Mariolater. For instance, with him, Mary is the garden of all delights (De Sanctis 3), by her name devils are put to flight (48), no one can be saved without her assistance (87 and 95), and she was conceived without earthly father (17). If Meffreth could swallow so many camels, he need not have strained at a solitary gnat. The sermons of Meffreth occupy 1412 pages of small, close print, in double columns, in the edition of Anthony Hierat, 1625; and they are furnished with three indices, one to each of the parts.
They are quite incapable of being reproduced in a modern pulpit, but they are nevertheless valuable, and worth the few shillings which they cost, for Meffreth was a man well versed in the mystical signification of Scripture, and he has carefully gathered together a vast amount of serviceable material, though he has been unable to build it together, with the wood, hay, stubble, which he has added, into a homogeneous mass.
His sermons open with a fact (?) from natural history, to which he gives an allegorical interpretation. This serves as an introduction. The body of the discourse is separated into two or three parts, and each part contains several heads; each head is again broken into divisions, and each division is subdivided. The sermons vary in length; those for Saints’ days are short, but the rest are of intolerable length. They are enlivened with anecdotes, sometimes good, generally pointless, occasionally absurd.
Those of Meffreth’s sermons which are intended as expositions of our Lord’s parables are better by far than the rest, and will be found useful by the theological
