Echoes of Spoken Words. By S. A. Tipple. (Sampson Low.)—Thee
are, in fact, sermons which Mr. Tipple, it seems, in the first instance preached extempore, and which he was subsequently persuaded by some of his admiring friends to publish. They savour somewhat o the Theodore Parker school of American theism, and the style an language also strike us as rather American. We should suppose the the author's stand-point is that of belief in God's universal fatherhood as revealed by Christ, whom he speaks of invariably with the utmos reverence, and regards, we presume, as in the fullest sense divine. The sermon on Christ having "perfected for ever them that are sancti- fied" is a good specimen of his line of thought. Christ, he tells us, held tip a perfect ideal to humanity, and he implanted in the human mind right convictions, which, as God works by evolution, will issue in a perfect result. The sermon concludes with a prayer that the " objec- tive may become subjective, and the germinal put forth and fulfil itself." Some years ago, this would have struck us as rather a quaint mode of expression, but now-a-days we quite expect these and kindred phrases to occur in sermons. We feel disposed to take exception to the title of the sermon on Abraham's temptation to offer up Isaac. "A temptation to murder" hardly seems an appropriate way of describing that groat crisis in Abraham's history. Indeed, the author very properly contrasts the patriarch with certain modern fathers, who have been tempted to kill their children because it seemed that nothing but misery was in store for them. Such men are really tempted to murder, though by a motive with which we are almost obliged to sympathise. But with Abraham the case was wholly dif- ferent, and as is pointed out in the sermon, the root of the temptation was his anxiety to maintain his trust in God, and not to allow Isaac in any way to take the place of God in his heart. As Mr. Tipple rightly
says, the thought that stirred his mind was that he ought to trust in God even to the extent of being willing to lose his son, and this true and divine thought came to be strongly blended with notions suggested to his mind by the sight of human sacrifices among the Canaanites. Mr. Tipple's sermons must, we think, judging from these specimens, have been worth hearing, and are worth publishing, though we do not like his style, and the excessive length of some of his periods.
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