Books of the Day

The Technique of the Sermon

The Art of Preaching. By Charles Smyth. (S.P.C.K. 8s. 6d.)

This "Practical Survey of Preaching in the Church of England, 747-1939," is addressed primarily to parish priests, and after them to professional historians. But it has an appeal

outside those categories, for the layman also is demonstrably "interested in preaching," even if his interest only takes the negative form of offering the alleged badness of sermons as an excuse for not going to church ; while in the lay Press it is usually taken for granted that the vitality of the Christian religion is to be estimated by the " drawing-power " of popular preachers. Canon Smyth's readers may be surprised to learn what early, and what Catholic, authority may be claimed by those who thus consider the hearing of sermons to be the one essential part of Christian worship. St. Ber- nardino of Siena (1380-1444) says : "If of these two things you can do only one—either hear the Mass or hear the sermon—you should let the Mass go "; and the English friar

who wrote Dives and Pauper (c. 1405-9) agrees, adding this reason:

For by preaching folk be stirred to contrition, and to forsake sin and the fiend, and to love God and goodness ; and be illumined to know their God, and virtues from vices, truth from falsehood, and to forsake errors and heresies. By the Mass they are not so ; but if they come to Mass in sin they go away in sin, and shrews they come and shrews they wend.

We may note that this glorification of the pulpit makes its appearance at the same time as, and in the mouths of, the great Preaching Orders, in whom the office of preaching was disjoined from pastoral activity ; whereas the earlier rule,

which Canon Smyth considers "infinitely sounder," had been to confine public preaching to those who had the cure of souls.

Nevertheless, it is true, as our friar goes on to point out, that the value of hearing Mass (or partaking in any other form of worship) depends on our knowing what it is all about, and that we cannot know this without instruction. To this end we must be "stirred and illumined "; it is only when this end is overlooked that stirring and illumination become ends in themselves, and the sermon degenerates into emotional entertainment, with the hearer's attention focused, not upon God, but upon his own feelings and the personality of the preacher. Against this danger, the close union of the pastoral and preaching functions provides a valuable safeguard.

A good parish priest may not, of course, possess a natural gift for preaching. But Canon Smyth rightly contends that a sound technique of preaching can be learnt, like that of other arts, and should in no case be left to be acquired by the random method of trial and error. The man in the pew too often rightly complains that sermons are " amateurish " by comparison with the lectures on secular subjects which he is accustomed to hear ; and in these days of competing attractions and hostile philosophies it is all the more neces- sary that the preacher should learn the craft of his profession.

The great schools of preaching in the past worked out rules of sermon construction which are still well worth our con- sideration. They will not make a man an "inspired speaker"

if he is not so already, but they will help him to aioid vagueness, scrappiness and incoherence, and assist him to prepare a discourse which shall at least be sound, solid and purposeful. To supplement the somewhat inadequate instruc- tion given by the ordinary theological training courses, Canon Smyth offers this useful historical survey of Anglican theory and practice.

The book is founded upon four lectures to clergy, given last year at Sion College. Two main sections are devoted to the Pulpit in the Middle Ages, and deal, one with the "Sermon Scheme," and the other with the use of the "Exemplum." Although the elaborate artificiality of the mediaeval convention may seem to us remote and a little repellent, we cannot but be struck by the majestic architectural structure of these

tremendous theological expositions, in which., indeed, nothing was left to chance or the vagaries of a momentary fancy. The casual modern plan of "offering a few thoughts" on some such subject as " Cheerfulness " or "Goodwill," or tacking a few pious observations on to a chat about electrons, or indulging in "flabby platitudes about the dangers of the international

situation," would have struck the mediaeval preacher with righteous horror. His business was to expound the Word of God, and to do it thoroughly and with system. The text must be taken from the Bible, and the sermon must be an orderly explanation and illustration of the text, amplifying and enlarging upon it, but never rambling away into side-issues. The ideal text is one containing a number—preferably three— of key-words, which may form suitable " divisions " for the argument ; and the text must be used in the meaning appro- priate to its original context, without any dubious omissions or perversions. The text or theme thus chosen forms the " root " of the sermon, from which, like a trunk, rises the ante-theme, based upon the same text or one closely allied to it, and ending in a "bidding-prayer." The preacher should then repeat the text for the benefit of late- comers, and then proceed to the three main branches of his discourse ; these should be announced with an elegant rhyming symmetry so as to please the ear and assist the memory.

One may perceive the scaffolding of the mediaeval architec- ture enduring throughout the late Middle Ages, sustaining alike the more intimate and homely eloquence of Latimer and the immense edifices of wit and rhetoric of the great meta- physicals. But the reaction against extravagance in thought and language which was produced everywhere about the time of the Restoration had its effect upon the pulpit. The new atti- tude towards Science, and the exaltation of the "Rational Man," helped to usher in the Age of Tillotson, which occupies the third section of Canon Smyth's book. In addition, there was that reaction against the inspired rantings and hot- gospelling jargon of the Covenanters which so notoriously set the faces of English churchmen into a "concentrated expres- sion of no-Enthusiasm." Statements of plain truths in plain language, without flowery ornament or flights of picturesque fancy, came into vogue. Sermons were still solidly framed and closely argued, but they rather resembled a reasonable exposition of Christian ethics than any kind ot preaching of the Cross of Christ. The general tendency was to prove that on the whole it was more rational, prudent, advan- tageous, and even easier, to be a Christian than not—a point of view that perhaps sets the sermons of this period farther apart from our own habits of thought even than the most elaborate thirteenth-century exegesis, in spite of the greater simplicity of their style. Even at the time, indeed, there were divines who protested against this secularisation of the Christian message, and would have deprecated the astonishing pronouncement of an early nineteenth-century Archbishop: "Were you to inculcate the morality of Socrates, you would do more good than canting about the New Birth ! "

In "The Nineteenth Century and After," to which Canon Smyth devotes his fourth section, the Evangelical Revival and the Tractarian Movement brought back the Gospel to English pulpits and happily counteracted this strange substitution of logic for the Logos. In some ways, this last section is the most interesting of the book, since it deals with the problems and conditions of our own day. It is less easy to summarise, chiefly because the abandonment of the formal sermon-scheme makes modern preaching so much a matter of the practice of individual preachers. Methods of construction under formal "Heads," some resembling the mediaeval use and others modelled upon Tillotson, were, indeed, used by the early Methodists and Evangelicals, but in most churches today the reduction of sermon-time to a brief quarter of an hour or so militates against elaboration of structure. The necessity of being brief ought, one would think, to entail a determination to be pregnant and a correspondingly careful preparation of the sermon ; Canon Smyth hints that he 4 not altogether happy about certain trends in twentieth-century popular preaching, and suggests that some attention to the earlier, more scrupulous models might not come altogether amiss. To the interesting and valuable matter of his book the lay- man would like to add one word. "Remember," he would say to his parson, "we no longer live in a Christian atmefr sphere. We are bombarded, six days of the week, with definitely anti-Christian teaching, much of it very skilfullY worded. If you are to counteract the effects of this in fifteen minutes on Sunday, you will have to be very convincing indeed." The task of the preacher has never been harder than it is at this moment ; and never, perhaps, in the historl of the world has it been more urgent. The helps that Cato Smyth has brought together in this volume come at a veil