SERMON READING W.SPOONER SMITH RABY OP RELIGIOUS THOUGHT %^^i-i ^s^^y BV A211 .S54 1916 Smith, William Spooner, 1821 -1916. Sermon reading JOHN COTTON SERMON READING FROM THE NOTE BOOK OF THE OCTOGENARIAN TRAVELLER ^IOV 1 7 19"' W. SPOONER SMITH Author of "Travel Notes of an Octogenarian" ^ LiUr: o-f TnallVjouS'tKotAcdn-t". BOSTON: THE GORHAM PRESS TORONTO: THE COPP CLARK CO., LIMITED Copyright, 1916, by Richard G. Badger All Rights Reserved Made in the United States of America The Gorham Press, Boston, U.S.A. CONTENTS PAGE The Origin of Sermon Reading ... 7 Sermon Reading in America .... 37 Prominent New England Preachers . 47 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FACINO PAGE John Cotton Frontispiece Henry VIII 8 Edward VI i6 Queen Mary I 24 Queen Elizabeth . . • 32 Cotton Mather 38 Jonathan Edwards 42 THE ORIGIN OF SERMON READING SERMON READING THE ORIGIN OF SERMON READING VAN OOSTERZEE, in his Practice of The- ology, complains that the History of the Art of Preaching is only for too many "terra Incog- nita," but allows validity to the excuse that there is yet wanting a good history of the Art. Furthermore, the exceeding meagerness, in all Church annals, of reference to that institution, dignified and emphasized by the final command of Christ to his Disciples, is like a surprise, disap- pointment and mystery to the student of Chris- tian history. Therefore, the task of presenting any historic phase of this subject is not an easy one. Hence, I bespeak the forbearing consid- eration of my readers in this attempt in a brief and imperfect way to tell whence and how the practice of sermons in the pulpit has come to be so familiar with us. 7 8 SERMON READING It goes without saying that preaching and this particular kind of preaching are not convertible terms, but the very wide distinctiveness between the two may be surprising to many as it shall be revealed by the lines of historical definition. For vast spaces of time may be cleared by brief nega- tive statements. Since in all the ages of the ancient dispensation recorded in the Old Testa- ment, when preaching itself was but a subordi- nate and occasional instrumentality, from Enoch and Noah to the last of the prophets that preached righteousness in the earth, that is the save in a single possible doubtful instance, so as save in a single possible doubtful instance. So as respects later times it is not difficult to accept Dr. Pressense's sweeping and emphatic statement, that none of the expressions by which preaching is spoken of in the New Testament can apply to written documents. And considering the high authority of the example thus set, it is easy to conclude with Prof. Hoppin, of Yale, New Haven, that there is no proof that the early patristic fathers were in the common habit of using writ- ten notes. By the revival of ceremonial worship IIEXRV VIII. SERMON READING 9 and the gradual restrictions of preaching, the altar came, at length, to displace the pulpit alto- gether In the regular ministrations of the Church. The ecclesiastical historian, Sozomen, makes the surprising and puzzling statement that In his time, toward the middle of the fifth century, the Church in Rome had no sermons, neither by the bishop or any other. There Is other testimony of the same sort, and It is certain that in large portions of the Latin and Greek churches preaching was rare and exceptional from the sixth to the sixteenth century. And what we know of the occasional preaching of medieval times, the sermons of men like Peter the Hermit, Andrew of Padua, and the monkish preachers that eventually arose, is of that fiery and passionate nature least suggestive of the written page. But the Reformation reinstated preaching in Its primitive dignity and power, where it has ever continued the supreme agency in the progress of the kingdom of God in the earth. But we may still continue onward in the nega- tive process of our Inquiry, for not only is the exclusion of the fifteen Christian centuries, with lo SERMON READING all preceding time, justified, but it is safe to claim that the Greek and Romish churches, as well as the various Protestant bodies of Continental Eu- rope, have been with very slight exception, even down to the present time, true to pulpit tradi- tions of the primitive church. Thus not till we come down to our own times in the records of the Anglo-Saxon race, do we find the object of our search. Which is, we repeat, not occasional, but habitual sermon-reading, — the deliberate and ex- clusive adoption of this as the method of deliv- ery. This kind of preaching as a usage, an insti- tution clear-cut, peculiar and distinctive, is not found previous to the English Reformation, but here do we come upon it with its local habitation and name. That German scholarship in the name of Van Oosterzee allows sermon-reading to have originated upon English soil, should convince any inclined to be skeptical upon this point that this statement is no straining of records, or point of special pleading, but plain historic prose. This English Reformation, the burning ques- tion not only in religious and ecclesiastical affairs, but in state and politics as well, for an hundred SERMON READING ii and fifty years of the most intense, changeful, tur- bulent and momentous period of English history, left the distinct impression of its mighty forces upon the Anglo-Saxon pulpit, which remains fixed, singular, and uneffaced to the present day. A brief study of this historic period, therefore, is necessary to an intelligent appreciation of the genius of manuscript preaching. It was Henry VIII, a man as hostile to Luther and his Doctrines as the Pope himself, and a bloody upholder of every Popish rite to the end of his days, who "broke the bond of Rome" by a successful vindication of his own personal head- ship of the Church of England. It is true that a corrupt and debased clergy was open to coercion and that neither himself nor the English nation, at large, ever held allegiance to the See of Rome as scarcely more than a constitutional fiction. Yet with all his advantages it is proof of the kingly might of the man that he made this first blow of reform so effectual. But his position was peril- ous and delicate, and to silence a yet hostile and rebellious clergy he promulgated that order which first framed the written sermon into law, for he 12 SERMON READING forbade the preaching of any sermon which had been written within these two or three hundred years, as the words ran. Thus he would put it out of the power of the recalcitrant priest to inflame the minds of the people by his pulpit harangues. Such was the state of affairs when that pre- cocious and promising boy, Edward VI, under the protectorate of Somerset, succeeded to the throne and honestly undertook the real reforma- tion of the nation. Naturally, preaching received early attention. A royal visitation in six circuits was ordered, with a preacher to each circuit, which preachers were to instruct the people in the Doctrines of the Reformation and bring them off from their superstitions. A book of homihes was also prepared and left with each parish priest to supply the defect in preaching. But the parish priests were still so disorderly that even Edward himself was obliged to prohibit preaching alto- gether, until some uniform order could be made out which should put an end to all controversies In religion. Hence the origin and the sublime purpose of the Prayer Book, viz., a device In- SERMON READING .13 tended and expected to put an end to all con- troversies in religion. But the untimely death of this youthful monarch gave place to the five bloody, disastrous years of Mary's reign, in which the Pope seemed to have come to his ow^n again in English affairs. But Protestantism proved it- self rooted in English soil, and sturdy enough to withstand Mary's hostihty and even the half- hearted and extremely unsatisfactory nature of Elizabeth's favor. True to her type of reform, she never yielded to the temporal assumption of the papacy, but she made no show of any per- sonal religion of any kind. But worse than that, as regards the interest of reform, she was an avowed and unrelenting enemy of all preachers and preaching. She hated the Puritans, among whom almost alone competent preachers could then be found. Most effectually to bar all such from the pulpit, she recast the service-book in use, and made copes and investments, therein for- bidden, essentials; and so offensive was this test that it was found impossible to fill even the oc- curring vacancies in the establishment with men of tolerable capacity. Neal, the Puritan histo- 14 SERMON READING rian, accounted it next to a miracle, as the case stood, that the Reformation had not fallen back into the hands of the papists, and is confident that such would have been the sad consequence had not some of the Puritans complied for the present, in hopes of the removal of the grievances in more settled times. There was but little preaching all over the land. The Bishop of Bangor had but two preachers in his entire diocese. It was much if the parson could read the service and some- times a homily, Elizabeth meanwhile complain- ing that there was too much preaching, two for a county was an ample supply! But the Bishops on the other hand, moved by the pleadings of the people for the ministry of the word, strained their instructions that they might let in the most conscientious and zealous of the reformers, but at the same time were obliged, also, to admit the meanest and most illiterate who came up to the laws. Another book of homilies was published for their further as- sistance. Yet the state of the churches continued most deplorable. Many of them were closed, and in those that were not no sermon was tp SERMON READING 15 be heard in some counties for the compass of twenty miles. In some parishes it was hard to find persons to baptize or to bury the dead. In about the thirteenth year of Ehzabeth, the Bish- ops by reason of the sore destitution of preachers resorted to a special system of training for the pulpit, called prophesying, by which the number of preachers was rapidly multiplied. But the Queen sternly suppressed the good work by a spe- cial order. After twenty years of such a policy as this, we are not surprised to still hear of the languishing conditions of the pulpit. In the large and populous town of Northampton there was not a single preacher, and had not been for a consid- erable time, though the people had applied to the bishop In the most humble supplications. Of the 140 clergymen in the county of Cornwall, not one was capable of preaching a sermon. One-half of the churches in London Itself were without a preaching ministry. It was stated that the great- est part of the ministries of 160 parishes in one county were guilty of the grossest sins, fornica- tions, adulteries; drunkards, gamesters, and felons even bearing the brand of the offense In their i6 SERMON READING hands. And the cause of all this curse and scan- dal was simply the narrow terms of conformity. For a rising generation of valuable preachers was ready for service, and while the ecclesiastical authorities were turning them away from the pul- pit, the gentry were receiving them into their houses as chaplains and tutors for their children. By a special survey made in 1585-86, fifty years along In the Reformation, it was found that there were but two thousand preachers for all the ten thousand parish churches. At a time when not one beneficed clergyman in six was capable of com- posing a sermon, one-fourth of all the preachers of England were under suspension in the various courts. It is proof of the autocratic and queenly force of Elizabeth's will that she was able to sus- tain this attitude of inveterate hostility to preach- ing through forty-five years of that period in which the English people as never before or since hungered and pleaded for the ministration of the pulpit. A good Bible reader would then draw and hold an audience more strongly than the most accomplished elocutionary attractions of our day. We may smile and wonder at the interminable EDWARD VI. SERMON READING 17 discourses of those old preachers, but they preached thus on and on because the people hung upon their words with the most unflagging interest. But Elizabeth's long reign finally came to a close, and Protestant England in view of the re- ligious antecedents of James hopefully welcomed him to the throne. But that most despicable of English kings disappointed all expectations and drew closer than before the limits of conformity. But there is not need to dwell upon the pitiless rigors of this or the succeeding reign which made the land so intolerable to devout Englishmen that 20,000 of them went into voluntary exile over the seas. With Cromwell indeed came a brief respite from ecclesiastical violence. But on the Restoration the storm of persecution rose again, and culminated in the cruel and infamous succes- sion of the last conformity, the conventicle and five-mile act. But the long agony of the Anglo- Saxon reformation was drawing to its close. The futile effort of James the Second to effect a Catho- lic reaction, precipitated that crisis from which issued that edict of universal toleration which 1 8 SERMON READING has made 1688 so memorable to the English- speaking race. Half Catholic and half Protestant under Henry VIII and Cranmer, Lutheranized under Edward VI, and involved in a bloody struggle by Mary — - England was not able to adopt the one-sided sys- tem of Luther and Calvin; and it soon discovered when it began to take a more definite form under Elizabeth that the spirit of the old religion was still powerful, and that much of the best religious thought of England retained a strong Catholic impulse. The reign of Mary had indeed embit- tered the popular feeling against the Roman Catholics, and they were almost crushed as a party by the ruthless cruelty of Elizabeth, but the Calvinistic party never took their place; and the great Ecclesiastical Polity of Hooker, the ear- liest and most lasting work of English Theology, confirmed the principal teachers of the English Church in that warm attachment to the English Church of the earliest ages of Christianity, which was but little known to the other Churches — ^^the Reformation. But the independent spirit of Cal- vinism, though rejected by the greatest of the SERMON READING 19 English Clergy, early obtained an Influence which was perhaps rather political than religious, over many of the ablest men of the English Gentry and middle classes, and It was owing to the alliance of the church party, and especially of Archbishop Laud with the despotism of James and Charles, that Ehot, Hampden, Pym, Crom- well, In a word, some of the greatest politicians whom England has ever produced, were mostly non-conformists. Thus the civil war was a strug- gle between religious as well as political princi- ples; but though Calvinism was triumphant, Its victory was Its destruction. The ten years of the reign of the Puritan are perhaps the convinc- ing evidence that Calvinism, from Its narrow- ness, bitterness and want of reason, can never either attract the mass or satisfy the most thoughtful of our countrymen. When It fell the old church of England at once resumed Its place; but It was no longer the same as It was in the days of Andrews and Laud, for It had all the fresh element of religious thought and activity, of which I have just spoken, to remold or struggle with. It Is facts such as these which make the 20 SERMON READING fifty years, from the Restoration in 1660 to the beginning of the eighteenth century, so marked a period in the history of the Church of England, because it saw that church assume its final form, and enter upon what may be called its modern course. The High Church party (though the name was not yet known), the Moderate party, the Latitudinarian party, and the Non-Conformist party were now branching in different directions from the two old parties of the Church of the Puritans; and it is certainly no small proof of the large and catholic character of the Church that Bull and South and Parsons and Jeremy Taylor, Lock and Boyle and Isaac Newton, were not only able to live as its attached members, but may be numbered among its greatest writers. This is a fact that must not be forgotten when we lament the failure of the larger attempts of comprehen- sion, which were made in the reigns of Charles II and William. Meanwhile it is useless to add that this period was also one of vehement strug- gle in which churchmen, Non-Conformists, and Roman Catholics had their alternate attempts and which were likely therefore to breed a race of SERMON READING 21 vigorous combatants. In view of the course which we have then roughly blazed, four stages in the introduction of sermon reading might be characterized with suffi- cient propriety, perhaps as the despotic, the providential, the necessitated and the voluntary phases of the innovation, I. Arbitrary, introduced by the order of Henry VIII to his but nominally reformed clergy that there should be nothing but the reading of old sermons from the pulpit. This great and startling change in the order of church ministra- tion was received by the people with mingled dis- gust, indignation and alarm. But this seemed safer to the king than the unrestrained incen- diarism of the parish priest. II. The providential phase. This comes to view in Edward's time when according to Bishop Bur- net's statement those also who were licensed to preach by the king, being often accused for their sermons, and complaints being made by hot men of both sides, came to write and read their ser- mons as a more safe and expedient resort in tur- bulent and perilous times. 22 SERMON READING III. The necessitated phase. This in the clas- sification differs from the Arbitrary in that it was not brought about by despotic orders, but was the necessary result of the situation and the policy of the government. For the English reformation was a combined movement of political and re- ligions forces, which were so disproportionately combined as not only to fail of harmonious ac- tion, but, on the other hand, to work harm and disaster. This is apparent at a glance. For political reformation was by a " word** as crea- tion came. England one day Catholic; the next Protestant. So Henry made it, Mary as imme- diately revised the order. Elizabeth again re- formed the nation by a breath. Not only was there no Protestant clergy to supply the parishes, but those parishes were still in the hands of the nominally reformed but really thrice Popish priests. Reading was a paradoxical necessity, for the supply of preachers was of the wrong sort. And the reader became the only possible resort until competent and trustworthy preachers could be provided. This was in the beginning of the reformation. Moreover, we have noticed how SERMON READING 23 the government, for more than four generations of Englishmen, in view of the nation's perishing need of adequate and competent church minis- trations, kept at the work as how best not to sup- ply that need. So, per force of hard necessities, protracted and aggravated, people and preachers were broken into the innovation. IV. We reach now the Voluntary phase. For the time came at length, in the course of suc- cessive generations, when manuscript preaching became the preferred practice, that the univer- sities even gave the sanction of their example to the new way. We have a curious piece of evidence in a state paper issued in the fifteenth year of the reign of Charles the Second. The paper or order was by the hand of the Duke of Monmouth to the University of Cambridge, of which he was Chancellor, and read as follows: "His Majesty has commanded me to signify to you his pleasure that this practice of sermon read- ing which took beginning with the disorders of the late times be laid aside, and that preachers deliver their sermons both in Latin and English by memory, being a way of preaching which His 24 SERMON READING Majesty judges most agreeable to the use of for- eign churches and the custom of churches here- tofore, and the nature and entertainment of that holy exercise." But we are told that this injunction was little heeded. Finally, Tillotson, after most care- ful failure in attempts at extempore preaching, brought the reading pulpit to the highest degree of perfection and popularity. Though the read- ing of his sermons by no means justifies the ex- travagant estimates of his contemporaries, yet we are not inclined to take exception to the quaint and curiously discriminating tribute which Bishop Burnet renders to the sermonistic literature of the great English divines, which runs as follows : "If there was not that heat and fervor which the friars had shown in their declamations, so that the passions of the hearers were not so much wrought up by it, yet it has produced the great- est treasure of weighty, grave, solid sermons that ever the church of God had, which does in a great measure compensate that seeming flatness to vulgar ears that is in the delivery of them." In the annals of the sermons made to be read, OTEEX MARY 1 ST. SERMON READING 25 the closing years of the seventeenth and the be- ginning of the eighteenth centuries is a period illustrious with great names. Yet these are but the brightest spots in an otherwise dark and dis- couraging picture. The reformed pulpit had come in at length with a certain magnificence of prestige. But when we inquire what had come with it and what it had accomplished, the answer is far from satisfactory and encouraging. The Evangelical and the Canonical divide on the dis- tinct line of pulpit delivery. Lecky says the writ- ten discourse comported best with the cold and colorless theology which prevailed. Voltaire wit- nesses that an English sermon of that period was a solid but sometimes dry dissertation which a man read to the people without gesture and with- out any particular exaltation of voice, while on the other hand discourses aiming at the pathetic and accompanied by vivid gesture excited laughter in the English congregation. But it is church- men thernselves who bring grave charges like the following upon this final outcome of the Eng- lish reformation. "The preachers as a body were not Prophets, they were not Seers, they were not 26 SERMON READING even instructed Scribes, they were but cold essay- ists and dull literarians. Their gospel was a gos- pel of bare respectability, there was no personal appeal to the wavering, no fiery denunciation of the wrongdoer, and a painful avoidance of en- thusiasm, a refusal to lift hand or voice to set off the finest composition. A clergy that, instead of a coal of fire from the altar, offered to the generation an icicle from the study, applying fee- ble sprinkling of tepid water to an age that needed burning deluges of baptismal fire — making the very conception of a sermon become to the last degree artificial and inane. A clergyman, says the poet Shenstone, might distinguish himself by composing a set of sermons on the ordinary vir- tues extolled by the classic writers, introducing the ornamental flourishes of Horace, etc. Bishops referred their clergy to the Satires of Juvenal rather than to the inspirations of the prophets and the apostles. A late writer sadly says, "Thus we became an unpreaching church, eloquence, powerful at the Senate and the Bar, was banished from the pulpit. Then followed the drowsy audience and the deserted pews and SERMON READING 27 at length the profound spiritual lethargy of the eighteenth century. There were great divines and there were written sermons of high and deserved repute, but preaching as an art, as the noblest art, had departed from us and the alienation of the hearts of the common people took place, from which we have never yet recovered. But fortu- nately this was not all of England nor all of the religion of England. The Puritan, the Ana- baptist, the Presbyterian and the Quaker yet lived, although long unrecognized by Church or State but with the persecuting scourge. And while learn^ed bishops were bewailing the impotence of their polished periods against the swelling floods of profligacy, brutality, and ungodliness, or confessing in the words of Warburton that they had lived to see the fatal crisis when religion had lost its hold upon the minds of men, or with Butler, that the avowed scorn of religion in some, and growing disregard of it in the generality, was the deplorable distinction of the age, even then when moral and spiritual forces seemed to be losing their hold altogether upon human society and the human heart, the fullness of the times 28 SERMON READING was drawing near in the gracious providence of God, when rude but sturdy hands of a new order of evangelists should grasp the sword of the Spirit, then so neglected by a beneficed priesthood, and go in its foreordained and primitive might, so subduing kingdoms and working righteousness that not only should the English world be re- formed indeed, but dead Anglicanism, itself, be made alive and mighty in every good work and word. Substantially then in the hands of a sermon- reading clergy, Christianity came perilously near to becoming a lost cause on English soil, a rescue and redemption to religion and people was under God by the fiery tongue of Wesleyan evangelism. According to Matthew Arnold the four chief names of the English church are Hooker, who is great by having signally and above others the sense of religion, of history, and of historic devel- opment; Butler, who is greater by having the sense of philosophy; Barrow, by having that of morals; Wilson, that of practical Christianity. Wilson's sermons were not great in the way of literary greatness, though they partake of and SERMON READING 29 illustrate that downward movement, which from the splendor of Barrow and Taylor plunged like a flake of falling fire, through the chill transpar- ency of Clarke and Tillotson into the orthodox dullness of Beveridge, and which, when all but ex- tinguished, sputtered feebly amid white ashes in the tawdry verbosity of Harvey and the artificial rhetoric of Blair. It was the age of Hume, yet Wilson does not contribute one iota of argument for the defense of Christianity; it was the age of Pope, yet he scarcely quotes or alludes to one line of poetry; it was the age of Addison and Johnson, yet he makes no reference to contemporary literature; it was the age of Berkeley and Butler, yet for him metaphysics are non-existent; it was the age of Hoadley, yet he had nothing to contribute to the Bangorian controversy; it was the age of Laes and Fenelon, yet he has not a word to say of mysticism and quietism ; it was the age of the early preaching of Woolsey and Whitefield, yet he never touches upon that breath of influence which, alas, too late it may be to avert the Nemesis of herneglectand will-blind, was beginning to breathe 30 SERMON READING over the dead church like a stream of fire. Sobriety and good sense were the qualities most valued in the pulpit and enthusiasm and extrava- gance were the most dreaded. The habit of ex- tempore preaching almost died out after Burnet and Tillotson set the example of written dis- courses. Clarke, who was at that time much dis- tinguished as an extempore preacher, abandoned the practice as soon as he obtained the important and fashionable pulpit of St. James. The age in which they preached was a Godless age; it was an age whose poetry was without romance, whose philosophy was without insight, and whose public men were without character. It abounded in "immoral thoughtlessness." A "loose and ignorant diem" was prattled in all fashionable circles and a general scorn of religion was, as always, attended by general profligacy of manners. The clergy were remiss in their labors and self-indulgent in their lives. There were some, even among leading statesmen, who were drunken, illiterate and coarse. There were mem- bers of the royal family who set a scandalous example. The odious letters of Chesterfield show SERMON READING 31 with what unblushing cynicism a father could teach Immorality to a son as a necessary element of a fashionable career. The uneducated and shamefully neglected masses sank into terrible depths of crime and brutality. The pictures of Hogarth, the novels of Smollett and Fielding show that English morals had fallen to their very depths of degradation. And how did God's ministers attempt to stem this torrent of iniquity? What was the teaching they offered, what the motions they opposed to all this crime and denial of God? Nothing, for the most part, but the coldest and nakedest of moral- ity. Their Gospel was a Gospel of bold respect- ability. There was no personal appeal to the wavering, no fiery denunciation of the insolent wrong-doer. Cringing flattery, unblushing incon- sistency, open worldliness, greedy hunting of pre- ferments. Bishops and archbishops amassed colos- sal fortunes and traveled across their provinces and gorged with pluralities of every desirable benefice their sons and kinsmen; a clergy addicted to such aims as these; a clergy painfully anxious to relieve themselves of the crying sin of enthu- 32 SERMON READING siasm; a clergy which reveled in such pompous euphemisms and polished nullities as those of Blair, could never deeply stir the hearts of the age. With beginning so unpromising, and efficacy so questionable, the practice of sermon reading did not very freely or widely spread. Wales kept strictly true to her honorable tra- ditions. The relation of Scotland to the inno- vation is well illustrated by a story told by Nor- man Macleod. Having upon a time preached in a district of Ayreshire, where the reading of sermons was regarded as the greatest fault a minister could be guilty of; on the dispersion of the congregation an old woman, overflowing with enthusiasm, addressed her neighbor, exclaiming, "Did ye ever hear anythin' so gran', wasn't that a sermon?" But all her expressions of admira- tion being met with stolid silence, she shouted, "Speak, woman, wasna that a sermon?" "Oh I aye," replied her friend sulkily, "but he read it." "Read it," said the other with indignant empha- sis, "I wouldna have cared if he had whustled it." And yet it is true Scotland's greatest preacher •• :^M WHm'-^^ S^*^-y^:. ■m^ '^^' OUEEN ELIZABETH SERMON READING 33 Is claimed as a sermon reader. But it is only fair to say that he was even less a mere reader than an extemporaneous preacher. Dr. Chalmers on great occasions was absolutely terrible, his heavy frame was convulsed, his face flushed and grew pythic; the veins on his forehead and neck stood out like cordage, his voice cracked or reached to a shriek, foam flew from his lips in flakes, he hung over his audience menacing them with his shaking fists, or he stood erect maniacal and stamping. If that be reading, it is reading with a pith in it, as a lady admirer who hated reading once styled it. In later years, how- ever, the practice of reading has gained ground somewhat in Scotland. Upon the continent, Netherlands alone had adopted the manuscript to any considerable ex- tent. But the Illustrations of our theme, both direct and comparative, in American history are too interesting and important to pass unnoticed. SERMON READING IN AMERICA SERMON READING IN AMERICA THE Puritan preachers of the first generation in New England were able, learned and fore- speaking men. Our John Cotton usually bestowed great labor upon his public discourses, but some- times even on his way to church pulpit his text would open to him in a new and striking manner and he would then unfold it by the hour to such effect that his most critical hearers never sus- pected he was listening to an unstudied effort. Samuel Danforth, of Roxbury, a man of un- bounded learning and influence, wrote his ser- mons twice over in an exceedingly legible and beautiful hand, but afterwards committed them to his most tenacious of memories. Jonathan Mitchel, a man of transcendent majesty and live- liness, wrote very largely, but read never a word after his text. In short, scholarly habits and elaborate preparation were subordinate to the fin- est and most effective delivery. But a change early set in; Cotton Mather says of John Ware- 37 38 SERMON READING ham, the first minister of Windsor, Conn., and maternal grandfather of Jonathan Edwards, that he was the first preacher who ever preached with notes in our New England. But it is not strange that the style of preaching which Tillotson and his school had made so popular with cultivated Englishmen of the period should appeal strongly to learned and critical tastes in the new world. And so it came to pass before the close of the first colonial century that the ministers of the New England churches became the most formal, impassive and inveterate of readers, and thus they also lost their hold upon the hearts of the common people, and the way was prepared for the in- coming of denominations of other names. How- ever, a goodly number in every generation of New England has held on upon the old way. Among such were many of the ablest and most popular preachers. More than fifty of the names commemorated in Sprague's Annals of the Congregational Pulpit are of men who kept themselves clear from any habitual use of notes in their preaching. Besides, wherever, in this country, the habit of sermon COTTON MATHER SERMON READING 39 reading had become prevalent there have not been wanting marked indications of dissatisfaction. The younger Ware, of Harvard College, and Dr. Wayland, of Brown University, were conspicu- ous, determined and persistent in their efforts for reform. Here and there have been witnessed striking examples of personal emancipation from the translating of notes. Without naming recent brilliant instances familiar to us all, there was Dr. Archibald Alexander, who discarded the use of notes in his later years. Albert Barnes likewise became an extemporaneous preacher after he was sixty years of age. Dr. James W. Alexander, of the most important Presbyterian pulpit in New York City in his day, responded as follows to Dr. Wayland's appeals for extempore preaching, "That the Baptist should forsake this strength and come down to the poor level of ourselves is amazing to me." "Were I not a poor fickle creature, whose work seems nearly done and who cannot simplify what he teaches, I would blow a trumpet of alarm." But the most marvelous case upon record, perhaps, of reform pulpit prac- tice is that of Rev. John Barnard, of Marble- 40 SERMON READING head, whose ministry extended from 1701-1770. A man grand in countenance and majestic in mien, one of the most vigorous and effective writers of his day among the New England clergy, when in the sixty-seventh year of his ministry and the eighty-seventh of his hfe, and unable to read his manuscripts by reason of defective eyesight, took to extemporaneous preaching with an effect, at times, greater even than that which had marked his best written sermons. But in addition to these reactionary movements against the stiffness and formality of the Ikter New England preaching, which had spread to some extent into the middle states, there is the singular fact that to-day this sermon-reading habit continues in practice with- out the avowed encouragement and support of a single homiletical authority. For when Prof. Phelps declares that the extemporaneous Ideal is the true one of perfect public speech, he but gives voice to the present undisputed theory of ser- mon delivery, even where the manuscript has been and is in most habitual use. But notwithstanding all. New England Congregationalism, both in its liberal and conservative wings, stands next to the SERMON READING 41 Anglican church in proportional denominational adoption of the manuscript sermon and practical adherence thereto. But there was another preacher of a far dif- ferent sort who in the vast regions west and south stood between the people and barbar- ism, which according to Dr. Bushnell was the real danger. The story of pioneer preaching in America is a tale thrilling with devotion, hero- ism and triumphant song. It is the record of the second and greater revolution which took place and broke the bonds of vice, brutality and irreligion. Whence those men came it is hard to tell, surely in the very least proportion, from the college and schools, for they had on them the slightest suggestion of the fashioning of man's hand, they seemed to spring from the very earth at the summons of God, a host of the most aggres- sive, impressible and invincible evangelists, Wes- leyan. Baptist, Scotch Irish Presbyterians, as a body, almost wholly uneducated, untrained, in- formal, unconventional, earnest, active, and sol- emn as thought of God, judgment and eternal salvation can make men, they went far in ad- 42 SERMON READING vance of the meeting-house, and the organized church, and by the wayside, in fields, and forests, in private houses, schools, houses or barns, any- where men and women could be found, and spake straight and full as men ever spake to men, to such effect that the vast spaces of the semi- barbaric wilderness of the wide land were soon saved to civilization and to God. Under God, wonderful was the power of these unschooled men. We are told of a southern evangelist who could move an audience of five thousand souls like a landslide, before he had mastered his spell- ing book. It was among the accomplishments of Bishop Asbury's servant, black Harry, that he was competent to take the place of his master in the pulpit as occasion might require, in a manner most acceptable even to city audiences, though unable to read a word. In this wise, by the most informal and purely extemporaneous preaching, the great denomina- tions of the country, Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian, were built up. The use of notes in the pulpit was universally discountenanced or utterly undreamed of by preacher and people. JONATHAN EDWARDS SERMON READING 43 But those zealous and often rough-spoken preach- ers were not only successful in the less cultivated communities, but were equal also to an effectual invasion of the land of the school and the col- lege, for the words of Bishop Asbury after his first discouraging visit to New England, that the Eastern church would yet find this saying true of the Methodist, viz., "I will provoke you to jealousy by a people that are no people and by a foolish nation will I anger you," were not with- out substantial fulfilment. An interesting remi- niscence of the late William E. Dodge: When a youth I resided in a New England village, where there was no place for evening meetings but a schoolroom in which we had frequent meetings and enjoyed several revivals. At times we would have perhaps a Methodist preacher, with little theological education, but good natural talent, a fine, full, clear voice, who would deliver a plain gospel sermon fresh from the heart and secure the attention of all present. And I was often ashamed at the contrast when one of our young men from New Haven or Andover would come along to preach and I would have to take a band- 44 SERMON READING box and cover It with a towel and place it on a little table, with candles, that he might read off his sermons generally to a sleepy and inat- tentive audience. Another comparison of the two kinds of delivery we have from an experience of the late Pres. Nott, of Hamilton College, on hearing that celebrated preacher. Dr. John Blair Smith. He says, "Coming as I did from Con- necticut, where the discourses of the clergy were for the most part argumentative, written dis- courses and read calmly and steadily from the pulpit, the impassioned and extemporaneous ef- forts of Dr. Smith filled me alike with admiration and amazement." So it came about that the Puri- tan preacher was obliged to share his original inheritance with the men who had a readier way to the hearts of the people. PROMINENT NEW ENGLAND PREACHERS PROMINENT NEW ENGLAND PREACHERS TOWARDS the close of the life of John M. Mason, D.D. ( 1792-1829),* the failure of memory consequent upon the disease which para- lyzed mind and body, obliged him to write his sermons and even to read them. It was not with- out a severe mental struggle that he consented to put on this ignoble yoke, as he called it, for he had all the old Scottish prejudices against 'read- ers of the Gospels' and had said as hard things about them as any one. The first time he preached for me in this way was at Spruce Street, Philadelphia, where he knew the people had a special dislike of 'the paper.' He laid his notes on the Bible and then said, 'My friends, I must ask your indulgence for adopting to-day a prac- tice which through life I have condemned. I must read my sermon — the hand of the Lord is upon me. I must bow to his will.' I need not say * All dates in parentheses refer to the years these ministers preached. 47 48 SERMON READING that the bitterest haters of 'notes' in the audi- ence were melted and for a time the church was truly a Bachim." — (Dr. McCarter.) Dr. Bithum says of "His printed sermons, ele- gant and powerful as some of them are, convey but a poor idea of his actual preaching." Of Edward Doar Griffin (1792-1837) Dr. Nicholas Murray says, "I have heard him preach great sermons, but the most eloquent and glowing thoughts that have ever been heard by me from mortal's lips were uttered by him in the school- house at Williamstown." Gideon Blackburn, D.D. (1792-1838), was a preacher of great distinction in the southwest. He alludes to the "Jerks," as it was some- times called. "I have not only heard of it and seen it, but have felt it, and I am persuaded that it is only to be effected by the immediate finger of God." He seldom wrote his sermons and never read them from the pulpit even when he had written them. In his preparation and studies for the pulpit, his plan was to fold a sheet of paper, and lay it on his writing desk, then com- mence to walk backwards and forwards across the SERMON READING 49 room, every now and then stopping to note down a head or leading subdivision of his thoughts, leaving considerable space under each head. Hav- ing thus arranged the plan of his discourse, which he called "blazing the path," borrowing a figure from backwoods life, he then proceeded to take up each head separately, until he had thought his whole discourse through and through, stop- ping occasionally as before to dot down a word or a thought, sometimes a sentence or an Illus- tration, under each division, until he had finished. Then, taking up the paper, he would con It over again and again, now blotting out, now adding something. Thus he continued till every part of the discourse was satlsfactoxlly arranged in his mind. The notes thus prepared he usually took with him into the pulpit, but he rarely had occa- sion to even glance at them. He used to remark, "I try to get my thoughts fully into my mind and leave the language generally to the occasion." Amsl Armstrong, D.D. (1795-1827), was a remarkable man In many aspects and would compare not unfavorably with the most promi- nent and gifted of his contemporaries. He early 50 SERMON READING accustomed himself to preach without his manu- script and ultimately attained to great self- possession and power in that mode of preaching. He, however, did not lay aside writing, but cul- tivated the two habits of writing and extemporiz- ing at the same time. George Addison Baxter, D.D. (1797-1841), never wrote anything and never had the brief- est outline committed to paper — yet his prepara- tion was thorough. He advised his students (of Washington College) always to put into words their extempore sermons at least twice before preaching them, and he observed that when they came to be delivered the language of either one or the other of these rehearsals would most prob- ably recur. He preached his sermons as he walked about from place to place. Henry Kollock, D.D. (1800-18 19), of Prince- ton College, Savannah, both read and extempo- rized, but the brightest efforts of eloquence were purely extemporaneous. Dr. Dwight regarded James Ingals, D.D. ( 1 801-1820), as the most signal instance of pre- cision in style that he ever met with. Though he SERMON READING 51 had his manuscript before him, he was always most striking and eloquent in his purely extem- poraneous sermons. James Laurie, D.D. (i 802-1 853), of Wash- ington, only took a manuscript into the pulpit by reason of impaired health and then apologized for appearing before them "on crutches." James W. Alexander says of John Holt Rice, D.D. ( 1 803-1 831), of Virginia, that in common with such preachers as Fenelon, Kirwan, White- field, Mason and Hall, he never allowed himself to be enslaved by what he had written down in his study. Rev. Benjamin Smith, D.D., speaking of the expression of a certain likeness of Dr. Rice, says, "It is very much such an expression as we may conceive him to have presented when by way of pleasantly criticising the close pulpit reading of a certain class of ministers, on meeting one of them In the streets of a Northern city the morn- ing after a ten-minute service in which the min- isters have participated, and by a servile adher- ence to his manuscript have subjected him to the criticism, he took from his pocket a paper and 52 SERMON READING read the usual questions and answers of common civility." James P. Nelson, D.D., of Philadelphia, who preached from 1806 to 1828, wrote on a blank leaf of his copy of Henry Ware's tract on "Ex- temporaneous Preaching" as follows: "I have preached twenty years and have never written a full sermon in my life and never read one word of a sermon from the pulpit nor opened a note nor committed a sentence and have rarely wan- dered five minutes at a time from my mental ar- rangement previously made." Rev. Ephraim Putnam Bradford (i 805-1 845), of New Boston, N. H., though a New Englander and a preacher for forty years in New Hamp- shire, did not generally write out his sermons, and during the latter part of his life he preached often without any written preparation. Sylvester Earned (18 17-1829), of New Or- leans, was a youthful wonder born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Although he died at twenty-four, he was one of the most popular and powerful of American preachers. James Long Sloss (1817-1841), of Georgia, SERMON READING 53 never read in the pulpit. Few of his contempo- raries equal him. John Cabell Breckinridge, D.D. (i 822-1 841), was born at Dale, on the North Elkhorn, Ky. His death-bed utterance: "I am a poor sinner who has worked hard, and had constantly before my mind one great object — the conversion of the world." Dr. Breckinridge's habit of using notes was peculiar and worthy of notice. Making his prepa- rations in the pulpit, he drew forth a small packet of quarters of sheets of letter size, folded length- wise so as to make four pages. The inside pages were blank, while one or both, as he might have need, of the outside pages were covered with his bold and careless manuscript. Next he provided a thin, round pocket pin-cushion, well filled. Then he selected one of these slips so as to lap the leaf on which his text was, so that when the first page should be exhausted, he might turn the leaf of the Bible and proceed with the second. Carefully selecting another place in the Bible, he there pinned another paper in like manner, and so on with the third. Each of these slips contained a 54 SERMON READING distinct head of remark, with brief links to be filled up in speaking, and concluded with a ref- erence to a topic that required the use of a text elsewhere; and following the reference he turned over to the page thus indicated, where he found his further hints and proceeded as before. It was Bishop Griswold, Episcopalian, who said, "I am not in the habit of preaching with my arms." Episcopal preachers in America have usually read their sermons. But among the exceptions to this rule was (i) Bishop John P. K. Henshaw, who composed his sermons with great care and incorporated in them the results of great study and thought. When necessary his preaching was purely extemporaneous. He was by universal consent ranked among the foremost preachers of Baltimore. (2) Dr. G. T. Bedell frequently preached un- written sermons with great effect, and his read- ing was marked with great freedom. (3) Dr. Reuil Keith, whose unwritten ser- mons were the more acceptable and effective, was never willing to preach without careful SERMON READING 55 preparation. He once said when declining to preach on the following sabbath, and he was still urged to preach an extempore sermon, "Ah! if a written sermon would do, I might draw upon old stores, but If you want an extemporaneous sermon I must have a week to get ready." Princeton Theological Seminary Libraries 1 1012 01197 0540