The Clergyman's Wife and Other Sketches/Preaching and Practising

by Anna Cora Mowatt

PREACHING AND PRACTISING.

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e who can take advice is sometimes superior to him who can give it," said a distinguished author. Change the "sometimes" to often and we tread one step nearer to the truth. It costs so little labor to give precepts and monitions; it is so natural to enact the task-master and apportion every man's duty; so pleasant to play the sign-post, and point out the road that others are bound to follow, while we travel upon the primrose-path ourselves!

There was never yet an honest counsellor, however wise or eloquent, who could not have exclaimed with Portia: "I can easier teach twenty what is good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching!" Seneca found it agreeable to set forth the advantages of poverty, while he was writing upon a table of gold; Steele delighted to laud temperance with the fumes of the grape careering through his brain. Sterne vented his tender-heartedness by a touching lamentation over a donkey, and the same hand with which he inscribed his pathetic plaint, fell heavily upon the trembling frame of his wife. But do we cite these as rare instances of preaching versus practising? Would it be difficult to select from the most approved of the social lawgivers, and sapient teachers of the present day, luxurious Senecas, who trumpet all the charms of penury; double-seeing Steeles, who wreathe with laurel the brows of Sobriety; and brutal Sternes, who move the multitude to weep over the wrongs of the brute creation?

"In sooth we've fallen on an age of talk,We halloo to each other of reform,And make the shouts suffice."

Assuredly it is not difficult to be a saint in words. Heaven would be abundantly peopled if its crystal gates flew open at the blast of righteoussounding breaths!

Perhaps we are very presumptuous, yet we dare to cherish the conviction that there exists a more attolent influence than all

"The full-voiced rhetoric of these master minds;"

one which hourly, but silently, lifts up the hearts of men. We hold to the belief that the most persuasive, impressive, effectual preachers are those whose daily lives are sermons, though we hear no homilies from their lips. In their own persons they exemplify the grandeur of pure aspirations, the beauty of goodness, the nobleness of self-sacrifice. They show that obedience to the harshest decrees of duty may become a pleasure. They demonstrate the value of time by such cheerful use of every moment, that conscience-stricken Indolence, sitting in their presence, becomes oppressed by her own idleness, and deems it heavier than the weight of labor. They inspire the weak of purpose with reverence for the strength of zeal, by their earnestness. They illustrate the glory of self-conquest, by their victory over those evil passions which are the "foes of a man's own household;" and prove how sweet is the peace which comes after such holy warfare, by their serenity. They pass through the world encompassed by an atmosphere of purity and power so potent and so subtle, that it penetrates into closed hearts, which no less delicate agency could reach, and melts their iciness, and softens their hardness, and breathes the very breath of life into souls that seemed dead. Therefore have we more faith in the puissant ministry of these voiceless preachers than in the most sensation-seeking, revival-rousing exhortation that was ever thundered from the lips of eloquence; for it is not possible to deny that

"Nearer the starsThe world is lifted up by noble lives; It is the men who in the silence work, Nor seek the notice of the vulgar eye That, like the coral insect, unobserved, Piling the reef and building with its death, Isles bright as Paradise, and strong to face The storms of centuries, lift up the age Above the idle froth and foam of time."