PLAGIARISM IN THE PULPIT
By THE VERY REV. J. S. MACARTHUR F one may judge from the number of advertisers with sermons I to sell who offer their wares in the columns of ecclesiastical newspapers, the practice of preaching other people's sermons seems to be fairly well rooted in the Anglican communion at least. Such advertisements can also be found in Free Church newspapers, but usually more discreetly camouflaged. .
Critics of Anglicanism sometimes attribute this to the defective instruction in homiletics that the Anglican ordinand receives, and this in its turn is attributed to the placing of insufficient emphasis on the Ministry of the Word. This charge cannot lightly be dismissed, but there may be another reason, namely, the position assigned to the Homilies in the Thirty-nine Articles and in the rubric in the Order of the Administration of the Holy Communion, according to which a sermon or one of the Homilies follows on the recitation of the Nicene Creed. Nowadays few of the clergy have so much as read the Homilies, let alone studied them with the diligence which the Thirty-fifth Article enjoins, and still fewer have preached them ; but here in the Book of Common Prayer is authority for the preacher to stand up in the pulpit and preach what someone else has written for him. The lazy preacher who uses a ready-made sermon would not refer you to this authority any more than the dog that scratches at the hearthrug before lying down would tell you that this was the habit of his ancestors who scraped a bed for themselves in the leaves of the forest.
Nevertheless, the origin of a habit is not always its justification. Is the preaching of other people's sermons ethically defensible? St. Augustine thought it was, and indeed circulated his own sermons among his clergy with the intention that they should use them without any fear of being considered guilty of plagiarism. The real plagiarist, he maintained, was the preacher whose life did not conform to his preaching. Here, of course, all was open and above board. When the priests of the diocese of Hippo made use of their bishop's sermons they can hardly have hoped to pass off his work as their own.
One has heard of modern bishops who, realising that their junior clergy were expected to deliver more sermons than they had time to prepare properly, presented their newly-ordained deacons with volumes of sermons which they were invited to use at their discretion. How many of the young men, when delivering one of the discourses so thoughtfully provided, would have the courage to say that it was the work of another man? I can remember only one example of such frankness. It was shown by a clergyman taking summer duty in a Swiss mountain resort. He explained that as he was on holiday and lad no inclination to make an original sermon he was going to preach one by Bishop Walsham How. Unfortunately, what followed was the preacher's own unskilful digest of the bishop's work.
At any rate, the purveyors of ready-made sermons do not expect their clients to take their flocks into their confidence, for they provide sermons in imitation typescript and, according to - an advertisement which lies before me, in a suitable format for the sermon-case. Its appeal is carefully adapted to consciences of varying grades of sensitiveness. Thus the hardened plagiarist can take it that the sermons may be used as they are, while the more scrupulous are reassured by the suggestion that the sermons they buy can be used as foundations and materials for the com- position of other sermons, thereby making the preparation of original discourses a real pleasure. These sermons, if purchased at subscribers' rates, work out at about eightpence apiece, and material obtained at so moderate a cost might reasonably be treated as raw, but who would dare to sub-edit a masterpiece which had cost him a guinea, for that is the-price asked for the highest quality of special typescripts for the present time? Is it not remarkable that the high cost of such homiletic aids is never mentioned in discussions on clerical poverty? Perhaps the silence may be taken as a sign that. the clergy still have a conscience in these matters, and that the use of such pre-digested sermon- fodder does not come under the heading of that diligence in " such studies as help to the knowledge of the holy Scriptures' which they promise at their ordination as priests.
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