BISHOP TEMPLE ON THE DEADENING POWER OF HABIT.
IT is said that Carlyle used to declare that there was only one oratorical figure of speech worth anything, and that was repetition. But then Carlyle bad an immense power of saying the same thing over and over again in the most various forms, and clothed in the most different meta-
phors. He was a thinker who hammered out his few con- victions till they became red-hot by the mere force of his imaginative bammerings. Instead of being sickened of a truth by having given expression to it a thousand times, he brought it out the thousand-and-first time with something like the accumulated energy of all his previous enunciation of it, and yet with as much variety as there is in the kaleidoscope when you have turned it round and round a host of times without exhausting its endless permutations of effect. It is not given to many men to vary their manner of saying the same thing with Carlyle's singular fertility. In his interesting apology last Saturday for not being able to plead the cause of temperance with all his old freshness, the Bishop of London confessed to a kind of despair at the difficulty of going over the same ground again and again with any of that warmth and impressiveness which are necessary to carry one's audience with one. He went so far, even, as to say that no sermon which had been preached five times or more ought ever to be preached again, for the effect of such repetition is, he thinks, that the sermon masters the preacher instead of the preacher mastering the sermon. And for those who have given up writing sermons, and who habitually preach extempore, the Bishop seemed to assert that it is dangerous to preach on the same subject repeatedly at all. "It will not do simply to burn what notes you have written, because then the words stay in your mind, and if you have to speak out, they come, whether you want them or not. They are ready, and the occasion seems to present itself, and the words seem as if they had a sort of independent action of their own, and they say, There's my place,' and out they come." Well, that may annoy the preacher who does not want the reputation of repeating himself so often, but it does not in the least follow that it has a bad effect upon the audience. Consider only bow often the actor or the reciter must repeat the same piece before be can gain his full power over his audience. In that case, of course, the audience expect the same words, and would be disappointed if they were not the same. But what we are drawing attention to is that the power of giving them with their highest effect., appears rather to increase, than to diminish, with repetition. We will not say that the actor or reciter impresses himself more at the twentieth repetition than he does at the first, and more at the two hundredth repetition than he does at the twentieth, but it is pretty certain that he learns to impress his audience more ; and he can hardly do that without in some sense entering into their full meaning more adequately than he did before he had reiterated frequently his presentation of the words. By dint of reiteration, the skilful orator will certainly give more, and not less, significance to the same words. Should it not be so also with the same thoughts ? Why should an orator pine for freshness of thought, when he can learn to give a great deal more impressiveness to the same thought by virtue of frequent repetition The old distinction,—Bishop Butler's distinction,—was that while the sensitiveness of the emotions diminishes with frequent demands on them, the ease of any action which is habitually used to express the emotions, increases with repeti- tion. Thus, if you constantly expose yourself to sights and sounds of suffering, the tenderness of your sympathetic feeling will be blunted by the repetition; but if you accustom yourself always to use these emotions only as prompting to the alleviation of pain, the strength and ease of the habit of actively relieving pain will constantly increase, so that while you shrink less from the pain you have to relieve, you gain more and more in ability to relieve it, and in something like inability to refrain from taking the proper steps for that purpose. For example, the sympathetic suf- fering with the patients of a hospital grows less and less as the habit of studying their sufferings is formed; while the habit of doing all in your power to alleviate these sufferings will increase in strength and irresistibleness with every act of remedial promptitude. Now, is there not a law of the same kind as regards even those acts, which are really acts of mere expression, intended to go to the hearts of others ? The actor may lose something of the power of impressing himself, as he gets accustomed to his part ; but does he not gain in the power of impressing others, if the words which he is endeavouring to interpret are rich enough in intrinsic significance to bear any- thing like a gradual enlargement of their force and meaning?
Again, let the Bishop consider whether it is even necessary
that the effect of habit should deaden the speaker's own impres- sion of the weight and meaning of what be says. Surely he does not find that in reading the liturgy, or in reading the Bible, habit has always this result ? It may have, of course. Familiar words do pass over the ear with a kind of far-away recognition, like the greeting we wave to a friend in the street, which means something, and something warm and true, and yet -does not realise itself fully to us in consciousness. But every one will admit that this is not necessary, and that unless repetition is too frequent, —like the repetition of the Lord's Prayer in most of our liturgies,—the familiar words to which we have been accustomed from our childhood upwards, convey more of the power of sacred association, if they sometimes convey less of the freshness which startles and arrests the listener, than the newest and most unexpected appeals to wonder or to hope. Words appear to have two distinct kinds of effect upon the mind,—one, the effect of an interesting message ; and the other, the effect of familiar and accumulated associations which do not startle, but do appeal to all the more moving memories of life, and wield something of the magic of action itself, something of a sacramental influence. Is not this, indeed, part at least of the meaning of a sacrament, that that which might seem to be mere words, through their power of summoning up old emotions and deliberate movements of the will, take the form and power of actions, and mould the inward life, as much as they mould the expression of the lips ? Of course, a sacrament is much more than this, because it pours in the infusion of a divine grace, a divine spell to raise the whole level of life ; but part of that spell is conveyed in the rush of the old memories and the renovating influence of the old resolves. What we venture to maintain, then, is that habit, though it deadens curiosity, enlivens speech when it is a habit charged with all the memories of past feeling and of -devoted will. Bishop Temple seems to us to regard the sermon too much in the nature of mere moral advice. If it be mere moral advice, or intellectual argument, no doubt it grows almost unmeaning when it has been repeated two or three times. But, to our minds, a sermon,—certainly a written sermon,—should not be a composition of the class that wearies the mind from which it proceeds after two or three repetitions, as if it were something mechanical which owes all its interest to its freshness and the impact it makes on the curiosity of the hearers. The sermon surely should be, much oftener than not, an expression of the deeper mind and feeling of the preacher, an expression, in fact, of that type of thought which is sown broadcast in the liturgies of the Church, in the words of Scripture, in the language of prophetic poetry, in the traditions of ideal piety and patriotic faith. Sermons -of this kind do not lose their meaning with repetition ; rather do they gain meaning with every fresh gathering -of spiritual association. We venture to say that by far the greater number of Newman's sermons,—or to go to a very different region of dogmatic belief, the greater number -of Dr. Martineau's published sermons,—are not of the kind which make the preacher conscious of the deadening power of routine, when they are repeated for the twentieth or even the fiftieth time. Habit and monotony have no doubt a very deadening power over the deliverance of mere intellectual and moral counsel. The words seem to Iose their meaning, and to reel themselves off as if they had, as Bishop Temple says, an existence independent of the preacher's mind. But let them be words which express the deepest and most passionate convictions of the heart, let them be words which concentrate all the associations of years of vivid experience with all its griefs and joys, and then the sense of routine disappears altogether, and, indeed, the mere reiteration of such beliefs and hopes, of such pain and patience, of such gratitude and confidence, will, instead of deadening, rather lend fresh life and meaning to words in which so many moving recollections are embodied, and the records of so many moral resurrec- tions are contained. No doubt "Temperance sermons" pall rapidly upon the preachers of them. But there should be comparatively few sermons of the type of Temperance addresses.
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