The American Quarterly Register Volume 12 13

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1840 edition. Excerpt: ...is not their phrase to say, they Preach, or to give to their own instructions and exhortations the name of Sermons; the pain they take themselves in this kind is either opening, I.ectun'ng, or Rcadm, or Erercising, but in no case Preaching."---" Whereupon it tnnst ol necessity fo low, that the vigour and vital efficacy of Sermons doth grow from certain accidents, which are not in them, but in their Maker: his eerlue, his gesture, his cmmtenance, his zeal, the motion of his body, and the inflexion of his voice who first uttereth them as his own, is that which giveth them the form, the nature, the very essence of instruments available to Eternal life."4 Hooker wrote the above about 1596. How extensively the distinction which he here obviously suggests, as made in his day, between Lectures and Sermons, was regarded in practice, and how long it continued to be made in England, is not known. There is reason to believe, that at the commencement of the seventeenth century, it existed very generally only in theory-, that most Puritans preached their Lectures, and wrote as well as preached their sermons. In this country it was attempted by the first settlers to preserve it between the Sermons of Pastors, and the Sermons and Lectures of Teachers, whose oflice nearly resembled that of beneficed Lecturers in the mother country. But in the Sketches or Abstracts (referred to under Charlestown, K.) of the Sermons and Thursday Lectures of Mr. Norton, Teacher of First Church, Boston, preached between X655 and 1661, no difference in the style of their composition can be erceived. And although in the annual Bampton Lectures at Oxford, Eng. and Dudleian Lectures in our own University, the distinction originally contemplated between Lectures...