CANON FARRAR.

Thames Star, Volume X, Issue 3121, 18 February 1879, Page 4

CANON FARRAR.

Canon Farrar, one of the rarest preachers the world has ever seen, reads every word of his sermons. His sermons in Westmister Abbey moved me to tears sometimes, though there was nothing that could be called exactly pathetic in them. There is a wonderful moral and aesthetic •wholeness in him; one rejoices in his rare courage and lofty moral inspiration. 1 know no man who combines, as he does, the simplicity, repose, and finish of Greek literary art, with the high religious devotion and unwavering courage of a Hebrew prophet. V es, and add, too, the magnanimity of a Christian discipk. ;His sermon on "The Confessional," delivered in July, 1877, to an audience that crowded all the hearingroom of the Abbey, was the most masterful peace of destructive eloquence I have ever heard. Argument, ridicule, invective, were all intensified by the highest moral indignation. But not for a moment was the perfect poise of the speaker lost; there were sentences that thrilled the hearers like an electric shock, but there was nothing vehement from first to last. And the whole was closed by a noble passage, in which the men who held the views he had attacked so successfully were treated with the greatest personal respect, and the excellence of their work was fully recognised. Oh, that it were always so in religious debate I— Dr Eggleston in Scribner.