JOSH BILLINGS ON PREACHING.

– “I always advise short sermons, especially on a hot Sunday. If a minister kant strike ile in boreing forty minutes he has either got a poor gimblet, or else he is a boreing in the rong place.”

MY MOTHER DON’T.

• – “Eddie, do you ever forget to say your prayers before you go to bed?” asked little Bertie.

• “Prayers! I never say my prayers,” answered Eddie. “I don’t know any.”

• “Oh,” continued Bertie, “ I have said mine ever since I can remember. My mother teaches me.”

• “Well,” said Eddie, “mine don’t.”

In a few minutes he added,

• “What do you say when you pray?”

• “Come with me in our yard, and I’ll tell you,” said Bertie.

Here the two children disappeared from view. How my heart ached for the bright-eyed boy whose mother was so forgetful of the immortal trust given her! I thanked God for giving his little playmate the will to labour in the vineyard of the Lord thus early.

QUICK IN HER APPLICATION.

• – “It amazes me, ministers don’t write better sermons; I am sick of the dull, prosy affairs,” said a lady in the presence of a parson.

• “But it is no easy matter, my good woman, to write good sermons,” suggested the minister.”

• “Yes,” re-joined the lady, “but you are so long about it; I could write one in half the time, if I only had the text.”

• “O, if a text is all you want,” said the parson, “I will furnish that. Take this one from Solomon: ‘It is better to dwell in a housetop, than with a brawling woman in a wide house.’”

• “Do you mean me, sir?” inquired the lady quickly.

• “O; my good woman,” was the grave response, “you will never make a good sermonizer: you…..

THE ANTIQUITY OF LADIES’ HOOPS.

– Our readers will find, by turning to the third chapter of the book of Isaiah, and reading the 18th verse, that not only were hoops worn in those days by the daughter Zion, but they were also an abomination in the sight of the Lord. To save them the trouble, however, of hunting it up, here is the verse: -

“In that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tiers like the moon.”

THE SOUL

The Soul, considered abstractedly from its passions is of a remiss and sedentary nature, slow in its resolves, and languishing in its executions. The use, therefore, of the passions, is to stir it up, and to put it upon action, and awaken the understanding, to enforce the will, and to make the whole man more vigorous and attentive in the prosecution of his designs.

THE TYPE OF HUMANITY.

– The rule of human nature, the canonical idea of man, is not to be taken as an average from any given number of human beings; it must be formed from the choice and chosen few in whom that nature has come the nearest to what it ought to be. You take not the idea of a cup from a broken one, not that of a book from a fox and dog’s-eared volume, nor that of any kind of animal from one maimed, or mutilated, or distorted, or diseased. Of every species, the specimen is the best which can be produced. So the idea of man is not to be taken from stunted souls, or wry souls, or sick souls, or withered souls, but from the healthiest and soundest, the most whole and wholesome, the straightest, the rightest, and the purest. –

Archdeacon Hare*.

*In 1840 Julius Charles Hare was appointed Archdeacon of Lewes.

THE VANITY OF DRESS.

– The popular preachers in Paris have entered upon a crusade against the lavish expenditure of their lady hearers upon dress, the waste of material especially exciting their indignation. One of them, a bishop, exclaimed in the height of his zeal, in the midst of a late discourse,

“Let women remember while putting on their profuse and expensive attire, how narrow are the gates of Paradise.”