Mr. Spurgeon lectured on Wednesday night on candles,—a subject on
which he had once told a young preacher that any one who was worth his salt ought to be able to preach for a twelve- month. He illustrated his theme with all sorts of candles and candle- sticks, and lanterns old and new, dirty and clean, broken and whole, and made of his lecture, of course, one continuous parable on the various degrees, kinds, and moral settings of intellectual and moral light. By a tallow dip stuck in a ginger-beer bottle he typified the illiterate street-preacher. " It was more useful than the nicest and most beautiful candle which was unlighted, but at the same time it lost none of its usefulness by being put into a silver candlestick,—which was to say that the preacher lost nothing by education,—and it was then likely to find its way into drawing-rooms and other places from which it would be otherwise excluded." But would a tallow dip, in fact, ever find its way either into a silver candlestick or a drawing-room? We suspect not, be- cause the greasy tallow would soil the silver candlestick, while the badness of the light and the smell it gives off, would be anything but agreeable in the drawing-room. And so, too, in all proba- bility, education would have the effect of making a really powerful street-preacher unfit for his street-preaching, without rendering him much more fit for the drawing-room, or it may be, half as useful in the drawing-room as he was in the streets. The last thing, we imagine, that Mr. Spurgeon intended was to illustrate the aristocratic maxim that " you cannot," even for moral pur- poses, " make a silk purse out of a sow's ear ; " but that looks very like the real drift of his parables,—and this shows the danger of delivering yourself up too implicitly to the guidance of a telling image.
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