undoubted intellectual force, and is qualified to deal with all the subtle and difficult problems which are being suggested by the restless and daring criticism of our time; but we may remind him that his largest success is attained in dealing with those everpresent and pressing questions which are rising in all human breasts, which the preacher of truth in every age encounters, and which it is his highest mission to answer out of the fulness of his own heart. Whenever Mr. Brooke touches those themes with which we are all familiar, he is a great teacher and helper. Then he speaks to us about those things which are common to the wants and woes by which we are all more or less oppressed. He then looks at the inward and vital experience of our hearts. He becomes what our fathers were always delighted to acknowledge as the "experimental preacher." He lays hold of the commonest and also deepest life of men, sounding its depths, exploring and explaining its mysteries, listening with attentive and reverent ear for its solemn inquiries, and hailing with thankful joy its holy and loving aspirations. We had rather hear him when he speaks to us as man with men, than as he adopts the tone and style of the Christian philosopher, seeking to thread his way for us into the mysteries which mingle with the thought and speech of the passing hour. We had rather hear him discourse on Peter's sin and sorrow, and on David's defeats and triumphs, than upon the profound doctrines which concern the Trinity or the immortality of the soul. How finely he pourtrays the condition of Peter on the betrayal night, and how much in the true manner of Robertson he derives lessons of value for us all!

"Have you ever seen a man who, having nerved himself for days for some great stroke in life, is suddenly betrayed into striking at the wrong time-too soon for success, or too late for honour? He has put all the concentrated passion of his heart into one blow at the wrong time, and the blow exhausts him utterly. He has no power left. He is thenceforth the prey of circumstances.

"Strike as hard as you like at the right time, and everything assists you. The blow, instead of diminishing, redoubles your force; success is parent of success. Strike at the wrong time, or in the wrong manner (and Peter's impetuosity and self-conceit were sure to lead him wrong), and all the virtue goes out of you; you fail, and failure gives birth to failure; your chance is lost, and you become fearful, unbelieving, the victim, for the moment, of any dishonour which may cross your path. So it was with Peter. As high as had been the excitement, so entire now was the exhaustion in the reaction. Fear came in upon him; he turned and fled; and oh! miserable, the brave man became a coward, and the loyal friend a base deserter."

Such teaching as that will help us all, no matter whether we be peasants or statesmen ; nor whether accustomed to the propositions of learned reasoners, or the simple inquiries of poor men. A sermon of that nature might be preached with large profit in the little village church to farmers and cottagers, as well as in the Westend chapel to Members of Parliament, and the high-born dwellers in palatial homes.

The next passage we quote will illustrate Mr. Brooke's exquisite mastery over those subtle forces which enable a preacher to call up before his hearers the scenes which have been familiar to the life that has gone by for him as for others. We know that he can use the brush as well as the pen. He is a painter. He idealises life and truth with touching and beautiful skill. He can sketch, in a picturesque way, the incidents of any narrative subject which is under his treatment. It is his manner and choice to speak thus. These sketches are not thrown off with the marvellous brilliancy and ease with which some have been able to do it; but you have the polished and perfect art of the careful and genuine interpreter of what he sees. He remarked himself, in his preface to the first edition of the "Life and Letters," that "Even Robertson's slight sketches of an idea, traced perhaps in a single sentence, contain the materials for a finished composition. If he is not a creator, he is evidently a lucid interpreter of thought. It is in this power of apt, logical, and striking expression that the chief literary interest of his writings consists." We may not have to acknowledge precisely the same power in his own sermons; but the style and manner are sometimes very charming and impressive. Peter was to him a real man, with the passions and faculties of a man. Only so can the Scripture aid such a preacher as Mr. Brooke in helping and blessing others. The human-ness, so to speak, of the "oracles of God," is an all-pervasive and sanctifying element, without which they would be devoid of that material power which gives them their blessed usefulness for human spirits. The old fashion of seeing in every line of Holy Scripture, whatever the subject might be, a Divine lesson for devout minds, is realised in a different form, and with far more salutary results. The whole of its teaching is felt to be sublime, but profitable for correction and instruction in righteousness.

"Immediately the cock crew. Then Peter remembered the word of the Lord.' Make the meaning of this your own. Much of the memory of the past is only waked by coming into contact with those things with which the past has been associated. See once more a river by which you walked in boyhood; hear a song which charmed your youth, and all the past rises from its grave and lives again.

"Blessed is he whose life has been pure, on whom the stars smile with the same smile with which they greeted his boyhood; for whom the sea hides no dark memories; in whose ear music is always sweet; who can revisit after years the haunts of the past, and no ghastly phantom come to bring back the exiled memory of guilt to chill his blood and sere his brain.

"For there is nothing really dead in this world. You have buried your sin, but it is only buried as the hurried murderer buries the corpse of his victim, with a thin layer of light sand. You pass it by, and inadvertently tread upon the grave. A skeleton arm starts up, and points to heaven and to you.

"There is nothing really forgotten. One touch, one sound, one sight, the murmur of a stream, a breaking wave, the sound of a church bell, the barking of a dog heard in the still evening from a hill; a green path in a wood, with the sunlight glinting on it; the way of the moon upon the waters-may, at certain moments, turn the heart to stone, and fill life with a concentrated agony of remorse. 'Immediately the cock crew. Then Peter remembered the word of the Lord; and he went out and wept bitterly." "

And if we put together with some connection his further thoughts upon this same subject, it will still be felt that his power is that of a master of the art of understanding human life, and expressing his conceptions of the hidden significance with exquisite beauty and grace.

It

"Bitter tears they were; but they made him a new man. was the moment of Peter's true conversion. He passed

in those awful tears from the state of childhood to the state of manhood... Till those tears or their equivalent come on us, we are not yet men, but children. Life has not opened to us its terrible but dignifying secrets. We have not yet trodden the inner shrine, the portal of which is kept by sacred sorrow.

"A new life was possible to him; he might yet be counted worthy to die for his Master, and so it was. None was so changed as he. His courage never faltered, his voice never again denied his Lord. His brave words still excite us as we hear them spoken before the Sanhedrim. He testified before kings; he died the martyr of the truth.

"O brethren, it should be so with us. When the pain of drear conviction of a lost life or a sinful heart is come upon you, do not go out with Judas into the night of despair; go out with Peter into the chill dawning, with Christ's look of reproachful love within your heart."

There is no apology for staying away from church when men can hear such words of living beauty as these. They are not musty with the damp of ancient theologies hidden away in the dark places

of an enfeebled religionism; they are full of the energy and vivacity of life.

Although Mr. Brooke may restrain the play of deep emotions with the habit of a cultured and high-mannered gentleman, there are times when it will have way. That most unique spirit which for a brief day thought and lived amongst us, whose history so far as seen and known Mr. Brooke has so interestingly revealed in the " Life and Letters," showed more passion than it is given to very few to possess, and still fewer to exhibit. The body, which so thickly veils most men's spirits, hardly seemed more than a gossamer web in the case of Mr. Robertson, which floated easily in the softest zephyr, and almost parted asunder when the breezes began to blow. It was a spirit-life, delicate and beautiful to an unusual extent. That heart was seen in its pulsations through the transparent vase in which it was carried about from day to day. Mr. Brooke is a stronger man physically than the subject of his excellent memoirs. But passion now and then burns forth in utterances which have all the grandeur of Divine emotion in them. No heart could have felt as that heart feels, which had not entered deeply into the meaning of human life. Some time the preacher must have wandered along the shores of being, and watched with intent and sorrowful sympathy the swaying to and fro of that great ocean, life. Else, how could he have uttered the following ?

"There are times when a man feels that all real life is over for ever; when he has seen every costly argosy of hope sink like lead in the dark waters of the past; when the future stretches before him a barren plain of dreary sea, on which a fiery sun is burning.

"There are times when another has at last felt that all the past has been unutterable folly and darker sin. He looks back upon his youth, and knows that never, never more 'the freshness of his early inspiration' can return. The pure breeze of an innocent morning was once about his way; he hides his head now from the fiery simoom of remorse in the desert of his guilty life. It is the conscience's valley of the shadow of death.

"There are times, too, even in youth, when, by a single blow, all the odour and colour have been taken out of living; when the treachery of lover or friend has made everything in existence taste badly afterwards; and we, tortured and wrung with the bitterest of bitternesses, say in our blindness that all is evil and not good. It is the heart's valley of the shadow of death."

Oftentimes Mr. Brooke's mind is warmed with a glowing vision which the heart has received of some precious truth of life and being. He is strong in the gift of impressiveness, and knows how to touch the human heart in its tenderest spots; but he can rouse and animate the spirit with bright and cheering truth. It would

be a frequent accusation against him on the part of certain theologians that he exalts human nature too much. Without pronouncing dictatorially upon the merits or demerits of his doctrinal views upon this or any other point, we may avow the belief that much of the success with which he gains acceptance with men's hearts is to be traced to his direct and earnest appeal to that which is noblest and best in them. He does not demolish them as with a sledgehammer, casting them to the dust at his feet. He takes them by the hand, charges them to look at their own high-born destiny, to dare to look even upon the face of God, to speak to Him as a Father, and to claim the privileges of sonship. To him the whole world of nature is replete with beauty and glory. The wonder and the splendour of the world have been seen and felt by him, and it is the Father's world, not the production of a mere Opifex Maximus. As he says

"Celestial messages and grace should flow to us through every sight and sound which touches and exalts the heart. Alone with nature in her sublimity and tenderness, standing on the highland moor, the wind your sole companion as it races over the heather, reaching at last the Alpine ridge with the silent world of peaks below, looking up into the purple depths of night upon the solitary sea, let the stillness creep into your heart and make you conscious of your God; let prayer rush to the lips, not the prayer which is petition, but that which is communion."

Mr. Brooke sees in the human heart the possibilities of goodness, and more, the certainty of it. He is, therefore, the preacher of hope, not despair. He more than "faintly trusts the larger hope." That which the Laureate, with a keen perception of the workings of thought and sentiment in our time, expressed with so much fine feeling and beautiful fancy, has become the unreserved trust of Mr. Brooke's heart. He boldly says-" The doctrine of 'total depravity' was unknown to Christ. Everywhere He believed not in the vileness, but in the greatness, of the human soul; and He called forth in men by this trust in them a conviction of their immortality, a longing for a nobler life, a sense of their degradation and death as long as they sinned, a conviction of the glory and beauty of holiness. He saw in the publican, whom all men shunned, the germ of an honest life. He believed in it, and it grew and bloomed into spiritual beauty. He saw in the fallen woman, whom the proud Pharisee thought had defiled his house, a spark of the Divine love. He believed in it, and it was quickened into a holy flame." A belief like this is so fully a characteristic of Mr. Brooke's preaching that we cannot consider it apart from a reference to its important bearing upon the influence of his sermons. Many listen gladly because of it. And none can surely deny that