the edge, a rough-looking man, who sat next to my friend, rose in his place, and looked over the gallery-front, to see the chasm into which they were falling! The whole figure had doubtless come with a rush to the mind of the preacher. It was as vivid to Dr. Kirk, on the instant of its utterance, as it was to this hearer. The whole swing of the sermon was behind it, as it leaped into speech; and it could not have been repeated, with any thing of the same effect. An effort to reproduce it, afterward, would have been like cutting the flower from stalk and root, to brighten other days with its beauty. What at first was spontaneous, would have then been a matter of mere art and mechanics.

So never go back to remember things, which do not spontaneously come up to your mind while you are speaking. Make as full preparation as you can, but leave it if it lingers. Let the push of your soul be in all that you say, and every sentence be charged with the vitality of an advancing and out-giving mind.

THE MIND READY FOR WORK.

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Next week I shall speak of some of the moral and spiritual conditions of success in preaching without one's notes. What I have to say to-day closes here. If you have within you the inspiring conviction that the Gospel has come from the mind of God, and is indispensable to the welfare of man; if you are then careful to keep your whole physical vigor at the highest attainable point, and to keep your mind in a state of corresponding activity and energy; if you make the plan of your sermon simple and natural, and imbed it in your thoughts, so that the mind in treating the subject naturally runs along on that plan, without effort or care, and is all the while free, ready for

whatever suggestions may come; if you have

sufficient command of subordinate trains of thought, of illustrations, images, historical instances, germane to the subject, but are not yourself commanded by them, and are ready to take them or to leave them according as at the moment they recur, or fail to appear;— then you have, I think, the essential physical and mental

conditions of that success which is possible for you. You may speak then with freedom, force, pleasure, and with direct and useful effect on the minds you address; with more effect, I suspect, oftentimes, than if you read a careful essay.

So fulfil these conditions, Gentlemen: and then follow the advice which Jehoshaphat gave, when he set of the priests and the chief of the fathers to be judges in Israel, and gave them their motto, among the grandest, I think, in all history; certainly there is none like it in the Kaiser-saal at Frankfurt, under all the portraits of German emperors which there are assembled, -"Deal courageously; and the Lord shall be with the good!"

THIRD LECTURE.

Mr. President: Young Gentlemen: —

In each of these talks to you I illustrate in myself, as I am quite aware, one of the disadvantages connected with the practice of speaking without notes; a disadvantage which becomes especially noticeable, and especially important, when one has a large subject to present, the treatment of which must be compressed into a comparatively small space of time.

I have been conscious every time, after speaking to you, that there were many things which I had not touched, of which I should have been glad to speak if the hour had permitted, and if I had not spoken under the

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pressure of its sharp limitations.

I feel the

same thing more keenly to-day, because each of the points which I have to present is deserving of special and separate treatment, and might reasonably occupy a full hour by itself: while I have to present them all within the same limits, or as near that as I can. It seems like trying to squeeze the thousand volumes of a library into one book-case: or to pack the entire furni ture of a room in a couple of trunks.

I shall be constrained to treat the subjects rapidly, cursorily, in a way which I fear will seem to your minds, as well as to my own, unsatisfactory. But I have no alternative, having no other afternoons on which I could properly ask you to hear me, or, indeed, on which I could promise to meet you here. I must therefore do briefly, in a summary way, what it would be pleasanter to do more at leisure, with larger scope; since whatever I am to say must be finished to-day.

In the last talk I spoke, as you will remember, of certain physical and mental conditions of