RECENT SERMONS.* READERS who may see very clearly the value
of Mr. Whitehead's Sermons—and there are few, we should imagine, who can fail to see it —may yet have a difficulty in classing them or defining their special excellence. As to the common party classification of "High," "Low," and "Broad," they stand wholly without it, and absolutely refuse to be included. It is surprising, and most of our readers will, we presume, join us in saying gratifying, to find a volume of discourses which are not by any means negative, or colourless, or wanting in emphatic judgments, showing so little to mark out the position of the writer. When we have said that he seems to stand well within the borders of orthodoxy and to be a man of liberal ways of thinking, we have about exhausted the possible in- ferences to be drawn from his volume. It will be understood from what has been said that Mr. Whitehead's Sermons are not distinctly theological or controversial ; when we add that they do not aim at that subtle analysis of character which has made some preachers famous, and that they do not possess the richly ornate or fervid rhetoric which gives such an attraction to others, it will probably be tusked in what their merit consists. Briefly, then, they are the plain, straightforward, unadorned, utter- ances of a man who can look at the Bible and at life with a mind and judgment singularly free from professional prepossessions. To feel, whether you read or listen, that the preacher never goes beyond the line of his own experiences and feelings, never says anything because there is a supposed conventional necessity for saying it, never uses phrases that do not express convictions, has a wonderful attraction for those who are wearied of the half-unconscious insincerity which so often besets the language and even the very tones and gestures of the pulpit. Add to these merits excellencies, both general and special, of no common kind, much power of felicitous illustration and combination, an unfailing freshness in the treatment of familiar subjects, a genuine sympathy with diverse phases of thought and feeling, a quiet humour just sufficient to relax the features into a not indecorouss mile, and, setting forth all to excel- lent advantage, a singularly clear style, and you have, it is evident, abundant reasons for a very hearty admiration. We admire also indeed sermons of a very different kind,—that eloquence, too rarely heard in English pulpits, and of which but one or two men keep alive the tradition in secular assemblies, which carries the hearer out of himself ; and we will even say that Mr. Whitehead's style is too bare, too studiously stript of ornament for our taste, too little concessive to that human feeling—call it weakness, if you will—which loves now and then the colour of an epithet or the roll of a sonorous period ; but for wise, honest, practical talk to men about their duties to God and man, talk not in the least hard, and though carefully kept within the severest restraint of taste, by no means wanting in spirituality, it would not be easy to find a more satisfactory volume than this.
A sermon, to be properly judged, must, more almost than any other literary work, be judged as a whole ; and to these discourses, which have no purpurei panne about them, such a judgment is especially necessary. One passage, however, we must quote, exhibiting more than one of Mr. Whitehead's characteristic merits :-
"Elijah Elijah and Jezebel were the master spirits of Ahab's reign. As for Ahab, he stood in awe of them both. Significantly identical is their way of addressing him, when they have serious business on hand ; Get thee up,' said Elijah to him, just before ascending Mount Carmel to pray, 'eat and drink ; " Arise, and eat bread,' says Jezebel to him, when she is plotting murder, 'and let thine heart be merry.' They both treat him like a child ; and indeed in the hands of either of them he was but a child. Perhaps in this respect he was but a fair repre- sentative of the mass of mankind, who are often like children in the hands of the master spirits. Just such a battle as Elijah and Jezebel fought over Ahab, they fought over all Israel. Posterity, no doubt, has with one consent denounced Queen Jezebel. But many a Jezebel, of either sex, has commanded contemporary admiration, and in the self- willed, high-handed exercise of 'lordship' has been called a 'bene- factor.' Jezebel herself must have been thought a benefactor by many in Israel. The prophets who sat at her table would talk gratefully of her splendid hospitality. Many a lover of the fine arts would take pride in the Phenician princess who encouraged Ahab in his building of cities and ivory palaces. Statesmen who valued an alliance with foreign • Sermons, chiefly on Subjects from Me Sunday LCSSCMS. By Henry Whitehead, M.A., Vicar of St. John's, Limehouie. London: Strahan and Co. 1871.
The Ten Commandments. By B. W. Dale, 11.A. London : Hodder and Stoughton. 1871. powers would speak approvingly of the queen who secured for Israel the friendship of Tyre and Sidon. So-called patriots, who looked with jealousy upon any traces of their former connection with Judah, would be glad to see the worship of Baal substituted for the calves in Bethel and Dan. which were supposed to represent the God of both Judah and Israel. Timid men, who remembered the intestine dissensions which resulted in the deaths of Elah and Zimri, would rejoice at the spectaele of a strong government and would be at no loss to detect the source and secret of its strength ; for there was now a spirit in the councils of the throne which knew how to 'govern the kingdom of Israel.' As for the prophets of the Lord, the time was now come for them to hide in dens and caves, or else, if they ventured forth, to suffer death for their temerity. Even he whose more than verbal protest against Baal-wor- ship and its material prosperity had earned for him, from the highest authorities, the repute of being the troubler of Israel, was nowhere to be found. A most impracticable man he must have seemed to the states- men of Israel ; and yet withal, they could but allow, a deeply interesting man, one of nature's heroes. Oh why ! they would ask in amazement, must a hero and a genius be so wayward and eccentric? Is it some mysterious madness which makes him incapable of statecraft, and hurries him off to the wilderness instead of to 'Jezebel's table '? Meanwhile Israel is 'governed,' and Baal's priests and prophets stalk complacently through the land ; for he they deem the troublor of Israel is far away."
Mr. Dale's volume is of a very different character, though it is certainly not less able, and to many audiences would be far more attractive. It is eminently rhetorical, though its rhetoric is of a manly, sincere kind, with nothing of false ornament or bad taste about it. It takes us out of the serene mther of first principles into a more disturbed and denser atmosphere. Such applications as the following lie, of course, very close to the laws which Mr. Whitehead enunciates, but he never dreams of making them. Here is an application of the Eighth Commandment :—
"If a workman, who is paid to work ten hours, takes advantage of the absence of the master or foreman to smoke a pipe and read the news- paper for one hour out of the ten, he steals one tenth of his day's wages. He does the very thing that a shopkeeper would do who gave him four- teen ounces of batter or sugar instead of a pound, or nine yards of calico when the bill charged ten. An assistant in a shop, who instead of caring for his master's interests as if they were his own, puts no heart into his work, exercises no ingenuity, treats customers carelessly instead of courteously, and so diminishes the chances of their coming again,—gets his salary on false pretences, does nat give the kind of service which he knowS his employer expects, and which he would expect if he were an employer himself. He cannot but know that his services are not worth half what they would be if he did his beat; instead of earning the thirty or forty pounds a year, for which he is engaged, ho does not earn more than fifteen pounds or twenty pounds,—and he practically steals the rest."
And here is one equally forcible of the Sixth :-
"If Moses had to regulate our legislation in reference to railway acci- dents he would put it on altogether a new basis. If half-a-dozen people were killed and a score seriously injured through the mail running into a goods train, and Moses found that the engine-driver who missed the signal had been on his engine twelve or fourteen hours, or that the pointsman who turned the mail into the goods siding had been kept at his post for, perhaps, a still longer period, I cannot help thinking that managers and directors would stand a chance of having a much sharper punishment than they commonly receive now. And if criminal care- lessness which might be fatal to life was punished by Moses with death, I think that fraudulent acts which are certain to injure the health and perhaps the life of the community would have been punished by him not leas severely. He would certainly have approved the sentence under which a few months ago a large farmer, greatly to his own astonish- ment and the astonishment of his friends, was put in prison for sending diseased meat to market; only I think that the old Jewish legislator would have inflicted a still heavier punishment.—a few years' penal service instead of a month or two's imprisonment."
A man who knows how to drive home blows like that, and is not afraid to do it, is sure to be a power in the community. Of course, there will be the danger, and Mr. Dale does not always avoid it, of hitting in the wrong place. Take this sentence, for instance :—" To a rich man the fine is practically no punishment at all ; to the poor man it may be a very grave punishment, even if he is able to pay ; and if he is not, the alternative of being imprisoned for seven days, fourteen days, or a month, is a penalty out of all proportion to that which is inflicted on the rich for the same offence." But surely to send to prison what is commonly called "a rich man," that is, a man who lives by a profession, is absolute ruin. To put a solicitor into jail would not be leas disabling to him for the future earning of his livelihood than to cut off a labourer's hands.
Generally, Mr. Dale's sermons are full of thought and vigour. Discourses on the Commandments very commonly are full of strained application, while the preacher attempts to make his text appropriate to modern circumstances. There is nothing of the kind here. There is not an irrelevant word from beginning to end. With one interesting passage we must conclude :—
" I am a Puritan. Church history makes me a Paritan. The philo- sophy of the religions life makes me a Puritan. Puritanism appears to me to be the highest expression of the spirit and genius of the Old Testament as well as of the New. I trust that I shall never be weary of protesting against every tendency to attach religious sanctity to any material thing. This building—consecrated though it may be to many of us by the holiest and most pathetic associations—is no House of God. Its walls have no sacredness which does not belong to the walls of your warehouse, your counting-house, or your shop, to the courts in which magistrates administer justice, the galleries in which paintings are exhibited, the hall in which we meet to discuss national politics, or to listen to Handel, Mendelssohn, and Mozart. Do you say that it assists your devotion to feel that this is in a special sense the dwelling place of God ? Again I say, that the same kind of argument would justify the Jews when they broke this Commandment by making the golden calf. Religious devotion not founded in truth must itself be false. If God is not here in any special sense, that cannot be true devotion which comes from believing that He is."
Would nothing that may be lawfully done in a house seem to Mr. Dale inappropriate to his chapel ? Is the act of our Lord in driving the buyers and sellers out of the Temple a case in point ? Surely the thought that there was a sacredness in these walls which did not belong to a shop.
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