This was certainly singular preaching; it reads like a leaf or two from Klopstock. We may believe that the enjoyment with which it was heard was rich and great, but we suppose that the taste of our time would regard it as almost intolerable. Still, there are left among us some who can enjoy the _Pilgrim’s Progress_, and the _Fairy Queen_, and we do not see how, in the presence of those pieces, a very arrogant exception can be taken to this extraordinary sermon.
A more serious objection, perhaps, will be taken to the nomenclature, the symbolic language in which the preacher expressed his theology. It literally represented the theology of Wales at the time when it was delivered; the theology was stern and awful; the features of God were those of a stern and inflexible Judge; nature presented few relieving lights, and man was not regarded as pleasant to look upon. Let the reader remember all this, and perhaps he will be more tolerant to the stern outline of this allegory; it is pleasant, now, to know that we have changed all that, and that everywhere, and all around us, God, and nature, and man are presented in rose-hued lights, and all conditions of being are washed by rosy and pacific seas; we see nothing stern or awful now, either in nature or in grace, in natural or in supernatural things; Justice has become gentlemanly, and Law, instead of being stern and terrible, is bland, and graceful, and beautiful as a woman’s smile!
In Christmas Evans’s day, it was not quite so. As to objections to the mode of preaching, as in contrast with that style which adopts only the sustained argument, and the rhetorical climax and relation, we have already said that Christmas must be tried by quite another standard; we have already said that he was a bard among preachers, and belonged to a nation of bards. It was a kind of primeval song, addressed to people of primeval instincts; but, whatever its merits or demerits may be, it fairly represents the man and his preaching. It does not, indeed, reflect the style of the modern mind; but, there are many writers, and readers at present, who are carrying us back to the mediæval times, and the monastic preachers of those ages, and among them we find innumerable pieces of the same order of sustained allegory which we have just quoted from Christmas Evans. What is it but to say, that the simple mind is charmed with pictures,—it must have them; and such sermons as abound in them, have power over it?