The Rev. Arthur Robins, chaplain - in - ordinary to
the Queen, and chaplain to the Prince of Wales and to the household troops, preached on Sunday last his five-thousandth sermon in Windsor ; and his parishioners, in celebration of the occasion, presented him with a complete set of clerical robes. We should like to know Mr. Robins's own reflections on his long career of exhortation. Does he look back on it with complacency, or with humiliation, or with some mixture of the two emotions ? If he has kept anything like a simple and natural mind throughout the fifty years or so daring which he has probably been preaching, he must be, as very possibly he is, a man of great force of character, for nothing sooner succumbs to the spirit of routine than the habit of telling " my dear brethren" what they ought to think or feel in relation to their fellow-creatures and their God. Think of the saying, that for every idle word you utter, you shall be accountable at the day- of judgment, and consider how many idle and ill-considered words there must generally be in five thousand sermons. It must be a pathetic if not a terrible retrospect. But we may hope that for the great majority of preachers, the penance will at least be very lenient. We hope so, or we journalists should probably be left in an even worse predicament than the preachers.
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