that pulpit oratory came in with the revival of paganism, impiously called the Renascimento. Men's heads were turned with literary vanity. The ambition to copy the Roman orators in style and diction and gesture destroyed the simplicity of Christian preachers, and bred up a race of pompous rhetoricians, frigid, pretentious, and grandiloquent. The evil, once in activity, spread, and has descended. Saints have laboured against it in vain—S. Ignatius with his energetic plainness, S. Philip with his daily word of God, S. Charles with his virilis simplicitas—his manly simplicity. But the flood had set in, and it bore down all opposition. The world runs after pulpit orators. They please the ear, and do not disturb the conscience. They move the emotions, but do not change the will. The world suffers no loss for them, nor is it humbled, nor wounded. We have not, indeed, seen our Divine Master, nor heard His voice; but if by faith and mental prayer we realise His presence, His truth, His will, and our own commission to speak in His name, we shall be filled with a consciousness of the unseen world and its realities, and out of that fulness we shall speak. We shall, indeed, need careful and minute preparation of what we are to say. But having a clear outline in our intellect, words will by a law of our nature
