Discipline, and other Sermons. By the Rev. Charles Kingsley. (Macmillan.)—These
sermons have the merit of being short, but even short sermons might be worked out, and Mr. Kingsley does not seem to have taken that trouble. He has thrown out some new ideas and some good ones, but he has been contented with throwing them out, and has not put them in shape for publication. There can, we think, be no objection to Mr. Kingsley's quotations from poets, though it seems slightly affected to assign thorn each and all to "the wise man." But if Burns is quoted in the pulpit ought his rhyme to be sacrificed, and if he is merely quoted for his thought, would it not be better to put the thought in prose ? We should have fancied, too, that Mr. Kingsley must have seen the fallacy involved in the lesson he draws from steam in his seventh sermon. Nothing, he says, is more soft and yielding, more frail and vanishing, than steam, and yet nothing is stronger. But it is the waste of steam, of an exhausted force, which is frail and vanish- ing, while the strength of steam is contained in the force before it is exercised. No doubt Mr. Kingsley wanted to produce a new and startling image, and there are some such in his sermons which stand the teat of analysis. Yet they, too, would be better if we did not detect this straining after them, and this readiness to put up with anything that promises to answer the purpose.
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