Notes of a sermon preached bj the Rev. C. E. Darwent in Union Church, Tientsin, Sunday evening, April 18. Text: Acts XVIII. 5. "But when Silas and Timothy came down from Macedonia, Paul was! constrained by the word, testifying to the Jesus, that Jesus was the Christ."
Samuel Johnson, the old literary warrior and society lion, is better known than any of our great writers. He and John Wesley were the greatest men of the eighteenth century. We know all about him. We know his temper, his tastes, his learning, his hates, his burly body, his love of tea,' his kindnesses, his stupendous memory, his knack of doing what we often try to do, and fail: scoring over other people. Of Shakespeare we ki next to nothing. Of old everything. What pithy sayings he has filled our language with!
He said Dean Bathurst was a man after his own heart: he hated a fool, and he hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig: indeed he was a very good hater. Here isa good one. "Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another man a shilling, and see which will respect you most." Of a quarrelsome fellow, he said, "Tf he had two ideas in his head they would fall out with one another." When a pertinacious gentleman, with whom he had- been talking said, "I don't understand you, Sir," he said, "I have found you an argument, but I cannot find you understanding." When Gratton, the Trish orator, said the Irish "vould not leave one link of the English chain to clank on the rags of an Irish beggar." Johnson said, "One link cannot clank." This also is very shrewd: "Depend upon it, if a man talks of his misfortunes, there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; no one mentions pure misery.""
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.