Man : a Story of Light and Darkness. By the
Rev. Henry Greene. (W. Macintosh.)—We can hardly think that Mr. Greene has done alto- gether wisely in giving this work to the press. He tells us that in tardy compliance with the request of friends he undertook to publish a selec- tion of his sermons, but that subsequent consideration led him to weave their subject-matter into a connected work. The meaning of this sen- tence is, that we have here another of those volumes of sermons in dis- guise which are becoming so numerous, and against which it is the duty of all critics to enter a systematic protest. One constant fault of sermons is that they are hasty in thought and fragmentary in execution, that they assume what they cannot argue, and argue out laboriously what is the plain and inevitable consequence of their postulate. The result is unpleasant in the pulpit, but when several discourses are built up into one connected work, the radical vice of their foundation is yet more conspicuous. When they come to deal with a great subject in- stead of approaching it in detail, we see that their author has not begun by mastering it as a whole. We should not write in this strain if Mr. Greene had simply published his sermons, which we daresay were good in their way. But his present effort is too ambitious to be passed over
with the few words which might be given to fair sermons, as sermons go, and anything more than those few words must be rather in the nature of blame than approval.
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