CHAPTER VII.
LA CORDIFIAMMA.
This chapter shall begin, good reader, with one of those startling bursts of "illustration," with which our most popular preachers are wont now to astonish and edify their hearers, and after starting with them at the opening of the sermon from the north-pole, the Crystal Palace, or the nearest cabbage-garden, float them safe, upon the gushing stream of oratory, to the safe and well-known shores of doctrinal commonplace, lost in admiration at the skill of the good man who can thus make all roads lead, if not to heaven, at least to strong language about its opposite.

True, the logical sequence of their periods may be, like that of the coming one, somewhat questionable, reminding one at moments of Fluellen's comparison between Macedon and Monmouth, Henry the Fifth and Alexander: but, in the logic of the pulpit, all's well that ends well, and the end must needs sanctify the means.

There is, of course, some connection or other between all things in heaven and earth, or how would the universe hold together?
And if one has not time to find out the true connection, what is left but to invent the best one can for oneself?
Thus argues, probably, the popular preacher, and fills his pews, proving thereby clearly the excellence of his method.

So argue also, probably, the popular poets, to whose "luxuriant fancy" everything suggests anything, and thought plays leap-frog with thought down one page and up the next, till one fancies at moments that they had got permission from the higher powers, before looking at the universe, to stir it all up a few times with a spoon.

It is notorious, of course, that poets and preachers alike pride themselves upon this method of astonishing; that the former call it, "seeing the infinite in the finite;" the latter--"pressing secular matters into the service of the sanctuary," and other pretty phrases which, for reverence' sake, shall be omitted.
No doubt they have their reasons and their reward.