Extemporary Preaching. By F. Barham Zincke. (Rivingtons.)— Mr. Barham Zincke
began his career as a clergyman by writing two sermons a week and reading them to his congregation. The results he experienced were much the same as the conclusions that must be forced on those of his brethren who have eyes to see and ears to hear. He found that English people were naturally fond of public speaking, and very tolerant of bad speakers. They had also, he saw, a singular love of sermons, and yet they were always abusing those they heard. A little reflection taught him the reason. The pulpit is the only place where a man professing to speak to the people really reads a composition which is not addressed to the people, which has nothing in it to recommend it to their minds, and which has not even made any mark on his mind in the course of writing it. This was Mr. Zincko's experience with his own sermons. The remedy he suggests is that all clergymen should preach extempore, should think beforehand on their subject, and then expound it to their actual congregation. Taking Mr. Zincke's history of his own attempt to cure the dryness of his sermons, this remedy seems easy. But it necessarily entails a vast amount of study and education, which all men do not receive, and are not willing to bestow. Young men who never spoke at the Union when they were at the University, and never learnt how to put a sentence together except on paper—and that badly—are not likely to think out a religions subject and elaborate it into an oration when they take a family curacy or living. What they would achieve in extemporary preaching without any previous thought may be more or less inferred from the usual after dinner-speoches of persons of their order. And we do not think that cultivated men are tolerant of those speeches.
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