CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Open Secret : Sermons. By the late Rev. A. J. Morris. (Miall.)— This is a volume of posthumous sermons, but they stand in little need of the indulgence which this circumstance might claim for them. The title, indeed, is unmeaning, and has a sound of affectation, but the reader must not be prejudiced by it. He will soon find that he has to deal with a collection of discourses of no common kind, distinguished by much originality and power of thought, by a vigorous style, wholly free from affectation and a straining after show, and especially by a manly tone. Mr. Morris seems to have said out boldly enough what ho thought, and never to have hesitated to confess a difficulty. Generally, his ser- mons leave on one the impression of being the utterances of a thoroughly honest man, who had contrived to shake himself free in a great measure from conventionalities to which his circumstances gave a power not easily to be broken. Some of his interpretations seem to bo wanting in depth. He gives us, for instance, the familiar reading of the story of the young man with great possessions who went away sorrowful when he was told to sell all that be had, taking the sorrow as a bad sign, whereas surely it was the most hopeful that could be. Sometimes, too, his language repeats conventions of the pulpit, which we cannot but think either misrepresent or very inadequately represent realities of life. But, on the whole, he speaks out with great freedom and power. We do not know whether the sermons are chronologically arranged ; but the last, " The Devil in Church," strikes us as being the best. There is something very pathetic in what we hear of the writer's life. At nineteen he was appointed to the regular ministry of a congregation in Lancashire. Could anything exceed the cruelty and folly of setting such a boy in such a place, to preach two sermons or more weekly to a hard-headed congregation, who would be determined to have their pennyworth for their penny, and would know whether they got it too ? No wonder that he broke down utterly in middle age, " that dark clouds of despondency mysteriously wrapped him round " for years, and that he shook them off only to die.
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