" At last his preaching of common morality is put to the highest test.

Thus fitly, as became her already historic part in it, Susanna Wesley may he said to have launched the important institution of lay-preaching in the Church that bears her name.

This office was nearly always the same in psalms, in hymns and in every part; so that Sunday after Sunday, for many years, there was very little change in the Sunday united-prayer part of the liturgy, although the preaching on the incidents of the life of our Lord (Beckel, Messe und Pascha, p, 91), the blessings and the thanksgivings relieved the service from monotonous sameness.

St. Paul Preaching at the Foot of the Acropolis After the painting by Gebhart Fügel.

[Illustration: MOFFAT PREACHING TO THE BOERS.]

By the year 1300 the Miracles were out of ecclesiastical hands and adopted eagerly by the town guilds; and in the following two centuries we find the Church preaching against the abuse of the religious drama which it had itself introduced, and which at first had served a purely religious purpose.

It is but fair to select a specimen of Evangelical preaching from one of its most celebrated and popular champions * *.

Much of his preaching about men is as like live men as Chinese pictures of trees and rocks and gardens,no nearer the reality than that.

Sir J. F. Stephen observed: “If the law were really impartial and punished blasphemy only, because it offends the feelings of believers, it ought also to punish such preaching as offends the feelings of unbelievers.

Savonarola spoke in the pulpit with the authority of the profoundest personal conviction, and his hearers were impressed by his preaching with the feeling that they listened to one who knew whereof he spoke.

What was the spiritual result of such preaching among the country people?

No fanatical preaching by Shaukatali can make people break up and leave their homes for an unknown land.

How cruel and exasperated the mind of Clement was, may be gathered from his treatment of Fra Benedetto da Foiano, who sustained the spirit of the burghers by his fiery preaching during the privations of the siege.

At the same time he received the news that the Cardinal of Sion, his most zealous enemy in connection with the Roman Church, was devotedly employing, with the secret support of the Emperor Maximilian, his influence and his preaching for the purpose of raising in Switzerland a second army of from twenty to five and twenty thousand men, to be launched against him, if necessary, in Italy.

But are there not, especially in these days of cheap printing, books of devotion, tracts, sermons, printed, which contain better preaching than any which they are likely to hear in church?

To see her preaching like George would make you laugh for a week.

The bronze group over Ghiberti's first doors, representing John the Baptist preaching between a Pharisee and a Levite, are the work (either alone or assisted by his master Leonardo da Vinci) of an interesting Florentine sculptor, Giovanni Francesco Rustici (1474-1554), who was remarkable among the artists of his time in being what we should call an amateur, having a competence of his own and the manners of a patron.