Sermons. By the late Rev. H. R. Huokin, D.D. (Bemrose
and Sons.)—We are glad, to welcome this memorial of the life and work of a good and able man, who was cut off in the very prime of his life. Dr.
Huckin, without possessing great abilities or learning, had just that practical power and aptitude in bringing his knowledge to bear on what was in hand that makes a good schoolmaster. The school in whose service he died, when little more than forty years of age, will not soon forget him ; while his friends will cherish the memory of a thoroughly genuine man. And these sermons, mostly preached in the chapel of Repton School, are not unworthy of him. They are published just as he left them. He might have elaborated them more, it may be, had he lived to correct them ; but they are not the less interesting, because we see them just as they came from his mind. The first sermon, on " Unity," is especially good ; it dwells, among other things, on the ideal of a school, and in thoughtfulness and power it rises to and maintains a very high level. Here is a fine passage :— " You must idealise your school, if you are to feel the emotion of public spirit, which at once can make you a blessing to the place, and the place a blessing to you. You are members of a visible body, but the visible body is but a collection of isolated members, until it is animated with the one impulse which gives it life. It is only when the life-giving spirit, call it by what name you will, loyalty, enthusiasm, patriotism, the consciousness of a great work to be done, a great contest to be waged, a great victory to be won, is breathed into the members, that a school becomes a living thing. And you must rise to this conception ; you must shake off selfish aims, put away base, mean, ungenerous feelings, before you can make out of the school that which it ought to be. It is ono of the unrealised functions of the imagination to create the truest and moat abiding realities."
The fourth sermon, again, on "Unconscious Sin," is fall of a very powerful, if somewhat sombre, eloquence. "Absalom," again, is made the subject of an excellent discourse to boys. For its own sake, as well as for the sake of its writer, this is a book to be valued.
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