testify that the property of social alertness has not evaporated from the family in the lapse of so many years.
It is recorded of Dr. Griffin, that, when President of the Andover Theological Seminary, he convened the students at his room one evening, and told them he had observed that they were all growing thin and dyspeptical from a neglect of the exercise of Christian laughter, and he insisted upon it that they should go through a company-drill in it then and there. The Doctor was an immense man,—over six feet in height, with great amplitude of chest and most magisterial manners. "Here," said he to the first, "you must practise; now hear me!" and bursting out into a sonorous laugh, he fairly obliged his pupils, one by one, to join, till the whole were almost convulsed. "That will do for once," said the Doctor, "and now mind you keep in practice!"
New England used to be full of traditions of the odd sayings of Dr. Bellamy, one of the most powerful theologians and preachers of his time. His humor, however, seems to have been wholly a social quality, requiring to he struck out by the collision of conversation; for nothing of the peculiar quaintness and wit ascribed to him appears in his writings, which are in singularly simple, clear English. One or two of his sayings circulated about us in our childhood. For example, when one had built a fire of green wood, he exclaimed, "Warm me here! I'd as soon try to warm me by star-light on the north side of a tombstone!" Speaking of the chapel-bell of Yale College, he said, "It was about as good a bell as a fur cap with a sheep’s tail in it."
A young minister, who had made himself conspicuous for a severe and denunciatory style of preaching, came to him one day to inquire why he did not have more success. "Why, man," said the Doctor, "can’t you take a lesson of the fisherman? How do you go to work, if you want to catch a trout? You get a little hook and a fine line, you bait it carefully and throw it in as gently as possible, and then you sit aud wait and humor your fish till you can get him ashore. Now you get a great cod-hook and rope-line, and thrash it into the water, and bawl out, "Bite or be damned!"
The Doctor himself gained such a reputation as an expert spiritual fisherman, that some of his parishioners, like experienced old trout, played shy of his hook, though never so skilfully baited.
"Why, Mr. A.," he said to an old farmer in his neighborhood, "they tell me you are an Atheist. Don’t you believe in the being of a God?"
"No!" said the man.
"But, Mr. A., let’s look into this. You believe that the world around us exists from some cause?"
"No, I don't!"
"Well, then, at any rate, you believe in your own existence?"
"No, I don't!"
"What! not believe that you exist yourself?"
"I tell you what, Doctor," said the man, "I a'n’t going to be twitched up by any of your syllogisms, and so I tell you I don't believe anything,—and I’m not going to believe anything!"
A collection of the table-talk of the clergy whose lives are sketched in Dr. Sprague’s volumes would be a rare fund of humor, shrewdness, genius, and originality. We must say, however, that as nothing is so difficult as to collect these sparkling emanations of conversation, the written record which this work presents falls far below that traditional one which floated about us in our earlier years. So much in wit and humor depends on the electric flash, the relation of the idea to the attendant circumstances, that people often remember only how they have laughed, and can no more reproduce, the expression than they can daguerreotype the heat-lightning of a July night.
The doctrine that a minister is to maintain some ethereal, unearthly station, where, wrapt in divine contemplation, he is to regard with indifference the
