“Lord John’s budget is as much a masterpiece in its way as Lord Althorpe’s. It really seems as if the aristocracy of this country were to be destroyed, so marvellously are they demented.
“While London is intent upon these debates, I have been reading Miller’s* Sermons, ‘intended to show a sober application of scriptural principles to the realities of life.’ Recommend them to your mother and Miss Fenwick, and to any of your friends who are not indisposed to read such books. I think you saw Miller here one evening, with a
* The Rev. John Miller, of Worcester College, Oxford. Of these discourses, my father says to another correspondent:—“Would to God that such sermons were oftener delivered from our pulpits! Bad sermons are among the many causes which have combined to weaken the Church of England; they keep many from church, they send many to the meeting-house; hurtful they can hardly fail to be if they are not profitable: and one of the ways by which incompetent ministers disparage and injure the Establishment in which they have been ordained, is by delivering crude and worthless discourses, which chill devotion even where they do not offend and shock the understanding. “These are, in the true sense of a word, which has been most lamentably misapplied—Evangelical. I do not know any discourses in which revealed truths and divine philosophy are brought home with such practical effect to all men. They have the rare merit of being at the same time thoroughly intelligible, thoroughly religious, and thoroughly discreet.” |
| Ætat. 56. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 91 |
“If I had leisure I could write a very curious essay, historical and critical, upon sermons. . . . .
“I have been reading, too, for the first time. Lord Chesterfield’s Letters; with a melancholy feeling that the one and only grace which he despised might have made him a wise and good man.
“Bishop Hacket and I go on well after supper. His are comical sermons: half Roman Catholic in their conceits, full of learning which would be utterly unprofitable if it did not sometimes call forth a shrewd remark, seasoned with piety; and having good strong sense mixed up with other ingredients, like plums in a pudding which has not too many of them.
“I think you will have another change at the Colonial Office ere long. This ministry cannot stand, if the aristocracy and monarchy are to be preserved. I believe they felt their weakness (how, indeed, could they fail to feel it after such a budget?), and therefore they went over to the Radicals at the eleventh hour, thinking so to find strength. Peel’s is said to have been the best speech he ever made. I am curious to see how far ‘the evil heart of fear’ will carry —— upon this occasion. God bless you!
