application.

The following is a list of the subjects for one Sunday—the second in Lent:—

St. Matt. xvii. “He was transfigured before them.”

Sermon I.—The means whereby a hardened sinner may be transformed into a new man, and his heart be softened.

Sermon II.—The incidents which took place on Mount Tabor, and the lessons they give us.

Sermon III.—What might be seen on Mount Tabor.

Sermon IV.—Why Christ in His passion made His decease (excessum). The point of this sermon depends on the various significations of the Vulgate expression, excessus.

Sermon V.—Pious exercises for the season of Lent.

Sermon VI.—The transfiguration of Satan into an angel of light, and how he deceives men.

Sermon VII.—Eternal good things offered us by God: what they are and what their nature.

Sermon VIII.—Wherefore Christ was transfigured.

Sermon IX.—The great Parliament held on Tabor, and what was treated of there.

Sermon X.—On the meaning of excessus.

Sermon XI.—Man’s fourfold transfiguration.

Sermon XII.—The five sources of joy to the redeemed.

Sermon XIII.—The estimation in which indulgences are to be held.

Sermon XIV.—Lessons drawn from the Gospel.

Sermon XV.—Mysteries contained in the Gospel.

These sermons of Matthias Faber, and indeed most of the sermons of great preachers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are very simple in construction. The system of dividing into a great number of heads, and then subdividing, had been cast aside by the Catholic preachers at the Reformation, as unprofitable. But Protestant orators continued the baneful practice. It prevailed till lately in England, and is common still in Scotland. Dr. Neale remarks, “One would think, to read some of the essays written on the subject, that the construction of a sermon was like a law of the Medes and Persians. Look at Mr. Simeon’s one-and-twenty tedious volumes of ‘Horæ Homileticæ.’ The worthy man evidently considered this the greatest system of divinity which English theology had ever produced. And of what does it consist? of several thousand sermons treated exactly in the same ways, in obedience to precisely the same laws, and of much about the same length. Claude’s Essay had laid down certain rules, and Simeon’s Discourses were their exemplification.… The preacher opens with a short view of the circumstances under which the text was spoken. This is a very convenient exordium, because it fills two or three pages with but little trouble. The clergyman has only to put Scripture language into his own, and he is fairly launched in his sermon without any effort. Another almost equally easy method of opening is to be found in drawing a contrast between the person or thing of which the passage in hand speaks, and that to which the writer may wish to allude. And it has this special advantage; that if he is unlucky in finding much likeness between the two, he is sure to discover a good deal of un-likeness, and either treatment will supply a good number of words. Thus, as every one knows, come the heads,—a most important part in this style of discourse. Taking Mr. Simeon as a pattern, we shall find that they cannot be less than two, nor more than four; though, indeed, there are not wanting those who have greatly extravagated beyond the superior limit, as the Puritan divine’s ‘And now, to be brief, I would observe eighteenthly, that—’ so and so, may suffice to prove. Then come all the minutiæ of subdivisions and underdivisions (little heads, as the charity children call them), all set forth, when the aforesaid discourses came to be printed, in corresponding variations of type.” After a lengthy exordium, one Sunday evening, a preacher divided his subject into twenty heads, each of which he purposed D.V. considering in all its bearings. On hearing this, a man in the congregation started up and proceeded to leave the church, when the preacher called to him, “Wherefore leave, friend?” “I am going for my nightcap,” replied the man; “for I plainly see that we shall have to pass the night in church.”

The conclusion in an old sermon of the three centuries under review, is short, pithy, and to the purpose. It consists in a vehement appeal to the consciences of the hearers, in the application of a parable or a Scriptural illustration, in a rapturous exclamation to God in the form of a brief extempore prayer, or in a string of anecdotes and examples. The following is a conclusion by Guevara, Bishop of Mondoneda:—

“Tell me, O good Jesu, tell me, is there any thing in a rotten sepulchre which is not in my sorrowful soul and unhappy life? In me more than in any shall be found hard stones of obstinacy, a painted sepulchre of hypocrisy, dry bones of old sins, unprofitable ashes of works without fruit, gnawing worms of great concupiscence, and an ill odour of an evil conscience. What, then, will become of me, O good Jesu! if Thou do not break the stones of my faults, throw down the sepulchre of my hypocrisy, reform the bones of my sins, and sift the ashes of my unruly desires? Raise me up, then, O good Jesu! raise me now up: not from among the dead which sleep, but from among sins which stink, for that the justification of a wicked man is a far greater matter than the raising up of a dead man; because that in the one Thou dost use Thy power, and in the other Thou dost exert Thy clemency.”

Many of Paoletti’s sermons conclude with a string of incidents and stories, from which I presume any preacher using the sermon might select that which seemed to him most appropriate.

The effect produced by the sermons of these ancient preachers was sometimes extraordinary. Jerome de Narni preached one day before the Pope, with such zeal, on the duties of residence, that next day, thirty bishops fled from Rome to their several dioceses. St. John Capistran, a Franciscan, preached in 1452 at Nuremberg, in the great square of the town, and he spoke with such vehemence against gambling, that the inhabitants brought out their dice, cards, and tables, heaped them up and burned them before him. The same thing happened next year at Breslau. Of the marvellous conversions, the result of their powerful preaching, of course we can know but little, though there is evidence that they were neither few nor unenduring. It was not an uncommon thing for people to throw themselves at the foot of the pulpit, and denounce themselves of crimes they had committed, or to throng the preacher after the sermon was over, earnestly desiring him to hear their confessions. But the most original scene, the result of a sermon of great power, exhorting to confession and amendment, took place in a church at Turin, during Lent in 1780. After the most touching appeal of the preacher, a man stood up and began to confess his sins aloud. He said that he was a lawyer, and that his life had been one of extortion. He mentioned the names of several families which he had pillaged, widows’ houses he had devoured, orphans’ substance which he had conveyed into his own pocket. This went on for some little while, when suddenly a gentleman on the other side of the church sprang up, and in a voice choking with rage, exclaimed, “Don’t believe him! it is not true. The good-for-nothing fellow is describing me and my acts; but I never did any thing of the kind!” It was evident to all that the cap fitted.

The story is told of a rich usurer of Vicenza urging the ecclesiastical authorities of the town to send for an eminent preacher to declaim against usury. “He has converted many usurers in various towns of Italy,” said the man, “and I should not in the least scruple to pay some of the expense of his coming here.” “But,” said the clergyman to whom he spoke, “if you are determined on your own conversion, you surely need not the exhortations of a preacher to strengthen your resolutions.” “Oh!” replied the usurer, “it is not for myself. This town is so full of usurers, that there is no room for a poor fellow like me to gain a livelihood. Now if they were all converted, and gave up their evil habits, there would be some chance of my being able to pick up a living.”

There were, indeed, preachers who were sent round the country to declaim against certain special sins. Their forte lay in attacking one species of guilt, but they were ineffective when preaching on another point. There were preachers whose strength lay in panegyrics upon saints; and others who—I pity them—were great in funereal discourses. Of the latter class was Geminiano, a Dominican, whose “sermones funebres” were published at Antwerp in octavo, 1611. They are ninety-eight in number. He preached over the graves of popes, archbishops, bishops, abbots, soldiers, doctors, rich men and beggars, beautiful women, an emperor, a drowned man, a prisoner who died in jail, an executed criminal, and a murdered man or two; he preached at the interment of merchants, fishermen, ploughmen, and huntsmen—in short, it would be hard to find some over whom John Geminiano did not dolorously hold forth. A sad moment for Geminiano when he first let people understand that his strong point lay in a grave.

A really great preacher was never suffered to hide his light under a bushel; according to our parochial system, the most eloquent man of the day may, for aught we know, be perched on the top of a Wiltshire down, or be buried in the clay of a North Devon parsonage, fifteen miles from a railway.

The Roman Church had the regular clergy to draw upon for preachers, and as they had no ties, could send them up and down the country, so that the same course of sermons would serve them again and again. Indeed, otherwise it would have been impossible for some of the favourite preachers to have continued providing fresh matter and committing it to memory, for it must be remembered written sermons are not tolerated in the Roman communion. It might be possible for an eloquent man with a lively imagination to continue for long without exhausting himself, but how could a solid and learned preacher, who relied on quotations, continue extracting and committing to memory long paragraphs from the Fathers, Sunday after Sunday, and year after year? Let us take a sermon of Mangotius the Jesuit, for instance.

Adrian Mangotius was a Dutchman, and consequently eminently practical and unimaginative. His sermons are good in their way; there is not a bit of originality in them, but the fragments of which they are composed are judiciously selected. In his fifty-ninth discourse, he quotes St. Matthew four times, St. Luke thrice, St. John twice, the Epistles five times, Revelation once, the Old Testament ten times, St. Augustine a dozen times, St. Gregory four times, St. Ambrose twice, St. Jerome twice, St. Bernard twice, St. Thomas Aquinas once, Cicero some three or four times, Plutarch, Sallust, and Virgil once.

This style of sermon suits some people, perhaps, but it did not take with the masses, who liked richness of imagery, abundance of simile, and neatness of illustration. So when Father d’Harrone, a man of sound learning, but little brilliancy of genius, preached a course in Rouen, after the great Bourdaloue, to use his own words:—“When Bourdaloue preached last year at Rouen, artisans quitted their business, merchants their wares, lawyers the court, doctors their sick; but as for me, when I followed, I set all in order again; no one neglected his occupation.”

In the following pages I have given a sketch of some of the most remarkable preachers of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. The divine and the bibliographer may miss the names of some great and eminent men, as Paolo Segneri, Antonio Vieyra, Latimer, Andrewes, &c. But these men are either well known, or their lives and sermons are within the reach of English readers. Segneri’s Lenten sermons have been translated and somewhat diluted by Prebendary Ford, Vieyra is noticed in “Mediæval Sermons,” and English preachers I have omitted entirely to notice, because they are for the most part hopelessly dull.

GABRIEL BIEL.

This excellent and learned man is generally supposed, from his name Biel, the modern Bienne, to have been a Swiss, though some assert that he was a native of Spire, and the latter is probably the real place of his nativity, though his family may have been of Swiss extraction, for he is called “Gabriel Biel ex Spira” in the beginning of his “Sermones de tempore,” as published by Johan Otmar, in Tubingen, 1510.

He went by the name of “the Collector,” from the fact of his being a laborious compiler rather than an original composer.

He was undoubtedly one of the best scholastic divines of his age, and was a careful reader of the Fathers.

Gabriel Biel was a member of the Regular Canons, and was Doctor of Theology, which he taught as professor in the University of Tubingen, founded by Count Eberhardt of Wirtemberg, in 1477.

He soon became a favourite with this nobleman, who listened to his sermons with delight.

At one time he was vicar and ordinary preacher at the metropolitan church of St. Martin at Mainz, but the date of his appointment is uncertain. Gabriel Biel was a man of gravity and learning; his sermons were popular, not on account of the eloquence with which they were delivered, for of that there was little, but of their beautiful simplicity and intrinsic excellence.

His hearers were not amused by his discourses, but I venture to say that they were edified.

His style is pithy, his sentences pregnant with meaning, for what he said, he said in few words, and he said it too very gracefully. Instead of wearying his hearers with unprofitable scholastic quibbles, he gave them practical good advice in plain and homely words.

The date of his death is not known with certainty, but it probably took place in 1495, though, according to some, he lived till 1520.

His works and their different editions are:—

Commentaria in libros iv. Magistri Sententiarum; Basil., 1512; Brixiæ, 1574, 5 vols. in 3, 4to.

In Sententias; Parisiis, 1514, fol.; Basileæ, Joc. de Pfortzen, 1512, 2 vols. fol.; Lugduni, Jacobus Myt, 1527, fol.

Sententiarum repertorium generale; Lugduni, Cleyn, 1614, fol.

Historia Dominicæ Passionis, prodiit una cum Defensorio et Sermonibus cunctis; Hagenæ, 1519.

Passionis Dominicæ sermo historialis; sine loco et anno, 4to.

Sermones dominicales de tempore. Sermones de festivitatibus Christi. Absque loci et anni nota, 4to.; sine loco impressionis, 1494, fol., Goth., a 2 col.; Tubingen, Otmar, 1510, Goth., 2 col.; Haguenaw, 1515, 4to.

Sermones de Sanctis. Absque loci et anni nota, 4to. Ejusdem de festivitatibus Virginis Mariæ, 1599, 4to.

Sermones sacri totius anni; Brixiæ, 1583, 4to.

Sermones medicinales contra Pestem et Mortis Timorem; Defensorium obedientiæ pontificis. Expositio canonis Migsæ; Lugduni, 1514, fol.; Parisiis, Jehan Petit, 1516, fol., Goth.; Hagenoiæ, 1519, fol.; Antuerpiæ, 1549, 8vo.; Lugduni, 1542; Venet., 1576; Brixiæ, 1580; Bergomi, 1594.

Lectura super canonem Missæ, in alma universitate Tuwingensi ordinarie lecta; Reutlingæ, Otmar, 1488, fol.

Tractatus de Monetarum potestate simul et utilitate; Norembergiæ, 1442, 4to.; Colon., 1574, 4to.; Lugduni, 1605, 4to.

Epitome scripti Gulielmi de Occam, et Collectorium circa iv. libr. Sent. Still in MS.

The Exposition of the Mass which passes under the name of Biel is really a copy from the work of Eggeling of Brunswick, as, indeed, Biel owns at the end of the book.

The simple earnestness of Gabriel Biel renders his sermons very attractive; and as being the production of a well-read and a thoughtful man, these sermons furnish ample material for reproduction in the modern pulpit. The reader will not find in Biel much of the fire of the Italian pulpit, nor the richness of simile which characterized the Spanish preachers, but he will find plain truths drawn from Scripture in a very straightforward manner, and applied in short but nervous sentences.

Perhaps the main difference between a sermon of Biel and one of a modern preacher, is, that the former contains many thoughts in few words, whilst the latter consists of many words, but contains few thoughts.

Analysis of Sermon xix. “De tempore,” being a sermon for Septuagesima, on the text from the Gospel: “The kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is an householder, which went out early in the morning to hire labourers into his vineyard,” &c. (Matt. xx. 1.)

Introduction.

This sermon is followed by another on the same Gospel; the subject being, the small number of the elect.

The analysis given will show how wholesome and practical were the discourses of this truly pious and learned man.

JEAN RAULIN.

John Raulin, born at Toul in 1443, of noble and wealthy parents, was educated at the Navarre College in Paris, and took honours in theology in the year 1479.

In 1481 he was elected President in the place of William de Châteaufort, and he filled the position with the utmost probity, and ruled with singular discretion.

In 1497 he resigned the mastership and retired to Cluni, where he lived a life of great sanctity.

In 1501 he obtained a commission from Cardinal Ambassiani to introduce a reform into the Benedictine Order. He died at Paris in the Cluniac monastery, on February 6th, 1514, aged seventy-one.

Raulin was a man of considerable piety, of blameless life, and of the utmost integrity. He seems to have been regarded in his day as a great preacher, and his sermons have been several times republished. Those for Advent have passed through six editions, and those for Lent through five.

Besides sermons, he wrote a “Doctrinale” on the triple death,—the death of the body, the death in sin, and the last or eternal death. He is also the author of a volume of letters and tracts on the reform of the Cluniacs; also of “The Itinerary of Paradise,” “A Discourse on the Reformation of the Clergy,” and a “Commentary on Aristotle’s Logic.”

He was a dry and methodical preacher, vehement in his denunciations of the corruptions in Church and State, and ready unscrupulously to attack all abuses in ecclesiastical discipline. His style is wholly devoid of eloquence, and is precise and dull. His sermons are full of divisions and subdivisions, which could never have fixed themselves in the minds of his audience, and serve only to perplex his readers. They are wanting in almost every particular which would make a sermon tolerable now-a-days; and after a lengthened perusal, one rises from the volumes wondering how there could have been found hearers to listen to such discourses, or readers sufficiently numerous to necessitate a rapid succession of editions.

As a representative man of a type common enough in the century which produced him, he is valuable. For the age and the taste of his period, he is grave; but he sometimes sinks almost as deep in buffoonery as Menot, Meffreth, or Oliver Maillard.

As an example, taken at hazard, of one of his sermons, I will give a short outline of his Epiphany discourse on the text—“It is the Lord that commandeth the waters; it is the glorious God that maketh the thunder; it is the Lord that ruleth the sea.” (Ps. xxix. 3, 4.)

Question. Was it of necessity that Christ should be baptized?

Answer. No; for reasons taken from St. Bernard and St. Chrysostom.

Christ however consented to be baptized for three reasons,—

In the baptism of our Lord, there were three manifestations: the Son in His humanity, the Father by the voice, the Holy Ghost by the descent of the dove.

Then follows an exhortation to humility, and a warning to priests and people to practise godliness instead of contenting themselves with professing it. “The hand is bigger than the tongue,” hints Raulin.

The Son was manifest in His humanity. A question is asked:—Did John Baptist recognize Christ?

Answer:—