Litchfield enquirer., 1881-07-07
Preaching.


 Said Lamb to Coleridge, when asked if he had ever heard him preach, 'I never heard you do anything else" One might almost say the same of the old style journal. 1tis astonishing how much more moralzing, preaching, reiteration of common places, is to be found in the old than in the modern news paper. How our grandfathers could take any interest in editorials written in the style of the National Preceptor" is great mystery to us moderns. The superiority of the current newspaper consists in it's careful collection of new facts. The old newspaper, with it's scanty paragraphs of intelligence, and it's columns of common place. is failure, be- cause it is neither successful preacher nor successful news s-gatherer. The modern news paper is success because 1t avoids common place and gathers heaps of intelligence. Peo- pie are chiefly concerned with what happens, or to speak more accurately, with what is happening. Let newsboy carry through a train of cars a New York Herald with the latest information from all quarters of the globe, and new Spectator with new Vision of Mirza as beautiful as the old, and how many passengers would take the Herald how many, the Vision?
 It is easy to criticise the public taste in pre- ferrlng the news to the best preaching; but is the public so far wrong after all, in reading average news and skipping average preaching ? The mixed heap of straw, chaff, and wheat which the morning paper gives us, may show fearful preponderance of the valueless over the valuable but of all chaff is not mete con- mon-place the least useful or entertaining Newspaper preaching, to be worth anything, must be extremely good. An editor of any talent whatever can threw some light on new facts. The man who can discourse so inter- estingly and instructively of old facts that thousands of busy people are glad to read his discoursings, is 8 man of 8 million. livery Monday morning our New York dailies are crowded with reports of the sermons of the day before. How interesting do most readers find them? The best thoughts of the most eloquent of our American clergy seem stale in the language of the Herald reporter.
 Indeed, when it is DO longer the thing said but the way it is said that is of moment, we have risen above the natural range of the daily newspaper. The young editors who bang away at all sorts of facts on the wing have no leisure for careful literary work The quan- tity they write is SO great that anything like first rate quality is clean out of the question. A few weekly papers like tue Nation, Har- pers Weekly, and the best religious papers, still offer some good old fashioned preaching j; but, in the main, the Addisons, Steeles and Johnsons of our day, preach in the magazines. There they have greater range, but they also lose something of the condensation, the light ness of the old editorial, which is all the more satisfactory because it is brief and because it is not exhaustive.
 It would seem, in this age of steem and electricity, as if preaching and poetry were going out of fashion. The preachers and the poets who have the public ear seem fewer than Tn the days when people read less. How, in short, are people who get their facts hot from the daily newspapers. and their fiction red hot from the dime novel, to learn to dis criminate between good and bad literary work?
 Yale and Harvard 'commeneed, "last week, and there was the usual number of young men made Bachelors of Arts, and the usual Der of D. Ds., and ILL D's created, and the usual orating on the usual high themes, in the presence of dull old dominies. and of admiring sisters, cousins, and aunts. A few of the young men graduated have done the best they will ever do. They have subjected their physical powers to strain from which they will never recover. Some who mature early are at their best in college, while others are as yet but boys, who afterwards develope power that lay latent in the undergraduate. In another respect college standing IS decep- tive. Talent. an even range of ability in all things. counts for more than genius, extraor- dinary power in single direction. In the great world, on the contrary, it is the man of exceptionally ability in one direction who takes the great prizes. Still, college rank is an important indication As a general rule the youth who rank higher before graduation continue to rank higher after. In one re- spect, college graduates err greatly. They fancy that the positive knowledge they have | acquired is great. Such is not the case. ! After immense toll they can read with more or less difficulty, and not accurately without frequent recurrence to the lexicon, the two more important of the dead languages. They know little French and German. They have smattering of science. They know less of the literature of their own language than most young men of their own age not
 ''liberally" educated who have taste and some leisure for reading. In short they are just beginning an education when many of 1 them fancy it completed.
 Few Americans who read the papers have forgotten the trial of Rev. Edward Cowley, 1 keeper of New York children's fold" fol cruelty to those children; nor the strong evi. dence against him-the strongest being the emaciated bodies and filthy, uncared fol plight of the children themselves-nor his conviction and sentence to the penitentiary greatly to the satisfaction of the public. Mir. Cowley is presbyter of the Episcopal church, and he had the support on the trial of many prominent brethren of that persuasion. Re
 gently, having served out his term in prison, a committee of ministers was appointed by
 Bishop Potter to examine into the accusation.
 against him, and, if they proved sufficiently
 serious to bring him to trial before an eccIesias
 ination and now declare that they find no evi
 dence of immortality or criminality against
 him. Consequently he is not tried, but re. mains clergyman in good standing in the
 Episcopal Church., and might be assigned te the charge of parish to morrow. This is all very strangel Was all the testimony or