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WE have here another volume from the prolific pen of Canon Farrar. It is marked in a conspicuous degree by the many excellences of its author, and by not a few of those faults which we would gladly miss. There are ten sermons in the volume, seven of which, preached consecutively at Westminster Abbey, give its title to the book. Two others were preached at the opening of Parliament, and the tenth was preached at Westminster Abbey in April, 1879. There is a certain unity in the volume, for each of the sermons is true to the subject declared on the title-page. The sermons are the product of a singularly facile mind and an enthusiastic and generous soul, but while we acknowledge this, we feel keenly the omissions which mark the book. We refer as an instance to the sermon on Sincerity of Heart the first Condition of Service. The whole of this sermon is a declaration that men must be good, but how it does not tell, beyond saying we must pray more and be pure in life. We doubt the utility of any mere exhortation to pray. We need to be told through whom to pray, by whom to pray; for the relation of Christ to the individual soul as the atonement for its sins is the true evangel which at once discloses personal guilt and inspires hope of salvation. The sermon on The Wings of a Dove, for poetical thought, is the finest in the volume, and as it is read one sees how the flowing eloquence of the preacher was aided by the finest possiblen surroundings in the venerable pile in which he ministered. The cure for sorrow here prescribed consists of action, patience, faith, hope. If it were worthwhile to describe the disease as fully as is done here, it were surely worth while also to describe its cure; yet Faith as a remedy for sorrow is dismissed in about twenty lines, and, divested of embellishments, the twenty would be reduced to two. --The London Quarterly and Holborn Review, Volume 55

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