stance. Five years after I was in a cathedral town, and went to one of the churches there, on a Sunday morning. To my surprise I saw my relation sail up the nave in rustling silk, preceded by the verger, escorting him to the pulpit. As he passed my pew, our eyes met. He was as surprised to see me as I was to see him, as he was only a visitor like myself. I noticed signs of agitation in his countenance, and that he was some time before he delivered his text, which was upon Zaccheus in the sycamore-tree.
After service I waited for him, and on our meeting, his first words were, “You wretched fellow! You put me terribly out; I had Felix trembling in my pocket ready for delivery; but when I saw you, our conversation five years ago flashed across me, and I had to change the sermon in the pulpit.” But this was not all. Next Saturday I was at the other end of England, staying with a country parson, and I related this incident. My host pulled a long face, broke out into a profuse perspiration, and said,—“I am really very sorry, but I had prepared Felix for to-morrow, and what is more, I do not see my way towards changing the subject.”
The remarkable part of this anecdote is, that the moral application was similar in all these discourses. Now, the sermons of the divines of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries seldom offended in this manner. Matthias Faber published three enormous volumes of sermons for every Sunday in the year, containing some fifteen discourses for each, and they are perfectly varied in matter and in application.
