PREACHING FOR APPLAUSE. T HERE is a statement in last Sunday's
Sun that, speaking in relation to the question whether preachers should or should not be encouraged and stimulated in their sermons by the usual indications which secular orators receive of the sympathy (and we suppose also of the disapprobation) of their audience, Mr. Stead had said, in a speech at Ipswich supporting the practice of applauding preachers, that "if he were a minister, he should go mad within six months,"—as we understand, for want of it. The state- ment, if it be authentic, is very characteristic of the most eager advocate for excitement qua excitement amongst living journalists, and as an expression of opinion it is all the more important because we believe that, both in the United States and in this country, there are not a few churches in which it is already customary to express audibly to the preacher sympathy with what he says, and that the practice is rather on the increase than on the decline. We have heard that an Oxford dignitary was much shocked and embarrassed, when preaching in a small country church in the North of England, at hearing murmurs of approval interrupting him more than once daring his sermon,—the rustic congregation not perhaps feeling any great enthusiasm, but thinking it the courteous and appropriate thing to express approval, whether they felt it or not. The present writer can remember in the days of his -boyhood the open murmurs of applause, and the quite unsuppressed laughter, with which the late Mr. W. J. Fox's eloquence and witticisms were received in his chapel at South Place, Finsbury, where he used to range about rather like a domesticated wild animal on a sort of stage, quoting "yesterday's Times," or telling his audience, during the time of the Anti-Corn-Law struggle, that the harvest depended on "the two P's, Peel and Providence," —as if some sort of joke, even though it were one as poor as it was profane, were more or less expected by the rather fast-looking men in white coats who used to lounge with their arms over the backs of their seats, looking up to that artificial and yet elaborately eloquent orator for the amusement no less than the destructive criticism of the day. It is not, however, any subject for wonder that a preacher who frequently substituted all sorts of secular literature for Revelation,—reading, for instance, from Leigh Hunt's "Captain Sword and Captain Pen" after he had read a passage from the Book of Job or the Book of Ecclesiastes,—should encourage applause. It is a much more serious thing that those who no doubt intend to enforce some sort of Christian teaching, should wish to call in the aid of this condiment, as we may call it, to religious eloquence, and to habituate the audience to sit in judgment on the speaker's efforts precisely as if they were being delivered to a meeting in Exeter Hall or the Marylebone Institute. Applause (or censure) is appropriate enough to the mere effort of a man to carry his fellow-men with him for any particular practical pur- pose. Where that is the chief object, there is something quite fitting and natural in the persons addressed giving him clearly to understand whether he is succeeding in his object or failing in it. But the address in a genuinely religious service should have for its object, not to earn men's approval, but rather to deserve it, even at the expense of earning their disapproval and dislike. There is nothing so important for a true religious teacher as to emancipate him- self entirely from the fear of censure or the desire for praise. There is nothing that would sooner degrade religious teaching to the level of political declamation, than to make it appeal to the democracy for authority, or to subordinate deliberately the voice of God to the clamour of the crowd.
Dr. Martineau has told us in the preface to one of his volumes of sermons, that he prefers the written sermon to the spoken sermon, expressly on the ground that the former can be and ought to be prepared in solitude, that it may proceed rather from the lyrical mood in which the poet gives form and substance to his highest visions, than from the rhetorical mood in which the orator strives to bend the purposes and shape the practical lives of his hearers, to his own ends. That may perhaps a little overshoot the truth. No doubt the preacher, like the orator, should be in suffi- ciently close sympathy with his audience to realise vividly whether he be writing in his study or speaking out of the feeling of the moment, how he may best gain a potent influence over them, and where he is in danger of losing his hold over them. But Dr. Martineau is nearer, a good deal nearer, the mark, than Mr. Stead. Of all the devices of which we can think for prostituting the influence of the pulpit, the device of making the preacher look habitually for the stimulus of popular applause, seems to us about the most effective. It is no easy task for the preacher so to interpret divine teaching as to keep it as free as possible of the refraction of human passion and prejudice. It is said of some of those who heard the only perfectly divine speech to which human lips have ever given utterance, " They loved the praise of men more than the praise of God ; " and what was said of the Pharisees in the time of our Lord, may certainly be said of human teachers in our own time, though many of them struggle, and struggle very successfully, against the temptation. The true object of preaching is to make God's will more effective than it is in its control over the hearts of the people,—in a word, to reveal a theocracy above the democracy. Mr. Stead's proposal would have the very opposite effect,—namely, to stimulate the tastes and hopes and passions of the people, and give them the impression that what they eagerly desire, the divine will is bound to accomplish for them. It is a curious fact that all true prophets, filled as they are with the divine ideal and preoccu- pied with the imperious commands of the divine will, can hardly look at the actual life of man and compare it with their hidden conception of what it ought to be, without appearing to be rather pessimists than optimists. Deeply as they believe that
God's will must in the end prevail, they are thrown into a kind of passion of despair when they see how far as the poles asunder are the divine and human wills in the world we live in, and so it happens that we have those passionate denunciations of the actual life of man, which result in such exclamations as : " Why should ye be stricken any more, ye will only revolt more and more; the whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint." That is not the tone of orators who hang on the applause of their audience. The latter will denounce the selfish- ness of "the classes," or the self-will and cruelty of "the masses," according as they find their mood reflected in the looks of their hearers ; but they will not engage in any vain endeavour to make them see that the Supreme Will requires from us not merely an abnegation of all the imperious pride and selfishness of individual cravings, but even perfect willing- ness to submit our most disinterested affections to the pruning- knife of his holier and severer wisdom. The last thing, for instance, that an orator who lives on the applause of his audience would think of, would be exhortations to surrender the puffed-up patriotism of a spurious national exclusiveness, or to endure with patience exile and blighted hopes, and the apparent failure of God's fairest promises,— a destiny which the Jewish prophets constantly exhorted their countrymen to undergo with piety and resignation. The orator whose true object is to satisfy the eager yearnings of his hearers, can never persuade himself that the will of God will disappoint those yearnings in spite of all their pertinacity and all their ardour. About the worst discipline that can be imagined for interpreting the Supreme Will, is the habit of watching for the signs of human sympathy and human censure, and guiding one's speech by the forecasts which a quick perception of these signs will discern.
The real meaning of any encroachment of the popular voice on the province which should be devoted to the study and interpretation of the divine will, is that, wherever such an encroachment is distinctly visible, faith in the divine will is beginning to ebb away, and that confidence in a much more visible and much more restless will is taking its place. Men do not applaud the decrees of God. They discern them imperfectly, if at all ; they apprehend them with more awe than hope, with more consternation than humility, with more disposition to cry out, " Be it far from thee, this shall not be unto thee," than " sweet reasonableness " or resig- nation. Yet it is the great duty of the preacher to watch for signs of this dread Providence, and to warn his people of the shadows which are cast before its slow and often apparently reluctant though steady approach.
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