LETTER XXXVI.

The May Meetings--Dr. Bushnell's Striking Sermon--Two Anti-Slavery
Meetings--A Black Demosthenes--Foreign Evangelical Society--A New Thing
in the New World--The Home-Missionary Society--Progress and Prospects
of the West--Church of Rome--Departure from New York--What the Author
thinks of the Americans.


The American May Meetings held in New York do not last a month as in
England,--a week suffices. That week is the second in the month. On the
Sabbath preceding, sermons on behalf of many of the societies are
preached in various churches. On the morning of the Sabbath in question
we went to the Tabernacle, not knowing whom we should hear. To our
surprise and pleasure, my friend Dr. Baird was the preacher. His text
was, "Let thy kingdom come;" and the object for which he had to plead
was the Foreign Evangelical Society, of which he was the Secretary. His
sermon was exceedingly simple, and the delivery quite in an off-hand
conversational style. There was no reading.

In the evening we heard Dr. Bushnell preach, on behalf of the American
Home-Missionary Society, at the "Church of the Pilgrims" in Brooklyn.
This is a fine costly building, named in honour of the Pilgrim Fathers,
and having a fragment of the Plymouth Rock imbedded in the wall. The
sermon was a very ingenious one on Judges xvii. 13: "Then said Micah,
Now know I that the Lord will do me good, seeing I have a Levite to my
priest." The preacher observed that Micah lived in the time of the