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Show A WONDERFUL SERMON. We quote from Richard Henry Dana's paper, in Scribner for November, on the late President Leonard Woods, of Bowdoin College: "Some thirty years ago it had been announced that President Woods was to preach in what is now the parish church of the Advent, in Bowdoin Street, but was ?? under the pastorate of the Rev. Dr. Winslow. The house was well filled President Woods spoke apparently without even notes. He spoke for nearly an hour and a half, of a warm summer afternoon, to a congregation which had been used to set their mental chronometers to twenty or thirty minutes. Yet it was a case of ?? omnes, intentique ora tenebunt, from first to last. There was not only attention, but an excited, glowing attention. His subject was ‘The Delayed Justice of God,' the text ?? Because sentenced against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore,' etc. For his space of time and his purpose, he was the master of every one in the house, and Dr. Winslow, in his concluding prayer, was so carried away, that he entered unconsciously upon a eulogy on the preacher, in thanking the Almighty for the great privilege we had enjoyed that day. At this time it was rarely if ever that a preacher of the orthodox sects took examples of illustrations from elsewhere than the scriptures; but in this discourse it seemed that, as was said of Burke, there had gone out a decree that all the world should be taxed. He drew his illustrations from all history, from all the known experience of mankind. As I have said, it is more than twenty-five years since I heard that sermon, but I can repeat, I think verbatum, many of its lines, passages, and retain a clear memory of its thought and order. After some years happening to speak with a scholarly and thoughtful man on the subject of sermons he said that the best he had ever heard was one by President Woods, in the old meeting house in Bowdoin Street, on the delayed justice of God, and he proceeded to describe it. Again, at New York, at a gathering of men of letters, the subject of best sermons was started, and one of the number, a man of high repute as a writer said that, chancing to be in Boston of a Sunday, some years before, he went to hear President Woods, at Bowdoin Street and there heard a discourse, on the delayed justice of God, which had ever remained in his mind the ideal sermon. Thus, the only three persons I know to have heard to give it the first place, and I doubt if any intelligent hearer on that day will fail even now, to acquiesce in this judgment. |