ADVERTISEMENT.

THE following Sermons, with one exception", were
preached by the revered Author to his village flock at
Hursley, and that mostly between the years 1840 and 1855,
when he began to preach extempore. "After that time,
or at least 1856, there are," I am informed, "very few
finished sermons. Up to that time, they are as a rule
perfectly finished.”

Being preached then between the time when he had
nearly finished his forty-ninth year and his sixty-fourth,
they represent the teaching, which, with the experience of
years spent among his people, and of his own advancing
age, he thought most adapted to their needs. They are
specimens, mere fragments of his teaching. They were
poured forth from the pastor's heart; for (as usual in his
early days) the days upon which they were preached are
marked upon them, and one third only were preached
a second time, one only, thrice. Of the rest, some he gave
away; of one remarkable series, on the penitential Psalms,
(preached upon the Wednesdays and Fridays in Lent) all
but one are lost. The one which remained has a notice
that it was to be finished on the following Friday, and
referred to other sermons, on Ashwednesday, and the in-
tervening Friday. The rest of the series has been care-
fully sought for, in vain.

a Serm. xli.

The characteristics of these sermons (if one may venture so to speak) seem to me their intense reality, their awe of God, their sense of the exceeding sinfulness of sin, of the malice and wiles of our unseen enemy, of the deep repentance with which God ought to be sought again, yet of the certainty of His being found, by all who really seek Him; and with regard to his own people, the anxiety for each soul of the Pastor's little flock, which was burned into him. Bright and cheerful outwardly, he himself, in that beautiful sermon, "Suffering the measure of love," describes the sufferings of one who loves our Lord, at the apparent waste of souls, or the jarring against God's holy Will. "How can it" (his inmost soul bursts out) "have one moment's perfect quiet, in such a world as this?" Yet the writer's truthfulness shews itself in the addition, "perfect quiet" quiet, relative to our state, the soul might have; only not "perfect quiet.”

Being Lenten Sermons, these Sermons are consequently strict. One object was apparently to unveil his hearers' hearts to themselves, to impress on them the misery and sinfulness of sin, and to draw off for them that covering of self-deceit, which self-love gathers around it. He appears to have avoided, purposely, all oratory; nay (which, until he had entirely trained himself to it, must have involved considerable self-denial to his poetic mind) even illustration from God's works in nature which he so loved. It is only in some two or three places, that imagery, as it were, involuntarily escapes him. Almost all his illustrations are from the types of the Old Testament; and these too are full of awe, how he tells his people that tempers to p. 71.

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which we now too are by nature, one or other, inclined, are the beginnings of the sins of Achan, or Cain, or Balaam, or the men of Sodom; or nearest to our Lord, of Judas, or that Esau's profaneness was "but a shadow of a Christian's wilful sinc. It is the pastor, not preaching. but speaking to, almost talking to, expostulating with his flock; in the Prophet's words, "Why will ye die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord God; wherefore also turn and live ye."

It belongs to his simple earnest style that he mostly closes his Sermons, not with an empassioned appeal to his people, but with a brief sentence (of which there are many in the course of the sermons) calculated to abide with them, and such as the poor often carry off, and live upon. And any one who would profit by these Sermons, would do well to weigh single words, as, e. g. where, speaking of other graces, he subjoins, not "truth" but "exact truth." For like the hermit, who thought that he had attained some measure of love or humility or thankfulness, and so, to burn out any sluggish satisfaction at what he had attained to, wrote on the side of his cell "fervent love" “deep humility” "overflowing thankfulness" or the like; saying, that of these he knew nothing; so, many a man who would be shocked at being thought untruthful, might hesitate before he claimed to himself "exact truth." when he says that by Christian principles he means, "ea deep sense of the continual Presence of Almighty God and of the care which He takes for the welfare of our souls; or where "the necessary parts signs and tokens of real

Or

Christian repentance," have to be weighed one by one and the like.

The sermons eminently serve that end, which S. Francis de Sales insisted upon, as the characteristic of a good sermon, that they sent the hearers home, saying, "God be merciful to me a sinner," or, "wherein can I better please God?"

Secondary and personal as this is, these sermons have, to many of us, a special interest, as giving glimpses into John Keble's inner life. For in a mind of such intense truthfulness as his, one should be quite sure, that what he wrote, he did not write from mere general knowledge, but had himself known and felt. Thus when he lays down that the duty of one who has the care of others is to ❝g contrive beforehand, how he might order all intercourse with them," so as "most to encourage them in duty or check them most effectually in sin;" or says incidentally that "h to think, is to be alone with God;" and assigns it as a test of the soul's state whether, "i when left to yourself, you naturally begin thinking of heavenly things; whether we find our thoughts returning of their own accord towards Heaven, whenever they have been interrupted by any worldly call or anxiety;" or says, "kno words can express the sinking of the heart in the reproof of that in others, of which, in some way, he feels himself perhaps guiltier then they; or the readiness to forgive "because it could not forgive itself its own more inexcusable transgressions towards God;" or that it is hypocrisy even to admit a thought other than people believe of any one; or that ready caustic which he had always at hand

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