MODERN SERMONS.
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CLASS of rhetorical chemists," says Hatch, " would be thought of only to be ridiculed ; a class of rhetorical religionists is only less anomalous because we are accustomed to it." Yet we must have a vehicle of communication between minister and flock ; and since religion, unlike chemistry, has its dwelling in the deep emotional substructure of the mind as well as in the intellect, this vehicle can be no passionless affair of formula and equation. The minister must fit the words which are his instruments to the temper of his flock. There is the lock, he must file out his key to fit it, and find the words, simple or subtle, which shall make men cry aloud, " Men and brethren, what shall we do to be saved ? " This art the old divines understood. Dr. South's essay in sermon criticism remains as much a model of common sense as of verve and humour.
The English pulpit has fallen on evil days. Father Bull, whose book on sermon construction* has just been published, would perhaps admit it. " Greek rhetoric founded the Christian sermon," says Hatch ; " this is why there is an element of sophistry in preaching." And the decline of what was once so important a feature of our public worship is due partly to a reaction against rhetoric—which is at a discount not only in the Church, but in Parliament and in the law courts ; partly to an increasing indifference to the techni- calities with which sermons still commonly deal ; partly to the tendency, which came in with the Oxford Movement, to subordinate the ministry of the Word to the administra- tion of a ritual ; most of all, perhaps, to the relatively low culture of the modern pulpit. These causes are intimately connected ; and, indeed, separable in thought only : their result is—what we see. A distinguished French Academician was lately taken the round of the principal London preachers, Anglican and Nonconformist. The impression left on him was that of the Dunciad "Dullness is sacred in a sound divine."
The preachers had nothing to say, and said it badly. In France they have also nothing to say—omnibus hoc vitiuns est eantoribus : but—they say it well. The Scottish level is distinctly higher than either the English or the Continental. The clergy are better edu- cated ; their hearers more intelligent, more interested in the subject, and more critical : few country parishes would tolerate the preaching which satisfies a fashionable town church here. The average English congregation prefers mediocrity to excellence. It does not move easily among ideas, and is incapable of following anything like sustained thought. It does not want to learn, but to be sent home feeling comfortable ; and what it asks for is a series of disconnected platitudes declaimed with a certain emphasis. Brevity is the feature most insisted upon. There is the famous story of a clergyman who, called upon to preach before Queen Victoria, is said to have applied to Lord Beaconsfield for counsel. " If you preach for half an hour," said the great man, " Her Majesty will be bored. If for a quarter of an hour, Her Majesty will be pleased. If for ten minutes, Her Majesty will be • Lectures on Preaching and Sermon Construction. By Paul B. Bull, of tia Community of the Resurrection. London : &P.C.& [8s. Od.; delighted." " But what can I say in ten minutes ? " asked the divine. " That will be a matter of complete indifference to Her Majesty." Let us hope that.the preacher followed this wise advice—in which case he is perhaps now a bishop. For the story—though probably mythical as regards Queen Victoria, who loved a Presbyterian sermon, and was accustomed to what we should now think lengthy discourses—is typical of the modern mind. Sermons, however, whatever else they may or may not have been, were not always dull. The preacher of the mountebank type was common among the early Franciscans—" Brother Diotisalve was an excellent buffoon, after the manner of the Florentines," says Salimbene ; their eccentricities survive in such American divines as " Billy Sunday," though they are perhaps less marked since he has developed into " the Rev. William Sunday, D.D." Pious buffoonery of this Franciscan type would probably not go down in modern England, though one cannot be sure of it ; but, short of this, there are preachers among ourselves who are expected to say odd, or unusual, things, and generally do so : people go to hear them from curiosity. " What," they wonder, " will he say next ? " But we must remember that, at the time when sermons were a power, they were very much more than sermons. Books were few, readers fewer : the pulpit was politics, news, literature—of a sort, at least ; all that the Daily Mail is now. Baronius preached the greater part of his Annals in the Chiesa Nuova at Rome ; in England the Puritan pulpit voiced the disaffection which had been excited by the ecclesiastical policy of Queen Elizabeth and the Anglican absolutism of the Stuarts. And when Wesley and Whitefield were names to conjure with, the religious belief of the masses was unshaken. It was a belief strangely mixed with superstition ; but it was never far from the surface, and a spark could kindle it to flame. It has now lost its original content ; and, as this has not been replaced by a rational grasp of religious and moral principles, the preacher has little to work on. His work is, more than anything else, to break down the false distinction in men's minds between the religious and the secular. To do so he must be acquainted with both. Hence the importance not only of a converted but of an educated ministry. The seminary will not help us. Une formation speciale et defeetueuse et* nicessairement tine mentalite partieuliere et inferieure : it is on the university, not on the theological college, that the future of English religion depends.
The modern multiplication of services has led to a corresponding multiplication of sermons ; and as their number has increased their quality has declined. " How often can a man preach ? " a preacher of the old school was asked. " An able man may do so once in two or three weeks," was the answer ; " an ordinary man every Sunday ; a fool every day." There is such a thing as a fatal fluency ; and it is difficult for those who possess it not to talk nonsense. The written sermon was formerly thought a safeguard in this respect : an Eton tutor of the last generation used to say that he took it as a personal insult if a preacher entered the pulpit without a MS., and undoubtedly the best English sermons are of the essay type. They are now, however, seldom heard outside a university pulpit ; and by no means invariably in it : preachers may be divided into two classes—the first, and by far the largest, those who preach because they have to say something ; the second, those who preach because they have something to say.
Fashions in preaching differ. Who could now preach the Homilies, which were " appointed to be read in churches ? " or the sermons of the famous Anglican and Puritan preachers of the 17th century ? or those of the solid but verbose divines commended by Johnson—Sher- lock, Seed, Jortin ? or Fordyce's " Discourses Addressed to Young Women "—whom he apostrophizes as " My fair ones "—which Mr. Collins read to the Bennet family till he was, happily, interrupted by Lydia ? It may be doubted whether even F. W. Robertson's—who was the first to strike the modern note in preaching—could be reproduced quite as they stand. Be the reasons what they may, the pulpit and the time in which we live are out of. tune ; the old sermon is dead, the new unborn. Two aims on the part of the preacher, laudable in them- selves, are unfavourable to its birth : the desire not to give offence, the result of which is often an apparently studied nullity—one has heard a preacher discourse foit half an hour and yet say absolutely nothing ; and the wish to preach down to the illiterate—the consequences of which are, if possible, even more disastrous. Persons of education are repelled; and those whom it is desired to attract are not attracted to be simple and to talk nonsense are not the same thing. Both to impart and to receive instruction demand a certain effort : we learn most from preachers, as from authors, whose level is higher than our own. The history of Christian belief and institutions suggests the question whether the masses have at any time had an appreciable understanding of religion. They have, of course, felt and lived it, and done both intensely ; but this is another thing. Their mental, as distinct from their emotional, attitude has perhaps oscillated between that of the Northern Farmer, who
" Niver knaw'd whot a melin.'d, but I thowt a 'ad summut to sally, An' I thowt a said whot a owt to 'a said, an I coom'd awaity " ;
and that of Joubert, whose answer to the question, " Why is even a bad preacher heard by the pious with pleasure ? is, " Because he talks to them about what they love."
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