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 BV 4211 .D384 1861 
 Davies, George J. 1826-188 
 papers on preaching ana 
 public speaking 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING 
 
 AND 
 
 PUBLIC SPEAKING. 
 
 BY 
 
 A WYKEHAMIST. 
 
 ^ 
 
 (jfcor^e- uev^n'mrs A—^on/je* 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 BELL AND DALDY, 186, FLEET STREET. 
 1861. 
 
TO 
 
 MY FATHER, 
 
 WHO GAVE ME A PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION, 
 
 IS DEDICATED. BY A 
 WYKEHAMIST. 
 
CONTE]TOiSf>.^ 
 
 
 
 
 Chap. Papp 
 
 Preface 1 
 
 I. The Schools of the Prophets 15 
 
 II. The Preacher's Difficulties 26 
 
 III. Are Written or Extempore Sermons best ? . . 35 
 
 IV. How far is Extempore Address within the Reach 
 
 of the Majority of Preachers? 49 
 
 V. How far does Pulpit Preparation lie amidst other 
 
 Parish Work? 64 
 
 VI. The Use of Anecdotes to enliven the Style . . 78 
 
 VII. The Power of Proverbs to impress 94 
 
 VIII. The Power of Word-painting 106 
 
 IX. Unity of Subject necessary 123 
 
 X. Variety in the Choice of a Subject 141 
 
 XI. Variety in the Treatment of a Subject . . . . 150 
 XII. The Power of the Hand and Eye in influencing an 
 
 Audience 168 
 
 XIII. Of the Use of a Preacher's Old Compositions . . 184 
 
 XIV. On the Legitimate Use to be made of other Men's 
 
 Writings 191 
 
 XV. On Reading and Meditation 206 
 
 XVI. Reality 220 
 
 XVII. Secular Lectures 239 
 
 XVIII. Unity of the Parochial System 252 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 OFFER to the public a rough 
 sketch of some of my gleanings from 
 the wide field of men and books, as 
 regards the usefulness and the power of our mo- 
 dern pulpits. Nor have I spared myself any 
 toil to make these Essays as good as I could ; 
 but this I feel — that, though I have read 
 every book that I could find opportunity to 
 read, there is still much knowledsfe to be sra- 
 thered in ; and that, in so wide a field of theo- 
 logy, the passages first selected for illustration 
 and examples of style are not always the ones 
 which would ultimately be considered the best. 
 Yet while I was waiting, I found my common- 
 place book growing wild and tangled with quo- 
 
2 PREFACE. 
 
 tations and references, so that it was my only 
 chance to publish at once, and to engraft into a 
 future edition the strength and substance of my 
 after reading. The first half of these Essays 
 was published in the " Guardian" newspaper ; 
 and I received, through the editor, amidst many 
 encouragements, some hints and observations, 
 a continuation of which I hope I may still be 
 favoured with through my publishers ; and I 
 can safely take, for my motto, the words, — 
 
 " Si quid novisti rectius istis 
 Candidus imperii — si non, his utere mecum." 
 
 The incognito which I assumed when I wrote 
 in that newspaper was very useful to me — be- 
 cause it enabled me to receive criticism and 
 congratulation without their coming through 
 the filter of private friendship ; and I now, in 
 publishing the " Papers on Preaching" in a 
 permanent form, acknowledge the request of 
 many of the clergy that I would continue the 
 series, and collect them into a volume. 
 
 Another reason why I have written anony- 
 mously is that, it seemed to me, in any work 
 setting forth a high standard of excellence, the 
 individual should not appear; lest the imper- 
 
PREFACE. 3 
 
 fection of his single endeavour should detract 
 from the standard held up for imitation. A 
 remark made to me some years ago seems to 
 the purpose. I was asking the opinion of a 
 friend on a work of great pretension, and his 
 answer was : — " I always admired the standard 
 set up, until I became acquainted with the 
 writer, and saw how impossible it was in prac- 
 tice." If this were made in my case, I could 
 but compare myself to the whetstone, which'' 
 sharpens without being able to cut. 
 
 Having for these reasons kept back my indi- 
 viduality, I was yet desirous of numbering my- 
 self among the clan of Wykehamists, and so of 
 offering some tribute of gratitude, however 
 small, to the memory of our founder. For 
 in days when the utility of a classical educa- 
 tion is called in question as a basis for the la- 
 bours of after-life, it behoves those who were 
 reared amidst the associations of the old foun- 
 dations to remember " the rock whence they 
 were hewn," and to contribute their mite to 
 roll away the reproach from these ancient seats 
 of learnins;. There is somethino; about the 
 clanship of public schools which is very sweet 
 in after-life — for I have always felt that, in 
 
4 PREFACE. 
 
 whatever part of the world I have pitched my 
 tent, if there was a Wykehamist near, I was 
 not without a neighbour and a friend. The 
 Winchester men who were in the Crimea will 
 go farther, and say, that even in that foreign 
 soil, an English merchant (with whose sons I 
 had been myself at Winchester) sought out all 
 the Wykehamists, and showed them marvellous 
 kindness in a strange city. 
 
 Nor can I forget that this little book is the 
 result of that which was emphatically insisted 
 upon at Winchester — yea, which was enforced 
 by four apple twigs — I mean, the system of 
 commonplace books. " H^c olim meminisse ju- 
 vabit" was probably the last motto which would 
 have been inscribed in those laborious note- 
 books ; yet is it true in my case : for having at 
 college and in after-life reduced the cream of 
 my reading into commonplace books, I find 
 that much study, which would otherwise have 
 been desultory, has thus become systematic ; 
 and that I have resources at hand when called 
 upon to lecture at a Mechanics' Institute, or to 
 contribute an article to a paper or periodical, 
 which I could not otherwise have commanded. 
 These Essays are the enlargement of matter 
 
PREFACE. 5 
 
 which has been accumulating in one of my 
 commonplace books for some years past, and it 
 is because I have left no stone unturned to col- 
 lect matter, and have left no book unread whicb 
 I could buy or borrow, that I hope my little 
 work will have some solidity about it, and may 
 not at once be put into the waste-paper basket, 
 or sold to shops licensed to sell snuffs, and to- 
 bacco, and pepper : — 
 
 " capsa porrectus aperta, 
 Deferar in vicum vendentem thus et odores 
 Et piper et quidquid chartis amicitur ineptis." 
 
 The notions which I set forth in these papers, 
 I arrived at from a quadruple mode of in- 
 quiry:— 
 
 First, — when I started, at my ordination, to 
 compose sermons for plain people in a country 
 parish, I found it a most difficult task, especially 
 when those sermons had to be produced at the 
 rate of two every week. I consulted all those 
 writers who offered hints for the young preach- 
 er's guidance, and made an epitome of the advice 
 they afforded. I therefore had, for the basis of 
 my own inquiry, the reflections of all who had 
 written previously ; and I take up the question 
 of whether our preaching may be improved, at 
 
6 PREFACE. 
 
 that point of observation where others have 
 left off. 
 
 Secondly, — whenever I heard any striking 
 preacher, I noticed what there was peculiar in 
 his language, arrangement, or delivery ; and, to 
 use old Fuller's expression, '^ turned down a 
 leaf in my memory." 
 
 Thirdly, — having had of late years three ser- 
 mons every Sunday — two in a large parish 
 church, and one in a chapelry, where the con- 
 gregation was small, and composed of village 
 labourers almost entirely — I have been able to 
 make full proof of extempore as well as of writ- 
 ten discourses, and have been driven to every 
 variety of treatment and of subject, to break 
 the monotony ; and have therefore endeavoured 
 to seal with my own practice before I com- 
 mended, to the notice of others, whatsoever 
 things I humbly conceive may be done to make 
 a village pulpit effective. 
 
 Lastly, — during the two years I have been 
 preparing these papers for the press, I have 
 made it my business to talk over the subject in 
 its various bearings with all orders and degrees 
 of men. The fact of preaching to the masses 
 being one of the movements of the time, has 
 
PREFACE. 7 
 
 enabled me to introduce the subject in conver- 
 sation to all with whom I conversed, without 
 the appearance of anything forced. I have 
 thus, whether in the study, or as I walked 
 about my parish, or in the course of travelling, 
 inquired of laymen of high station, as well as of 
 shrewd mechanics and agricultural labourers, 
 what they valued and found instructive in va- 
 rious preachers, either in the Establishment or 
 outside it. And herein I have endeavoured to 
 view the subject from every possible point of 
 observation, and through the medium of every 
 class of mind. 
 
 The experiment of great preachers filling our 
 cathedrals with hearers has been tried, — doubt- 
 less it is profitable to the audience ; certainly 
 it is a good school for the preachers. In these 
 matters the writer was " a reformer before the 
 reformation" — before it became the fashion to 
 use the cathedral naves, he had always hoped the 
 day would come when the waste places of the 
 old sanctuaries would be filled. Mio^ht not 
 these steps in the right direction be followed up 
 by further advances ? "Would it not give unity 
 to a diocese, if the Bishop summoned to his 
 Cathedral in turn the several men who were 
 
8 PREFACE. 
 
 famous for popular persuasive eloquence; for 
 men have gifts differing according to the grace 
 that is given them — some of prophecy or preach- 
 ing, and others of pastoral visitation. If thus 
 men went up to the mother-church of the dio- 
 cese, according to the order of their priesthood, as 
 they do, indeed, in some sort now go up to the 
 pulpits of either university, it would call out 
 latent talent, and make our pulpits what they 
 were in the days of St. Paul's Cross and King'^ 
 Cross. In the cathedral towns, too, where there 
 are theological colleges, would not the future 
 candidates for ordination profit by hearing effec- 
 tive preachers, as John Chrysostom profited by 
 the rhetorician Libanius — and carry into the 
 ends of the diocese the power which they have 
 thus witnessed ? Might not also a professor of 
 preaching be added as a teacher at the theolo- 
 o:ical colle2:es ? Our cathedral towns then would 
 be the centres of diocesan work, and not merely 
 places which give names to certain bishoprics. 
 Iron or other moveable churches would, on the 
 other hand, form the circumference to the dio- 
 cese, as these would form a centre ; which move- 
 able churches might be the property of dioceses 
 to be pushed out on the outskirts of increasing 
 
PREFACE. 9 
 
 towns with good preachers, until the inhabitants 
 had been induced to build a permanent church, 
 parsonage, and schools. 
 
 The Church of England is, happily, far less 
 riven with disputes about doctrine than she was 
 ten or twenty years ago ; yet still it must be 
 owned, that any one, defining minutely what 
 he conceived to be subject-matter of a sermon, 
 and the proportion of the different doctrines of 
 our Church of which it should consist, would 
 oifend some in proportion as he satisfied others. 
 There is sufficient truth in the reply of one 
 who, on being asked why he preached a visi- 
 tation sermon on such a general subject as the 
 existence of a God, answered, " that it was the 
 only subject in which he could fall in with the 
 views of all his hearers." 
 
 The following advice was given to me in the 
 spirit of friendly criticism by a dignitary of our 
 Church : — " Would it not be desirable to have 
 one or two papers on the substance and essence 
 of a sermon — I mean the great doctrines and 
 truths which it must treat of? At all events, 
 if you do not attempt this, it would be wise to 
 explain in the preface why you do not do so ? " 
 I feel that I could say nothing on this head 
 
10 PREFACE, 
 
 which has not been said better before bj others, 
 and therefore I do not attempt it. Besides, I 
 feel that I have treated of preaching, rather as 
 a science or an art {ars est celare artem) than as 
 the exposition of any particular tenets ; and I 
 have quoted from authors of various schools of 
 theology, without regard to the points of doc- 
 trine in which they diifer from my own views. 
 
 Thus much only will I say on the matter of 
 doctrine — that it is the brino-ino; one truth out 
 of the harmony of its due proportion, which is 
 the origin of parties ; and we cannot too con- 
 tinually bear in mind the Apostle's command : 
 — " Let us prophesy according to the propor- 
 tion of faith." Let our doctrines be not only 
 scriptural doctrines, but standing in the same 
 relative proportions in which they stand in 
 Scripture. I will state what I mean — perhaps 
 rather over-broadly — for the sake of clearness 
 in the same words in which a friend put the 
 idea before me : — " I would say, (these are his 
 words) to any young writer, use doctrines in 
 the same order of sequence and in the same 
 proportions as the writers in the New Testa- 
 ment use them. If, for instance, you find the 
 person and office of Christ alluded to a thousand 
 
PREFACE. 11 
 
 times, and the sacraments of Baptism and the 
 Lord's Supper alluded to ten times ; then these 
 two sacraments ought, in your teaching, com- 
 pared with Christ, to stand In the proportion 
 of ten to a thousand." 
 
 And how many of the so-called difficulties of 
 the present age may be settled by a similar ap- 
 peal to common sense. One such I remember, 
 which seems worth recording. A clergyman 
 was objecting to the Bible being placed on a 
 lectern, as being opposed to the practice of all 
 evangelical religion, and a custom redolent of 
 popery. The person to whom this appeal was 
 made very sensibly pointed out to the objector 
 that his reasoning was most incorrect ; for to 
 place the Bible (which is the word of God) on 
 a pedestal high over the prayer-book (which is 
 the word of man) is the greatest possible pro- 
 test for evangelical truth and the all-sufficiency 
 of Holy Writ. 
 
 A similar instance of common sense, cutting 
 at the root of fine-drawn quibbles, occurs in 
 the memoir, lately published, of Bishop Arm- 
 strong ; in which he assails the vexed question 
 of gown or surplice to preach in, by some such 
 words as these : — " If the singing of metrical 
 
12 PREFACE. 
 
 hymns or psalms to God be an act of joyful 
 worship good for the people, we must suppose 
 it is good for the pastor also ; and I do not see 
 why the clergyman should be obliged to be ab- 
 sent in the vestry, changing his surplice for his 
 o-own durino; the sino-ino;." 
 
 In this little book I have been stimulated by 
 the fact — that no body of men, having so much 
 knowledge, pays so little attention to public 
 address, as a vehicle for imparting that know- 
 ledge, as the clergy of the Church of England. 
 And I would remind them of Paley's remark, 
 " that ease in public speaking is not the result 
 of negligence, but the perfection of art." 
 
 We may argue that orators are few and far 
 between, when we perceive how great is the ef- 
 fect produced by a single orator. Let but a 
 living prelate of finished oratory, and having 
 command of all the keys of the voice, from the 
 treble to the bass, appear at a meeting for 
 Home or Foreign Missions, and you are sure 
 he will command a full and attentive audience. 
 1 was very much struck with the following fact 
 when I was in the West of England three years 
 since. An eminent nonconformist preacher 
 preached two sermons, on Tuesday, at Exeter, 
 
PREFACE. 13 
 
 on Wednesday, at Torquay, on Thursday, at 
 Plymouth. After each of these sermons he 
 was able to give about £100 taken in sixpences 
 and shillings to one of the local charities. If 
 " knowledge is power," it may after this be af- 
 firmed, that " eloquence is a mine of wealth." 
 
 If oratory is assiduously cultivated by the 
 barrister and the senator, it ought also to be cul- 
 tivated by the preacher ; for he alone exercises 
 a high art with reference to the highest possible 
 end — the salvation of the souls of his brethren. 
 " They that turn many to righteousness shall 
 shine as the stars : " — this is the future reward ; 
 and there is nothing which meets with so much 
 present encouragement, at the same time, as 
 eloquence : — " The gift of public speaking is 
 an accomplishment which, when possessed in a 
 moderate degree, raises its possessor to consi- 
 deration with rapidity. It is one for which 
 there is a constant demand, and yet, strange to 
 say, there is none which is so little studied. 
 There is still the same disproportion, as of old, 
 between the extensive learning of the educated 
 classes and their capacity of imparting it. Yet 
 there is no species of intellectual excellence 
 which produces such an immediate return. 
 
14 PREFACE. 
 
 While the speaker is in the very act of forming 
 his sentences, his triumph is reflected in the 
 countenances of his auditors. The orator pro- 
 ceeds, animated, at every step, by this silent 
 applause, which comes to other men in feeble 
 echoes long delayed, and which are often lost 
 before they can reach the ear of him who is the 
 subject of their praise." — Quarterly Review, 
 No. 206. 
 
 Thomas Fuller says : — " The pastor conceiv- 
 eth himself to hear his mother-college always 
 speaking to him in the language of Joseph to 
 Pharaoh's butler. ' But think on me I pray 
 thee when it shall be well with thee ; ' " which 
 I should not have ventured to apply to myself 
 but that Fuller continues : — " And if he hath 
 but little, the less from him is the more accep- 
 table ; a drop from a sponge is as much as a ton 
 of water from a marsh." 
 
 I therefore subscribe myself, 
 
 A Wykehamist. 
 
CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE SCHOOLS OF THE PROPHETS. 
 
 ^p^HE tendency of the age has, for some 
 M P^A^ time, been setting in the direction of 
 the pulpit. Make our pulpits resound, 
 as of old, at King's and Paul's Cross 
 — open the cathedrals — let men have a chance of 
 cultivating eloquence which, perhaps, is hidden in 
 some out-of-the-way country parish — anyhow, give 
 the preacher a chance to try his powers of reclaim- 
 ing the masses — give him hours when the poor can 
 attend — a shorter service than usual to precede his 
 discourse — these are the cries of the past year.* All 
 may be epitomised in this — " Give the preacher a 
 fair field and no favour, and let him try." The way 
 to the fulfilment of these wishes has been opened by 
 gradual attempts to extend the influence of preach- 
 
 * This was written at the close of 1858. 
 
16 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 ing. There have been Advent and Lent sermons 
 preached by guilds and fraternities of eminent men. 
 At Oxford, last Lent, the sermons of this kind on 
 Wednesday and Friday evenings were listened to 
 by crowded audiences. In country places, if the 
 neighbouring clergy were to associate together in 
 similar guilds, it would strengthen their hands for 
 good over their flocks, and promote much unity 
 among themselves. The Oxford diocese proposes, 
 by means of its lately organized ^' Spiritual Help 
 Society," to support some revivalist preachers which 
 shall be ready to preach special sermons, w^hen called 
 in to the aid of incumbents. The Report of the 
 Lower House of Convocation, in July, 1857, re- 
 commends a similar body of men — missionary or 
 revivalist preachers — which " body of men was not 
 unknown at the time of the Reformation." 
 
 It would be a curious inquiry how far the use 
 made of the pulpit outside the Establishment, and 
 especially the notoriety wliich one of their preachers 
 has attained, may have driven the Church to turn her 
 eyes inwards, and review her own neglect of preach- 
 ing as an engine of good. In the same way it would 
 be easy to see that the Exeter Hall controversy has 
 proved its Churchmanship by opening the cathedral 
 naves. The newspapers which usher in the events 
 of a new year tell us of evening services for the mil- 
 lion in many churches in London, and in Westmin- 
 ster Abbey. The cathedrals throughout England 
 will, doubtless, (if this attempt prove successful,) 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 17 
 
 be centres of interest to all the rising preachers in 
 each diocese. The fact that places have been found 
 where men must lift up their voices in order to be 
 heard at all, where they must yreach, and not read, 
 their sermons, will show the want of a specific, 
 training for the voice as an instrument to fill space. 
 Franklin computed, by allowing two feet to each 
 person, that Whitfield could be heard in the open air 
 by we forget how many thousands : this he did by 
 having made a study of the art of using the voice, 
 just as Demosthenes and many others less known 
 to fame have done. Many preachers now-a-days 
 have the power in them, but do not know how to 
 put that power forth. The effect of a singing- 
 master's lessons on a vocalist, in bringing out the 
 tones and compass of the voice, show what may be 
 done by the preacher in the cultivation of the same 
 art. It must be a natural voice which is used, for 
 no bawling will be half so audible as a man's own 
 key-note. He must address himself to some one 
 at the farthest end of the space he preaches in, to 
 throw his voice out from him into the circumference 
 of the building. The chief effort used, and the chief 
 watchfulness required, is to sustain the ends of the 
 sentences ; where it would be natural, in conver- 
 sation, to drop the voice slightly. Otherwise a 
 man cannot be too natural, or speak too clearly as he 
 would in conversation. The voice must be rested by 
 speaking in different notes within the compass of 
 the preacher's natural scale. By changing the keys 
 
 c 
 
18 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 he will rest one while using another, and so avoid 
 fatigue. 
 
 " Modo summa 
 Voce — modo hac resonat quae cordis quatuor ima." 
 
 As nothing is so wearisome to the audience, so 
 nothing is so fatiguing to the preacher as that 
 monotony which " flows muddily along." In one 
 of the lectures delivered at the Working Men's 
 College, Red Lion Square, in 1855, there is an 
 account given by a medical man of the cause of 
 clerical sore throats. They are said to proceed 
 from the men stooping in reading, so that the 
 throat does the work of the chest and lungs, which 
 cannot act as they would if the posture was upright, 
 with the shoulders well open. 
 
 Then, again, in the composition of a sermon, how 
 much may be done to help delivery and save the 
 voice, the economy of which, in the nave of a 
 cathedral, would be with most men the essential 
 of success. If any one doubt this, let them take a 
 sermon of long involved sentences, where there is 
 no stop for ten lines, and another of short ones, 
 and try the difference. Pauses there must be ; and 
 some preachers have great art in so making the 
 stopping-places on the road as to call attention to 
 the finest views. While they must pause some- 
 whe7'e, they select such opportunities for resting as 
 leave the result of a section of the discourse to lin- 
 ger on the minds of the hearers. This should be 
 always done where there is a break in the argu- 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 19 
 
 ment, and, if possible, driven home with some terse 
 aphorism or proverb, containing the sense of what 
 has gone before, so as to leave the substance of each 
 section of the sermon in some tangible and portable 
 shape on the memory of the audience. After some 
 nail has been driven home and clenched, let the 
 hammer pause awhile and listen for the responsive 
 echo in the soul of the hearer. 
 
 Numberless, too, are the other ways of easing the 
 voice, which follow upon the change of style in the 
 composition. What is rest to the preacher is also 
 doubly a rest to the listener; and dull men; — " Beo- 
 tum crasso in aere nati'' — as our colliers and cos- 
 termongers, must have time to digest the preacher's 
 reasoning;. At one time an anecdote mav be intro- 
 duced, either from history or from passing events. 
 What is to be said in didactic teaching may be en- 
 forced by the same thing being personified, as 
 having happened to some example of good living 
 in modern times — of a Leighton or a Henry Martyn. 
 Donne and Latimer and Jeremy Taylor show us 
 how anecdotes may be introduced effectively, and 
 without injury to the dignity of the pulpit. A 
 scene may be brought on the stage reverently by 
 descriptive powers, and that picture-painting which, 
 being real, has yet the attractiveness of dramatic 
 effect. The style may be broken by short appeals 
 to the audience, by pithy questions, by objectors 
 being introduced, and their objections answered in 
 an imaginary dialogue ; by an exclamation, a touch 
 
20 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 of irony, or the flow of the sentence being turned 
 into a prayer. The didactive and argumentative 
 parts, which, from their nature, are generally heavy 
 in constructure, and composed in longer sentences 
 than the rest of the sermon, should be lightened by 
 short remarks, so as to break up the uniformity of 
 wide far-stretching plains of thought, by hedges ; 
 and conversely, after broken sentences, short pithy 
 appeals, anecdotes, aphorisms, and the smaller ar- 
 tillery of oratory, we may well introduce a piece of 
 sonorous and nicely-balanced rhetoric — some gem 
 of eloquence or a quotation from the rounded ora- 
 tory of some master in Israel. These jewels of 
 eloquence will stand out and show themselves the 
 better for their setting in inferior metal, just as trees 
 in the foreground of a landscape, or water, glitter 
 the brighter for the dull background of the moor or 
 plain. 
 
 The advantage to be derived from variety in the 
 structure of sentences, as a rest to the voice, is 
 obvious if we consider any extempore preacher by 
 the side of a man of written sermons. Extempore 
 delivery, being only one degree removed from con- 
 versation, has a close resemblance to it. It adopts 
 the same vivacity of argument, the same terseness 
 and shortness of construction. Listen to conversa- 
 tion, and take it down in short-hand — you find no 
 seven-leagued sentences there. Let the man who 
 has been conversing retire into his study — let him 
 write down his ideas on the same subject as that on 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 21 
 
 which you have recorded his conversation. What 
 a change has come over the style ! The period 
 while he paused with the pen was one of thought, 
 and this gave an elaborated and artificial mould to 
 the sentences. He wrote as if considering what 
 would read well, not what would s^wak well. What 
 flashed on his brain has been turned over in the 
 crucible of reflection, and comes out at the end of 
 the pen — no longer nature's production, but the 
 child of art dressed in all the artistic stiffness of the 
 age. In writing a sermon which would read well 
 by the fire-side, we may let our judgment sit, sen- 
 tinel-like, over each thought as it moulds itself into 
 shape ; but in writing a sermon to ^?re6tc/i we must 
 let it flow as naturally as possible from the brain — 
 in nature's broken short sentences. 
 
 It is worth a thought how far a more systematic 
 training for preachers would be desirable. Many 
 get into the pulpit, who, so far from being able to 
 preach, cannot read a chapter of Scripture with any 
 effect. Might not some professorship of this sort 
 be attached either to the universities or to the theo- 
 logical colleges, or, to give it a more diocesan cha- 
 racter, as a stall to each cathedral ? The time and 
 money now spent on other things, in educating a 
 student for the Church, might well aflbrd a three 
 months' course of this kind ; and it might be quite 
 consistent with parochial training at the same time, 
 only we would have a professor selected for this 
 branch with special reference to his own success in 
 
22 PAPERS ON PREACHING, 
 
 preaching. If the Bishops, who are themselves so 
 eloquent as preachers, were to take this np, the 
 funds, the man qualified to hold the office of teacher, 
 the students to attend the course, would be forth- 
 coming. The cathedral naves being made a rally- 
 ing point for the most successful preachers in the 
 diocese in after-life, is a part of the same diocesan 
 care for a body of men apt to teach in each diocese. 
 *^ It was Cranmer's wish that the cathedrals, at 
 tlie time of the dissolution of the monasteries, should 
 be converted into theological colleges. That read- 
 ers of divinity, of Hebrew, of Greek, should be at- 
 tached to them ; that a body of students should be 
 maintained in them, out of whom the bishops might 
 always iind clerical recruits duly qualified for the 
 pastoral office ; that here, in short, should be realized 
 a second time the institution which Samuel (the great 
 reformer of his own church) established throughout 
 all the land of Israel — Uhe schools of the pro- 
 phets.'" — Blunt's Reformation, p. 183. 
 
 The teacher might give exercises in delivery and 
 composition of sermons, as any other teacher of 
 music or rhetoric does. He would take the skeleton 
 of some well-approved sermon, and make the student 
 fill it up ; after doing so, make him compare his own 
 composition with the original from which the ske- 
 leton was taken. In sermons with clear divisions, 
 like Mr. Bradley's last printed volumes, the method 
 and clearness acquired by the pupil would be in- 
 valuable. The professor might occasionally make 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 23 
 
 the beginner read some masterpiece of eloquence, 
 and sometimes try his power at a parable as an ex- 
 tempore address, where he would have sufficient 
 matter to rest upon in the text, if words for a mo- 
 ment failed him. In the preface to Bishop Burnefs 
 History of his own Time, it is recorded ^^ that the 
 probationers to orders are first appointed to preach 
 practically upon one text assigned to them ; next, 
 critically upon another, the sense of which is con- 
 troverted; and then a mixed sermon of criticism 
 upon the text, and practical influences from it is 
 expected of them. The examiners then allot a head 
 of divinity to each, on which they have to give out 
 theses, which they undertake to defend in pub- 
 lic" (p. 8). When professor of divinity at Glas- 
 gow, in 1660, he made "each student, in course^ 
 preach a short sermon upon some text he assigned ; 
 and when it was ended, he observed upon anything 
 that was defective or amiss, and showed how the 
 text ought to have been opened or applied" (p. 14). 
 The pulpit, we think, might be raised in useful- 
 ness and power, without at all calling forth the 
 reproof that we are neglecting other parts of the 
 parochial system. For the very readiness of preach- 
 ing would make an able, a full, and a ready man, 
 apt to teach methodically and earnestly in the school 
 and at the bedside, as well as in the Bible-class and 
 cottage lecture, and when put into the chair at a 
 benefit club dinner, or any parish, vestry, or other 
 meeting — in fact, would make a pastor armed at all 
 
24 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 points. In the sick room the clergyman counts his 
 hearers by tens ; in the pulpit by hundreds : it is in 
 the pulpit, then, that he has the most multiplied 
 opportunity of reaching a parishioner's heart. In 
 the schools and weekly visiting, the clergyman wins 
 hearts and beats up recruits for the expectant con- 
 gregation on which he looks down from the pulpit 
 on Sunday ; and it is in the week that he has for 
 himself been learning the faults and the ignorance 
 of his congregation, that he may know how and 
 what to say on the Lord's Day to them. 
 
 In the unity of all parish work lies the secret of 
 success in the whole. One who has worked from 
 house to house gets up into the pulpit as a friend 
 who has earned the ear of his people, and they look 
 upon him as one accredited to speak to them. If 
 he rebuke harshly, they know that he loves them, 
 and is willing to spend and be spent for them ', and 
 if he has toiled all the week long and caught nothing, 
 on Sunday he shall so address them as to drive home 
 the wedge, the thin end of which he has inserted in 
 the week ; he shall follow up his conversations by 
 his sermons, and so, by God's blessing, ^* shall 
 enclose a multitude of fishes, so that his net bid fair 
 to break." For tlie aphorism of Cecil is very terse, 
 " Men look at a man out of the pulpit to see what 
 he is worth in it." Anyhow, let us not assert, as 
 do some, that he wlio extols preachings cares little 
 for other ministrations, for prayers and for sacra- 
 ments ; and let us conclude with the remark of Pro- 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 25 
 
 fessor Blunt, who, being dead, yet speaketh out of 
 a heart which knew no party spirit or clap-trap war- 
 cry — " There was a period, and almost within my 
 own memory, when a notion prevailed that the 
 duties of the clergy were the duties of the Sunday, 
 and little more ; but I am not clear that the moment 
 is not come when the danger lies the other way ; 
 and whether the pastor of the parish, yielding to 
 the importunate demands of an overwhelming po- 
 pulation, does not occupy his time, so much of his 
 time, in the ^ goings into the streets and lanes of the 
 city,' as trenches on his studies and his sermons. 
 ^ The one should be done, the other assuredly not 
 left undone.' " 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE PKEACHER'S DIFFICULTIES. 
 
 N order to arrive at any just conclu- 
 sions about preaching, it seems best, 
 in the outset, to ascertain what are the 
 difficulties which beset the preacher's 
 path. A correct estimate of these will open up 
 and introduce the best rules to obviate them. The 
 disadvantages under which preachers labour may 
 differ slightly in particular localities and in the 
 cases of particular menj but, speaking generally, 
 they may, we think, be stated as follows. We are 
 speaking, let it be remembered, not so much of 
 popular preachers as of the ordinary run of sta- 
 tionary preachers addressing their customary weekly 
 congregations, whether in town or country parishes. 
 1. This remark introduces us to the first disad- 
 vantage, which is that, year after year, probably 
 twice a Sunday, the preacher has to present liim- 
 self before the same hearers. He may confess to 
 himself that he has exhausted his subjects, his ar- 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 27 
 
 guments, his illustrations — still next Sunday he 
 must be ready with new matter and fresh illustra- 
 tions. Wesley writes, in his journal, " If I had to 
 preach to the same congregation Sunday after Sun- 
 day, even for a year, I should soon preach myself 
 and them asleep." We know, too, that his co- 
 temporary, Whitfield, had a cycle of sermons, 
 which he had worked up with artistic effect, and 
 his hearers looked for certain passages, which, we 
 are told, did not lose their effect from repetition. 
 Such was the appeal to the angel Gabriel to stay 
 till he could carry back to heaven the news of one 
 sinner's repentance. We can well understand an 
 incumbent who exchanges his living every two 
 years on the express ground that he has used all 
 his best subjects for sermons. Especially would 
 this be the case where a sermon would annually 
 be demanded by the recurrence of Saints' Days. 
 Of some of the apostles so little is said that even 
 the first year a well-known preacher, from the 
 paucity of matter for a Saints' Day Sermon, selects 
 as his topic, " Unknown Benefacto7'sJ^ 
 
 2. Then, again, the audience is mixed ; some 
 perhaps highly educated, side by side with some 
 who cannot read. The University preacher may 
 calculate on a learned and critical audience — at 
 least, all his hearers would be educated up to a 
 certain point. In country parishes the exception 
 may occur where the congregation may consist of 
 all uneducated persons ; just as, on the other hand, 
 
28 PAPERS ON PREACHINO. 
 
 in a fashionable town congregation, the exception 
 may exist of all being educated. But it must be 
 admitted, in the general run of town and country 
 congregations, that one part of the audience re- 
 quires language which the wayfaring man cannot 
 mistake, and another jmrt language which may in- 
 terest minds as highly educated as the preacher 
 himself. Is it, then, not difficult to write a ser- 
 mon for both extremes — such a one as that the 
 ploughboy shall exclaim, ^^ I understood that ser- 
 mon ! " and the barrister or the member of Par- 
 liament, " That was well said — that preacher car- 
 ries me along with him ! " Not only do men err 
 on both sides, but not seldom they err on both sides 
 in the same composition. We could imagine a 
 man taking his sermon out of the theology of the 
 eighteenth century, which is the cheapest on every 
 bookstall, and so preaching that the poor man 
 would be bewildered by the religious phraseology, 
 while the scholar would have a difficulty to sit it 
 out. And many a similar sermon is composed in 
 the nineteenth century, where words are used to 
 darken counsel; recoiling from which, in a hope- 
 less attemjDt to understand, the peasant goes to 
 chapel, though a churchman in heart, because the 
 preacher seems to speak to him, and, somehow, he 
 seems to get more good there. The liveliness of 
 the preacher must often atone for the absence of 
 liveliness in the hearer. We do not find many of 
 whom we can say, as Jeremy Taylor did of a dis- 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 29 
 
 tinguislied listener to his sermons, " I have often 
 thought that the eminency of her discerning facul- 
 ties did reward a jjious discourse, and placed it in 
 the regions of honour and usefulness, and gathered 
 it up from the ground, where commonly such homi- 
 lies are spilt and scattered in neglect." — Funeral 
 Sermon over Lady Carhery. 
 
 3. But again, the tale which the pastor unfolds 
 is an old one. The Gospel has been preached so 
 often that we enter into the exclamation of a 
 preacher, " I almost wish you had never heard the 
 good news which the angels proclaimed to the 
 shepherds at Bethlehem, that I might speak with 
 more chance of stirring up your hearts by telling 
 you of it ; and that you had never known of Jesus' 
 love, if so you might become more susceptible of 
 it." The charm which suspended interest, as to 
 result of a story, sheds over many secular subjects, 
 is, for the most part, absent in sermons. When 
 the preacher unravels the wondrous lives of Scrip- 
 ture heroes, or dwells on the great events of our 
 Saviour's life, every hearer knows the issue of the 
 story. You speak of Jacob's lamentation over 
 Joseph's supposed death, but every child knows 
 that the favourite son is to be restored to the patri- 
 arch in Egypt. If you speak of the sorrow, there 
 is the joyous reunion lurking behind in the hearer's 
 mind to spoil the effect of the account. The writers 
 of fiction always, and the writers of history gene- 
 rally, can depend on the interest which ignorance 
 
30 PAPERS ON PREACHING, 
 
 of the result keeps up. The lecturer at Mechanics' 
 Institutes, and the platform speaker, like the Italian 
 improvisatore, may atone for heaviness of style and 
 other defects by the novelty of the matter which they 
 communicate. At the Reformation — previous to 
 which the treasures of divine truth had been shut 
 up in dead languages — the people hung on the 
 preacher's lips as men listen to news. Even in a 
 later age Baxter could say, '^' I will either preach 
 to people who have never been preached to, or to 
 those who have profited by preaching; never to 
 those who have grown hardened under sermons." 
 But, alas ! the clergy of the present day have not 
 this alternative, unless it be the missionary going 
 to the heathen abroad, or the revivalist preacher 
 (who is a sort of home missionary) speaking to 
 heathens at home who have never attended any 
 ministry. To most of the preachers of the present 
 day these words of Blair will be full of meaning — 
 " Nothing within the reach of art is so difficult as 
 to bestow on what is common the grace of novelty : 
 no sort of composition is such a trial of skill as 
 wdiere the merit of it lies wholly in the execution — 
 not in giving any information that is new — not in 
 convincing; men of what thev did not believe — but 
 in dressing truths which they knew, and doctrines 
 of which they were before convinced, in such 
 colours as may most affect their -hearts." In the 
 Hulsean Lectures for 1858 we are reminded that 
 " it is difficult to realize the far greater freshness 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 31 
 
 with which narratives and expositions of Scripture 
 fell upon those early congregations, who, as we 
 have seen, had to depend almost entirely on hear- 
 ing rather than on personal 7'eading." — Moule's 
 Christian Oratory ^ p. ^^. " With regard to 
 preaching, men are apt to compare it with ordi- 
 nary speaking. The lawyer or the statesman has 
 continually fresh facts to deal with ; fresh facts, 
 which in themselves suggest fresh arguments to 
 the mind, and keep them there when suggested. 
 Let them, however, have to speak several times on 
 the same subject before the same audience, and if 
 they expect to command an equally attentive hear- 
 ing on each successive occasion, they must bring 
 elaborately prepared new arguments and fresh il- 
 lustrations." — Speaker at Home, p. 49. Mr. Bor- 
 row (in Romany Rye, p. 346) writes: — "It is to 
 me quite wonderful that most of the sermons one 
 hears are as good as they are, considering the un- 
 intermittent stream in which most preachers are 
 compelled to produce them. I have often thought, 
 in listening to the discourses of a really thoughtful, 
 able clergyman, if you, my friend, had to write a 
 sermon once a month instead of once or twice a 
 week, how very admirable it would be." 
 
 What we have already said presents a combina- 
 tion of difficulties which may be thus stated in one 
 sentence. It is difficult to preach the old truths of 
 the Gospel Sunday after Sunday to the same hear- 
 ers in such a way as to descend to the capacity of 
 
32 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 the humblest while you interest the most educated 
 of your audience. 
 
 There are a few other points of disadvantage un- 
 der which the young man starts in his first attempts 
 at sermon-writing, which we will conclude with. 
 
 1. He has to make his statements on different 
 doctrines dovetail in together into a whole system. 
 Every beginner must take his creed, to a certain 
 extent, on the faith of his teachers, nor does any 
 know, till he comes to write on the several doc- 
 trines, how difficult it is to make his teaching on 
 one point square with his teaching on another, so*^ 
 as to form a consistent and harmonious code. A 
 regular system of divinity drawn up for himself, 
 such as Mr. How has done in his Plain Words, or 
 the Bishop of Tasmania in his lectures on the 
 Church Catechism, would be a great help to eveiy 
 beo^inner. 
 
 2. Not only has he had no direct training for the 
 pulpit, but the formal style of his school and college 
 exercises have probably induced a stiffness of com- 
 position most unfitted for a popular address. He 
 must descend from his stilts, and speak naturally as 
 the words flow from his heart. As Archbishop 
 Sumner says in the Apostolical Preaching, "He 
 must descend from the rounded periods in which 
 he has been educated, to walk in the humble terms 
 of Scripture." 
 
 3. The language as well as the sco])e of sermons, 
 which, until very lately, have been considered mo- 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 33 
 
 dels, has been most unnecessarily narrowed. This 
 bondage the younger preacher has not at first the 
 courage to escape from. He is naturally more 
 cautious than his elders ; he leans on a staff which 
 makes his walk very stiff. In the old style of 
 essay (from which a sermon became synonymous 
 with dulness) everything was sifted out which could 
 possibly militate against decorum and dignity, and 
 this sifting process was carried to an extreme. In 
 the attempt at polish, everything that had edge was 
 lost. In the etiquette of those days the pulpit cast 
 off all biting references to time and place which are 
 the salt of a sermon, all allusions to common life, 
 as if the language of such a place would be tainted 
 by the mention of the factory and the farm, the 
 mill or the market. Because Rowland Hill and 
 his school roused men by home-thrusts, without 
 regard to polish, the Church of England rushed 
 into the other extreme, and would allude to nothing 
 in the daily walks of life or by the cottage fireside. 
 " None of your homely illustrations for us, we, at 
 least, will be select," was the cry. Yet the pro- 
 phets and our blessed Lord have shown us that the 
 homeliest illustrations borrow dignity from the cause 
 in which they are enlisted, and from the lips that 
 utter them. But in the last century all force was 
 willingly lost if only sermons could be dignified ; 
 and many seem to have been written with the fear 
 that some of the hearers " should see with their 
 eyes and be converted." 
 
 D 
 
34 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 And not only was the language shorn down to 
 this model of decorum, but the very mould in which 
 each sermon was to be made was stiff in the ex- 
 treme. " Let there be/' says Blair, " exordium, 
 divisions, narration, explication, argumentative part, 
 pathetic part, the peroration." Mr. Neale, in the 
 Preface to his Medi(Bval Preaching, says of this 
 stiff form of sermon, "Claude was the rule — Simeon, 
 in his Horce Somiletic^ , the exemplification." 
 Every subject was to be treated in too uniform a 
 manner. Then some stiffness ensues from the cus- 
 tom of preaching from one verse, whereas many 
 truths lie evenly between two extreme texts, and 
 would be come at better by being attacked on either 
 side. We have seen much effect produced by preach- 
 ing on two extreme texts in this way. For instance, 
 speaking of heaven as a place of rest, in connection 
 with Revelations iv. 8 — '* They rest not day and 
 night," &c. — we arrive at the double idea, rest and 
 employment, a recreation which occupies, an energy 
 which does not fatigue. As Dr. Pusey, in vol. ii. 
 Parochial Sermons^ 15, amplifies the idea, " the 
 rest of love and praise." In Dean Goodwin's ser- 
 mons, and in those of Mr. Robertson's of Brighton, 
 there are some good specimens of approaching a 
 subject from both sides by the use of two texts. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 ARE WRITTEN OR EXTEMPORE SERMONS BEST ? 
 
 'HE question has been sfenerally dis- 
 /-^ cussed, m the abstract, whether writ- 
 i'^ ten or extempore sermons are the best. 
 As if the only alternative was a com- 
 prehensive yea or a comprehensive nay. So, at 
 least, we have seen it too often stated by the adhe- 
 rents of either system. " Written sermons are the 
 best, none of your extempore preachers for me ;" 
 while the antiphonal cry is equally loud and posi- 
 tive, — "Nothing like extempore sermons." Yet 
 in all cases where there are strong adherents to 
 either side of the question, where, consequently, 
 we may expect to find much truth in the argu- 
 ments which support either extreme, is it not pro- 
 bable that the answer may lie somewhere between 
 the two extremes ; or may at one time lie in one 
 extreme and then in the other ; in a word, that the 
 answer must be guided by circumstances, and not 
 given too positively in the affirmative or negative ? 
 
36 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 For, as we humbly conceive, neither yes or no will 
 stand the test of '^ semper, ubique, ab omnibus." 
 Sometimes each will be true, according as a man 
 is in nerve or not ; or with some preachers, accord- 
 ing as a man has sufficient clearness to keep his 
 subject from confusion ; or with some subjects, as 
 whether a man is preaching on doctrine or a hor- 
 tatory appeal ; whether he is preaching upon a 
 text which admits of little scope, or on a parable or 
 history where, if his memory should not be reten- 
 tive, there will still be plenty of matter to suggest 
 topics ; or to some congregations, to a university 
 audience, or in a village church. Perhaps, also, 
 there may be a style of sermon between the two, 
 which unites some of the excellencies of each ; as, 
 for instance, an extempore sermon having been 
 written first, inasmuch as " writing makes an exact 
 man,^^ and tlien delivered from notes in conversa- 
 tion at the family prayer, or the sick bedside, or 
 the cottage and schoolroom lecture, inasmuch as 
 " conversation makes a ready man^^ — always the 
 subject having been previously studied and read 
 up for, inasmuch as " reading makes a full man." 
 
 When we put the written sermon and the extem- 
 pore sermon into the scales against each other, we 
 would be understood by the extempore sermon to 
 mean — not that unpremeditated and crude effusion 
 which men use to save the labour of committing 
 their thoughts to paper — but a discourse the matter 
 of which has been w^ell digested, and of which the 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 37 
 
 divisions and skeleton outline are accurately graven 
 on the memory; which, in a word, differs from 
 a written sermon only in the fact that the mind 
 has been the paper which has been covered with 
 thoughts instead of the pages of the sermon-case. 
 This is a style which no one would adopt from 
 laziness, for it is far more laborious than the mere 
 writing of a sermon, the wear of which is over as 
 soon as the ink is dry, whereas, in the other, the 
 mind is strung up until the sermon be delivered. 
 
 If we go to antiquity for our argument we shall 
 find it in favour of extempore delivery. The 
 teachers of the early Church spoke from the inspi- 
 ration of the moment. (See Moule's Christian 
 Oratory of the Three First Centuries, and Riddle, 
 p. 415.) It was the same in the next ages of 
 the Church. (See Neale's Mediaeval Preaching, 
 Inti'oduction, p. 20 — 25.) At the time Erasmus 
 wrote, we find Dean Colet, who died 1519, ad- 
 vocating the extempore course, and blaming his 
 bishop, Richard Fitzjames, for preaching from a 
 book. Erasmus {^E'pistles, lib xv. p. 708), enu- 
 merating the charges which Dean Colet brought 
 against his bishop, says, — " Quod cum in concione 
 dixerit quosdam de charta concionari (id quod 
 multi frigide faciunt in Anglia) oblique taxasset 
 Episcopum, qui ob senium id solitus sit facere." 
 To speak of a time a little after this, 1542, Bishop 
 Short (^History of the Church of England, sec. 
 223) says : — " The evil which might have arisen 
 
38 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 from a want of preachers was obviated, as far as 
 possible, by a set of homilies now published. Du- 
 ring these troublous times, such of the clergy as 
 were licensed to preach were so frequently attacked 
 on account of their expressions, that many adopted 
 the custom of writing their sermons, which has 
 since generally prevailed." In the time of Charles 
 the Second book-preaching was forbidden by sta- 
 tute to the University of Cambridge, which says, 
 "the lazy way of reading sermons began in the 
 time of the civil wars." 
 
 There is something strangely unreal in men read- 
 ing their discourses (though it has so long been 
 the custom that it has become second nature to us), 
 especially when their eyes cling so tenaciously to 
 the manuscript as to convey the notion that they 
 have never seen it before. Dissenters, who are 
 used to extempore delivery, notice the unreality 
 more than we do, who always expect to see a book 
 under the preacher's eyes ; one of them had come 
 to the conclusion, " that Church ministers' sermons 
 never had been written by anybody, but had been 
 always copied." Archbishop Leighton " disliked 
 the practice of reading sermons, a practice scarcely 
 known across the seas, being of opinion that it de- 
 tracted much from the weight and authority of 
 preaching." So his great friend, Bishop Burnet, 
 in his Pastoral Care, says, — " The reading of ser- 
 mons would be endured in no nation but ours." 
 And Sir W. Scott says, — " It is conclusive against the 
 
PAPEES ON PREACHING. 39 
 
 frigid custom of reading that in any other mode of 
 public speaking it would be held childish and ab- 
 surd." A friend said to us the other day, " I had 
 a brother-clergyman staying here over Sunday, and 
 I asked him to preach for me ; his answer was, — 
 ^ If I had brought my book with me I should have 
 been most happy.' " And this was an answer 
 which nine out of ten men would have made under 
 the circumstances. Yet surely, said our friend, he 
 might in a strange church have had one subject, at 
 least, on which he would have been sufficiently at 
 home to have spoken for half an hour. It was not 
 a very apostolic answer to the request, " If you 
 have any word of exhortation for the people, say 
 on !" to reply, ^^ I have left my sermon-case at 
 home." We must be very little exercised in the 
 use of pulpit weapons, for a man of real learning 
 and ability to shelter himself behind such an excuse. 
 This leads us to one answer to the question we 
 have proposed for solution, which is, — that many a 
 man who may not be able to keep up extempore 
 preaching twice a-week in his own parish, may 
 have one or two topics which he has well pondered 
 and digested, some favourite parable or history, 
 which, supposing him to forget half what he meant 
 to say, will still remind him of sufficient matter for 
 a good sermon. ^^ I know," says Leighton, " that 
 weakness of the memory is pleaded in excuse for 
 this custom; but better minds would make better 
 memories. Such an excuse is unworthy of a father 
 
40 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 addressing his children. Like Elihii, he should be 
 refreshed by speaking." When any one becomes 
 an itinerant preacher, staying with a friend, he 
 should, at least, do as all itinerant preachers have 
 always done, have a cycle of sermons which he 
 can produce from his heart, where they have been 
 " laid up and pondered," like Mary's remembrances 
 of the child Jesus. 
 
 Then, again, so much depends upon the subject, 
 the style of treating it, and the congregation to 
 whom it is addressed. Here a man of tact will 
 use variety ; the alternation of a written sermon on 
 a doctrine, with an extempore hortatory appeal 
 from a parable, may be very grateful to an audience. 
 Some subjects require to be treated differently from 
 others. One of our bishops, who inherits the elo- 
 quence of his family name, has published more 
 than one volume of sermons which read well, having 
 been composed in polished words, for educated 
 audiences ; at the same time, no one is more happy 
 in his occasional extempore sermons to country 
 parishes, or to the " working classes in London," 
 adapting himself to their faculties by his conver- 
 sational style, and the great art of borrowing his 
 similes and illustrations from the handicrafts at 
 which his hearers have been toilino; all the week. 
 In a small country church, where the size of the 
 building admits of your being heard in a conver- 
 sational tone, there you can converse ; but if you 
 are preaching in a vast building, you will do well 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 41 
 
 to know exactly what words you are going to use, 
 in order that you fill out the sound at the ends of 
 your sentences. 
 
 In university sermons, where the sentences are a 
 page long, and where, in consequence of the argu- 
 mentative nature of the style, everything depends 
 upon the exactness of the language, a written ser- 
 mon is a necessary thing. Yet, surely, the case is 
 widely different when we come to short hortatory 
 appeals and familiar expositions suited to the capa- 
 city of a rural population. The heart is to be in- 
 fluenced and not the head, and language coming 
 direct from the preacher's heart, without the me- 
 dium of paper, will flow easiest into the listener's 
 heart. " Dip and season your words heart deep," 
 says George Herbert, " verae voces ex imo pectore," 
 and if there be sympathy — as how can there help 
 being — it will be " deep answering to deep." On 
 paper you may be more elegant and more exact; 
 but what do the men in the smock-frocks care about 
 elegance or know about exactness ? Let them feel 
 the edge of your words before they lose their 
 sharpness by contact with paper. Let them feel 
 the salt of your words before it evaporate in the 
 ink. Verily that sermon-case, which is so great a 
 help to you, is often a great partition-wall between 
 you and your hearers. It adds a stiffness to what 
 you say, which, though you may call it polish, is 
 still stiffness, and nothing else, to them. Every 
 bit of art you throw into your composition, every 
 
42 PAPERS ON PEEACHINQ, 
 
 grace that you bestow upon your rhetoric, removes 
 you a step farther from the comprehension of na- 
 ture's children on the deal bench. What does your 
 audience know of polish ? Then why sit in your 
 study and polish away at your sentences until you 
 have rubbed all the rough, biting edge off them ? 
 Eloquence is " vehement simplicity ;" and accord- 
 ing to another, " a certain wonderful power of 
 making oneself believed/' Let this be the elo- 
 quence you strive after. Live so as to be beloved 
 — speak so as to be understood — so shall you " get 
 within your hearers" and ^^ screw truth into their 
 minds." There is something in real passion, when 
 one warms to the occasion and the words flow out 
 of the heart, which all the art in the world can 
 feebly imitate. 
 
 There is one great advantage and one great dan- 
 ger in extempore preaching, with which we will 
 conclude. 
 
 The advantage is this, which, in a late article of 
 the Quarterly Heviem, on " The Parish Priest," is 
 described in some such words as these — but we 
 quote only from memory — " To those who do not 
 repeat 7nemo7'iter, but are masters of their subject, 
 there is the advantage that they can watch the 
 effect of their words upon their audience, and con- 
 sequently contract or expand their arguments, and 
 vary their illustrations according to the pulse of their 
 audience and the impression which they see to be 
 produced ; and this, in St. Augustine's opinion. 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 43 
 
 was the essential element of pulpit success. The 
 happiest flights are those which are born of the 
 occasion, the warmth of which will atone for many- 
 defects of style." If we made up our conversation 
 before we went to a party, how flat it would fall 
 compared with that which arises out of the occa- 
 sion ; now something analogous to this occurs in 
 preaching — at least sufficiently analogous to bear 
 comparison. True, the audience at sermons cannot 
 enter into a conversation with their tongues, but 
 they can make the response to the preacher with 
 the intelligence of their eyes and features. The 
 preacher gazing into their countenances can see 
 how far they appreciate, approve, or understand. 
 In lecturing on science, Arago picked out a dull 
 type of humanity among his hearers, with a low 
 forehead. On him he kept his eye fixed — he ad- 
 dressed himself to him as if there were no other 
 present, and by the effect of his explanations, as re- 
 flected in this man's countenance, he judged of their 
 influence upon the rest of his audience. When 
 this pupil remained unconvinced, the orator tried 
 new arguments and illustrations till light beamed 
 on his countenance. " We often see," says a mo- 
 dern preacher, " as we go on in our discourse, from 
 the straining attention of some in the crowd, that 
 we have not yet succeeded in what we have spoken. 
 Are we, then, to go forward without making another 
 attempt with some change of address or variation of 
 imagery?" The extempore preacher will, then, in 
 
44 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 this point, stand at a manifest advantage, because 
 he has more freedom ; he can strike as he sees his 
 blows tell ; if he sees his argument is beyond his 
 audience, he can refrain. We will suppose his notes 
 to be certain algebraic symbols, or natural contrac- 
 tions and signs, leaving the subordinate fillings up 
 to the impressiveness and excitations of the moment. 
 Around these algebraic symbols the extemporist 
 can swing at leisure, anchoring the head of his ship 
 to them to avoid losing his course, wdiile he has 
 sufficient elasticity to swing gracefully, expanding 
 or contracting at will. What would look like repe- 
 tition upon paper, does not sound like repetition 
 when spoken ; and repetition, with slight varia- 
 tions, is necessary for the full understanding of many 
 things. To the preacher from notes, w^e may say 
 what Dr. Johnson said to Boswell, when he handed 
 him notes for a speech to an election committee in 
 the House of Commons, — " This, sir, you must 
 enlarge on ; you must not argue these as if you 
 were arguing to the schools. You must say the 
 same thing over and over again in different words. 
 If you say it but once, they miss it in a moment of 
 inattention." Fox advised Sir Samuel Romilly, 
 when about to sum up the evidence in Lord Mel- 
 ville's trial, " not to be afraid of repeating obser- 
 vations which were material." Pitt urged a simi- 
 lar defence for that amplification which was thought 
 a defect in his style. " Every person," he said, 
 "who addressed a public assembly, and was anxious 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 45 
 
 to make an impression on particular points, must 
 either be copious upon some points or else repeat 
 them, and copiousness is to be preferred to repeti- 
 tion." Lord Brougham gives his testimony on the 
 same side, — *' The orator often feels that he could 
 add strength to his composition by compression, but 
 his hearers would then be unable to keep pace with 
 him, and he is compelled to sacrifice conciseness to 
 clearness. The expansion, which is a merit at the 
 moment of delivery , is turned into a defect when a 
 speech is lorinted. What before was impressive 
 seems now to be verbose, and the effect is dimi- 
 nished in much the same proportion as originally 
 it was increased. It was for some such reason that 
 Fox asserted, that if a speech read well it was a bad 
 speech. No Athenian audience could have followed 
 Demosthenes in the condensed form in which his 
 speeches are printed." — Quarterly Review, No. 
 206. Fuller reminds us that to the uneducated 
 listener, the intellectual food should not be pre- 
 sented in too solid a form, saying, in his inimitable 
 way, " without a fair proportion of chaff a horse is 
 apt to bolt his oats." 
 
 The danger is that the text, instead of being 
 adhered to, becomes only a starting-point in the 
 preacher's mind, from which he rushes off to his 
 favourite and hackneyed themes. We may have 
 remarked in some of the worst specimens of extem- 
 pore speakers that they always give you the same 
 sermon, more or less, whatever their text may be. 
 
46 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 The danger is described by Isaac Taylor as " the 
 glib run of the mental associations upon worn tracks 
 — this way or that — as the mind may chance to 
 take its start from a given point." To take an 
 extreme case, to illustrate what we mean, we have 
 somewhere read an anecdote — we think in Moore^s 
 Life of Wesley — to this effect. A curate, who 
 preached extempore, always introduced into his 
 sermon a dissertation on the duty of paying debts, 
 whatever the subject might be. The congregation 
 considered this an insult, and appealed to the rector 
 to pfive the curate some text from which he could 
 not branch off to this old topic. The rector fixed 
 ^^ the conversion of St. Paul," thinking no path- 
 way out of this could lead to the curate's favourite 
 grievance. However, after a few minutes' descrip- 
 tion of St. Paul's conversion, amongst the marks 
 of a regenerate man, the curate enumerated a pay- 
 ing of outstanding accounts as one of the most 
 obvious. Strange that even so he was not to be 
 restrained from throwing himself off the rails and 
 getting on his old tramroad. It must be confessed 
 that sameness is the great evil of bad extempore 
 preachers ; but then this is no reason against extem- 
 pore delivery, because a reading man, a full man, 
 will be always replenishing himself with fresh mat- 
 ter, and " bringing out of his treasure things new 
 as well as old." He will also have before his 
 mind's eye a distinct outline and skeleton of what 
 his subject consists, and the filling in of the nerves 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 47 
 
 and sinews will be all that he trusts to the occasion 
 to suggest. 
 
 In drawing a comparison, and in forming a judg- 
 ment of the relative merits of written and extem- 
 pore discourses, let us bear in mind that the effect 
 produced at the time is the great point to be kept 
 in view. Extempore addresses taken down in short- 
 hand, and read over by the fireside, may appear 
 very poor ; but they were never meant to be so 
 criticised. Whitfield's sermons, in their printed 
 state, are poor specimens, however great the effect 
 produced was by their delivery. The story which 
 Lord Macaulay quotes from Plutarch is to the pur- 
 pose: — '^Lycias wrote a defence for a man who 
 was to be tried before one of the Athenian tribunals. 
 Long before the defendant had learnt the speech by 
 heart, he became so dissatisfied with it, that he 
 went in great distress to the author. * I was de- 
 lighted with your speech the first time I read it ; 
 but I liked it less the second, and still less the third 
 time, and now it seems to me to be no defence at 
 all.' ^ My good friend,' said Lycias, ^ you quite 
 forget that the judges are to hear it only once.' " 
 So is it with the extempore sermon, which may not 
 be able to bear criticism as a work of art ; if it 
 produces its effect at the time it has answered its 
 purpose. Bishop Home relates the difference be- 
 tween the eloquence of Demosthenes and Cicero, 
 quoting it from Fenelon : — " When Demosthenes 
 had done speaking, the Athenians said, ^Let us 
 
48 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 fight Philip.' When Cicero ceased, the Romans 
 said, * What a fine orator.' " After hearing Mas- 
 sillon, at Versailles, Louis XIV. said to him, " I 
 have heard many great orators in this chapel, and 
 have been highly pleased ivith them, but for you, 
 whenever I hear you, I go away displeased with 
 myself, for I see more of my own character." The 
 object of all preaching being to make men better, 
 let us have whatever will be most effective ; but we 
 believe that while over a written sermon men would 
 exclaim how beautiful the language and how po- 
 lished — by an earnest rough extempore address 
 they would be most pricked to the heart, and led 
 to cry out, " God be merciful to the children of 
 
 men 
 
 »" 
 
 Let us have extempore sermons where they may 
 be had — for the substance of the argument in their 
 favour lies in these words of Cotton Mather's — 
 "How can you expect your hearers to remember 
 what, but for your book, you are afraid you should 
 yourself forget ? " 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 HOW FAK IS EXTEMPORE ADDRESS WITHIN THE 
 REACH OF THE MAJORITY OF PREACHERS ? 
 
 'F a conversational style of preachino^ 
 be suitable for the uneducated classes, 
 and has a reality and earnestness about 
 it which more than counterbalances 
 its defects, the question arises — how far is it 
 within the power of the majority of our country 
 clergy to acquire facility in extempore delivery ? 
 To say that there are very few good extempore 
 preachers in the English pulpit is no answer: 1st, 
 because there are very few who make the attempt ; 
 2ndly, those who do attempt it are generally in 
 towns, where the audience is less fitted for it than 
 in rural parishes; 3rdly, we may conclude, natu- 
 rally enough, that as it is attempted where the 
 sphere of labour is most arduous, it is resorted to 
 as a saving of time ; whereas, to do justice to an 
 unwritten sermon, it requires more study and la- 
 bour than is usually devoted to a written one. To 
 say that the clergy of the EstabHshed Church are 
 
 E 
 
50 IWPEBS OX PBKACJliyCr. 
 
 unequal to it — before they have tried wliat tliev 
 can aehieve, not merely by one attempt, but by 
 giving" themselves to the study of it — is an answer 
 >vhieh has been listened to long enough ; the Chureh 
 has made sueli immense progress in the other 
 branehes of pastoral "svork that she has taken out 
 of her own mouth all excuses on the score oi^ in- 
 ability to achieve anything which she attempts. 
 
 Would a painter think it enough to decline 
 his art, because at liio tontli or fifteenth time he 
 could not produce a picture ! Rather, he might 
 sivy, as one is reported to have done, " I painted 
 this picture in three ^veeks, it is true, but I ^vas 
 thirty yeai's learning to paint it in three weeks. " 
 Consider, too. how numy yeai-s of labour are repre- 
 sented by the tirst skiltul performance of a musician. 
 ** Bishop Burnet (^says his biographer) attained to 
 an easiness in extempore address, chiefly by al- 
 lotting many horn's ot' the day to meditation upon 
 all sorts of subjects, and by accustoming himself at 
 those times to speak his thoughts aloud, studying 
 always to render his expression correct." Loiti 
 Stanhope in his address, on being installed Lonl 
 Rector at Aberdeen, in March 18-38, instances, as 
 similar examples, Sir Isaac Xewton, Adam Smith, 
 Rousseau, and even Lord Byron, whom one would 
 least have suspected of laboriousness. He then con- 
 tinues, " No nuin had that gift of using, in public 
 speaking, the right word in the right place, in 
 greater perfection than Mr. Pitt. 31y father, pre- 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHiyG. CI 
 
 suminfr on the honour of his acquaintance with that 
 great man, asked him one day how he acquired 
 that great advantage. Mr. Pitt replied, that what- 
 ever readiness he might be thought to possess in 
 that respect, he had derived from a practice which 
 liis father, the great Lord Chatham, enjoined upon 
 him. Lord Chatham had bidden him take up some 
 book in a foreign language — say Greek, Latin, or 
 French — then to read out of this book a passa^re, 
 stopping where he was not sure of the right word, 
 till the right one came. Mr. Pitt said he followed 
 the command assiduously. At first he often had 
 to stop for a while till he found the proper word, 
 but that he found the difficulties gradually disap- 
 pear, until what was a toil at first became afterwards 
 an easy pleasure." " Even if you could satisfy 
 yourself (says another writer) with the first attempt, 
 vet the vers^ exertion will do vou good — thousrht 
 produces thouj^ht. You must not be discourasred if 
 the attempt at first seem to fail. The infant bird 
 practises his wings as he stands up in the nest; 
 then gets upon the edges of it ; then upon the neigh- 
 bouring bouf^hs ; and then takes short excursions 
 before it flies its more daring lengths. As the natural 
 consequence of use and improvement, follows the 
 divine blessing. This is especially true of the cul- 
 tivation of readiness in speech — for the memory, 
 like a friend, loves to be trusted, and seldom fails to 
 reward the confidence placed in it." — (Jay's Auto- 
 hiograpky.) 
 
52 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 What every illiterate Nonconformist does every 
 Sunday, in proportion to his ability, an educated 
 body of men, with their logical training, and their 
 long practised experience in Meriting themes and 
 essays from their youth — with their greater com- 
 mand of time and their unlimited access to books, 
 could assuredly do in a much more effectual man- 
 ner. It was the remark of Mr. Grenville in his 
 ninetieth year : " The only change worthy of the 
 name which I recollect in my long life, is the change 
 which has taken place in the tone of the clergy of 
 the Established Church." Is it not time to see 
 whether our clergy cannot attain to the more perfect 
 way of speaking without book, which is in use in 
 every other nation but the English, and which those 
 who were trained by our side at school and the 
 Universities are practising without difficulty in the 
 senate and at the bar ? There are, no doubt, some 
 few who could never preach without book, just as 
 there are some few men in the world who can never 
 return thanks for their health being proposed — just 
 as there are some men who could never write ten 
 lines on any given subject. But these are gradually 
 getting fewer and fewer every year. The debating 
 societies at the Universities, the clergy meetings 
 which are now so frequent, and the various plat- 
 form meetings and secular lectures, are, we doubt 
 not, convincing many men that extempore address 
 is a thing quite within their reach. What hinders, 
 then, the majority of our clergy, where tlieir con- 
 
PAPERS ON PEEACHINO, 53 
 
 gregation is uneducated, and therefore not critical, 
 and where the churches are small, and therefore 
 such as admit of a conversational tone being used, 
 from making the attempt ? They might begin with 
 subject " sermons," as opposed to " text sermons," 
 as admitting of more scope and containing more 
 matter ; and as they grew more self-possessed they 
 might venture on sermons of a narrower and there- 
 fore more difficult and delicate treatment. We have 
 great faith in the old maxim, that success in most 
 things depends far more in the pains taken than in the 
 natural innate talent. " Poeta nascitur non fit" ap- 
 plies to but few cases besides the poet. Demosthenes 
 training himself, by speaking to the wild waves, for 
 the tumultuous assemblies of the Athenians, could 
 at least say, " orator fit non nascitur." If any con- 
 siderable number of our clergy were to try, no doubt 
 a few would give it up, but we believe the majority 
 would rejoice in their new-born strength, and some 
 few would greatly excel. We are convinced that 
 if a few trials were suggested to all the students at 
 a Theological College the experience of the ma- 
 jority would confirm what we say — that the gift is 
 within most men's reach, and that a heartfelt, real 
 style of preaching would draw back again within 
 the ministrations of the Established Church many 
 who, by the frigid, chaste style of her discourses, 
 have been scattered abroad into diverse sects. 
 Granted that few would be satisfied with their first 
 attempts : were they any better satisfied with their 
 
54 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 first written sermons ? Granted that here and there 
 one shall come down from the pulpit lamenting that 
 much matter had escaped his memory from nervous- 
 ness, and that he had missed many happy illustra- 
 tions and pretty turns of sentences which would 
 have had due place in his written pages. Though 
 artistically his sermon may have been worse, yet it 
 may, for these very reasons, have been intrinsically 
 better suited to the audience. Nor must it be for- 
 gotten — we have experienced the truth of the re- 
 mark ourselves — that those very sermons for which 
 a man most condemns himself have told the most 
 upon the hearers. Here is a story which will illus- 
 trate our point, for the truth of which we can an- 
 swer, though we suppress the names : — The rector 
 of a parish in Worcestershire, who always leant 
 upon his written manuscript for words, suddenly 
 found himself in the pulpit with no sermon in his 
 pocket : he had dropped it on the way to the church. 
 There were only two more verses of the singing, 
 and he must begin without his book from necessity — 
 a thing which he would never have done from 
 choice. Turning to the 53rd of Isaiah, he impro- 
 vised such remarks as he could, which proved to be 
 burning words. As he walked home he lamented 
 his lost MS., and bemoaned tlie way in which he 
 had acquitted himself in his first extempore address. 
 Everybody else, to his surprise, was deHghted with 
 it, and in the course of his weekly round through 
 his parish he discovered, to his joy, that a woman 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 55 
 
 who had generally attended a Socinian chapel had 
 returned to Church-membership, saying that never 
 before had she been convinced of the personal cha- 
 racter of Christ. In this case there was that rough 
 earnestness about the words that drove them home 
 to the heart. The spirit of the preacher spoke before 
 the fastidious taste of the critic and the scholar had 
 time to spoil the vigour of the thought. God pro- 
 mised to Moses, when he sent him to Pharaoh, and 
 Christ promised to the disciples, when they were 
 called before kings and rulers, that their stammering 
 lips should be supplied with words ; and without 
 entering into the question of where inspiration be- 
 gins and human knowledge ceases, we cannot doubt 
 that God, who has told us that He will supply all 
 our infirmities, will give utterance sufficient for the 
 occasion, in answer to prayer, to one who has 
 given due diligence to human study and prepara- 
 tion. The practised archer shoots nearest the mark, 
 though in this case " a certain man drew a bow at 
 a venture," and the shaft went home. 
 
 It may be answered, with some apparent show of 
 truth, that instances are on record in which some of 
 the giants of the English pulpit — Archbishop Til- 
 lotson and Bishop Saunderson — tried extempore de- 
 livery and confessed themselves unequal to the task; 
 and that even that man of ready wit, Doctor South, 
 when attempting to extemporise before the king, 
 rushed out of the pulpit, exclaiming, " God have 
 mercy on our infirmities." But to make the^r«i 
 
56 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 attempt on a controversial subject before a king and 
 court, is like attempting to run without having 
 learnt to walk. There are many lower stages even 
 before preaching in a village church, by which con- 
 fidence may be acquired. The family gathering 
 for prayers, the schoolroom and cottage lecture, are 
 shallows in which the beginner may exercise the 
 art of swimming before plunging into the great 
 deep of addressing a critical audience. The Wor- 
 cestershire rector, of whom we have spoken, was 
 the case of a man who would never have known he 
 could swim till he found himself suddenly in the 
 water, and was obliged to strike out for his life. 
 Yet the timid beginner will do well to provide him- 
 self with corks — which will save him from sinking 
 if he should grow confused and strike out too fast 
 — which, nevertheless, may be cast aside if he finds 
 he is getting on without them. The author of Eccle- 
 siastes Anglicanus recommends the novice to take 
 a written sermon into the pulpit, with the headings 
 opposite the matter in the blank pages ; so that he 
 can begin from notes, with the assurance that he 
 has the written MS. to fall back upon in case of 
 being obliged to beat a retreat. The only objec- 
 tion to this kind of corks is, that they are apt to 
 entangle the beginner. Written matter is so diffe- 
 rent from what would be said extempore from notes, 
 that the change of style is very confusing. The 
 sentences we write undergo a mental scrutiny which 
 makes them differ from viva voce remarks — so that 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 57 
 
 they cannot be interchanged at pleasure without 
 greatly confusing the speaker. In the Preface to 
 his Family Exposition of the PeJitateuch, the late 
 Henry Blunt, of Chelsea, expresses the difficulty 
 arising out of the difference in the two styles. He 
 says — " To those who are, by God's help, enabled to 
 make a short and viva voce commentary on the Word 
 of God (and few would fail if they would attempt it 
 in the true spirit of self-renunciation and of prayer), 
 the 'author strongly recommends that method at 
 family worship. To those who are unable, he 
 offers this work as a very inadequate substitute. 
 For he cannot but acknowledge that when he sat 
 down to write, he found how totally different in 
 expression what he put upon paper was from what 
 he had been in the habit of speaking with the Bible 
 before him, and though he contin iially endeavoured 
 to re-assume the speaker, he always found the 
 7vriter predominate." The plan of the running 
 notes, by the side of the written sermon, is on this 
 account very apt to confuse; but there are other 
 helps which are less open to this objection. The 
 report of the committee of the Upper House in 
 Convocation leads us to the most obvious when it 
 says — " That the clergy be urged to substitute for 
 their more formal addresses plain expositions of 
 God's Word." An exposition of a continuous pas- 
 sage, instead of drawing out the smallest portion of 
 a verse (as the manner of some is) would of itself 
 give all the requisite support to a timid man. He 
 
58 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 would have an ample staff on which to lean if he 
 took the broad basis of an historical character, or a 
 parable, as the groundwork of his homily. No 
 man, moderately conversant with his subject, could 
 break down for lack of material. It was the advice 
 of one of the Bishops most competent to advise his 
 clergy on such a head — to take a parable and ex- 
 pound it, letting the various strong points in it be, 
 instead of notes — for (as he most truly remarked) 
 elaborate notes, which are generally supposed to be 
 the half-way house between a written sermon and 
 an extempore delivery, are of all things the most 
 confusing, and cause more hesitations than they 
 prevent. For argument's sake, let us suppose a 
 young clergyman (who sets out with telling you he 
 is sure he should break down if he tried) induced 
 to make the attempt. It is the week preceding 
 the Second Sunday in Lent, and the Gospel for the 
 day brings forward the healing of the Syropheni- 
 cian woman's daughter — a subject which Luther 
 was never tired of enlarging on. Wishing to give 
 his sick and bedridden parishioners the same food 
 as he gives the whole on Sunday, following the 
 cycle of the Church services, he reads the account 
 of this miracle in his round of pastoral visits, he 
 thus becomes intimately acquainted with the iacts 
 of the miracle, which he meditates on and enlarges 
 in his mind as he goes from house to house ; he 
 thus, by examining some of his parishioners who 
 may be taken as a sample of the rest of the parish, 
 
PAPEES ON PREACHING, 59 
 
 ascertains how much he may take it for granted 
 tliey know, and, consequently, where he must lay 
 the basis of his teaching. He becomes so full of 
 his subject, that if his memory should fail in the 
 pulpit, he can supply it out of the deeper well of 
 his heart — for ^' out of the abundance of the heart 
 (and this is the glory of extempore delivery) the 
 mouth speaketh." In his interleaved Testament he 
 notes down opposite the text such few points as 
 form the marrow of his exhortation, but only in 
 very few words, so that a glance of his eye may 
 recall, by one prominent word, the idea which it 
 represents. Let us suppose him to be going to 
 treat the subjects after good old George Herbert's 
 rule, which to this kind of homily is more applic- 
 able than to a mere text sermon : — " The parson's 
 method of handling a text consists of two parts : 
 Jirst, a plain and evident declaration of the meaning 
 of the text ; and, secondly, some choice observations, 
 drawn out of the whole text, as it lies entire and 
 unbroken in the Scripture itself." Having given 
 a paraphrase of the text, and gone down the several 
 verses, explaining them with the attendant circum- 
 stances, he sums up the lessons to be learnt under 
 six heads, which he might note down in almost 
 as few words — energy (in seeking Christ), impor- 
 tunity, humility, intercessory prayer, persevering 
 prayer — all summed up by our Lord in the word. 
 Faith. In this way the desultory, rambling nature 
 of extempore preaching will be avoided, because the 
 
60 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 framework, though so sHght as not to assume even 
 the nature of notes, will keep the whole matter 
 within due bounds — will preserve the thread of the 
 discourse entire — and will be a skeleton of which 
 the sinews and flesh will be easily filled in. We 
 think that this cannot fail to unite the advantages of 
 a well-ordered discourse — such as a written sermon 
 professes to be — with the life and animation of an 
 extemporised address. 
 
 The painstaking man, without any great ability, 
 may make his first attempt successfully and securely 
 in this way, until, having acquired confidence, he 
 can rely upon his memory entirely. But no amount 
 of self-reliance ought ever to lead any one to dis- 
 pense with due preparation, and a well digested 
 outline of what the subject should embrace. For 
 thus it comes to pass that many men who fancy 
 they have attained the acme of preaching when they 
 can talk on any subject at a moment's notice, are 
 the very men that the world points at when it wants 
 to find illustrations for the theory that even clever 
 men become tedious in extempore sermons, and 
 that therefore it should be abandoned. One of the 
 greatest proficients in extempore speaking, whose 
 reputation rested on many years' experience, bore 
 testimony to this saying, that the homilies which 
 seemed to flow so easily from his lips as to appear 
 to the listeners to be born of the occasion, had cost 
 him many hours' laborious preparation and earnest 
 prayer. *' The coinage cannot be good if the mint 
 be empty." 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 61 
 
 Dr. Arnold says the teacher's mind should re- 
 semble a lake fed by a running stream — always 
 acquiring fresh knowledge, and never allowing itself 
 to lie stagnant. " When a man ceases to learn, that 
 moment he becomes unfit to teach.'' If a full man 
 (says Professor Blunt) is required anywhere, it is 
 in the minister of a church who is fixed to the 
 same spot the whole year round. Nothing short of 
 a large magazine to draw from will sufiice for these 
 frequent demands : without it the thread of his 
 speech will soon run out the staple of his argument, 
 and instead of a preacher, he will become a spin- 
 text.'' 
 
 " The country parson," says Herbert, " hath 
 read the Fathers also, and the schoolmen and the 
 later writers, or a good proportion of all ; out of 
 all of which he hath compiled a book and body of 
 divinity which is the storehouse of his sermons, and 
 which he preacheth all his life, but diversely clothed, 
 illustrated, enlarged." And so Bishop Burnet and 
 others have recommended a body of divinity col- 
 lected in the mind, on the several parts of which, 
 to try its consistency, the Christian minister has 
 held conversations with himself. Not 7'eading only, 
 but deep rmising and meditating on the different 
 topics which he is called upon to treat of in the 
 pulpit, are most necessary to the Christian pastor. 
 It is well for him to have turned his Sunday theme 
 over and over in his mind in all its bearings during 
 his rambles in the week — to have answered in his 
 
62 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 own mind all the objections which may possibly be 
 started — as well as all the difficulties which may 
 want clearing up ; in short, as far as he can, to have 
 placed himself in the position of one of his unedu- 
 cated hearers to see what they require, as well as 
 what he can give. 
 
 Extempore delivery, in its very nature, consists of 
 greater expansion and more repetition than written 
 language. This is, perhaps, the secret of poor 
 people's saying they derive more instruction under 
 it. The scholarly epitome of truth is not so suited 
 to their dull comprehension as the diffusive manner 
 of conversational preaching, w^hich states the same 
 thing over and over again in different words ; some- 
 times putting it in the poor man's own simple 
 words, and then reproducing the same in a Scrip- 
 tural expression; lingering over instead of hastening 
 by an idea, turning it round in every point of view, 
 that the hearer may take it in and be sure of his 
 ground as far as the preacher leads him. As Ro- 
 bert Nelson says in his Life of Bishop Bully " If 
 men design to interest the generality, they must 
 repeat the same thing often, and turn it after a dif- 
 ferent manner to inculcate it with force." 
 
 Extempore preaching, as we have sketched it, 
 requires constant application and carefulness ; it is 
 not the refuge of a lazy man ; such a one had better 
 far adhere to his written stock of sermons. It is 
 for the earnest man, who gives himself wholly to 
 these things, and is willing to be spent in his work, 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 63 
 
 to avail himself of this method of giving a simple 
 reality to the pulpit part of the ministry, as he has 
 probably already given to his pastoral visitation and 
 his schools. But though it be a work of care and 
 thought, independently of its direct object, it has 
 minor advantages by the way which amply com- 
 pensate for the trouble. It feeds the preaclier him- 
 self with the Word of God as an engrafted word. 
 The labour of acquiring it bears directly upon all 
 the other parts of parish work. When it is ac- 
 quired it makes the self-dependent man, able to 
 defend the Church of England — apt to teach and 
 catechise readily in church ; and whether at a meet- 
 ing, a vestry, or a club dinner, to gain the respect 
 of the parish as an educated and a ready man. It 
 opens numerous channels of usefulness which would 
 be otherwise inaccessible to him. It makes an 
 inferior man into a superior man. These are its 
 accessory advantages. Yet it well repays the labour 
 of acquiring it by the hold it gives the Church over 
 the working classes; it enables the clergyman to 
 meet the dissenter with his own weapons, extempore 
 address; and thus (while self-constituted teachers 
 are pulling at the flock on every side) it often 
 empowers the clergyman to hold his own, if not to 
 gather back into the fold many who, not objecting 
 to church doctrine, have gone over to the meeting- 
 house because its preaching was less insipid than 
 the written theological essays of the past age. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 HOW FAR DOES FULPIT PREPARATION LIE 
 AMIDST OTHER PARISH WORK ? 
 
 HE preacher of a chapel with no dis- 
 trict attached will have ample time 
 either for written sermons or the no 
 less laborious preparation which is re- 
 quired to make extempore preaching worthy of the 
 name. Few, however, of the parochial clergy have 
 leisure hours to devote to exclusive preparation for 
 the pulpit ; attendance at schools and clubs occupies 
 the morning, and the afternoon is snatched away by 
 pastoral visits. Yet we have pleaded for a diligent 
 preparation, in order that the pastor's exhortation to 
 his assembled flock may be neither flimsy nor ill- 
 digested. It remains that w^e should show how 
 this may be achieved, and how that which is so 
 desirable is also far from im2:)ossible. We shall be 
 able to do this only if we can trace out a plan of 
 preparation wherein the study requisite for the pul- 
 pit is contained in the other branches of parish work, 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 65 
 
 and may be carried on simultaneously with them ; 
 wherein the germs of the sermon lie in the school- 
 teaching, and are nourished and developed in pas- 
 toral visitation. And this we are led to believe is 
 the true method of preparation, because it cements 
 the parochial system together, and is itself derived 
 from that principle of unity which makes the labours 
 spent on any depai'tment tell with equal force upon 
 the whole pastoral work, 
 
 A character is introduced in Mr. Pycroft's 
 Twenty Years in the Church, who gives the fol- 
 lowing receipt for rearing useful country clergy- 
 men : — 
 
 1. Your mother's tongue to learn. 
 
 2. A poor man's heart to anatomize. 
 
 3. A poor man's brain to dissect. 
 
 Nor does this seem an unfair threefold division 
 of the preparation required, — and two-thirds of it 
 can be obtained out of doors, and in the discharge 
 of the other duties of parochial life. If the reading 
 must be done in the study, the thinking on what 
 has been read may be done out of doors ; like the 
 patriarch, we may walk in the fields to meditate 
 (^Gen, XXV. 63). Hear the testimony of William 
 Jay (p. 123) : — '^ After a nervous malady, and to 
 avoid sedentariness, I accustomed myself to think 
 abroad. The practice was difficult at first, as my 
 attention was often diverted; but I soon by use 
 acquired the power of fixed and regular application; 
 and the sceneries of nature rather aided than injured 
 
 F 
 
66 PAPERS ON PRE A CHING. 
 
 my meditations; inspiring also the tmins of my 
 reflection with a freshness and feeling underivable 
 from dull and dry porings over books. In these 
 musings in the garden, the meadow, the field, the 
 wood, the leading ideas of my discourse soon fell 
 into their proper places, and a division resulted 
 without much effort ; so that when I came home, I 
 had only to secure what I had already found, and 
 to write what I had already methodized/' 
 
 It will be admitted that the study requisite for a 
 good sermon comprises two branches — accurate 
 knowledge of human nature ydiH^ intimate acquaint- 
 ance with the Bible. Either of these studied alone 
 will be insufficient. A physician must study the 
 properties of herbs and drugs ; he must also study 
 anatomy and the human constitution ; so the pastor 
 must be " a discerner of spirits^' as well as " mighty 
 in the Scrii^ttures,^' and must have studied in the 
 world as well as in the library. 
 
 Obviously the study of the human heart is un- 
 folded before the pastor's eyes as soon as he issues 
 into his parish. He turns into his school, and there 
 he becomes acquainted not only with the lambs, 
 but also indirectly with the sheep ; for the children 
 reflect the ways, words, and works of the parents. 
 *' The school is, in fact, the epitome and brief ab- 
 stract of the parish. The features of the offspring 
 do not half so faithfully express the features as their 
 morals betray the morals of the race they spring 
 from .... The needle or the ticket purloined from 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 67 
 
 a companion's bag augurs but too truly the fuel 
 pilfered, the hen-roost or orchard taxed, the sheaf at 
 the gleaning unrespected, the hare snared, and the 
 turnip-field laid under contribution by the elders at 
 home. The irregular penny is but too significant a 
 manifestation of the arrears at the shop and the mill ; 
 the task-book soiled, tattered, and repeatedly lost, is 
 but too sure a sign of wages squandered, timely 
 stitches neglected, supplies unhusbanded at head- 
 quarters. As, on the other hand, the artless, neat, 
 and orderly child is a never-failing argument that 
 the roof under which it dwells is the abode of re- 
 ligion and of those virtues which, when found in a 
 cottage at all, are found nowhere in such perfec- 
 tion." 
 
 After a visit to the school the pastor pursues his 
 way through the parish, conversing here and there 
 with some one he meets or whom he sees at work 
 in the fields, otherwise he will be comparatively 
 unacquainted with the male part of the population, 
 as they are out in the fields when he visits their 
 cottages. Here he visits a sick person, and there a 
 family in health. If the pastor has long had charge 
 of the parish, the fathers and mothers of the rising 
 generation were formerly in his class at school, and 
 afterwards at Confirmation ; he is thei'efore no 
 stranger to their dispositions and habits. He comes 
 to their homes as one who has long shown his love 
 and care for them ; they have every encouragement 
 to open their hearts to him and tell him their tale of 
 
68 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 joy or sorrow. The course of many a soul is there- 
 fore opened under his eyes for his instruction, which 
 he cannot fail to read with profit if he have a fair 
 ability in reading character. Here is a volume of 
 human nature continually inviting his perusal, more 
 or less full of the secrets of each heart's history ac- 
 cording as the people know their pastor to be free 
 from the rimosd aiire or not ; here is ample scope, 
 in the midst of his business hours, for the pastor to 
 be fitting himself for his pulpit ministrations by 
 stirring up knowledge in those minute divisions of 
 character and dissections of conscience which give 
 to a sermon all its point and particular application. 
 One who has thus made himself wise in what is 
 thought and said and done among his people, will 
 be able from the pulpit to discover a man fo himself 
 in such a way as he never saw his own character 
 before; he will avoid being personal on the one 
 hand, so that no one shall be able to say he was 
 talking at such a one, while at the same time he 
 will so accurately and minutely describe imaginary 
 cases that there will be no need of saying to each, 
 '^ Thou art the man," for they will confess to them- 
 selves ih^ii mutato nomine fahula narratiir, nothing 
 is wanting but the name to complete their case. 
 They will feel the reality of such a ministry, and 
 honour one who delivers the message of God with 
 no *' uncertain sound." At however vast an inter- 
 val, still earnestly does the minister strive in this to 
 imitate the ministerial character of Christ, whose 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 69 
 
 delineation of her state made the Samaritan woman 
 exclaim, " Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet !'' 
 and turning to the men of her own city, " Come, see 
 a man that told me all that ever I did !" 
 
 " Above all other advantages," (says Spencer 
 Thornton, Life,^. 153,) " daily cottage visiting will 
 be a help to our preaching in this way, viz., that it 
 will make us acquainted with the state of their souls, 
 so that we may not draw a bow at a venture from 
 the pulpit, but direct our arrow skilfully. Our 
 ministry will then cease to be general — it will be- 
 come particular — suited to our place and people." 
 '^ I have been very careful, perhaps too careful," 
 (says Robert Suckling, Life, p. 194,) " not to hurt 
 their prejudices, but to build upon what truth they 
 did hold ; and I place the measure of success God 
 has granted me, among them, to my endeavours to 
 find out what they did hold, and then in my sermons 
 building carefully iqjon that.'' 
 
 By this free intercourse with his people, inviting 
 them to ask for information on any points of doubt, 
 the pastor supplies links which had been omitted in 
 his chain of teaching — a notion which was carried out 
 in a more marked way by a clergyman of our ac- 
 quaintance who offered to preach sermons in answer 
 to questions put on slips of paper into the poor's box. 
 One of the common complaints against sermons is 
 that they fly over the heads of the hearers — that they 
 assume too great an acquaintance with the subject in 
 the audience — that they adopt phrases, such as justi- 
 
70 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 fication, sanctification, &c., which are so obvious to 
 the preacher himself that he forgets the poor people 
 attach no particular meaning to them. By asking 
 questions after reading a verse or two in his cottage 
 visits, the clergyman becomes acquainted with the 
 standard of knowledge among his people, and will 
 know where their knowledge ceases and their ig- 
 norance begins, how much he may take for granted, 
 or into what depths of simplicity he must descend. 
 He will then be able to put himself into his hearers' 
 places, and, instead of " beating the air," will take 
 care that the information he gives will dovetail in 
 with the previous knowledge of his flock, so that 
 the superstructure will be well cemented to the 
 foundation. Without this occasional probing of the 
 intellect the sermon must carry the same impression 
 to the poor man as the reader of a review experiences 
 on the perusal of an article on some deep book of 
 philosophy which he has never heard of. In the 
 same way, finding that the uneducated often talk in 
 proverbs and similes of their own coining, which 
 they do as a roundabout way of expressing things 
 for which their vocabulary does not furnish a direct 
 expression, he steals many a coin from their own 
 mint, and stores his mind with illustrations taken 
 from the handicrafts at which they work. 
 
 Thus much of the one side of the arch on which 
 a good sermon rests, viz., an accurate knowledge of 
 human nature ; the requisite studies lie in the pastor's 
 daily walk, and the wisdom may be gleaned by the 
 way. 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 71 
 
 The other side of the arch is the study of the 
 Bible. Here, too, it may be shown — a thing which, 
 perhaps, is less obvious — that to the over-worked 
 pastor the use of his Bible in the school and at the 
 sick man's bedside may be turned to account for his 
 pulpit ministrations — that the sermon is but the de- 
 velopment of the Scripture-class in school, and the 
 Scripture exhortation in the cottage. Let us sup- 
 pose that his sermon is by choice out of the services 
 of the day. In the early part of the week he takes 
 his first class through the Epistle, Gospel, or one 
 of the Lessons for the coming Sunday, in order that 
 whatever portion they may have to learn may be 
 previously explained to them, in order to their 
 learning it with the understanding as well as the 
 mere parrot-like exercise of memory. He is thus 
 able to fix on the passage from which he will preach, 
 and make it the point to which all his meditation 
 and study during the week shall tend. If it be the 
 Epistle or Gospel, we will suppose him at his family 
 devotion to read Bishop Trower's exposition of it to 
 his household. Thus any of the prominent points 
 which have escaped him will be recalled. Turning 
 it over in his mind, with this new light thrown upon 
 it, he discourses on one of the leading points to each 
 of his sick parishioners, and as he may have some 
 half-dozen to visit, he thus goes through the whole 
 subject in the course of his afternoon walk through 
 his parish. But how many new avenues of thought 
 have opened themselves thus to his mind ! With 
 
72 PAPERS ON PREACHING, 
 
 what reality has he seen the bearing of the subject 
 for practical ends ! How does he see things as he 
 never saw them before ! 
 
 Having, then, worked out in the school and at 
 the bedside his conversations, we will go with him 
 to some distant hamlet, from which very few, if any, 
 of his hearers will be able to come to church on 
 Sunday. Here, in the cottage lecture, is a review 
 day for him to try his forces before bringing them 
 to bear before a larger audience on Sunday. If he 
 does not mean to avail himself of the gift of extem- 
 pore address for the present, he will do well not to 
 waste the opportunity of acquiring it at these cottage 
 lectures before an audience so little disposed to be 
 critical. Thus far in its earlier stages the passage 
 of Scripture required for Sunday will have been 
 studied with little else than such labour as arises out 
 of his other ministrations. The end of the week 
 finds him full of his subject, instead of having to 
 look out in a hurried way for some text on which 
 to preach. If he be an extempore preacher, he 
 notes down in his interleaved Bible the strong fea- 
 tures of his subject, that he may not be carried 
 away from the thread of his discourse. If he use 
 manuscript, the matter is well digested and arranged 
 already, and therefore in the mere writing the 
 quicker he throws it off the better, because he will 
 thus approach more nearly to the natural and the 
 real. How much forethought we bestow on the 
 matter, before we sit down to write a letter of busi- 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 73 
 
 ness of importance ; still, when we sit down to write 
 we soon dash over the sentences. 
 
 In passing, it is well to remark how this continuous 
 preparation for the sermon reacts upon the weekly 
 ministrations, and makes the clergyman a careful 
 pastoral man in his school and with his sick. By 
 taking some set portion out of the services of the 
 Church he is carried round in a cycle of teaching, 
 whereas, by dropping in at a cottage and opening 
 his Bible at hap-hazard, he is sure to omit many 
 points of doctrine and practice. How often is a 
 clergyman tempted to make his visit one of mere 
 gossip, because he does not know what portion of 
 Scripture to turn to. How often do you hear the 
 question, '' What book do you recommend for read- 
 ing to the sick ? " or, '^ I find it so difficult in a 
 long case of sickness to find any guide to a course 
 of reading which shall be simple enough." And 
 here lies the only satisfactory answer — Imbue your 
 heart with the germs of your Sunday's discourse, 
 and in the simplicity of conversational exposition 
 pour out thy word of exhortation at the bedside of 
 the sufferer, and give to the sick (only in a more 
 palatable form, because of his infirmity) the same 
 food as thou givest to the whole on Sunday. Can 
 any book be so good a manual to the pastor as an 
 interleaved Bible with his own deepest thoughts 
 written opposite a few of the parables and most 
 simple touching parts of the Gospels — thoughts 
 which were, perhaps, conceived over the sick beds 
 
74 PAPERS ON PREACHING, 
 
 of others of the flock, and which have been sancti- 
 fied by the prayers of the dying ? Yet such a 
 manual will every pastor's Bible shortly become to 
 him who thus studies the Word of God amid the 
 other calls of parochial work. To every case of 
 conscience he will go with the antidote, or it may 
 be the medicine, of a prayerfully considered portion 
 of God's Holy Word, suiting the particular case in 
 hand. " For this sort goeth not out save with 
 prayer and fasting." 
 
 But at all events (for this purpose as well as for 
 others) let all notes be carefully preserved. And not 
 only notes, but let all sermons which have been 
 composed — especially if they have cost much pa- 
 tient toil — be preserved, and let them by all means 
 have a blank page to contain any thoughts which 
 may occur in the pastor's walks or subsequent read- 
 ing. Whatever has been composed to the best of 
 a man's ability can never be otherwise than use- 
 ful; what has been written in the freshness of 
 youth may be improved by the maturer judgment 
 of age, and thus become the accumulated wisdom 
 of a life. When he reproduces them in this man- 
 ner, he will not be giving his old sermons, but 
 his old sermons with all that he can add to them, 
 which is not the act of a lazy, but of a careful^ 
 jjainstaking writer. Thus tlie preparation for a 
 sermon is a continuous act, and certainly it may 
 be affirmed that any plan is the best in propor- 
 tion as it is the farthest removed from sittins: down 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 75 
 
 with a Bible and a pen, to select a text at liap-ha- 
 zard, and to compose a sermon on the spm' of the 
 moment — for this last plan possesses the upremedi- 
 tated vapidness of an extempore sermon without 
 any of its attendant advantages. If the mind be 
 filled with what is to be written, and the cud of 
 meditation be well chewed, the proper time to com- 
 mit the thoughts to paper is the first moment of in- 
 spiration, which, if a man pass by, he may find him- 
 self compelled to write, in moments of heaviness, 
 when his pen drags heavily, and it becomes a toil 
 instead of a pleasure to compose. 
 
 Speaking of Rowland Hill, a good critic remarks, 
 — " The most brilliant sentiments I ever heard him 
 utter escaped from him when his mind was void of 
 all sense of exertion. Indeed, when a preacher who 
 extemporises much is in a good frame of mind, 
 and his thoughts flow freely and easily, he will feel 
 more fresh and lively than one who has anticipated 
 and familiarized his subject by premeditation — but 
 at other times having nothing to support him, or to 
 start from, he is perplexed by efibrt or reduced to 
 common-place. So true is it, as Lord Brougham 
 says, that ^he who studies and is most prepared 
 always extemporises best.'" 
 
 Nor will the thrifty preacher be looking forward 
 only to the Sunday next ensuing, but to future oc- 
 casions also. He is willing to let slip nothing which 
 crosses his mind as applicable. Therefore, whenever 
 a subject strikes him he notes it down, and adds under 
 
76 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 it whatever in his reading is to the purpose, or at least 
 the references to such passages, that he may turn 
 and renew his thoughts. Nor will he do amiss to 
 keep a record of such anecdotes and j^f^overhs as 
 serve to drive home a point, or to clench it (which 
 they each do in their several ways admirably), as he 
 meets with them in his way. Of these we shall 
 speak more fully hereafter, for they are weapons of 
 such undeniable use as to deserve separate notice. 
 The preacher's reading, whether in sacred or profane 
 books, will be systematic, not desultory ; it w^ill all 
 point to that storehouse of divinity which is the 
 treasure out of which he will brino^ " thino;s new and 
 old" for his people. Sunday is the clergyman's har- 
 vest, here he reaps all the sowings of the week — 
 every stroke struck in the school and the parish 
 tends to this Sunday harvest. The man who has 
 won the children's hearts in the school, and the pa- 
 rents' esteem in the parish, will start with the advan- 
 tage, which the mere preacher must be without, that 
 his congregation is predisposed to believe and to act 
 up to all that he, who has shown himself their friend, 
 shall tell them. Sorely will they be disajDpointed 
 if he does not give them such words as a friend 
 anxious for another's welfare, and cognizant of his 
 secret history, would speak. Sorely will he have 
 wasted an opportunity if he does not speak words 
 full of point and individual application to those in- 
 quiring and loving faces which surround his pulpit, 
 and look up to be fed with something which will 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 77 
 
 satisfy their cravings. To bring a man up to the 
 mark, and make him equal to such an occasion, 
 surely no exertion during the week can be too great. 
 Surely preaching cannot be over-estimated, except 
 it be to the depreciation of other parts of the pa- 
 rochial system. '^ We know," says Bishop Wilber- 
 force, in his Ash-Wednesday Sermon for 1858, 
 " that God does work miracles of grace through the 
 weakness of our preaching. We know that this 
 setting forth of His Word, to be brought home to 
 the hearts of the listeners by His mighty grace, ac- 
 cording to the sovereign working of His blessed 
 will, is, and has been ever since St. Peter preached 
 at Pentecost, by far the commonest means by which 
 He does draw souls to conversion and to life." Or, 
 as another testifies, himself a preacher of no mean 
 fame (Archer Butler, vol. i. Sermon xxii.p.322) 
 — " The drunkard, the voluptuary, the man of ^nYj, 
 of ambition, of avarice, resigns the hoarded and 
 hardened depravity of a life. The desperate are 
 taught to hope, and by hope stimulated to exertion, 
 by themselves undreamed of; and I hesitate not to 
 affirm that, amid failures innumerable from all the 
 opposing influences of human corruption, wonders 
 are, through the compass of the professing Church 
 of Christ, wrought on any single Sunday by preach- 
 ing the life and death of Jesus, which exceed in 
 number, in degree, in permanence, all the moral 
 transformations from habitual vice to genuine virtue, 
 ever, by any means, effected since the fall of man." 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE USE OF ANECDOTES TO ENLIVEN THE 
 STYLE. 
 
 HEN the parson preacheth he pro- 
 cureth attention by all possible art. 
 . . . Herein also he serves him- 
 self of the judgments of God, as those 
 of ancient times, so especially of the late ones ; and 
 those most which are nearest to his parish ; for 
 people are very attentive at such discourses, and 
 think it behoves them to be so, when God is so near 
 them, and even over their heads. Sometimes he 
 tells them stories and sayings of others, according 
 as his text invites him; for them also men heed and 
 remember better than exhortations, Avhich, though 
 earnest, yet often die with the sermon, especially 
 with country people, which are thick and heavy ; 
 . . . but stories and sayings they will well re- 
 member." 
 
 Whoever follows this ad-vice of good George 
 Herbert will have two keys wherewith to unlock 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 79 
 
 tlie attention of the most stolid audience — first, al- 
 lusion to present events ; secondly, anecdotes. 
 
 " Seize late, if possible present, occurrences," is 
 the advice of Charles Wolfe (^Memoir, p. 175). 
 Mr. Freemantle, in his Memoii' of Spencer Thorn- 
 ton, records his having availed himself of current 
 events — as of a contested election — of a conversation 
 on the road to church — to tarn them to good ac- 
 count (^Memoirs, p. 132. 242). Some of the early 
 Fathers are very happy in the dexterous use of 
 passing occurrences, as they naturally would be, 
 speaking in conversational extempore language to 
 their converts. Tertullian gives a graphic descrip- 
 tion of the heathen games (Z>e Spectaculis, 29, 30). 
 Chrysostom contrasts the listlessness of congrega- 
 tions with the eagerness of spectators of the Hippo- 
 drome {Ser. iv. 660). He also makes, with a happy 
 readiness, allusions to a storm gathering during the 
 prayers, and to the lighting of lamps in the assem- 
 bly (Opera, iv. 597 and 613, Ed. Ben.). 
 
 Now that our villages have lending libraries, and 
 every one gets his peep at a paper, the events which 
 are happening anywhere in our empire are brought 
 home to the farm and the cottage, and the preacher 
 may, with good effect, make those subservient to 
 pulpit instruction. For no illustrations are so likely 
 to arouse attention and break the monotony of a 
 sermon. A friend was preaching on " the almost 
 Christian/' and it happening to be just the time 
 that the papers were full of the massacre at Cawn- 
 
80 PAPERS ON PRE A CHING. 
 
 pore, he described the approach of Havelock's vic- 
 torious troops, he drew a graphic picture of the 
 suspense of the English prisoners in the city — how 
 high their hopes ran when the guns told them of 
 the nearer approach of what they hoped would 
 prove a rescue — how the British rested for the night 
 within half a mile of their prison, and entered the 
 city in the morning only just too late — they were 
 almost saved. In another sermon, describing the 
 value of time, he gave three illustrations thus — 
 " To-morrow the Princess is to enter Berlin ; thou- 
 sands of people, looking forward to the holiday to- 
 morrow, find the time pass slowly. We, having no 
 particular object in view, find no cause either to 
 anticipate or delay the time. But there is a criminal 
 waiting to expiate his crimes on the gibbet in Lon- 
 don, and with him how swiftly do the precious mo- 
 ments given him for repentance run out." Could 
 that beautiful feature which the Apostle gives of 
 Christian love, when he says, " charity envieth 
 noty^ be illustrated more vividly than by Sir James 
 Outram's refusal to supersede Havelock in his com- 
 mand ? Could the principle, that God knows how 
 to give better than we to ask, be more clearly shown 
 than the fact of Dr. Livingstone, disappointed in 
 his application to be employed as a missionary, 
 being reserved by Providence for a more extensive 
 sphere of usefulness ? This is a mine which every 
 one may draw from and enlist secular science in the 
 cause of religion. It is remarked by Mr. Willmott, 
 
PAPERS ON PBEACHING. 81 
 
 of Jeremy Taylor and his contemporaries, "He reads 
 everything and makes it useful ; from the ^neid to 
 Entomology, and the Council of Trent to the Buc- 
 caneers." And so the village pastor, while he reads 
 his newspaper or his book of travels, culls out 
 something to point the moral of his Sunday theme. 
 
 The pastor of Bemerton wrote this advice to the 
 country parson: — *^ To avail himself largely of stories 
 in his preaching" — in the seventeenth century ; and 
 the best commentary of this is the pulpit of that 
 time. If we look at the writings of Jeremy Taylor 
 and Thomas Fuller, we shall find every page rich 
 with this kind of lively illustration. 
 
 Of Jeremy Taylor many excellent specimens are 
 collected by Mr. Willmott in his sketch of the times 
 in which this English Chrysostom lived. " He 
 knew that men are certainly deaf when they are 
 yawning, and therefore he tried everything to in- 
 terest their curiosity; and if his discourses be in- 
 spected, they will be found rich in all that engaging 
 vivacity which, in a different shape, made Mon- 
 taigne the most agreeable of essayists, and Livy the 
 most fascinating of historians." The transformation 
 of the natural into the spiritual man is one of the 
 most wonderful achievements of divine grace, and 
 this is the illustration that Taylor gives of it: — 
 " St. Jerome tells us of the custom of the Empire ; 
 when a tyrant was overcome, they used to break 
 the head of his statue, and upon the same trunk to 
 set the head of the conqueror, and so it passed 
 
 G 
 
82 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 wholly for the new prince. So it is in the kingdom 
 of Grace. Sin is overcome, and a new heart is put 
 into us, so that we may serve under a new head, in- 
 stantly we have a new name given us, and we are 
 ^ esteemed a new creation." Or, again, how nobly 
 \jt *^\ does Jeremy Taylor carry his hearers with him 
 It^y^y through the Eastern tale of Abraham turning the 
 ['#T< if- /ol^ ™^^ o^t of his tent, to prove to them the beau- 
 Vties of Christian toleration. Not only are stories 
 which are well known introduced, but anecdotes 
 are culled from the most recondite sources of classic 
 ground ; and if the story be told, instead of an ac- 
 quaintance with it being presumed, it matters little 
 from how inaccessible a source it springs. Thus 
 Fuller quotes a story from Plutarch, and supplies 
 the comment. '^ The Roman Senators conspired 
 ao;ainst Julius Caesar to kill him : that verv next 
 morning, Artemidorus, Caesar's friend, delivered 
 him a paper (desiring him to peruse it) wherein the 
 whole plot was discovered ; but Caesar complimented 
 his life away, being so taken up to return the salu- 
 tations of such people as met him in the way, that 
 v/ he pocketed the paper, among other petitions, as 
 unconcerned therein : and so, going to the Senate 
 House, was slain. The world, the flesh, and the 
 devil, have a design for the destruction of men : we 
 ministers bring our people a letter — God's Word — 
 wherein all the conspiracy is revealed. But who 
 hath believed our report ? Most men are so busy 
 about worldly delights, they are not at leisure to 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 83 
 
 listen to us, or read the letter ; but thus, alas, run 
 headlong to their own ruin and destruction." Surely 
 we have the highest possible authority for the use of 
 stories to stir up more curious attention to divine 
 truths ; for when it is said of our Lord, " He spake 
 a parable unto them," it is merely that He arrested 
 their flagging attention with an entertaining inci- 
 dent, which stimulated curiosity because the mean- 
 ing was concealed in allegorical form. Only let us 
 be careful to seize the opportunities thus afforded of 
 pressing needful and all-important truths upon the 
 awakened mind. Still remember that we may use 
 amusement only as the stepping-stone to instruction, 
 and be careful not to employ as an end that which 
 is only a means — that we do not substitute for the 
 solid food that which is only the seasoning. 
 
 The earliest writers of the Christian Church knew 
 well how to use this weapon for arresting attention, 
 and not seldom in a way which shocks our fastidious 
 taste. There are many things in the writings of the 
 early Fathers, as well as in the mediaeval preachers 
 of every nation, which a modern writer would turn 
 from as beneath the dignity of the pulpit. Let us 
 turn from the Quadresimale of Paolo Segneri — the 
 founder of Italian eloquence in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury — which has been recently translated by Mr. 
 Ford, and published by Masters in a very accessible 
 volume. Carried away by a strain of fervid elo- 
 quence, Segneri, nevertheless, gives us a story in 
 every section of his discourses, and most of them 
 
84 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 quoted from the Fathers. Here is one : — " St. 
 John Chrysostom ingeniously remarks that the 
 animals which went out of Noah^s ark went out the 
 same as they came in. The crow went out a crow, 
 the fox a fox, and the porcupine, all armed with its 
 living arrows, was a porcupine still. But the 
 Church transforms the animals she receives into her 
 bosom, not by any change in their substance, but by 
 the extirpation of their sin. Like unto a crow that 
 sinner entered the Church, who, having hardened 
 his heart by delaying repentance, ever croaked to 
 the same tune, * To-morrow, to-morrow;' now, be- 
 hold, he goes out mourning like a dove. Like unto 
 a spiteful fox that swindler entered the Church, who 
 built his house on the ruin of his competitors ; and, 
 behold, he goes out more harmless than a lamb, 
 willino; to sacrifice his own interests for the welfare 
 of others. And that impatient, quarrelsome man, 
 who made every one smart who touched him, came 
 here like unto a bristly porcupine ; and, behold, he 
 goes away like a loving spaniel that is tractable and 
 Sfentle to all. And what new creatures have we 
 here ? The magic viands of a Circe formerly me- 
 tamorphosed men into brutes ; but such is not the 
 eifect of our gracious food — it rather changes the 
 brutes into true men" (p. 71). Here is another in 
 the next sermon (p. 91) : — " Itansura, King of 
 Scythia, once sent to King Darius, his principal 
 enemy, an extraordinary present. It consisted of a 
 bird, a fish, a mole, and a poisoned arrow. This 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 85 
 
 was to intimate to Darius (as St. Clement of Alex- 
 andria relates) that if he had not lurked low like a 
 mole, or had not dived into the sea like a fish, or 
 had not vanished into the air like a bird, the poi- 
 soned arrow from the King's arm would have 
 reached him. This was no doubt the empty boast 
 of a barbarian, you will say to me; but tell me, 
 would these means have been sufficient to save him 
 from God ? No, David replies. They would not 
 have been sufficient. If I climb up into heaven, 
 Thou art thei^e. Mark God's arrow when I fly 
 aloft as a bird. If I go down into hell. Thou art 
 there also, Mark God's arrow when, as a mole, I 
 hide myself under ground ! If I dwell in the 
 uttermost parts of the earth, there also Thy hand 
 shall find me. Mark God's arrow when I plunge 
 deep into the ocean ! Far too fondly do we flatter 
 ourselves when we trust by any means to escape 
 God." 
 
 The eighteenth century, loving overmuch the 
 dignified and majestic style, was not likely to con- 
 descend to anecdote or legend. In the nineteenth, 
 we find its use revived, and we need only to open a 
 volume of popular sermons to find instances of it. 
 Archdeacon Hare gives us the following speci- 
 men of the efficacious use of a story : — " A professor 
 of great reputation for wisdom and piety was once 
 accosted by a student just entering the University 
 of which he was a professor. ' My parents have 
 just given me leave to study the law, which is the 
 
86 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 thing I have been wishing for all my life, and I 
 have now come to this University on account of its 
 great fame, and mean to spare no pains in master- 
 ing the subject.' While thus he was running on, 
 the professor interrupted him. ^ Well, and when 
 you have got through your course of studies — what 
 then V ' Then I shall take my doctor's degree.' 
 * And then?' answered the doctor. ^And then 
 (continued the youth) I shall have a number of 
 difficult cases to manage, which will increase my 
 fame, and I shall gain a great reputation.' ^ And 
 then ?' repeated the holy man. ^ Why, then there 
 cannot be a question I shall be promoted to some 
 high office or another ; besides, I shall make money 
 and grow rich.' ^ And then ?' the holy man gently 
 interposed. ' And then,' replied the youth, ^ I shall 
 live in honour and dignity, and be able to look for- 
 ward to a happy old age.' * And then ?' was again 
 asked. 'And then, and then (said the youth), I 
 shall die.' Here the holy man lifted up his voice 
 and again inquired — * And then V The young man 
 could answer no more, but went away sorrowful." 
 
 How well does Mr. Ryle expose the folly of flat- 
 tering epitaphs, by this story : — " A Scotch girl 
 asked her mother where they buried the had people ; 
 for she saw no mention in the churchyards she had 
 visited of any but the goocl.^^ How does Mr. 
 Maurice confirm the omnipresence of God out of 
 the testimony of heathenism, by the anecdote : — 
 " A sculptor was employed to erect a statue in one 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 87 
 
 of the Grecian temples, and on being asked why he 
 carved the back part which was to be let into the 
 wall with as much pains as the front, he replied, 
 ' The gods see it.' " 
 
 In the present century men have availed them- 
 selves of the power of anecdotes to impart religious 
 truths. In the last volume which has come into 
 our hands Mr. Guthrie discourses on the City and 
 its sorrows. Two or three sermons commence by 
 forcibly arresting the attention in this manner. 
 
 Mr. Jay's preaching was always enlivened by 
 stories, more especially in the early part of his mi- 
 nistry, and his use of them was very powerful ; 
 with him they were always set in solid matter, and 
 being never in excess, relieved the weightier points 
 of the sermon wonderfully. With Rowland Hill 
 they were rather used in excess, so that, like rich 
 clusters of grapes, sometimes for want of support 
 they fell down and were soiled on the ground. 
 *' One sermon only (says the Rev. Isaac Williams) 
 did I ever hear Robert Suckling preach : it was on 
 the raising of the widow's son at Nain. Of that I 
 can recall nothing more than the impressive manner 
 in which he mentioned a traditionary account of 
 Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary; that 
 when he had been recalled to life from the grave by 
 our Lord, he was never afterwards known to smile, 
 as having become so keenly alive to the joys and 
 the importance of the unseen world. The tradition, 
 from whatever source he derived it, will be new to 
 
88 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 most people. In reading the Fathers and other like 
 books, he was always observing and remembering 
 matters that appeared to have a practical bearing 
 on the one great object he had at heart — not great 
 principles or dogmatic theology, or theories of mo- 
 rals, but everything of interest that would serve to 
 kindle the thoughts on that, on which his soul was 
 set, the devotion of himself and others to the imme- 
 diate service of the one great and only master" 
 (^Life, p. 35). We can well understand how, when 
 the sermon was forgotten, this affecting story still 
 clung to the memory of the hearer. ^* People like 
 a tract with a tale in it," said a book-hawker. Do 
 not we ourselves remember more of Rugby life and 
 manners from reading Dr. Arnold's Life, and Tom 
 Brown's School-days, than we should from a whole 
 library of dry description of a public school ? *^ A 
 story (says Cecil) will hold a child by the ear for 
 hours together, and men are but grown children." 
 
 I will give from my common-place book three 
 parables, which happen to lie there side by side — 
 no doubt most people will have read them before. 
 " A nobleman had heard of the extreme age of one 
 not dwelling far off, made a journey to visit him, and 
 finding an aged person sitting in a chimney-corner, 
 addressed himself unto him with admiration of his 
 age till his mistake was rectified ; for ^ Oh, sir,' said 
 the young man, * I am not he whom you seek for, but 
 his son ; my father is farther off in the field.' If we 
 go to antiquity for doctrines and ceremonies, we must 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 89 
 
 go to the earliest ages of all, not to the old Fathers, 
 but to the very old Fathers of the Church." And 
 here is one from a great classic work of fiction : — 
 " * Pr'ythee, Trim,' quoth my father, ^ what dost 
 thou mean by " honouring thy father and mother ?" ' 
 ^ Allowing them, an't please your honour, a shilling 
 a week out of my pay when they grow old/ ^ And 
 didst thou do that, Trim V said Yorick. ^ He did, 
 indeed,' replied my Uncle Toby. ^ Then, Trim,' said 
 Yorick, springing out of his chair, and taking the 
 corporal by the hand, ' thou art the best commentator 
 upon that part of the Decalogue ; and I honour thee 
 more for it. Corporal Trim, than if thou hadst a hand 
 in the Talmud itself.' " Here is another from the last 
 page of English Hearts and English Hands : — " A 
 traveller was crossing mountain heights of untrod- 
 den snow alone. He struggled bravely against the 
 overpowering sense of sleep, which seemed to weigh 
 down his eyelids ; but it was fast stealing over him, 
 and if he had fallen asleep death would have been 
 inevitable. At this crisis of his fate his foot struck 
 against a heap that lay across his path. No stone 
 was that, though no stone could be colder. He 
 found it to be a human body half-buried in snow. 
 The next moment the traveller had taken a brother 
 in his arms, and was chafing his chest and hands. 
 This effort to save another brought back to himself 
 life and energy. Speak to others of the life-giving 
 Saviour, and you shall find it will restore vitality to 
 your own life-giving soul." 
 
90 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 But as this art flows more naturally out of an 
 extempore delivery than a written, we find, as we 
 should expect, that with Dissenters it is most in 
 use. The Park-street pulpit abounds with lively 
 stories, though the maxim of quaint old Fuller is 
 often infringed, who says, "The preacher avoids such 
 stories whose mention may suggest bad thoughts to 
 the auditors, and will not use a light comparison to 
 make thereof a grave application, for fear his poison 
 go farther than his antidote." From Rowland Hill 
 downwards stories have been introduced which have 
 offended serious-minded men. Nor has this been 
 confined only to Nonconformists ; an ear- witness re- 
 cords the following of the Rev. Thomas Mortimer, of 
 the Episcopal Chapel, Gray's-inn-lane. The preacher 
 was explaining the doctrine that no one can plead his 
 own cause : — " I will tell you a story (he said). A 
 person was being tried in a court of justice, and had 
 eno-ao^ed Erskine to defend him. Just as the case 
 was coming on he wrote on a slip of paper, ^ I'll be 
 hanged if I don't plead my own cause.' Erskine 
 returned the paper with this written on the back — ■ 
 ' You'll certainly be hanged if you do.' " Then, 
 just as the audience was on the edge of a laugh, Mr. 
 Mortimer turned it aside in a solemn tone, by show- 
 ing that without an advocate we all must be un- 
 done ; for no one can plead our cause successfully 
 but Christ. It is difficult to draw the line between 
 wit and levity ; but surely nothing in Rowland 
 Hill could court a smile more than this anecdote. In 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 91 
 
 his tract on The Navvies, and How to Meet Them, 
 Mr. Munro says, ^* Let your language be as nearly 
 as possible approaching to wit and humour with- 
 out transcending the bounds of reverence. They 
 (?'. e. the navvies) will easily follow anything like a 
 tale." " A story (says Mr. GilfiUan in his Literary 
 Portraits) — a story in the mouth of a lecturer, 
 dexterously handled, is as a bone in the hand of an 
 anatomical professor." We will conclude with one 
 instance from the writings of a Nonconformist : — 
 " On the narrow ledges of the steep cliffs of the 
 Yorkshire coast multitudes of sea-fowl lay their 
 eggs, by gathering which some people obtain a 
 livelihood. It once happened that a man, having 
 fixed in the ground his iron bar, and having lowered 
 himself down by the rope which was fastened to it, 
 found that in consequence of the edge of the cliff 
 bending over the part below, he could not reach the 
 narrow ledge where the eggs were deposited with- 
 out swinging himself backwards and forwards. By 
 this means he at last placed his foot on the rock, but 
 in so doing he lost his hold of the rope. His 
 situation was most dreadful. The sea roaring hun- 
 dreds of feet below. It was impossible to climb 
 either up or down. He must soon perish from want, 
 or fall and be dashed to pieces on the rocks. The 
 rope was his only way of escape. It was still 
 swinging to an fro ; but when it settled, it would 
 be out of reach. Every time it approached him 
 it was farther off than before. The moral is ob- 
 
92 PAPERS ON PREACHING, 
 
 vious. * Now is the accepted time. Now is the 
 day of salvation.' " — Newman Hall. 
 
 No one who has tried the effect of a well-told 
 anecdote upon an audience whose attention is be- 
 ginning to flag can doubt of the desirableness of 
 adopting George Herbert's advice, which stands at 
 tlie head of this chapter. But many may say, 
 " Very desirable, no doubt, but very impossible." 
 Say not so, reader. There is a fund of this kind in 
 every modern biography which the circulating li- 
 brary leaves at thy door ! What, is there nothing in 
 tlie devotion of a Bishop Broughton or a Bishop 
 Armstrong ? Nothing in the history of a successful 
 merchant at Bristol ? Nothing in English Hearts 
 and English Hands, the Memorials of Hedley 
 VicarSy or The Life ofHavelock ? Hast thou heard 
 no incident of stirring interest at thy missionary 
 meeting, or read of none in the Quarterly Report 
 of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel ? 
 Has no scientific book fallen into your hands, from 
 which you may introduce some incident of moral 
 philosophy, in the way that a Melville or a Chalmers 
 does to point to the power and goodness of God ? 
 Only believe that not in thy own section o)ilg of the 
 Church is good done, and thou shalt find number- 
 less records of instances, in biography alone, worthy 
 to be told of in the sanctuary. The writers of olden 
 time, who are so full of incident, had only the stores 
 of classical lore to draw from ; but we live in an age 
 of books, when, as the Prophet says, *' men run to 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 93 
 
 and fro, and knowledge is increased." Our hearers 
 read as well as ourselves, and we may often take facts 
 for granted which our forefathers had to explain as 
 they went. Archbishop Whately's works alone fur- X 
 nish a rich mine of pleasing and well-told tales. 
 Let us then indorse the fequest of a rector to his 
 curate — " In every sermon, try and give us at least 
 one good anecdote. ^^ 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE POWER OF PROVERBS TO IMPRESS. 
 
 T is astonishing how little even of a 
 sermon which they have understood 
 will be carried away by an uneducated 
 audience. In proportion as the preacher 
 has interested his hearers, and carried them with 
 him, might he expect them to remember what they 
 have heard, because what goes to the heart is, as the 
 expression intimates, '^ learnt by heartJ' But the 
 memories of the labouring classes in country places 
 are so little exercised, that, like tubs which have 
 been standing empty long, they have not the power 
 of retaining what they receive. We shall find, after 
 the simplest sermon which they have been able to 
 follow, that, on being questioned, they are often 
 able to give no account excepting the chapter and 
 verse of the text. 
 
 Accordingly, we find that the most popular writers 
 in all ages have availed themselves of the terseness 
 of proverbs, to wrap up as it were in small parcels 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 95 
 
 the wisdom of their most thoughtful hours. We 
 shall at once be reminded of the names of Bacon, 
 George Herbert, Whately; Joubert among the 
 French ; and Novalis among the Germans : and, in 
 fact, an illustrious catalogue of names from Cer- 
 vantes (who calls a proverb " a short sentence 
 drawn from long experience") to the authoress of 
 Adam Bede. 
 
 Cecil was convinced, that " any profound argu- 
 ment, or long-continued illustration will fail in 
 keeping up the attention, or in securing the remem- 
 brance of ordinary hearers — that * the ivords of the 
 loise are as goads and nails' — that what preponder- 
 ates, must be weighty; what pierces, must be 
 pointed ; what is carried away, must be portable ; 
 and that all cannot equally carry." 
 
 It was said of William Jay of Bath, " That he 
 was a most sententious preacher, and could by a few 
 words, said in a quaint and powerful manner, pro- 
 duce a most wonderful effect. Some such sayings 
 remain in the minds of his hearers unto this day ; 
 for it was his maxim to sum his appeals by things 
 which would strihe, and stich.^' His own words 
 are : — ** Nothing that requires a lengthened con- 
 nection of argument will succeed with ordinary 
 hearers. They are not accustomed to unbroken 
 trains of thought or discussion. For them, if 
 the preacher be wise, he will find out acceptable 
 words. The deep and the subtle will often escape 
 the masses, yet there is in them the principle of 
 
96 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 common sense very strongly developed; and they 
 are capable of taking in even a profound thought if 
 it be dispatched with brevity and plainness. It is 
 also very advantageous, if not necessary in their 
 case, to attach to proof or argument some fact or 
 image, not in evidence, but in illustration. Thus a 
 kind of handle is given to the subject, by which 
 they are enabled to lay hold of and carry away 
 what would else be too large, or unfit for their 
 grasp." Mr. Melville, himself mighty in the 
 Scriptures, says : — " It is perhaps a single sentence 
 in a sermon, a text which is quoted, a remark to 
 which probably, if asked, the preacher would attach 
 less importance than to any other part of his dis- 
 course, which makes its way into the soul of an 
 unconverted hearer. We wish that there could be 
 compiled a book which should register the sayings, 
 the words, which, falling from the lips of preachers 
 in different ages, have penetrated that thick coat- 
 ing of indifference and prejudice which lies naturally 
 on every man's heart, and reached the soil in which 
 vegetation is possible. We are quite persuaded that 
 you would not find many whole sermons in such a 
 book, not many long pieces of elaborate reasoning ; 
 tlie volume would be a volume of little fragments, 
 of simple statements, and brief pithy sentiments." 
 (^Sermons at Camden Cha/pel, vol. ii. p. 383). 
 
 " Any one," says Dean Trench, ^' who, by after 
 investigation, has sought to discover how much our 
 rustic hearers carry away, even from the sermons to 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 97 
 
 which they have attentively listened, will find that 
 it is hardly ever the course and tenor of the argu- 
 ment, supposing the discourse to have contained 
 such ; but if anything has been uttered, as it used 
 so often to be by the best Puritan preachers, tersely, 
 pointedly, epigrammatically, this will have stayed 
 by them, while all the rest has passed away.'' Ac- 
 cordingly, he says, " Great preachers for the people, 
 such as have found their way to the universal heart 
 of their fellows, have been ever great employers of 
 proverbs.^' 
 
 It is well to clench a nail so that it cannot slip 
 back, after it be driven home — and this every good 
 workman takes care to do. So, knowing that the 
 people he speaks to have short memories, the 
 preacher at the end of his divisions puts the pith of 
 what has been said into some short proverb, or other 
 terse and pointed expression, in order to leave the 
 substance of his argument in a portable shape. Be- 
 fore the Rev. Daniel Moore was appointed to the 
 Golden Lectureship, we remember to have heard a 
 friend giving an account of a sermon that he heard 
 him deliver in a country parish. Preaching on 
 '^ The written Word of God," his first point was to 
 prove that it was the poor man's book as well as the 
 scholar's, which, after explaining at some length, he 
 put into a proverb, by saying — and he repeated the 
 expression twice — " Remember, then, as we have 
 seen, the Bible is not a puzzle for wise heads, but a 
 lamp for the wayfaring man." " The Bible has 
 
 H 
 
98 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 depths in which an elephant can swim, as well as 
 shallows in which a lamb can ivade/' might embody 
 the result of another paragraph ; and a third im- 
 portant point, of the spirit in which the Bible should 
 be read, might be well contained in a clever saying 
 of Archbishop Whately's : — " A desire to have 
 ScTipture on our side is 07ie thing, and a sincere de- 
 sire to he on the side of Scriptwe is another tiling.'^ 
 " It is one thing to pray that we may learn what 
 is right, another thing to pray tliat we way find 
 ourselves in the right." 
 
 Inasmuch, however, as one great element of a 
 proverb is salt, or wit, we must be careful to avoid 
 such as provoke a smile ; but there are many whose 
 wit is their deep wisdom. The old writers upon 
 this head sometimes overstep the bounds of decorum. 
 St. Jerome quotes the Latin proverb " o/* « gift 
 horsed St. Bernard (quoted in a note to Dr. 
 Pusey\s Sej'mons) urges another which we have in 
 the translation, " Love me, love my dog.'' Dr. 
 Sanderson is not to be followed, says Dean Trench, 
 in his illustration of the familiarity which grows 
 on men by sin, ^' over shoes over boots." In the 
 same way Bishop Latimer ends a sermon by the pro- 
 verb, ^' One man may lead a horse to water, hut ten 
 men canriot mahe him drinh.'" And Jeremy Taylor 
 says, ^' The crime of backbiting is the poison of 
 charity, and yet so common, that it is passed into a 
 proverb, ' After a good dinner, let us sit down and 
 hachhite our 7ieighhours.' " 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 99 
 
 An eminent living preacher reminded his audience 
 that theatres carried the remembrance of their evil 
 deeds and their future doom graven on the lintels 
 of their doors, for at the Adelphi it was written up, 
 "^ Down to the PitT Mr. Jay introduced the fol- 
 lowing into a sermon {Life, p. 252) — '' Some of 
 you, my dear brethren, are so inconsistent, that if I 
 saw the devil running away with you, I could not 
 say stop thief, for he would be only taking his own 
 property." Yet this will be remembered by those 
 that heard it, when many common-place thoughts 
 are forgotten ; and it illustrates the very true re- 
 mark, that a thousand beauties are snatched from 
 the very verge of propriety — while many humdrum 
 common-place men deserve the rebuke of Quin- 
 tilian : — " His excellence was that he had no fault, 
 and his fault that he had no excellence." A ser- 
 mon had better have too much salt in it than too 
 little. *^ In some of the most comprehensive men, 
 as Plato, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Scott, hu- 
 mour was present to the extent of half their genius." 
 (Mr. David Masson.) 
 
 It has been well said, in a recent article on " The 
 use of proverbs in grave composition," in Frasern 
 Afagaziue, that as Dean Trench shows us what a 
 provei'b is, and how it is manufactured, so Professor 
 Blunt shows us, in his History of the Refornnatioji, 
 and indeed in all his works, how aptly a proverb 
 may be introduced. Indeed, no one can read the 
 works of either without being aware how rich the 
 
100 PAPERS ON PREACHING, 
 
 vein of proverbs is, and that they possess a morality 
 and a theology of their own. 
 
 Many proverbs are derived from the handicrafts 
 of mechanics and operatives ; this, however, is but 
 a truism, as it is one element of a proverb that it 
 should be popular. For agricultural men, what can 
 be more fitting than this one of Tauler's in the four- 
 teenth century. He is speaking of sin destroying 
 happiness in this world and in the w^orld to come, 
 which he thus sums up : — " So that they say the 
 sinner drags the harrow in this world, and the 
 waggon in the world to come.'' Again, — ^' The stone 
 that is fit for the wall, is not left in the way 5 " 
 which Trench thus beautifully explains : — " Only 
 be fit for the wall : square, polish, prepare thyself 
 for it ; do not limit thyself to the bare acquisition 
 of such knowledge as is absolutely necessary for thy 
 present position ; but rather learn languages, acquire 
 useful information, stretch thyself out this way and 
 that, cherishing whatever aptitudes thou findest in 
 thyself; and it is certain thy turn will come. Thou 
 wilt not be left in the way ; sooner or later the 
 builders will be glad of thee; the wall will need 
 thee to fill a place in it, quite as much as thou 
 needest a place to occupy in the wall." These two, 
 again, are they not taken from the village mill ? — 
 " The devil's corn grinds all to bran." *' The mills 
 of the gods grind slow, but they grind to powder." 
 Here are two for the manufacturing districts : — 
 " What we weave in time we must wear in eter- 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 101 
 
 nity." ^^ You may consecrate an anvil or desecrate 
 a pulpit." And here is a very beautiful one for the 
 agricultural labourer, which Mr. Blencowe uses to 
 show that a ripe Christian is always a humble one : — 
 " Remember the ears of barley which bear the most 
 fruit always hang the lowest." 
 
 Here are a few more which occur to us — which 
 contain sermons, or the marrow of sermons, in a few 
 words : — " If deliberate sin has slain its thousands 
 delay in repentance has slain its tens of thousands.' 
 " The floor of hell is paved with good resolutions.'' 
 " Never be afraid to douht if you wish to believe.' 
 " Sin forsaken is the surest sign of sin forgivenJ 
 " Never mind how you die, but be sure you live 
 well." " Meddle with no man's person, but spare 
 no man's sin.'' 
 
 Few books have had so great a sale, or been so 
 greedily devoured by the masses, as the writings of 
 the Rev. J. C. Ryle, of Helmingham. His Home 
 Truths are models of terse and pointed Anglo-Saxon. 
 Those who would be most inclined to criticise the 
 doctrine and the tone of the writer may still take a 
 lesson from the style of composition. The interest 
 is kept up by anecdotes — the words are all short 
 and plain — no previous knowledge is assumed, and 
 yet, though perspicuous, the style is never feeble or 
 common-place — every truth is driven home and 
 then clenched by some apt proverb as this — " When 
 every one sweeps before his own door the street is 
 soon clean ; " or by quotations from the Puritan 
 
 > 
 
102 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 writers, as this one of Owen's — " Did Christ die, 
 and shall sin live?'^ 
 
 The proverb, in its strictest definition, is a saying 
 which is well worn, and has been handed down from 
 father to son as a legacy ; in its wider meaning it may 
 be any pointed saying — any gem which we may have 
 met with sparkling by its brightness in any author 
 - — such as these sayings of Robert Hall's — *' Prayer, 
 morning and evening, serves as an edge and border 
 to prevent the web of life from unravelling." " An 
 oath is a pepper-corn rent to the devil in acknow- 
 ledgment of his right of superiority." Or this one of 
 Chilling-worth's — " If we shine not hereafter as the 
 jewels of God's mercy, we shall glare fiercely as the 
 firebrands of His wrath for ever." Or this one of 
 a living writer's — " Surrender up your heart in 
 youth y when it is the free-wiU offering of a pious 
 mind, and not in old age, when it is at best but the 
 refuge of a coward." Or that well-known one, 
 which is owed to St. Augustine — " There is one 
 case of death-bed repentance recorded (the penitent 
 thief), that no one should deqjairj and only one, that 
 no one should presume." 
 
 In this way the pithy sayings of poets and prose 
 writers will become stock, and contribute to the 
 mass of our future proverbs. The Pathway of 
 Safety, by Mr. Ashton Oxenden, contains many 
 such gems of thought used as quotations to clench 
 an argument, with four specimens of which we 
 conclude : — " If the arrow of prayer is to enter 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 103 
 
 heaven, it must be drawn from a heart fully bent." 
 ** One son without sin, none without suffering." 
 *' That was a wise man who said, whenever I see 
 one fault in a neighbour I search for two in my- 
 self." " Repentance has a double aspect — a weeping 
 eye for the j^f^^t — a watchful eye for the future." 
 
 A proverb in its very nature contains in a nutshell 
 a wide scope of teaching. It requires, therefore, to 
 be moralised on in the way Trench would do — to be 
 expanded, developed, diluted, in order that the un- 
 derstanding may grasp it and see it in all its bear- 
 ings, and then again compressed into its nutshell 
 portable shape for the memory. The points, too, 
 in which proverbs, true in their secular sense, are 
 not necessarily true in their spiritual sense, may be 
 taken hold of to arrest the attention. " It will not 
 matter a hundred years hence/' which Mr. Melvill, 
 coming upon in a sermon at the end of the year, 
 admits to be true, most true as regards the things of 
 the body, but shows to be equally untrue as regards 
 the things of the sotd — for a false step in spiritual 
 things unrepented of will matter infinitely more a 
 hundred years hence than it does now, while the 
 day of salvation lasteth. So Mr. A. B. Evans re- 
 verses the secular judgment of two proverbs — ^^ The 
 world says, ' seeing is believing , the Gospel the re- 
 verse, believing is seeing. Abraham desired to see 
 Christ's day, and (by faith) he saw it and was glad. 
 The Old Testament saints were saved by looking 
 (with the eye of faith) across the vista of ages, and 
 
104 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 by believing saw the promises afar off." ^^ Again, 
 it is a saying, ^ once a man twice a child,' but, of 
 cases without number, it may justly be said, once a 
 man always a man; tens of thousands there are 
 whom this second childhood toucheth not, whose 
 inward vigour evidently increaseth as their outward 
 strength decays, or, to use the words of inspiration, 
 * though our outward man perish, yet the inward 
 man is renewed day by day.' " — (2 Co7\ iv. 16.) 
 
 Flowing side by side with the stream of proverbs, 
 to which every age has added its share, is a stream 
 of quaint terse sayings, which contain in as few 
 words as possible a great deal of matter. If they 
 are not admitted into the family of proverbs, they 
 are, at least, blood relations. Every one must have 
 observed such, spoken with so admirable a choice of 
 language, that any words other than those used 
 would weaken the force of the expression. Can 
 any chapter of description add anything to Bunyan's 
 saying in the Pilgriin's Progress, " when religion 
 walks in her silver slipj)ers?'' These sayings of 
 Sidney Smith's are comprehensive : — " He who 
 steals in the dark breaks God's lock.'' " God's 
 centre is everywhere. His circumference is 7io- 
 where J" These two, from Is it possible to make 
 the best of I3oth Worlds? by Thomas Binney, are 
 worthy of note : — '^ The Bible will always be to 
 you what you are to it." " The transformation is 
 complete, when the man has overcome the beast and 
 God has overcome the man.'* 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 105 
 
 " The detractor/' says St. Bernard, " carries the 
 devil in his mouth ; so that he that hearkeneth to 
 him may be equally said to carry the devil in his 
 ear." " You may as well try to barricade space, as 
 to tie up the tongue of slander." " The ripe Chris- 
 tian's soul leaves the body, as the ripe acorn leaves 
 its cup." The Proverbial Philoso'phy abounds 
 with such sermons in one line. Take the following 
 as an example : — 
 
 " Help thou the Shepherd in the seeking, to se- 
 parate be His." 
 
 Our own version of the Holy Scriptures has pre- 
 served, in the form of striking antitheses, many 
 sayings, which embody for the simple man a truth 
 which volumes of controversy can never unsettle ; 
 such as are these three : — " I will have mercy and 
 not sacrifice.'^ " It is more blessed to give than to 
 received' " The Sabbath was made for man, and 
 not man for the Sabbath." 
 
CHAPTER YIII. 
 
 THE POWEE OE WORD-PAINTING. 
 
 r- ^ HE Persian proverb — which we will 
 ^^-A^ take for the motto of our present 
 
 chapter — says that " he is the best 
 preacher who turns our ears into eyes,^' 
 
 which is only a translation of the familiar lines of 
 
 our schoolboy exercises : — 
 
 " Segnius irritant surdos demissa per aures 
 Quam quse sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus." 
 
 Among the ancients, religious teaching, and, in- 
 deed, all knowledge, was enforced through the eye. 
 The dramatists, with the painters and sculptors of 
 Athens, were the tutors and preachers of the Athe- 
 nian people. "The fables of ^sop (the most pictorial 
 writings which can be imagined) were not," — says 
 their able editor, Mr. James — " were not a child's 
 plaything hut a nation's pr'iiner.^' 
 
 " You will find," (says Ruskin, JPolit. Econ. p. 
 151,) " that the knowledge which a boy is supposed 
 to receive from verbal description, is only available 
 to him so far as in any underhand way he gets a 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 107 
 
 sight at*the tiling you are talking about." The eye, 
 whether for good or evil impressions, is the most 
 direct avenue to the heart. As a look at the for- 
 bidden tree ruined a world, so a look at the Cross of 
 Christ is the remedy proposed by God. " Sight is 
 the short road to knowledge, it is also the direct path 
 to love ; the eye is the first, the readiest, the surest 
 of instructors. Why do we say ^ example is better 
 than precept?^ The one appeals to the eye, the 
 other to the ear, and the eye is quicker than the 
 ear."— (Rev. A. B. Evans.) 
 
 The novelist presents us with a scene in a prison, 
 which is likely enough to have its counterpart in 
 real life : — " Mr. Eden, the gaol chaplain, had a 
 great collection of photographs. His plan with 
 Carter, a half-witted prisoner, was, to tell him, by 
 means of a photograph, some fact or anecdote. First, 
 he would put under his eye a cruel or unjust action. 
 He would point out the signs of suffering in one of 
 the figures. Carter would understand this, because he 
 saw it. Then Mr. Eden would excite his sympathy ; 
 ' Poor so-and-so,' he would say. Afterwards he 
 would produce a picture of more moderate injustice, 
 and so raise a shadow of a difficulty, and thus draw 
 upon Carter's understanding as well as his sym- 
 pathy. Then would come pictures of charity, of 
 benevolence, of other good actions. Thus the 
 chaplain got at this man's little bit of mind through 
 the medium of the senses. Honour to all the great 
 arts ! The limit of their beauty and their usefulness 
 
108 PAPERS ON PREACHING, 
 
 has never yet been reached. Painting was the 
 golden key which this thinking man held to the 
 Bramah lock of an imbecile's understandinfj." 
 
 It would be considered out of place for the pastor 
 now to avail himself of that significant teaching by 
 outward gesture which, in the earlier ages, was the 
 every-day practice of God's messengers. Ahijah 
 rent his garment into twelve pieces, to signify the 
 dislocation of the twelve tribes (1 Kings xi. 30). 
 Jeremiah was ordered to break a potter's vessel in 
 pieces, on one occasion, before the people (chap, 
 xix.) ; and on another, to bind himself with a yoke 
 and fetters (chap, xxvii.). In the same way Agabus 
 bound himself with Paul's g-irdle. Pontius Pilate 
 " took water and washed his hands before the mul- 
 titude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just 
 person ; see ye to it" (^3fatt. xxvii. 24). Did not 
 the highest Teacher that ever appeared upon earth 
 enlist the eye as well as the ear, as an avenue through 
 which to impart instruction — when he asked for a 
 coin to point to the image and superscription — or 
 when he took a child and set him in the midst as an 
 emblem of simplicity and purity ? 
 
 Descending, however, from the vantage-ground of 
 this illuminated style (which is more in accordance 
 with the customs of Oriental nations than our own), 
 we may yet find in Scripture instances of picture- 
 painting by the mere force of language attainable, 
 suitable to the most fastidious and critical audience, 
 and not much inferior to the other in the force of its 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 109 
 
 appeal to the hearing ear and seeing eye. That the 
 Holy Scriptures seek to make things visible by the 
 power of language is evidenced by the way in which 
 they speak of God. God is a spirit, and dwelleth 
 not in temples made with hands ; yet the inspired 
 writers describe Him as " having body, parts, and 
 passions," as being glad or sorry, as being angry or 
 repenting, as saying, " Heaven is my throne, and 
 earth is my footstool," as riding on the storm, and 
 speaking in the thunder — to bring an infinite and 
 invisible God within the comprehension, as far as 
 may be, of a finite mind. " God hath, indeed, what 
 is more than hand or arm, voice or ear ; He hath 
 that which men have a very inadequate idea of when 
 they think of these organs ; He hath that which 
 these organs do, nevertheless, in some degree, enable 
 them to conceive." — (Moberly's Sermons.) 
 
 For the same reason, personification — that noble 
 element of Hebrew poetry — is so often introduced 
 in Scripture, to bridge over, as it were, the gulf 
 between man's understanding and the lessons God 
 would have him to learn. We can quote no better 
 example of this than the 10th and 11th verses of the 
 85th Psalm, as explained in Bishop Andrewes's fa- 
 mous Sermon for the Nativity. Mercy, truth, justice, 
 peace, and righteousness, are represented as parting 
 in hopeless disunion at Man's Fall, to be summoned 
 together again over the Incarnation. " Mercy and 
 truth are met together, righteousness and peace have 
 kissed each other. Truth shall spring out of the 
 
110 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 earth, and righteousness shall look down from hea- 
 ven." 
 
 Figurative language is the plainest which can be 
 used, because — like our Lord teaching purity by a 
 little child — it gives a spiritual lesson while it points 
 to a material and visible object. Figures, then, as 
 we should expect, are of frequent occurrence in the 
 Bible. Thus, St. Paul says the Old Testament is a 
 shadow of the New — a sltadow in its exact likeness, 
 at the same time that it is a shadow in its unreality. 
 Thus, children sent forth into the world for undying 
 good or undying evil, with a youth full of energy 
 and glorious opportunity, are said to go forth like 
 arrows from the hoiv of a giant. Thus, hope is an 
 anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast. And any 
 man seeking to be a true preacher to the people 
 must follow up his teaching with abundant appeals 
 to things on which the eye rests, and so to enlist two 
 senses in his attempt to reach the heart. We cannot 
 help quoting the quaintly pictorial description of the 
 rainbow in the 43rd chapter oi Ecclesiasticus, which, 
 in our translation, seems to wish to give the idea of 
 its having been made straight, and then bent : — 
 ^' Look upon the rainbow, and praise Him that 
 made it ; very beautiful it is in the brightness thereof. 
 It compasseth the heaven about with a glorious 
 circle, and the hands of the Most Hujh have 
 bended it.'' 
 
 In our Church the dramatic element has been 
 discarded, except it be in the way in which the 
 
PAPEBS ON PREACHING. Ill 
 
 cycle of events in our Lord's life and death are 
 brought round every year as if they were now hap- 
 pening ; in other Churches the eye is enlisted, as, 
 for instance, in the Greek Church, when on Easter 
 Eve the Archbishop, descending from the altar, ad- 
 vances towards the bier in which the body of Christ 
 is supposed to be, and, lifting the lid, discovers that 
 Christ is risen. There is, therefore, in our own 
 Church the more necessity for the preacher to use 
 that power of description by the exactness of graphic 
 detail which may be called word-painting. Whit- 
 field is said to have been the great master of this 
 art, and every one is familiar with the story of his 
 description of a sinner under the similitude of a blind 
 beggar, whose dog had strayed from him, groping 
 on the edge of a precipice, which, as the preacher 
 neared the climax, made Lord Chesterfield start for- 
 ward as if to save the blind man and exclaim, ''He 
 is gone." The legend no doubt was coined to suit 
 the truth on which it was founded, that Whitfield 
 was a great master of description, and that men said 
 of his meaning, as we do when we clearly perceive 
 and thoroughly understand anything, " I see it." 
 
 William Cobbett knew all the secrets of popular 
 address. I have heard it recorded, by a friend, that 
 on one occasion he appeared with a bag in his hand 
 on a platform, drawing thence some apples and refuse 
 fruit, he said, " These are the missiles with which 
 constituencies pelt unfaithful members of parlia- 
 ment j" and then replacing the fruit, and taking out 
 
112 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 a cannon-ball, which he threw up and down in his 
 hand, he continued, " but these are the missiles with 
 which nations punish unfaithful rulers." 
 
 If it be desirable to make an old subject alive 
 with new interest ; if it be worth while to state a 
 thing so that people may not only understand it, but 
 cannot possibly misunderstand it ; to put truth which 
 has lost its edge by repetition vividly before the 
 people, by all means let us preach in an interesting 
 and awakening way. Learned congregations may 
 be able to follow dry abstract reasoning, but the 
 masses of the people, whose minds are exercised by 
 little education, want sharp pithy appeals and vivid 
 pictures for the mind's eye to rest on. Therefore, 
 we plead that the thing spoken may as much as 
 possible be made evident, and the old records un- 
 rolled as one would unroll a panorama to a gaping 
 audience. The Rustic in Southey's Doctor, who 
 enjoyed Sunday because he went to church, put up 
 his feet and thought of nothing, is not a curious 
 specimen of humanity rarely to be met with in our 
 country churches, but a type of a very numerous 
 class. 
 
 Thouirh tlie old woman was not sufficientlv re- 
 spectful to the ^' powers that be," who said to her 
 pastor — " I suffer so from the rheumatics, that I 
 have had no rest, night or day, for these three 
 weeks, till I came to hear you last Sunday." 
 
 There is a power in language of word-painting 
 which differs as much from common verbiage as 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 113 
 
 the Illustrated London News does from the letter- 
 press of a weekly paper. If any one doubt, let him 
 read first the historian's dry details of the French 
 Revolution, and, secondly, Carlyle's chapters, every 
 one of which (written in the present tense, as if the 
 things were now going on) is a picture, graphic 
 amid its grotesqueness, of one of the acts in that 
 terrible tragedy, brought on the stage by the mere 
 power of language. 
 
 We are sensible of the difficulty of describing 
 what we mean, and the only, though a very inade- 
 quate, way of explaining our thoughts will be by a 
 few illustrations of pictorial style. 
 
 Here is a description of the Passion from the pen 
 of a Nonconformist, in which the use of the present 
 tense gives reality to the scene : — " There was a 
 blood-shedding once, which did all other sheddings 
 of blood by far outvie ; it was a man — a God — that 
 shed his blood. Come and see it ! Here is a gar- 
 den, dark and gloomy ; the ground is crisp with the 
 cold frost of midnight ; between those gloomy olive- 
 trees I see a man, I hear him groan out his life in 
 prayer ; hearken angels, hearken men, and wonder; 
 it is the Saviour groaning out his soul. Come and 
 see him. Behold his brow ! O heavens ! drops of 
 blood are streaming down his face and from his 
 body ; every pore is open, and it * sweats ! ' but not 
 the sweat of men that toil for bread, it is the sweat 
 of one that toils for heaven — he ^ sweats great drops 
 of blood.' This is the blood-shedding without which 
 
114 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 there is no remission. Follow that man farther — 
 they have dragged him with sacrilegious hands 
 from the place of his prayer and of his agony, and 
 they have taken him to the Hall of Pilate; they 
 seat him in a chair and mock him, a robe of purple 
 is put on his shoulders in mockery ; and mark his 
 brow — they have put about it a crown of thorns, 
 and the crimson drops of gore are rushing down his 
 cheeks ! Ye angels ! the drops of gore are rushing 
 down on his cheeks. But turn aside that purple 
 robe for a moment. His back is bleeding. Tell 
 me, demons, who did this ? They lift up the thongs 
 still dripping clots of gore ; they scourge and tear 
 his flesh, and make a river of blood to run down his 
 shoulders ! That is the shedding of blood without 
 which there is no remission. Not yet have I done ; 
 they hurry him through the streets, they fling him 
 on the ground, they nail his hands and feet to the 
 transverse wood, they hoist it into the air, they dash 
 it into its socket, it is fixed, and on it hangs the 
 Christ of God ! Why is it that this story doth not 
 make men weep ? I told it ill you say. Ay, so I 
 did ; I will take all the blame. But, sirs, if it were 
 told as ill as men could speak, were our hearts what 
 they should be, we should bleed away our lives in 
 sorrow.'^ 
 
 We are told that the writer of this is in a great 
 measure self-educated ; if it be so, we may urge it 
 as a proof that the power of word-painting is natural 
 to a vigorous mind, and therefore within the reach 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 115 
 
 of many who have not time for diligent pulpit pre- 
 paration. 
 
 Most of our readers are familiar with the en- 
 graving from Martin's picture of The Deluge^ in 
 which the waters are covered with the wreck of 
 habitations and corpses, and some few agonised 
 wretches are still clinging to the highest points of 
 ground. It is a very graphic picture ; but not more 
 so than the following description by Mr. Guthrie 
 of the same event. We quote from the fourth 
 chapter of The Gospel in JEzekiel : — 
 
 " God is slow to punish. He does punish ; yet 
 no hand of clock goes so slow as God's hand of 
 vengeance. Look, for example, on the catastrophe 
 of the Deluge. The waters rise till rivers swell into 
 lakes, and lakes into seas, and along fertile plains 
 the sea stretches out her arms to seize their flying 
 population. Still the waters rise, and now, mingled 
 with beasts that terror has tamed, men climb to the 
 mountain tops, the floods roaring at their heels. Still 
 the waters rise ; and now each summit stands above 
 them like a separate and sea-girt isle. Still the 
 waters rise, and crowding closer on the narrow 
 spaces of their lessening tops, men and beasts fight 
 for standing-room. Still the thunders roar and the 
 waters rise, till the last survivor of the shrieking 
 crowd is washed off", and the head of the highest 
 Alp goes down beneath the wave. And now the 
 waters rise no more ; God's servant has done his 
 work ; he rests from his labours ; and all land 
 
116 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 drowned, all life destroyed, an awful silence reigning, 
 and a shoreless ocean rolling. Death for once has no- 
 thing to do but ride in triumph on the top of some 
 giant billow, which meeting no coast, no continent, 
 no Alp, no Andes to break upon, sweeps round and 
 round the world. We stand aghast at this scene ; and 
 as the corpses of gentle children and sweet infants are 
 floating by, we exclaim, * Has God forgotten to be 
 gracious ; is His mercy clean gone for ever ? ' No, 
 assuredly not. Where, then, is His mercy ? Look 
 here; look at this ark, which, steered by an in- 
 visible hand, comes dimly through the gloom. 
 That lonely ship on a shoreless sea carries mercy on 
 board, and between walls that are pitched without 
 and within she holds the costliest freight which ever 
 sailed the sea. The germs of the Church are there 
 — the patriarchs of the old world and the fathers of 
 the new. Suddenly, amid the awful gloom, as she 
 drifts over that dead and silent sea, a grating noise 
 is heard : she has grounded on the top of Ararat. 
 The door is opened, and beneath the sign of the 
 olive branch they come forth from their baptismal 
 burial like life from the dead — like souls passing 
 from nature into a state of gi-ace — like the saints 
 when they shall arise to see new heavens and a new 
 earth." 
 
 In one of the sermons of Mr. Cooper — which 
 were better known a few years ago — by a happy 
 turn of the expression he imparts a life-like appear- 
 ance to the scene. He is illustrating St. Paul's 
 
PAPERS ON PBEACHING. 117 
 
 declaration, that sin brings no present pleasure. 
 " What fruit had ye then in those things whereof 
 ye are now ashamed ?" Having traced the work- 
 ings of a guilty conscience, robbing the anticipated 
 pleasure of all its sweetness, he continues — " Come, 
 thou drunkard, who makest it a practice, whenever 
 a convenient opportunity may offer, to indulge thy 
 sensual appetite and sink the man into the beast, 
 stand forth, and, in the sight of this congregation, 
 say whether thou findest the ways of drunkenness 
 to be ways of pleasantness and peace ? Say, in the 
 midst of thy guilty pleasures, dost thou not often 
 feel a pang of conscience, a secret misgiving, a 
 horrid foreboding which embitters all thy seeming 
 joy? Can the envious man give a better account of 
 the paths in which he walks ? Will the passionate 
 revengeful character come forward and tell us that 
 he is happy ?'* 
 
 Religious truth to a dull mind needs to be per- 
 sonified and brought on the stage in the person of a 
 visible actor. You may tell your people over and 
 over again the dry abstract truth that religion can 
 keep the mind in perfect peace in the midst of ad- 
 versity ; it will fall flat on them ; they will attach 
 no particular meaning to the words. But personify 
 the same idea — speak to them from the mouth of 
 Richard Cecil in his own words, and they will see 
 it. " I see two unquestionable facts : first, my 
 mother is greatly afflicted in circumstances, body, 
 and mind, and yet I see that she cheerfully bears up 
 
118 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 under all by the support she derives from constantly 
 retiring to her closet and her Bible ; secondly, that 
 she has a secret spring of comfort of which I know 
 nothing, while I, who give an unbounded loose to my 
 appetites and seek pleasure by every means, seldom 
 or never find it. If, however, there be any such 
 secret in religion, why may not I attain it as well as 
 my mother ? I will immediately seek it of God" 
 (Cecil's Remains, p. 6). 
 
 The story goes that the artist having completed 
 in his studio a picture of swine feeding, bethought 
 himself of showing it to a countryman and asking 
 his opinion, and received this answer — ^^ Not at all 
 like nature, for who ever saw several swine feeding 
 without one having his foot in the" trough ?" It is, 
 indeed, in the little touches of truth and fidelity to 
 nature that pictures acquire their reality. Hence, 
 in descriptions of places in Scripture History, a 
 local knowledge is brought to bear with effect, as in 
 some of Mr. Bellew's sermons. We fancy we have 
 recognized in other pulpit addresses an acquaintance 
 with modern books of travel such as Mr. Stanley's 
 Palestine. Mr. Hamilton, in \\\^ Lessons from the 
 Great Biography, attempts with good success to 
 give reality to the scenes by little touches of com- 
 mon life, and especially (as the Preface tells us) 
 " to supply a few of those historical and topogra- 
 phical details for which we are indebted to recent 
 research." 
 
 Oftentimes the simplest words are the most de- 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 119 
 
 scriptive — let us take an instance from Mr. Charles 
 Bradley. He is explaining the text, " Behold I 
 stand at the door and knock/' &c. (^Revelations iii. 
 20). " By the door we understand the various inlets 
 of the soul ; those parts and faculties of it which, as 
 it were, admit things into it. And by knocking at 
 these is meant, appealing to them ; trying them ; 
 endeavouring to get into the heart by them. There 
 is our understanding, for instance — or our judg- 
 ment — Christ knocks at that by showing us that it 
 is reasonable we should admit Him — that it is our 
 duty and interest to do so. Then there are our af- 
 fections ; he appeals to them. ^ I have loved you,' 
 He says, ' and given myself for you, surely you 
 would not shut me out.' Sometimes He tries our 
 hopes — ^ I will ease the heavy laden, and speak 
 peace to the troubled soul.' Or He will turn and 
 appeal to our fears — ' There is nothing but misery 
 beyond the grave for those who reject me.' .... 
 You know now how you act when you let any one 
 into your house. You first hear him knocking, and 
 then you go to the door and remove its fastenings 
 and throw it open to him. Now transfer this to 
 your own hearts. Naturally Christ has no place in 
 them ; that is. He does not dwell in your hearts and 
 your affections. Naturally Christ is to your heart 
 just what a man standing outside the door is to the 
 house, near it but not in it. To open the heart to 
 Him is to discover that He has been shut out, and 
 is still willing to be admitted ; it is to draw back the 
 
120 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 bolts of pride, prejudice, and unbelief, and to admit 
 Christ and His salvation." 
 
 Sometimes it seems possible to lift a picture into 
 sight on the pedestal as it were of a simile — to set a 
 spiritual truth on the scaffolding of a material fact — 
 as in this beautiful illustration of Manning's: — "The 
 unity of the Church on earth with the Church un- 
 seen, is the closest bond of all ; hell has no power 
 over it; sin cannot blight it; schism cannot rend 
 it, death itself can but knit it more strongly. No- 
 thing is changed but the relation of sight ; like as 
 when the head of a far-stretching procession, wind- 
 ing through a broken hollow land, hides itself in 
 some bending vale ; it is still all one ; all advancing 
 together; they that are farthest on their way are 
 conscious of their lengthened following ; they that 
 linger with the last are drawn forwards as it were 
 by the attraction of the advancing multitude" (Vol. 
 i. p. 322). Or on the pedestal of an ancient legend 
 or well-known story, as in the following from Dean 
 Trench's Five Sei'inons before the University of 
 Camhridge : — " You remember perhaps the comfort 
 with which the great Athenian orator and patriot 
 sought to strengthen and encourage the spirits of 
 his countrymen in their final struggle with Philip. 
 ' If,' he used to say, ^ we had done all that we 
 might, if we had been watchful as we should have 
 been, if we had put forth our strength wisely and 
 well, and yet were in such evil condition as we are, 
 we might then with good reason despair. Bi\t 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 121 
 
 seeing we must own that we have not clone so, that 
 all this has come upon us because we have been 
 careless, self-indulgent, wanting promptitude to fore- 
 see danger and promptness to meet it, there is a 
 good hope that if we take another course, our affairs 
 will take another course as well.' Exactly so it is, 
 brethren, with some of us. If we had prayed ear- 
 nestly and yet no more had come of it than has 
 come ; if we had striven manfully against sin and 
 yet sin had obtained so great a dominion over us as 
 it has," &c. 
 
 We have said that this is a subject on which it is 
 difficult to express exactly what one feels. In this, 
 and in our chapter on Anecdotes, we have endea- 
 voured to meet the requirement of a modern critic 
 who says, '^ He would be a benefactor of his race 
 who should succeed in laying down a code of rules, 
 by obeying which men of ordinary ability might 
 succeed in preparing and preaching sermons which 
 should be interesting to an ordinary congregation." 
 " Will any one deny," (says Mr. AngelJames, J5'ar- 
 nest 3Iimstrij, p. 172,) " that in the present state 
 of modern society we want an earnest ministry to 
 break in some degree the spell and leave the soul 
 at liberty for the affairs of a kingdom which is not 
 of this world ? When jDolitics have come upon the 
 minds and imaginations of our people, for six days 
 out of seven, invested with the charms of eloquence 
 and decked with the colours of party; when the 
 orator and the writer have thrown the witchery of 
 
122 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 genius over the soul, how can it be expected that tame, 
 spiritless, vapid common-places from the pulpit — 
 sermons without either head or heart — havingneither 
 weight of matter nor grace of manner — neither 
 genius to compensate for the want of taste, nor taste 
 to compensate for want of genius — no unction of 
 evangelical truth, no impress of eternity, no radi- 
 ance from heaven, no terror from hell ; in short, no 
 adaptation to awaken reflection or to produce con- 
 viction : — how can it be expected, I say, that such 
 sermons can avail to accomplish the purposes for 
 which the gospel is to be preached ? What chance 
 have such preachers, amidst the tumult to be heard 
 or felt, or what claim have they upon the public 
 attention, amidst the high excitement in which we 
 live ? Their hearers too often feel that in listening 
 to their sermons on the Sabbath, as compared with 
 what they have heard and read during the week, it 
 is as if they were turning from the brilliant and 
 tasteful gas-light to the dim and smoking spark of 
 the tallow and the rush. Who but the pastor that 
 can speak in power and demonstration of the Spirit 
 — a man who shall rise Sabbath after Sabbath in 
 the pulpit, clothed with a potency to throw into 
 shadow, by his vivid representations of heaven and 
 eternity, all these painted nothings, on which his 
 hearers are in danger of squandering their immortal 
 souls." 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 UNITY OF SUBJECT NECESSARY. 
 
 flN" a work recently translated from the 
 French of M. Bautain, Vicar-General 
 and Professor at the Sorbonne, much 
 stress is laid upon the necessity of unity 
 in the discourse, whether it be delivered in the senate, 
 at the bar, or from the pulpit. The following passages 
 occur amidst many others to the same purpose : — 
 ^' You must adopt your centre or chief idea, and subor- 
 dinate to this idea all the rest, in such a way as to 
 constitute a sort of organism, having head, organs, 
 and limbs, by means of which the light radiates, just 
 as in the human body the blood circulates to the 
 extremities" (p. 114). " Each discourse must have 
 its own unity, and constitute a whole, in order that 
 the hearer may embrace in his understanding what 
 has been said to him, may conceive it in his own 
 fashion, and be able to produce it at need" (p. 149). 
 " A discourse without a parent idea is a stream 
 without a fountain, a plant without a root, a body 
 
124 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 without a soul, empty phrases, sounds which beat 
 the air, or a tinkling cymbal." *' The hearer does 
 not cling to a speaker who, undertaking to guide 
 him, seems to be ig^norant whither he is ffoinrj" 
 (p. 169). 
 
 In his Ordination Address for 1837, Bishop Stan- 
 ley gave similar counsel to his candidates : — '^ Per- 
 haps the best suggestion I can offer in the com- 
 position of a sermon is always to put yourself in the 
 place, or have some known pious plain parishioner 
 before you as a sort of prominent type of the con- 
 ffresration, and insert no word which vou think 
 would not be quite intelligible to him. With regard 
 to arrangement, be careful not to be vague. A 
 well-written sermon should be like a simple and 
 well-arranged piece of mosaic work, each part natu- 
 rally falling in with what goes before and with wdiat 
 follows after it. In a word, let your sermon have 
 a regular and connected beginning, middle, and 
 ending. I state tJiis, because I have often heard 
 sermons, even from men of talent, sadly deficient in 
 this respect, in which it was impossible to trace a 
 regular connection ; and it may be considered as a 
 sure ride that something is ivrong, ivhen there is a 
 dijfficulty, after hearing a sermon^ to give an outline 
 of its continuous arrangement in a few concise 
 words." 
 
 These words of advice might seem too obvious to 
 fall with much weight on the hearers ; yet any one 
 who reflects will see that no canons are so often 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 125 
 
 violated. In the ordinary routine of speeches, how 
 much time might be saved by the speakers sorting 
 their ideas before they rose ; in extempore sermons, 
 how often, from want of method and lucidus ordo, 
 is each sermon a mixture of every other sermon ; 
 and in written discourses (where there is less ex- 
 cuse), how often is Archbishop Whately's severe 
 criticism verified — " Many a wandering discourse 
 one hears in which the preacher aims at nothing, 
 and hits it." " Some speakers resemble an exploring 
 party in a newly-discovered island, they start in any 
 direction, without aim or object." 
 
 Archdeacon Sinclair, in his Charge delivered in 
 1855, tells an anecdote which shows that even pre- 
 lates are not exempt from this rambling, confused 
 style of writing. " An estimable prelate, long de- 
 ceased, used to boast that nothing could interrupt 
 him in the composition of his sermon. He could, he 
 said, resume his task as if it had never been broken 
 off. The truth being, that in composing his dis- 
 courses he made almost every paragraph complete 
 in itself, and often independent of those that followed 
 or preceded it." 
 
 The interruptions in a clergyman's time are so 
 frequent that seldom can a man expect to write a 
 sermon at a sitting; if, however, he have noted 
 down a compact abstract of what he intends to write 
 when he first planned the tenor of his discourse, he 
 will be able to resume his pen at each section of the 
 discourse, without saving; an unconnected stvle to 
 
126 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 his manuscript. He will be like a builder resuming 
 the work on a building he has previously sketched 
 in his plans. The writers of all ages have been 
 very explicit upon the point of not attempting too 
 wide a range of teaching in one discourse, nor cer- 
 tainly can there be any necessity to introduce too 
 much into one sermon now-a-days, when every 
 church has its two or three sermons each Sunday. 
 Mr. Neale, in the Preface to his Mediceval Preach- 
 ing ^ tells us that Bede, in common with the writers 
 of those ages, always contented himself with making 
 one impression in one sermon, and (knowing that 
 an ignorant congregation is capable of carrying 
 away only one great idea at one time) dwelt upon 
 the main subject of his discourse up to the very 
 end. This he follows up by a quotation from 
 Vieyra — " A sermon ought to have one theme only, 
 and to be of one material only. This is why Christ 
 said that the sower in the parable sowed, not many 
 kinds of seed, but one. A sower went forth to sow 
 his seed — his seedy not his seeds. If the sower 
 went first to sow wheat, then rye, and over those 
 millet and barley, what would spring up ? A 
 tangled forest, a green confusion. And so it is with 
 sermons of this kind. How many subjects did the 
 Baptist take ? Only one — ^ Prepare ye the way of 
 the Lord.' On how many themes did Jonah di- 
 late ? On one only — ^ Yet forty days and Nineveh 
 shall be destroyed.'" Professor Blunt, the latest 
 writer on this same subject, enforces the same on 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 127 
 
 the students at Cambridge : — " To select a text out 
 of the services of the day would be almost peremp- 
 tory when the season is of remarkable character ; 
 but in general, and at other times, it would enable 
 you to make the whole service, sermon as well as 
 liturgy, tend to the same point — to producing on 
 the congregation some one definite impression which 
 the Church has in view that day, and towards which 
 the services of that day seem more particularly to 
 run. For it will be often found that the Psalms, 
 Epistles, Gospels, and Lessons, or several of these 
 at least, even on ordinary occasions, draw to some 
 one subject, or may be made to draw to it without 
 force or constraint, and naturally illustrate one 
 another. And this will not only be to act upon, 
 but to improve upon, Paley's advice — viz. to pro- 
 pose one point in each discourse and stick to it ; in- 
 asmuch as a hearer never carries away more than 
 one impression" (Blunt's Duties of the Parisk 
 Priest, p. 158). In the very application and sum- 
 ming-up of a sermon some have contended for unity, 
 as when Mr. Isaac Williams says in the Preface to 
 one of his works — " In practical exhortations to 
 commend many things at the same time is to weaken 
 the obedience due to each one.^' 
 
 The trainino; at school and coUegre which most 
 clergymen go through has the effect of making the 
 style in which they compose too artificial and ela- 
 borate. " We have stamped on our clergy," says 
 Professor Blackie, " a type of scholarship divorced 
 
128 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 from life and ashamed of nature, and the prevalence 
 of this artificial system is one of the chief reasons 
 why uncultivated Methodists and wild untutored 
 apostles of all kinds have so much more influence 
 with the masses than regularly trained clergymen." 
 This is the disadvantage of our high classical train- 
 ing, that it makes our style go upon stilts. We ad- 
 mit it. It has, however, or ought to have, its cor- 
 responding advantage, in the order, method, and 
 arrangement which it enables a sermon-writer to 
 apply to his subject. The wearisome hours spent 
 over verse-tasks and prose-tasks, in which every 
 superfluous thought and every redundant epithet 
 must be lopped ofl" by a wholesome discipline — the 
 " nihil ad rem'' affixed by the tutor to some unlucky 
 excrescence in the composition, which has no more 
 business there than the mistletoe on the apple-tree — 
 the " limce labor''' of school and college ; all these 
 ought to be great correctives to the vagrant ten- 
 dencies of the mind. This training ought to tell in 
 after life on the curate in his study; it ought to 
 quicken in him that power (which even the unedu- 
 cated, to a degree, possess) of sitting in judgment 
 on each sentiment that arises, and determining, 
 while it is in the first stage of thought, how far it 
 has reference to, or is foreign to, the matter to be 
 treated of. 
 
 There is propriety in Lamonfs remark, that "there 
 is no excuse for a long sermon ; for if it be good it 
 need not be long, and if it be bad it ought not to 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 129 
 
 be lon^." When royalty complimented Dr. South 
 on a sermon, saying, " I wish you had had time to 
 make it longer'" — Dr. South replied, "May it please 
 your Majesty, I wish I had had time to make it 
 shorter." It does take a long time to make a com- 
 pact sermon. As a general rule, we cannot follow 
 nature too closely in the pulpit ; but in one thing we 
 must curtail nature — we must use the pruning-knife 
 to the luxurious offshoots of the mind, else our dis- 
 courses will be like a tangled wilderness. The 
 close-woven texture of Gibbon's page is to be ad- 
 mired quite as much for what it leaves unsaid as for 
 what it says. Eloquence is silver, but reticence is 
 sometimes golden. Look at the authorities Gibbon 
 quotes, and admire and wonder at his power of 
 condensing. With the same amount of matter, 
 how many historians would have filled a library 
 instead of a shelf. Herein is that proverb of Cecil's 
 true — " It requires as much wisdom to know what 
 is not to he put into a sermon as what is." Or 
 that saying of Charles Wolfe — " Oh the difficulty 
 of rejecting a clever thought, because it is inoppor- 
 tune /" 
 
 The temptation to be devious arises thus. Let us 
 suppose some bit of information or learned criticism 
 rises up before the young and unpractised writer 
 while he is composing, and it seems hard to miss a 
 chance of saying it. True, it is not quite in the 
 direct line of argument, but then it is so clever that 
 the young composer exercises an act of self-denial 
 
 K 
 
130 PAPERS ON PREACHING, 
 
 in letting oiF the opportunity of informing his 
 Iiearers. It is equally hard at first with the young 
 vine-pruner ; it seems so wasteful and cruel to cut 
 out such fine young wood covered with the promise 
 of future fruit. But sliortly he will learn that the 
 unsparing use of the knife will be the wisest economy 
 in the end. So the preacher by experience finds 
 those sermons tell most which are least encumbered 
 with matter, and which have the argument lying in 
 the nearest and most direct line from the beginning 
 to the conclusion. 
 
 The old divines gloried in saying all that could be 
 raked up on a subject ; so that while they are full 
 of matter, and on that account worthy to be studied, 
 they are by no means to be taken as models of a 
 perspicuous, intelligible, lucid style. Their mode 
 of writing is cumbrous, and that which was said to 
 one of them in a great measure applies to all — 
 " that he was an unfair preacher, because he had 
 exhausted the subject and left nothing more to be 
 said." " The sermons of the last century were like 
 their large unwieldy chairs. Men have now a far 
 truer idea of a chair. They consider it as a piece of 
 furniture to sit on, and cut away from it ever3^thing 
 that encumbers it. One of the most important con- 
 siderations in making a sermon is to disembarrass 
 it as much as possible. A young minister must 
 learn to separate and select his materials. Some 
 things respond — they ring again. He must remark, 
 too, what it is that puzzles and distracts the mind j 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 131 
 
 all this is to be avoided ; it may wear the garb of 
 deep research and acumen and extensive learning, 
 but it is nothing to the mass of mankind" (Cecil's 
 RemainSy p. 74). Modern preachers, on the other 
 hand, seeing, in the case of a mixed auditory, the 
 extreme importance that the line of light flowing 
 from the pulpit should be single and unentangled, 
 " choose out and use such arguments and topics as 
 shall be most interesting and persuasive — they look, 
 in short, not to their subject y but to their hea7'ers" 
 (^Ecclesiastes AngUcanus). The old writers may 
 not inaptly be compared to their own massive and 
 uninviting folios, while the new answer rather to 
 that which a lady considered the most desirable 
 point in theology, who said, " Can you recommend 
 me any sermons that I could hold in one hand and 
 peruse over the fire of a winter's evening?" 
 
 In the olden times, when preachings were rarer 
 than they now are, or in the case of itinerating 
 Wesleys and Whitfields, who addressed congrega- 
 tions they would probably never see again, it was 
 well to put as full a view of the subject as possible 
 into one discourse ; but in our pastoral preaching, 
 where the clergyman has two or more opportunities 
 of speaking to his people every week from the pul- 
 pit, there can be no object in huddling subjects to- 
 gether, or inserting any extraneous matter, for 
 which the occasion will pi'esently come round, 
 when, instead of being ill-timed, it will be the 
 " right remark in the right place." Let anything 
 
132 PAPEES ON PBEACHING. 
 
 worthy of note be carefully stored up in the common- 
 place book, under its proper head, to come forth 
 out of that treasury of things new and old — " a 
 word in season." 
 
 Who has not found himself, when a tyro at com- 
 position, running wild with unconnected disjointed 
 thoughts? He takes some subject which appears at 
 first sight to be an easy one, because it has a large 
 area — we will suppose him to write down at the 
 head of his paper. Soli/ Scripture, Prayer, or 
 Faith. He will soon find that from profusion of mat- 
 ter he grows confused — "blind from excess of light." 
 Whereas if he take a section of the subject, he will 
 more easily reduce it to unity ; thus, if preaching 
 on faith, let him not speak of faith generally, but 
 confine himself to one phase of faith at a time, as 
 he would be led to do (it is Mr. Evans' suggestion 
 in the BisJiopric of Souls) by such a text as JEph, 
 iii. 17, " That Christ may dwell in your hearts by 
 faith." Some subjects can only be treated by con- 
 trast, as the characters of the Pharisee and the 
 Publican, or the busy and the meditative characters 
 exemplified by Martha and Mary ; the unity of sub- 
 ject is not broken in these and similar cases as it 
 would be by a sermon the first half of which should 
 be about the younger and the last half about the 
 elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son, or, 
 as we remember once to have heard, as a series of 
 family portraits in one sennon, the characters of 
 Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Let no more ground be 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 133 
 
 entered upon than can be thoroughly cleared up in 
 one hearing. 
 
 The first step, let us suppose, is to read up a 
 subject from the several authors who have written 
 thoughtfully on it; having let this matter rest 
 awhile on the mind, try to skim the whole into a 
 few notes. But we will speak in the words of Pro- 
 fessor Bautain — " The moment a sense of fulness 
 on a subject is felt, the moment for acting has 
 arrived. You take up your notes and you carefully 
 re-read them face to face with the topic to be 
 treated. You blot out such as diverge from it too 
 much, or are not sufficiently substantial. By this 
 elimination you gradually concentrate the thoughts 
 which have the greatest reciprocal bearing. You 
 work these a longer or shorter time in your under- 
 standing as in a crucible, by the inner fire of reflec- 
 tion, and in nine cases out of ten they end by amal- 
 gamating and fusing into one another, until they 
 form a homogeneous mass, which is reduced, like 
 the metallic particles in incandescence, by the per- 
 sistent hammering of thought into a dense and solid 
 oneness^' (p. 172). 
 
 Not always the thoughts which come easiest will 
 be the best — these must be often rejected for others 
 which need the study of good writers to set the 
 mind on suggesting them ; for often the words of a 
 writer kindle trains of thoughts in the reader which 
 never suggested themselves to the original writer. 
 The first thoughts must make way for these often, 
 
134 PAPERS ON PEEACHING. 
 
 lest the subject be overcrowded ; and the judgment 
 of the preacher may not inaptly be compared to the 
 librarian of a free public library, who has to reject 
 the donations which pour in readily (because they 
 are the refuse of the bookshelves of the donors), and 
 accept a few standard works which would otherwise 
 have been lost amidst the heap of rubbish. 
 
 Divisions of the subject, too, even if they be in- 
 formal and, like sunken fences, imperceptible, are 
 nevertheless useful, because they act as boundaries 
 to include the writer within due limits, and prevent 
 the redundant mind from straying off the line of 
 argument. " However varied the anecdotes, argu- 
 ments, and illustrations, they will, like a wheel, 
 tend to one centre, and lie within one circum- 
 ference." 
 
 If a preacher on each occasion drive home one 
 subject, or one main idea only, will he not still, 
 at the rate of two sermons a Sunday, have gone, 
 in two years, over the whole course of Christian 
 ethics ? 
 
 Still this unity of design must be surrounded with 
 the greatest variety of treatment. What gratifies 
 us is not variety on the one hand, nor uniformity 
 (or rather unity) on the other. Where the truth set 
 forth is rather of an abstmct character, nothing con- 
 veys it to the mind with such power and clearness 
 as abundant and familiar illustrations. ^* Every 
 composition which is designed to gratify the mind 
 should have this property of variety in unity. A 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 135 
 
 discourse which repeats continually one and the 
 same idea, under one and the same aspect, soon be- 
 comes wearisome. Would it, then, gratify the mind 
 to strino- tos^ether a number of distinct ideas, how- 
 ever stirring ? Such an effusion would not deserve 
 the name of a discourse — it would be simply a num- 
 ber of ideas knit together by no unity of purpose. 
 In order to gratify the reader or listener, there must 
 be one thread of argument running through the 
 composition, to the illustration or elucidation of 
 which the various topics touched upon must be one 
 and all subordinate. Here, too, we must have 
 unity in variety, one leading thought, variously de- 
 veloped, variously established, brought out imder 
 various aspects" {Thirteenth Sermon hy Dr. Goul- 
 burn). 
 
 Of this variety we will speak at another time. 
 Let us only observe now, that the wise preacher 
 avails himself of it, first in the selection of his sub- 
 ject, and then in the treatment of it. He preaches 
 one day from a history, another from a parable, 
 another from a doctrinal text. He breaks up hisf 
 subject into long and short sentences, hill and dale, 
 leaving: no stone unturned to enchain his audience 
 by variety ; introducing, now and then, a story, a 
 quotation, or a proverb. Yet, in all this variety, 
 he admits nothing which does not bear on the sub- 
 ject in hand. The subjects are various, but when a 
 topic is once fixed on, it is kept in view through- 
 out 5 the treatment is various, but all turned towards 
 
136 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 the one thing to be pressed home. Everything is 
 so arranged as that what goes before may shed 
 light on what follows ; the introduction is not one 
 which would apply to any other subject equally 
 well, but leads up forcibly to the topic in hand, just 
 as the application flows distinctly and easily out of 
 it; there is a main point to which the whole ser- 
 mon refers, so that it is one and entire — teres atque 
 rotundus. Over such a composition the author 
 will be able to write a motto, which shall include 
 the subject-matter and be an exhaustive definition 
 of the discourse ; and a moderately intelligent hearer 
 being asked what it was about, will be able at once, 
 in so many words, to say what the subject was 
 without referring to the text. "Whenever the 
 preacher has the satisfaction to feel at the close of 
 his sermon that he is dismissing his congregation 
 with one truth distinctly impressed upon their 
 minds — that he has so clearly defined a particular 
 truth to them, that in recalling the discourse this 
 M'ill immediately present itself as the subject for 
 thought and meditation — he may then safely con- 
 sider that he has preached a good sermon, however 
 homely may have been the language in which it 
 was expressed; and that his hearers will derive 
 more benefit from it, though possibly less entertain- 
 ing, than had he displayed a greater variety of 
 ideas dazzling with the colours of a flowery elo- 
 quence. To produce this effect, therefore, should 
 be the object in a preacher's mind whenever he sits 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 137 
 
 down to prepare a discourse ; and if he be success- 
 ful, he will find as the result that a clear meaning 
 accompanies his words, and substantial convictions 
 are engrafted on the hearts of those who listen. 
 And this, my brethren, is the end, the only satisfac- 
 tory end, of preaching" (Gatty, Sermons, vol. i. 
 Ser. xx). 
 
 These remarks are aimed at that desultory ramb- 
 ling in sermons which is the result of an illogical 
 mind unwittingly pursuing its own course. But 
 what has been said applies also to some who de- 
 signedly say that every sermon should be a com- 
 plete system of divinity. " There are some doc- 
 trines which should not only be implied and re- 
 ferred to in every discourse, but should be distinctly 
 and fully treated several times in the course of the 
 year" (Jay, Autobiography ^ p. 150). " Of course 
 the great fundamental doctrines of redemption by 
 the blood of Christ, and sanctification by His 
 Spirit, will be stated or implied in each sermon ; 
 but injurious results have frequently arisen from 
 following up too closely the well-known wish of an 
 eminent Nonconformist, that every sermon which 
 he preached might be such as to convey to any 
 casual stranger, who might never have a future 
 opportunity, the means of fully answering to him- 
 self the question, ' What must I do to be saved ? * 
 In vain is it objected that to adopt this practice 
 would be to compose a creed or confession of faith, 
 and not a sermon, and would deprive it of all its 
 
138 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 significance and definite application. This supposed 
 individual may, after all, not be present ; and if he 
 is, will be far from likely to be profited by the mis- 
 cellaneous composition thus arbitrarily dictated for 
 his special advantage" (^Archdeacon Sinclair's 
 Charge to his Clergy in 1855). "It would be ut- 
 terly impossible, in a course of preaching of this 
 kind, to lay forth in any single sermon, or in any 
 chance sermon that a stranger may hear, what are 
 called the vital doctrines of Christianity, so that 
 he may carry them away, and be content with that 
 one sermon which he had heard. You know very 
 well that such is often required of preachers of the 
 Gospel. It is said, * There was nothing in that 
 sermon for the fainting soul to feed on.' Very 
 likely not ; and it may have been, notwithstanding, 
 a practical, useful, instructive sermon, laid into its 
 right place, and bearing its part in building up that 
 co7igregation. We are to preach to edify the 
 Church of God, which very word implies building 
 up upon a foundation — that foundation is the Chris- 
 tian doctrine, which, just as in laying an ordinary 
 foundation in life, is placed in the ground, and 
 hidden for the most part, while the building is con- 
 tinually raised upon it, and rests upon it, notwith- 
 standing its concealment" (Dean Alford's Ser- 
 mons at Quebec Chaj)el, vol. vii.) " Preaching is 
 a continuous act : it is, in several consecutive ser- 
 mons, one and the same sermon" (Vi net's JPas- 
 toral Theology, p. 189). This is the end of the 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 139 
 
 whole matter. So let the eminent Nonconformist 
 have his wish for the insertion of a whole system of 
 divinity^ and we ours, that every sermon have unity 
 of subject, iov preaching is a continuous act through- 
 out a pastor^ s whole ministry. 
 
 This chapter, which was written in the spring of 
 1859, was in reprint thus far when I found that a 
 book was announced, called. Thoughts on Preach- 
 ing, by the Rev. Daniel Moore. It is a great 
 satisfaction to find that he has taken the same view 
 of this last topic as I had done, and I cannot but 
 enforce my own observation by the following elo- 
 quent words of his : — " We know it is customary 
 to say that a faithful evangelical message may be 
 expressed in one word — it is preaching Christ. 
 But surely it is not preaching Christ merely to re- 
 peat the word every two or three minutes in a ser- 
 mon. It is not preaching Christ to be always la- 
 bouring after some prismatic variety of the ex- 
 pression, * Neither is there salvation in any other. ^ 
 It is not preaching Christ to be looking out for 
 allusions to Him in the baldest facts, and subtle 
 references to Him in the most common expressions ; 
 straining after unnatural interpretations of Scripture 
 language, almost as an excuse for bringing in the 
 sacred name. But it is preaching Christ when, in 
 the awful mystery of his twofold nature. He is set 
 forth as a living Saviour to living men. It is 
 preaching Christ when we preach the duties which 
 He commanded — the cross of self-denial which He 
 
140 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 bore — the holiness which He practised ; the eleva- 
 ting power of sympathy, such as His was, with a 
 brother's needs ; the peace and blessedness of resig- 
 nation, such as His was, to a heavenly Father's will. 
 It is preaching Christ when we preach the mildness 
 of His yoke, the sweetness of His promises, the com- 
 fort of His near presence, the sufficiency of His grace 
 to cheer and support and guide. It is preaching 
 Christ when we preach an interest in Him as our 
 hope ; union to Him as our life, and the prevalency 
 of His intercessions as the strong confidence of our 
 prayers. It is preaching Christ when, in His per- 
 son. His work, or His offices, He is permitted to 
 be ' the diamond to shine in the bosom of all our 
 sermons' (Bp. Wilkins), when named or unnamed, 
 seen or unseen. He is made to shed a glorious sun- 
 light over our entire field of subject, when views of 
 what He is, was, and what He does for us, are so 
 in-wrought with the web and woof of every dis- 
 course, that, like the name of Phidias in the shield, 
 to get out every trace of reference to Him the entire 
 work must be destroyed." 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 VARIETY IN THE CHOICE OF A SUBJECT. 
 
 fN the preceding chapter we endeavour to 
 draw attention to that unity which is 
 necessary to the well-being of a sermon, 
 and recommend the rejection of all ex- 
 traneous matter, so that nothing should draw the 
 preacher out of his line of argument, or interfere 
 with the one thing he is endeavouring in that par- 
 ticular discourse to enforce upon his hearers. 
 
 Ordinis hsec virtus erit et venus aut ego fallor ; 
 Ut jam nunc dicat, jam nunc debentia dici 
 Pleraque differat et prsesens in tempus omittat. 
 
 As this unity is essential to the clearness which is 
 required, so variety both of subject and of treat- 
 ment is necessary to keep up the attention of the 
 hearers. 
 
 " I treasured up," says Mr. Jay (Autobiograjjhy, 
 p. 372), " the admonition of Cecil to guard against 
 having too great a plenitude of matter in a sermon'* 
 — which he so carefully followed out, says his bi- 
 ographer, " that numerous individuals who only 
 
142 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 heard him once have been able, after many years, to 
 give the substance, if not the divisions, of the 
 only sermon they ever heard from his lips" (p. 
 250). At the same time it is recorded " that the 
 great variety of subjects chosen by him for the pul- 
 pit made it necessary to hear Mr. Jay again and 
 again before being able to come to a sound opinion 
 as to the nature and exact character of his preaching" 
 (p. 249). 
 
 Let us ask whether we have not too much same- 
 ness of topic ? " Is our preaching what it ought to 
 be in point of subject ? Do we not insensibly get 
 into a narrow circle of subjects, and work round 
 and round upon them like a horse in a mill, thus 
 leaving an immense portion of the field of Scripture 
 untilled?" (J. C. Ryle.) For argument's sake, let 
 us suppose that a settled pastor has one hundred op- 
 portunities annually of addressing his congregation, 
 the choice of subject, except on great festivals, rest- 
 ing entirely with himself. If, therefore, he has 
 attained to the habit of confining himself strictly to 
 the topic he has selected, without branching off into 
 collateral matter, he will have in reserve so much 
 greater extent of unbroken ground to enter upon 
 in future. The richness of variety will depend on 
 the preserving strict unity in the treatment of each 
 separate subject. This is rightly to divide the 
 Word of Truth. 
 
 In the ordinary run of volumes of printed sermons 
 it is observable how little variety there is in the se- 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 143 
 
 lection of subjects. Before opening the book, it 
 would be possible, by anticipation, to name many 
 of the texts, simply because they are commonplace 
 texts. Without doubt this occurs, in some measure, 
 because the texts chosen are those which lie on the 
 surface of the services for the day. Of old time, 
 when sermons were expected to be expositions of the 
 Epistle or Gospel, there was good reason for this 
 sameness, but in days when the number of sermons 
 is increased, the variety of subjects should be in- 
 creased also. That which Archer Butler says of our 
 fondness for favourite doctrines and fragments of 
 Scriptural teaching is true when applied to com- 
 posers of sermons — " We hold a few texts so near 
 our eyes that they hide the rest of the BihW^ 
 [Serm. vol. i. p. 104). Or, as Bishop Armstrong 
 subjoins the reason to a similar thought — " Such 
 persons, for instance, as are disposed to give way 
 overmuch to sorrow would love most to ling-er over 
 the agony in Gethsemane, or the last bitter sorrows 
 of the cross, and would stop short of the bright joys 
 of the resurrection, and the glorious elevating 
 thoughts of the ascension into heaven. Others, on 
 the contrary, too much disposed to be confident, and 
 too little humbled to a sense of their own guilt, 
 would choose out the brighter portions of the truth. 
 They would meditate chiefly on our Lord's victory 
 over death, on the coming of the Holy Ghost, and 
 think little of the temptation in the wilderness and 
 the dreadful sacrifice of the cross. Thus ^ the pro- 
 
144 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 poi'tion of faitK would be lost, and the height, 
 breadth, depth, and length of the love of Christ 
 would not be understood" (Serm. for Christian 
 Seasons). In this passage Bishop Armstrong is en- 
 forcing the idea, that if we follow the current of the 
 Christian seasons we shall be led to view, in their 
 due proportion, all the events of our Lord's life. 
 But even here we would not stop ; we would say, 
 do not let the ^^ Church Service'^ be substituted for 
 the " Hible;" it may do as well in the pew, but not 
 in the closet or study. The texts of some preachers 
 are never taken but from the most prominent pas- 
 sages of Scripture. Whereas, with freshness unim- 
 paired to the general run of hearers, maybe brought 
 to bear, by the careful reader of the Old Testament 
 and especially of the Prophets, numberless verses 
 which add variety if not novelty to the hackneyed 
 subject of religion. Can a joyous Christmas ser- 
 mon be appended to a more striking text than these 
 words which Nehemiah spoke to the people in the 
 open air ^^from a pulpit of woocl^^ (viii. 4) — ^' Go 
 your way, eat the fat and drink the sweet, and give 
 portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared ; 
 for this day is holy unto the Lord V (Nehemiah 
 viii. 10.) " There is not in all the book we profess 
 to believe a chapter more specially and directly 
 written for England than the second of Habakkuk, 
 and I never, in all my life, heard one of its practical 
 texts preached on" {The Political Economy of Art, 
 J. Ruskin). There is the notion of variety in the 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 145 
 
 title of two volumes of Mr. Melvill's sermons, 
 entitled, On the less prominent Facts in Scripture 
 Story. 
 
 Men who trust too entirely to their own resources, 
 without inquiring what the world outside them is 
 doing, or taking counsel of other minds, get into a 
 way of repeating themselves, so that each discourse 
 is a dry theological essay, made as it were in one 
 mould. They have either read certain rules for 
 writing a sermon, or have formed for themselves 
 some ideal of what a sermon should be, and their 
 whole endeavour is to reproduce Sunday after Sun- 
 day something according to this pattern. 
 
 An infinite number of changes may be rung upon 
 the few kinds of sermons which are obvious, so that 
 monotony, by a little management, may easily be 
 avoided. A text sermon, which is a mere drawing 
 out the meaning of the passage selected for a text, 
 may be well varied by "a subject sermon" — i.e. 
 one in which the writer groups round the central 
 idea all the thoughts he has elsewhere collected, as 
 Bishop Armstrong has done in such sermons as those 
 on ''Conscience" and " Influence," in the Sermons 
 for Christian Seasons. Professor Blunt admonishes 
 us to make frequent use of biographical and histo- 
 rical subjects, which introduce in the most interest- 
 ing form what is otherwise inculcated in the drier 
 forms of dogmatic teaching. The exposition of a 
 prophecy, a psalm, or a parable, comes in with 
 great relief as a change ; and without particularising, 
 
 L 
 
146 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 to one diligently casting about in the treasures of 
 Scripture there will occur ample resources for Ta- 
 riety. Thus we shall interest our flocks and lead 
 them into pastures ever new, instead of driving 
 them from us by the tedious uniformity of a tune 
 ever grating on one string. 
 
 The occasional sermons of Canon Wordsworth, 
 preached in Westminster Abbey, are a favourite 
 instance of the way in which the social questions of 
 the day may be made subservient to the teaching of 
 the pulpit. 
 
 In his speech in Convocation in February, 1859, 
 Bishop Wilberforce proposed to add seven Occa- 
 sional Offices by way of appendix to our Prayer- 
 book, on the just plea that occasions arise which 
 need extra elasticity in the services. If the special 
 Offices be still a desideratum, we can, at least, write 
 the special sermons, and thus improve the occasions 
 in the best way in our power. We would add to this 
 list another additional Office for Children. At the 
 Church of St. Stephen's, Shepherd's Bush, London, 
 besides the usual services, there is once every Sun- 
 day a service with a familiar extempore address, 
 specially for the children of the parochial and other 
 schools in that neighbourhood. 
 
 As an instance of special sermons being effective, 
 we cannot take a better one than some of the ad- 
 dresses preached during the last year at Harvest- 
 home thanksgivings, which come home with un- 
 usual freshness to the concerns of dailv life. 
 
PAPERS OiV PREACHING, 147 
 
 Anyhow, it is most desirable that the tedious 
 uniformity of routine subjects should be as much as 
 possible broken through ; the leading doctrines and 
 truths of religion will strike deeper root when they 
 are less hackneyed, and when they come less as a 
 matter of course. A side-wind will oft waft a ship 
 better than a direct breeze, and so the chief corner- 
 stone doctrines of our faith may be advanced by 
 allusion often as much as by direct preaching. Our 
 clergy — since how to preach effectively to the 
 masses has been discussed during the last two years 
 — seem sensible of the relief which comes either 
 from a new topic or from approaching the old topic 
 from a new road. 
 
 Let us appeal to the testimony of recent biogra- 
 phies to confirm this plea for variety in lectures and 
 sermons. The following are from the diary of a 
 country clergyman : — " Lecture on Ps. xcv. Read 
 Shej^herd on Common Prayer, from p. 112 to 126, 
 in parts. Next month notice Gloria Patri. At com- 
 municants' lecture explain, * It is very meet,' &c." 
 (^Memoir of Rev. Spencer Thornton.) Ano- 
 ther pastor was careful to make his Sunday morning 
 and evening sermons different, because he noticed 
 that those services were attended by a different class 
 of people. On Wednesday evenings he explained 
 the Prayer-book and Occasional Services, and went 
 through (extempore) all Scripture characters. (^Me- 
 moir of Rev. R. A. Suckling, p. 17 and 195.) As 
 often as the chapters in the Epistles to Timothy 
 
148 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 and Titus come round in the Lessons, there can 
 never be wanting apt passages on which to hang 
 some observations on the relationship between a 
 pastor and his people, and their mutual duties — 
 discussions upon which topics usually lose their 
 effect by being appended to a charity sermon for the 
 *' Pastoral Aid'' or " Additional Curates' Society ;" 
 but which come home to a simple people when 
 spoken by one who lives among them to spend and 
 be spent, as the following passage from the Memoir 
 of the Itev, George Wagner will testify : — " Every 
 July, when the anniversary came round of his first 
 entrance on his parochial charge, it was his custom 
 to preach a sermon upon the nature, the purpose, 
 the duties, the responsibilities, or the authority of 
 the Christian ministry ; recalling the thoughts of 
 his people and himself to the relations which sub- 
 sisted between them, and urgently pressing home 
 the question, what results had arisen from it? 
 Thus, in July, 1847 (for instance), he preached a 
 sermon on 1 Ham. iii. 19 : — * Samuel grew, and the 
 Lord was with him, and did let none of his words 
 fall to the ground;' in which he set forth with 
 luminous clearness, deep pathos, and rich abundance 
 of anecdote, what ought to be the marks and evi- 
 dences of a successful ministration of God's word — 
 sadly contrasting the ideal of his hopes with the 
 reality of his experience" (p. 73). 
 
 A similar opportunity is offered to every pastor 
 by the advent of a new year. What a resume may 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 149 
 
 then be made by the skilful pastor of the progress 
 and regress during the past twelvemonths of every- 
 thing which relates to a parish — of its mercies and 
 warnings, its providences and opportunities of good. 
 Especially is this suitable in a country place, where 
 the unity of the parish as a body politic is more 
 keenly felt than in large towns. We have before 
 us, while we write, a recollection of one who availed 
 himself very dexterously every year of this obvious 
 mode of enlisting his hearers' attention ; having 
 been many years resident as rector of a country pa- 
 rish, he would begin in all the homely but forcible 
 language of face to face extempore conversational 
 preaching — " For the twentieth time I now wish 
 you a happy new year," &c., and then proceed to 
 give what we can best designate as a parish history 
 sermon. But of the variety which may be exer- 
 cised in the choice of the subject we have said 
 enough ; we would speak in the next chapter of the 
 variety in the details of treatment, when the subject 
 has been fixed on. 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 VARIETY IN THE TREATMENT OF A SUBJECT. 
 
 HE interest which may be awakened 
 by the preacher who selects his sub- 
 jects with due reference to variety, 
 needs also to be diligently sustained 
 throughout each discourse by variety in the style 
 and manner of treatment. This, if it be carefully 
 managed, leads at once to those variations in the 
 voice which are themselves so powerful to enchain 
 the attention of an audience. " Every voice has its 
 bell-note, which makes it a bass voice, a tenor, or a 
 soprano, each with immediate gradations — the mid- 
 dle voice or tenor is the more favourable for speak- 
 ingf : it is that which maintains itself the best, and 
 which reaches the farthest when well articulated. 
 It is also the most pleasing, the most endearing, 
 and has the largest resources for inflection, because 
 beins: in the middle of the scale it rises or sinks 
 with greater ease, and leans itself better to either 
 hand. It therefore commands a greater variety of 
 
PAPERS ON PRE A CHING, 151 
 
 intonations, which hinders monotony of elocution, 
 and reawakens the attention of the hearer, so prone 
 to doze" (^Professor Bautain, p. 89). 
 
 A varied and broken-up style has therefore these 
 two advantages over a monotonous flow, that it is 
 easier for the hearer to follow, as well as easier for 
 the preacher to deliver, with effect. St. Augustine 
 (-De Doctrind, iv.) says : — ^^ A variety of usage 
 should be employed, one style being made to relieve 
 the other ; the low and gentle being relieved by the 
 even and regulated, and this again by the lofty and 
 impressive." Dr. Arnold, in the Eighth Lecture on 
 Modern History, writes : — " The very style of an 
 historian often gives us an impression which will 
 enable us to form an estimate of his mind. If it be 
 heavy and cumbrous, it indicates a dull man, or a 
 pompous man, or at least a slow and awkward 
 man ; if it be tawdry and full of commonplaces, 
 enunciated with great solemnity, the writer is most 
 likely a silly man ; if it be highly antithetical, and 
 full of unusual expressions or artificial ways of 
 stating a plain thing, the writer is clearly an aflected 
 man. If it be plain and simple, always clear but 
 never eloquent, the writer may be a very sensible 
 man, but is too hard and dry to be a very great 
 man. If, on the other hand, it is always eloquent, 
 rich in illustrations, full of animation, but too uni- 
 formly so, and without the relief of simple and 
 quiet passages, we must admire the writer's genius 
 in a very high degree, but we may fear that he is 
 
152 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 too continually excited to have attained the very 
 highest wisdom ; for that is necessarily calm." 
 
 Notwithstanding the comfort which dry and 
 dreary men have drawn for themselves out of those 
 expressions in the Epistles — that the gospel is to be 
 proclaimed not with excellency of speech, nor with 
 enticing words of man! s wisdom — still we are about 
 to plead for a light, airy, and interesting style. 
 That dulness of diction, which is inexcusable in any 
 other profession, and which would condemn any 
 book issued from the press, cannot be venial in a 
 preacher who has undertaken to be a teacher in 
 God's heritage. "The bored hearer" (says the 
 proverb) " becomes an enemy." Many a man 
 ceases to attend a ministry in which the wheels drag 
 heavily, and if God has no need of our eloquence 
 He certainly has less of our dulness. 
 
 The theology of a past age was very solid, but 
 not very inviting to the popular mind — it was 
 strong meat doubtless, food for giants, but not well 
 seasoned. The profound scholarship and critical 
 acumen of these heavy-armed divines would be 
 preached out of the field by a lighter and more 
 pleasing style of address. The establishment has 
 been roused to a more animated and popular style 
 by the vigorous preaching of Nonconformists. 
 " We have taken a lesson out of their book," as 
 Fuller says, " we have gone down to the Philis- 
 tines to sharpen every man his goad and his coul- 
 ter." 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 153 
 
 Let us hear the evidence of one of our own most 
 popular preachers; Dean Alford (^Lecture at Exeter 
 Halt), 1858, says, " We have borne sermons long 
 enough, we begin to ask of them to bear us." In 
 order to do this it is shown that the preacher must 
 be not only solid and edifying, but he must keep up 
 a sustained interest, and, as it is expressed, carry his 
 hearers with him; and the variety must be come at in 
 this way — we must analyse the soul, and then make 
 our sermons responsive to the wants of its several 
 parts. " What is the human soul ? It is a vessel 
 moored in life by a thousand interests, occupations, 
 feelings, sympathies; a plant with far-stretching 
 fibres of root, sucking in at their spongioles various 
 and manifold nourishment. And this persuasion, 
 this conviction, this information, which the pulpit 
 is to minister to it, is to take it up in all its in- 
 terests, to send in nourishment through every one 
 of those distant fibres, and by that nourishment to 
 supply it with a new and better life. It needs no 
 persuasion to show that by the abstract terms of 
 theology alone this cannot be done. How can such 
 terms, standing alone as we often find them, having 
 no real representatives in men's daily lives, lay hold 
 of their feelings or bespeak their interests ? Holding, 
 therefore, that men's daily lives are the proper ful- 
 crum for the preacher to rest his lever on, yet we 
 do not deny, that all the faculties and ranges of the 
 human soul, imagination, memory, fancy, reason, 
 and the rest, are the lawful fields on which the 
 
154 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 preacher may work, and that this also has not been 
 done enough in our own day we are persuaded." 
 
 Here, then, we have not only the fact clearly 
 established, that we must cultivate variety, and in 
 so doing must go farther afield for our matter and 
 illustrations, but also the reason for it; viz. that 
 there are various faculties to be affected, and there- 
 fore a variegated treatment is required. 
 
 This is the law to which we would induce obe- 
 dience. Let us look at the question in another 
 light, and taking the works of any preacher who 
 has rendered himself popular, and has maintained 
 that popularity, let us inspect them closely, and see 
 whether by another road we do not come to the 
 same conclusion. Take, for instance, the writings 
 of the Rev. Henry Melvill — here you have none 
 of the monotony of dignity, none of the artistic 
 manufacture of a book-learnt craft, no array of 
 technical and abstract terms of theology. Solid 
 food you have, indeed, but still it is savoury meat, 
 such as my soul loveth. He has bound ^^ the 
 flowers of fancy around the marble statues of 
 thought.^' Mr. Melvill is not always harping on 
 one string — he has chosen subjects of the most va- 
 rious hue — all clustering, at greater or lesser inter- 
 vals, around the only theme we preachers may 
 know, the crucified Messias — not seeming at first 
 start to be bearing on the evangelical points of reli- 
 gion — beguiling you awhile in some devious road; 
 but returning in due course to the great theme of 
 
PAPERS ON PEEACEING, 155 
 
 Christian redemption. The imagination is enlisted, 
 the attention aroused by infinite variety, the poetry 
 as well as the prose of man's nature is appealed to — 
 you are carried on while you listen to him through 
 a shifting succession of thoughts, so that the scene 
 never stands still. Is not every art and science laid 
 under contribution — " Chemistry, that tells of God's 
 wisdom ; Astronomy, that speaks of God's immen- 
 sity; and Geology, that testifies to his eternity?" 
 Like a bird, going far for materials, but weaving 
 them, on her return, carefully into the nest she is 
 building; so does Mr. Melvill ransack history, phi- 
 losophy, and physical science — things above, things 
 on, and things under the earth, and bringing them 
 to bear upon the subject in hand, makes them subser- 
 vient to his will. And if he has ranged far from the 
 point for his illustrations, in a very noticeable way, 
 at the end of each devious paragraph, he returns to 
 his starting idea, and clenches the subject by the re- 
 petition of the text ; as if he would say. Thus it is 
 that this divergence bears upon the matter in hand. 
 Like the Magi of old, bringing gold, frankin- 
 cense, and myrrh, he offers them all to the God of 
 heaven. 
 
 It is worth while, therefore, inquiring what are 
 some of the lights and reliefs which may be applied 
 to preaching; for we want a structure airy and 
 cheerful, and not a heavy pile of buildings. Let us 
 liken the calm, didactic teaching of the discourse to 
 the dark background of the picture — for this is as 
 
156 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 indispensable to a sermon as to a painting ; without 
 it the more ornate parts do not tell upon the hearers. 
 When the whole is didactic or expository, as in the 
 theological essay of the last century, who would not 
 recoil from the monotony of dignity ? There may 
 be unity, but it is unity without variety ; a tune on 
 one note. Equally possible is it to spoil a picture 
 from over-colouring, to paint so as to have all 
 figures and no background. Does not the exuberant 
 fancy of Jeremy Taylor run riot to excess, so tliat 
 one can hardly discern the cross for the garlands 
 which his poetic fancy has hung over it ? Do not the 
 anecdotes of Segneri, among the mediaeval writers, 
 and Mr. Guthrie, among the moderns, usurp too 
 prominent a place in the composition ? One story 
 succeeds to another without sufficient didactic teach- 
 ing to give connection to them ; brilliant as they 
 are, they weary with excess of light, and glitter 
 like vases of flowers from which the backQ:round of 
 evergreens has been withdrawn. Rounded periods 
 may be brought in with admirable telling effect 
 amidst shorter sentences ; but who that has taken up 
 a volume of Dr. Blair's sermons has not become 
 impatient of the continual roll of his elaborated 
 sentences ? Yet even these Johnsonian periods may 
 be used with effect when introduced sparingly. In 
 a recent number of the Quarterly Review there is 
 an article on Lord Brougham's speeches, in which 
 the writer points out some bursts of eloquence so 
 refined, so carefully elaborated, so well compacted 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 157 
 
 in BYerj point of the sentences, that, as he says, 
 they could not have been born of the occasion, but 
 were evidently pre-arranged in all their symmetry. 
 If this be so, it seems that one of the secrets of 
 oratory is to conceive certain fine passages in their 
 detail, and then to work up to them in the extem- 
 porised parts of the oration. To apply this thought 
 to the case in hand, such telling sentences may not 
 lie within the scope of average intellect to conceive 
 or to execute, but by falling back upon his reserves 
 they are within the reach of every diligent pains- 
 taking student of theology ; there is the reserve of 
 his memory — then of his well-indexed library — 
 then of his commonplace book. Suppose a man's 
 natural style to be that short, broken, conversa- 
 tional style, which is best for the humbler classes, 
 especially when mixed with questions and brief 
 appeals to the head and hearty this forms an ad- 
 mirable background : then how well may he inlay 
 sentences in other forms — the antithesis of one 
 writer — the word-painting of another — the massive 
 grandeur of Hooker and Donne — the playful poetry 
 of Jeremy Taylor — the concise wisdom of Hall and 
 Herbert — the terse proverbs of Fuller and Cecil — 
 the well-chiselled rhetoric of Melvill and countless 
 other writers, who have made thought elaborate it- 
 self in sonorous cadence, each after his own manner. 
 None will tire, because each will relieve and set off 
 the other; surely, therefore, we ought not to be 
 monotonous when so great a variety lies within our 
 
158 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 reach. Do we not find this variety strongly exem- 
 plified in Scripture, and ought not Scripture to be 
 our model in style, as it is in doctrine? " Let a 
 man minister according to the ability which God 
 has given him — let a man speak as the oracles of 
 GodJ'^ The Scriptures, which are full of plain 
 dialogue and short statements, rise at times into the 
 highest flights of poetry and rhetoric, never con- 
 tinuing in one stay. George Herbert notices the 
 manner in which the prophets break off" into apos- 
 trophes ! as, Oh, that thou wouldst rend the heavens! 
 Oh, that thej^e were such a heart in them! (j'c. 
 " This care (he says) may be learnt there and 
 woven into sermons.'' Canning confessed that from 
 the fiery passages of the prophets he had culled 
 those flowers armed with thorns, the imagery and the 
 energy of his speech. ^' Passages of Scripture were 
 brought forward by Mr. Jay, as classic quotations 
 are by public orators, to grace a speech, and to 
 convey the speaker's idea in the apposite language 
 of a high authority. While listening to his dis- 
 courses, his hearers were often surprised by his re- 
 petition of Scripture, so appropriate that it seemed 
 as if written for the occasion." 
 
 I do not know any turn in the manner of an ad- 
 dress more striking, more beautifully abrupt and 
 awakening than the following from the Country 
 Parish Sermons of Augustus W. Hare : — '' Con- 
 ceive an unforgiving revengeful man repeating that 
 petition of the Lord's Prayer, * Forgive us our 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 159 
 
 trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against 
 us.' Conceive a man with a heart filled with wrath 
 against his neighbour, with a memory which trea- 
 sures up the little wrongs and insults he fancies 
 himself to have received from that neighbour. 
 Conceive such a man praying to God Most High 
 to forgive him his sins, as he forgives the man that 
 has sinned against him ! What in the mouth of 
 such a man do such words mean ? They mean — 
 but that you may more fully understand their 
 meaning — I will turn them into a prayer, which we 
 will call the prayer of the unforgiving man : — ^ O 
 God, I have sinned against Thee many times from 
 my youth up until now. I have often been forget- 
 ful of Thy goodness; I have not daily thanked 
 Thee for Thy mercies ; I have neglected Thy ser- 
 vice ; I have broken Thy laws ; I have done many 
 things utterly wrong against Thee. Deal with me, 
 I beseech Thee, as I dealt with my neighbour. He 
 has not offended me one hundredth part as I have 
 offended Thee, but I cannot forgive him. Deal 
 with me, I beseech Thee, as I deal with him,' &c." 
 (Vol. ii. p. 297.) Every one must perceive, at a 
 glance, how the rapid change in the construction 
 of this passage adds force and liveliness to the idea 
 and lights up the whole thought. The dullest 
 hearer must have his attention arrested, and the 
 most thoughtless made to think. 
 
 Another art for lightening up style, and one for 
 which opportunities present themselves in every ser- 
 
160 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 moil, is to make a character, whether real or im- 
 aginary, the speaker of his own thoughts. Take an 
 instance from Dr. Goulburn : — " We may imagine 
 Jacob as he went along on his lonely pilgrimage 
 with his staff and his wallet, which contained hife few 
 provisions, saying to himself — Had I trusted in 
 God to bring about His own purposes, respecting the 
 birthright and the blessing, in His own way, and not 
 attempted to forestallHistimeof bringingthem about 
 by subtlety and deceit, had I not vainly, &c." Often- 
 times this may be done in the way of a dialogue, 
 which still more effectually breaks up and enlivens 
 the style. For this also we have the example of 
 Scripture ; as, for instance, in the dialogue between 
 the Almighty and Satan in the book of Job, and in 
 many of our Lord's parables. Take the follow- 
 ing as an illustration ; it is one of the many beauti- 
 ful passages of Mr. Charles Bradley, in which he is 
 showing that at every epoch of man's life Christ has 
 knocked at the door of the heart for admission : — " I 
 came to you (says the Saviour) in childhood, and I 
 said to you, My son, give me thy heart. I love them 
 that love me. They that seek me early shall find 
 me ; but you turned me away ; you said it was too 
 soon then to admit me ; childhood was an age of 
 folly, and folly must run its course. I came to you 
 again in youth ; I knocked yet louder for admission, 
 and you heard me ; but you said that I had come 
 too soon ; youth was the season for pleasure, and 
 l)leasure must have its day. It has had it ; your 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHINO. 161 
 
 youth is now gone ; business and the cares of a 
 family have succeeded to pleasure and folly, and 
 again I come, knocking louder than ever for admit- 
 tance, but you still send me away,'' &c. 
 
 What an admirable turn may occasionally, if the 
 subject admit of it, be given to the even flow of 
 words by the expression of wonder and surprise. 
 The following is from Professor Archer Butler's 
 Sermon On crucifying the Son of God afresh. He 
 has been suggesting the thought to one of his 
 hearers, whom he has supposed to argue against the 
 possibility of such an idea entering his head; and 
 then he supposes him to start up and exclaim — 
 " What ! crucify Jesus, my Lord and my God, the 
 Majestic sufferer whom no man need have been 
 commanded to adore ; for no single-hearted man 
 could ever have seen or heard him without the in- 
 stinctive adoration of devoted love ! Crucify Him ! 
 No ! bring me to the trial, place me in the Judg- 
 ment Hall of Pilate, or in front of the accursed tree ; 
 let me look but once upon my Saviour's face ; and 
 I will tear that crown of thorns from His bleeding 
 brow, and bend in worship of my offended Lord 
 before them all" (^Sermon iv. vol. 1). Look at 
 all the sermons, on any obvious subject, which were 
 written in the last century. If the subject wasfaith, 
 you would be condemned to read through a dry, 
 continuous description of this virtue, with no break 
 in the monotony of the style. It never occurred to 
 the writer that there was any way of approaching 
 
 M 
 
162 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 the subject by illustration, by biography, or by 
 anecdote. Even the statement, unattractive as it is, 
 is useless, because it is spread over so mucli ground, 
 that from its very diffusiveness it eludes the grasp 
 of the hearer. The man of tact, on the other hand, 
 studying how best he shall present the subject in 
 every possible variety, sums up, in a few sentences 
 of narrative or statement, all the other has said in his 
 twenty pages, and proceeds to show the working of 
 faith in certain instances recorded in Scripture. One 
 writer perhaps takes all those cases in the Gospel 
 to whom our Lord addressed the words — '^ 21iy 
 faith hath saved thee.'' Another takes the line St. 
 Paul has done in enumerating those of whom the 
 world was not worthy. 
 
 Or again, if repentance be the theme ; instead of 
 an elaborate half hour description of " repentancey' 
 of which probably every word would be forgotten by 
 next Sunday, if the preacher, after some simple 
 statement of the doctrine, follow it out through a 
 catena of instances from Scripture, something like 
 that which was followed at the Oxford Lent lectures 
 of 1858 : Esau finding no place for repentance ; 
 Pharaoh repenting while the plagues are on him, 
 but relapsing afterwards ; Saul asking Samuel to 
 honour him before the people and before Israel; 
 Ahab's imperfect repentance — " ^6'^.^?^ thou horn 
 Ahab humbleth himscf.^'' — Judas rushing into de- 
 spair : or, to trace it through more favourable in- 
 stances, the prodigal returns in self-abasement and 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 103 
 
 confession ; David takes all the blame to himself — 
 " I have sinned ; but these sheep, what have they 
 done ?" — St. Peter goes out and v-eeps bitterly : in 
 this manner the subject ^ows on the hearers ; they 
 see it, they understand it, they carry it away with 
 them, which in the dry statement of fact I imagine 
 they very seldom do. 
 
 To illustrate this from an actual case, look at a 
 sermon by the author of the celebrated Ode on the 
 Burial of Sir John Moore. The text is Ecclesi- 
 astes viii. 2 : — " Because sentence against an evil 
 work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of 
 the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil." He 
 first states the fact — if sentence upon evil deeds was 
 executed speedily men would not think of the sin 
 without thinking also of the punishment. He then 
 shows that in some cases punishment treads close 
 upon the sin ; *he adds cumulative evidence of this 
 fact from all parts of Scripture. He instances the 
 case of the flood, the murder of Abel by Cain, the 
 cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the case of Korah, 
 Dathan, and Abiram, whom the earth swallowed up. 
 He passes on to the blasphemer who was stoned 
 without the camp, the sabbath-breaker, who met a 
 like fate, and those of whom there fell in one day 
 three-and-twenty thousand, as instances where the 
 Almighty bared His own arm for immediate ven- 
 geance. 
 
 Or look, he continues, at the Christian dispensa- 
 tion. There is a guilty pair come before the Apos- 
 
164 PAPERS ON PREACHING, 
 
 ties with their hands full of gifts, and a lie in their 
 mouth ; and behold they fall down and give up the 
 ghost. Turn your eyes to Herod, and, while the 
 people are shouting " it is the voice of God," the 
 angel of the Lord hath smitten him. 
 
 To complete the argument he instances next 
 from daily life — the drunkard and the debauchee 
 who have ruined their health, and the prodigal who 
 has brought himself to poverty. He speaks of con- 
 science smiting, the moment sin is committed, itself 
 a speedy avenger. He sums up these by the con- 
 clusion that sudden judgments come often enough to 
 show us that there is punishment, but yet so seldom 
 as to prove that the greater vengeance is yet to come, 
 in that great day when all things shall be made 
 equal, and God be justified in all His sayings. Thus 
 Charles Wolfe teaches variety in style as the best 
 way to interest and to instruct; for, says Arch- 
 deacon Russell, his biographer, — " He knew the 
 vast importance of that brief space of time during 
 which a minister is permitted to address his flock, 
 and he was fearful lest those moments which are so 
 pregnant with the concerns of eternity should be 
 squandered away in vague harangue or barren dis- 
 cussion." 
 
 He, therefore, who would command attention 
 must be well armed with variegated knowledge, 
 able to apply it readily, able to make diverse illus- 
 trations converge to one point. He must be mighty 
 in the Scriptures^ not only in some select parts, but 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 165 
 
 equally in all ; in the historical books, and in the 
 poetical books of the sacred volume, as well as in 
 Galatians and the Romans. This will do away 
 with a great deal of the sameness which makes some 
 sermons so very tedious. Then when people hear 
 him they " will hear him gladly J^ As it is at pre- 
 sent, the Bible which many quote from might be a 
 thin volume indeed. How few are familiar with 
 the prophetical writings ? (See remarks on this, by 
 way of comparison of the modern with the ancient 
 writers, of Mr. Neale,i^/(ec?^<^^?a/Pre«cA^?^^,p.xxvi.) 
 The liturgy and the articles of the Church should be 
 quoted, so as to make them familiar books. " It is 
 a good plan," says the late Robert Anderson, " to 
 write your sermons with your prayer-book as well 
 as your bible before you, so that you may appeal to 
 the articles and to the formularies of the Church" 
 (Zz/^,p.48). 
 
 I observe that an eminent nonconformist preacher 
 appeals often to the hymns which have been sung, 
 saying, " Doyou douht this ? Is the belief of that too 
 great a stretch of your faith ? What, have not 
 you already given your assent to it in the hymn we 
 have just sung ?" If this could be done with so good 
 effect when there was no ritual to whose words the 
 preacher could appeal, how much more powerfully 
 could it be used with ourselves, who have the 
 articles, the liturgy, the occasional services, to ap- 
 peal to, who can remind the sponsor and the cate- 
 chumen of his own plighted troth ! 
 
166 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 In a reading age like this (an age, be it remem- 
 bered, of printing and education, of which we have 
 only seen the beginning probably, compared with 
 what our children and grand-children will see) — in a 
 reading age, may not allusions to the current litera- 
 ture of the day be reverently introduced, w ithout 
 the charge of pedantry and affectation, if they sub- 
 serve to the one great object — ^' the reducing of man 
 into obedience to God V I observe that poetry of a 
 popular and high tone is now of frequent occurrence 
 in quotations among sermon writers. If any of 
 these serve to drive home a thought, or to fix a 
 floating idea, it is consecrating earthly vessels to the 
 service of the sanctuary. What Dean Trench has 
 done in the following instance with our old Latin 
 classics in academic ground, has often been done 
 with equal effect in humbler audiences with a more 
 familiar poetry. "It was boldly said by one of 
 old, All the way to heaven is heaven. The w^ords are 
 also true in the converse. If all the way to heaven 
 be heaven, God blessing even now with infinite 
 blessings His servants that walk that way, so too, 
 which is the same truth on its sadder and sterner 
 side. All the way to hell is hell : — 
 
 ' Vestibulum ante ipsum, primisque in faucibus Orci, 
 Luctiis et ultrices posuere cubilia cume; 
 Pallentesque habitant morbi tristisque senectus.' " 
 
 We sum up in the words of the author of The 
 Eclipse of Faith : — ''The style we commend is cha- 
 racterized by rapid changes of construction — frequent 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 167 
 
 recurrence to the interrogative — not to mention 
 numberless other indications of vivacity and anima- 
 tion, marked in speech by the most rapid and varied 
 changes of voice and gesture. Of all its charac- 
 teristics the most striking and the most universal is 
 the moderate use of the imagination. Being of that 
 brief, rapid, familiar, natural manner, which a mind 
 in earnest ever assumes, it is best illustrated by the 
 style of a man engaged in conversation on some 
 serious subject — intent, for instance, on convincing 
 his neighbours of some truth, or persuading him to 
 some course of conduct." 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE POWER OF THE HAND AND EYE IN 
 INFLUENCING AN AUDIENCE. 
 
 fT was said of the vexed question of 
 "whether written or extempore ser- 
 mons are the best?" that it cannot be 
 answered in the affirmative or nega- 
 tive in all cases and for all people. We must say 
 the same of the question now to be considered, 
 " whether action is desirable in preachers ?" it is 
 not a question which can be answered by a simple 
 yea or nay. Leaving it, therefore, as open ground 
 for each man to arrive at his own conclusion, ac- 
 cording to his own natural bent of mind and tem- 
 perament, we will discuss the different opinions 
 which are afloat, and record the judgment of such 
 men as seem worthy of honour. 
 
 Doctor Johnson, in his usual sententious way, 
 pronounces against it; but the argument he ad- 
 duces, and on which he grounds his opinion, only 
 needs the reason and logic of a schoolboy to refute 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 169 
 
 it. He says, in his Life of the poet Dr. Watts : — 
 " Dr. Isaac Watts did not endeavour to assist his 
 eloquence hy any gesticulations ; for as no corporeal 
 actions have any coy^respondence with theological 
 truth, he did not see how they could enforce it.'* 
 Now this is very well to round a period, and if the 
 premises are good, according to the same Dr. 
 Watts' logic, the conclusion would be established. 
 But the premises are totally wrong; the learned 
 lexicographer is guilty of petitio principii, and is 
 taking for granted exactly what he ought to prove. 
 For who does not see that corporeal action has to 
 do with the enforcement of all truth, and therefore 
 of theological truth ? Do we not all see that a man is 
 convinced by the earnestness of his friend's manner, 
 if in conversation he take him by the button-hole and 
 reason earnestly with him ? This is an instance of 
 corporeal action in its simplest and least studied 
 form, and therefore one from which we may form a 
 correct opinion. 
 
 In another passage of Dr. Johnson, which occurs 
 in the Rambler, we find his opinion somewhat mo- 
 dified. But here again Dr. Johnson seems to have 
 in his mind's eye only action in its lowest form, viz. 
 that violent theatrical gesticulation which is unna- 
 tural, and therefore devoid of gracefulness. " Whe- 
 ther action may not be of use in churches where 
 the preacher addresses a mingled audience may de- 
 serve inquiry. It is certain that the senses are more 
 powerful as the reason is weaker, and that he whose 
 
170 PAPERS ON PRE AGEING. 
 
 ears convey little to the mind may sometimes listen 
 with his eyes, till truth takes possession of his heart. 
 If there be any use of gesticulation in the pulpit, it 
 must be applied to the ignorant and rude, who will 
 be more affected by vehemence than delighted by 
 propriety/'' (^Hambler). 
 
 This vehemence in action, as opposed to ^?ro- 
 j)riety by the Doctor, is of course a very different 
 thing from the action we speak of as being often 
 admissible with effect into the pulpit. This action 
 we would define as a natural consonance of the 
 limbs of the speaker with his mind, the gesture 
 keeping pace with the thought, and having sym- 
 pathy with it ', and being by this sympathy set in 
 motion, just as a man of musical ear often im- 
 consciously beats time to an air in music. It is an 
 essential attribute of action that it should not be 
 forced ; to give rules, therefore, or to try (as some 
 have done) to teach action as a histrionic art, at 
 once destroys that which alone is desirable in ac- 
 tion — its spontaneity and simplicity. When it is 
 graceful and easy, it is the natural accompaniment 
 of the voice, and a very effective mode of arresting 
 attention, according to the old quotation — 
 
 " Segnius irritant surdos demissa per aures, 
 Quam quae sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus." 
 
 Just as in good reading the voice is the natural 
 commentary on the sense of the passage read — being 
 gad or cheerful as the sense is — in the same way the 
 eyes and the hands of the preacher afford yet a fur- 
 
PAPERS ON PBEACillNG. 171 
 
 ther commentary on the thing spoken, and are a 
 forcible motive-power, by no means to be neglected 
 when we are in duty bound to avail ourselves of 
 every resource to reach the hearts of our people. 
 It has been well written of the origin of gesture, 
 that " apiwopriate gesture in sjjeakmg arises from 
 the mind either anticipating some forcible expres- 
 sion, or finding words on the spur of the moment 
 inadequate fully to convey its meaning " (The 
 Speaker at Home, p. 92). 
 
 The best refutation of Samuel Johnson's dictum 
 quoted above — " that no corporeal action has any- 
 thing to do with theological trutK^ — is found in the 
 well-known Bridgewater Treatise, by Sir Charles 
 Bell, on The Hand — its Mechanism and vital 
 Endowments as evincing Design. The following is 
 the passage most to the point, which is also fortified 
 by the testimony of Quintilian : — 
 
 "On expression in the hand — before we conclude 
 let us speak of the hand as an organ of expression. 
 Formal dissertations have been composed on this 
 topic. But were we to seek for authorities, we 
 should take in evidence the works of the o:reat 
 painters. By representing the hands disposed in 
 conformity with the attitude of the figures, the old 
 masters have been able to express every dififerent 
 kind of sentiment in their compositions. Who, for 
 example, has not been sensible to the expression of 
 reverence in the hands of the Magdalens by Guido, 
 to the eloquence in those of the Cartoons by 
 
172 PAPERS ON PEEACHING. 
 
 Raphael, or the significant force in those of the 
 Last Supper by Da Vinci ? In these great works 
 may be seen all that Quintilian says the hand is 
 capable of expressing : — ' For other farts of the 
 hody assist the speaker, but these I may say speak 
 for themselves. By them roe ask, we promise, we 
 invoke, we dismiss, we threaten, we entreat, we depre- 
 cate, we express fear, joy, grief, our doubts, our 
 assent, our penitence; we show moderation, pro- 
 fusion ; we mark number and time' " {3Iurray^s 
 edit. 0/1854, p. 262). 
 
 Addison, alluding to the " insipid serenity'* of 
 English speaking, thus writes : — " We can speak of 
 life and death in cold blood, and though our zeal 
 breaks out in the finest tropes and figures, it is not 
 able to stir a limb about us. In England we see 
 people lulled to sleep with solid and elaborate dis- 
 courses of piety, who would be warmed and trans- 
 ported out of themselves by the bellowings and dis- 
 tortions of enthusiasm. If nonsense, when accom- 
 panied with such an emotion of voice and body, has 
 such an influence on men's minds, what might we 
 not expect from many of those admirable discourses 
 which are printed in our tongue, were they delivered 
 with becoming fervour, and with the most agreeable 
 graces of voice and gesture" (^Addison's Works, by 
 Bp. Hurd, vol. iii. p. 386). 
 
 Whether Sydney Smith had ever seen this pas- 
 sage or not, he certainly has written thoughts which 
 are a good commentary and enlargement on it. 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 173 
 
 The passage is so graphic that we give it at length : 
 — " To other causes of the unpopularity of sermons 
 may be added the extremely ungraceful manner in 
 which they are delivered. The English, generally 
 remarkable for doing very good things in a very 
 bad manner, seem to have reserved the maturity 
 and plenitude of their awkwardness for the pulpit. 
 A clergyman clings to his velvet cushion with 
 either hand, keeps his eye riveted on his book, 
 speaks of the ecstacies of joy and fear with a voice 
 and a face which indicate neither, and pinions his 
 body and soul into the same attitude of limb and 
 thought, for fear of being called theatrical and af- 
 fected. The most intrepid veteran of us all dares 
 no more than wipe his face with his cambric suda- 
 rium ; if, by mischance, his hand slip from its 
 orthodox gripe of the velvet, he draws it back as 
 ft om liquid brimstone or the caustic iron of the law, 
 and atones for this indecorum by fresh inflexibility 
 and more rigorous sameness. Is it wonder then 
 that every semi-delirious sectary, who pours forth 
 his animated nonsense with the genuine look and 
 voice of passion, should gesticulate away the con- 
 gregation of the most profound and learned divine 
 of the Established Church, and in two days preach 
 him bare to the very sexton ? Why are we natural 
 everywhere but in the pulpit ? No man expresses 
 warm and animated feelings anywhere else, with 
 his mouth alone, but with his whole hody ; he arti- 
 culates with every limb, and talks from head to foot 
 
174 PAPERS ON PREACHING, 
 
 with a thousand voices. Why this holoplexia on 
 sacred occasions alone ? Why call in the aid of 
 paralysis to piety ? Is it a rule of oratory to ba- 
 lance the style against the subject, and to handle 
 the most sublime truths in the driest manner ? Is 
 sin to be taken from men, as Eve was from Adam, 
 by casting them into a deep slumber ? or from what 
 possible perversion of common sense are we all to 
 look like field preachers in Zembla, holy lumps of 
 ice, numbed into quiescence, stagnation, and mumb- 
 ling? 
 
 " It is theatrical to use action, and it is metho- 
 distical to use action ! But we have cherished con- 
 tempt for sectaries, and persevered in dignified 
 tameness so long, that while we are freezing com- 
 mon sense for large salaries in stately churches, 
 amidst whole acres and furlongs of empty pews, the 
 crowd are feasting on ungrammatical fervour and 
 illiterate animation in the crumbling liovels of Me- 
 thodists. If influence over the imagination can 
 produce these powerful effects, if this be the chain 
 by which the people are dragged captive at the 
 wheel of enthusiasm, why are we, who are rocked 
 in the cradle of ancient genius, who hold in one 
 hand the book of the wisdom of God, and in the 
 other grasp that eloquence which ruled the Pagan 
 world, why are we never to rouse, to appeal, to in- 
 flame, to break through every barrier, up to the 
 very haunts and chambers of the soul ? If the 
 vilest interest upon earth can daily call forth all the 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 175 
 
 powers of the mind, are we to harangue on public 
 order and public happiness, to picture a reuniting 
 world, a resurrection of souls, and to unveil the 
 throne of God, with a wretched apathy which we 
 neither feel nor show in the most trifling concerns 
 of life ? This surely can be neither decency nor 
 piety, but ignorant shame, boyish bashfulness, lux- 
 urious indolence, or anything but propriety and 
 sense. There is, I grant, something discouraging 
 at present to a man of sense in the sarcastical 
 phrase of popular preacher ; but I am not entirely 
 without hope, that the time may come when energy 
 in the pulpit will be no longer considered as a mark 
 of superficial understanding; when animation and 
 affectation will be separated ; when churches will 
 cease (as Swift says) to be public dormitories ; and 
 sleep be no longer looked upon as the most con- 
 venient vehicle of good sense " {^Preface to Sydnev 
 Smith's Sermons), 
 
 If we were asked to account for the want of 
 animation in the generality of sermons preached in 
 the Established Church, we should assign as a rea- 
 son the habit which obtains of reading sermons 
 from a manuscript. In the pulpits of Dissenters, 
 where manuscripts are not used, there is certainly 
 more animation. That this is the natural result of 
 such a system is evident by reverting to a compa- 
 rison which was made use of before. When a man 
 is talking on a topic about which he is very much 
 interested to a friend, we notice that his earnestness 
 
176 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 naturally breaks out in bodily gestures — he points 
 with his finger, he sways his arm, or he seizes his 
 friend by the button-hole; such is the inevitable 
 accompaniment of extempore address, whether it be 
 in conversation or in preaching. But if this same 
 man take a letter out of his pocket to read to his 
 friend, his eyes follow the writing, and the gesticu- 
 lation which had enforced his conversation ceases 
 when he reads. The case is somewhat similar in 
 written and extemporized sermons. But, on the 
 other hand, it may be urged, and with some truth, 
 that when the matter is written down, and is thus 
 secured to the preacher, the mind is at leisure to 
 energize in the natural vent of gesticulation ; while 
 in extempore delivery it has to concentrate all its 
 attention on the matter and thought, so that the 
 ensuing sentences may follow in their due sequence 
 and order. 
 
 If we admit this as a corollary to the preceding 
 proposition, the result seems to be something of 
 this sort : — that the style which admits most readily 
 of action seems to be a written sermon, which is 
 either the free current of the writer's own matured 
 thoughts — or, if he shall have found it expedient to 
 use the scaffolding of other men's writings — yet he 
 shall have made the trains of thought so entirely his 
 own, by digesting them, and thus passing them 
 through the alembic of his own mind, before he 
 throws them on paper in his own natural language 
 and natural flow of sentences, that they are, in fact, 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 177 
 
 (since there is nothing new under the sun,) virtually 
 his own. This, when he has done, he will naturally 
 take them up, and will not be condemned to follow 
 in too servile a way the manuscript, but will raise 
 his eyes with ease and dignity to enforce his mean- 
 ing on his hearers, and will be at leisure to use 
 such other gesticulations as are auxiliary to the 
 sense. 
 
 This, it will be replied, takes time and labour ; 
 but so must every work which has for its object great 
 ends, for ^' all glorious things are difficult." Like 
 extempore delivery, an animated style (though not 
 so difficult to acquire as many imagine) is not to be 
 mastered the first or the second attempt; but for 
 any to despair, because they fail on the few first 
 occasions, is as plainly contrary to common sense as 
 for a man to say he shall never be a musician, be- 
 cause he cannot play an instrument at the end of a 
 week's instruction. As the EnMish are confessedlv 
 a modest and unmoved nation, it is but a truism to 
 say that they require some discipline and culture to 
 undo these constitutional defects. 
 
 This is not the case with foreigners; they are 
 naturally lively and animated. An Italian can un- 
 derstand (far better than we can) Raphael's picture 
 of St. Paul preaching at Athens, with both his 
 arms extended. Gavazzi, delivering an oration in 
 Italian to English people who know only their 
 own language, may be followed to a certain extent 
 by the way in which he acts the scenes he de- 
 
 N 
 
178 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 scribes. It is told, too, of Madame Rachel, the 
 actress, that while in Russia she succeeded, by her 
 wonderfully expressive gesticulation, in making her 
 meaning intelligible to people who did not under- 
 stand the language in which she spoke {^Fraser^s 
 Magazine for August, 1858). The following anec- 
 dote is illustrative of the power of action. On the 
 occasion of the day of Prayer and Humiliation, 
 when the army was in the Crimea, a clergyman 
 was preaching to a small village congregation in 
 Kenton this text {Exodus xvii. 11) : — " It came to 
 pass that when Moses held up his hand that Israel 
 prevailed, and when he let down his hand that 
 Amalek prevailed." The lesson, as applied to the 
 troops in the Crimea, connected with the churches 
 being that day opened throughout the entire king- 
 dom, was obvious, and the preacher was speaking 
 extempore, in a conversational way, as it was a 
 small and simple congregation, with considerable 
 emphasis of action. There was in that village 
 audience a woman who was quite deaf. But having 
 been only deaf the last few years, and a good 
 scholar, as well as a diligent reader of Scripture, by 
 getting the text found for her by the person who 
 sat near her, she was able, it seems, in this in- 
 stance, to follow the drift of the sermon, for on 
 coming out of church she saluted the clergyman 
 with the following speech : — " Beautiful sermon — 
 never heard a word of it — but I knew when Amalek 
 and I knew when Israel prevailed." 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 179 
 
 To what conclusion shall we come if not to this, 
 that if gesticulation conveys some portion of mean- 
 ing when language is not understood, how available 
 may it be as an auxiliary to enforce thoughts which 
 language inadequately expresses? And what an 
 assistance must it be to a feeble voice in carrying 
 the meaning to the end of a large assembly. 
 
 It is not difficult to find modern instances of 
 successful action in the pulpit, bounded by the rules 
 of propriety, to sustain what we have set forth. Let 
 one suffice. There is a clergyman in London at 
 the present day who was said, by a grandson of 
 Daniel Wilson, to have been able to keep a con- 
 gregation interested and awake in the sultry climate 
 of the cathedral at Calcutta. The same preacher, 
 landing in England, with no interest or patronage, 
 made his way in London to the pulpit of a proprie- 
 tary chajDcl, which chapel has, we believe, been 
 since purchased for him by his congregation ; and, 
 at all events, he holds his own by his pulpit decla- 
 mation. If we come to analyse and weigh his 
 printed discourses, they seem to be below the 
 average of printed sermons, so that there must be 
 something in the delivery and animation with which 
 they are declaimed which gives them their power. 
 The power is not in the matter, for there is nothing 
 in them beyond certain descriptive points and paint- 
 ings of scenes in the Holy Land, which are the 
 natural result of the preacher having visited those 
 hallowed spots which he describes. It must be, 
 
180 PAPERS ON PBEACHINQ. 
 
 therefore, in the manner, and this we believe is the 
 case. 
 
 This manner may have had its origin in the early 
 visits of the preacher, when at the Univei'sity, to the 
 Oxford Debating Society; and may have been 
 heightened by his friendship, in after life, with 
 Macready, one of the greatest of tragedians. If 
 such conclusions are correct, it proves that action is 
 a thing which is, to a certain extent, to be culti- 
 vated by exercise in debating societies, and from 
 the imitation of illustrious examples. If so, the 
 theological colleges might impress the necessity of 
 it on their students, and guide them to the effective 
 and moderate practice of it, being assured that it 
 is the fire with which the preacher speaks that 
 kindles the warmth in the heart of his hearers. 
 
 " Efforts are worth making," says Professor Bau- 
 tain, " to acquire beforehand good habits in this re- 
 spect, in order that the body, trained 7vith delibera- 
 tion to imjndse of the words, and to adapt itself to 
 their insj)iration, may execute of its own accord, 
 and gracefully, the most expressive movements, 
 may itself take the most appropriate attitudes, and 
 not have its limbs working ineffectually, or with 
 the arms motionless and tied down to the figure, or 
 the hands nailed to the pulpit or the platform 
 balustrade. Nothing is more wearisome to the 
 audience than a violent delivery without respite ; 
 and, next to a monotony of voice, nothing more 
 readily puts it to sleep than a gestm-e for ever 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 181 
 
 repeated, which marks with exactness each part of 
 the period, as a pendulum keeps time. This por- 
 tion of oratorical delivery, more important than is 
 supposed, greatly attended to by the ancients, and 
 too much neglected by the moderns, may be ac- 
 quired by all the exercises which form the body, by 
 giving it carriage and ease, g;race of countenance 
 and motion, and still more by well-directed studies 
 in elocution. To this should be added the often- 
 repeated study of the example of those speakers 
 who are most distinguished for the quality in ques- 
 tion, which is only too rare at the present day.'' 
 
 What has brought discredit upon action seems to 
 be the cushion-thumping of some who knew no 
 other gesticulation than this ; but they forgot that 
 the dust from the old cushions raised a cloud and 
 not a halo about their illustrations, and obscured 
 rather than exemplified their meaning. In The 
 Sea Dream, by the poet-laureate, this violent em- 
 phasis is thus described: — 
 
 " For sideways up he swung his arms and shriek'd 
 Thus, thus with violence, ev'n as if he held 
 The Apocalyptic millstone, and himself 
 Were that great angel. Thus, with violence^ 
 Shall Babylon be cast into the sea." 
 
 " Action," says Archbishop Whately, '^ seems to 
 be natural to man when speaking earnestly; but 
 the state of the case at present seems to be, that the 
 disgust excited, on the one hand, by awkward and 
 ungraceful motions, and, on the other, by studied 
 
182 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 gesticulations, has led to the general disuse of 
 action altogether, and has induced men to form 
 the habit (for it certainly is a formed habit) of 
 keeping themselves quite still, or nearly so, when 
 speaking. This is supposed to be, and perhaps is, 
 the more rational and more dignified way of speak- 
 ing ; but so strong is the tendency to indicate strong 
 internal emotion by some kind of outward gesture, 
 that those who do not encourage or allow them- 
 selves in any, frequently fall unconsciously into 
 some awkward trick of swinging the body, folding 
 
 apaper, twisting a string, or the like Boys 
 
 are generally taught to employ the prescribed action 
 either after or during the utterance of the words it 
 is to enforce. The best and most appropriate ac- 
 tion must, from this circumstance alone, necessarily 
 appear a feeble affectation. It suggests the idea of 
 a person speaking to those who do not fully under- 
 stand the language, and striving by signs to ex- 
 plain the meaning of what he has been saying. 
 The very same gesture, had it come at the proper, 
 that is, the natural point of time, might perhaps 
 have added greatly to the effect; viz. had it ^;?'e- 
 ceded somewhat the utterance of the words. That 
 is always the natural order of action. An emotion 
 struggling for utterance produces a tendency to a 
 bodily gesture, to express that emotion more quickly 
 than words can be framed, — the words follow as soon 
 as they can be sj)olten. And this being always the 
 case with a real, earnest, unstudied speaker, this 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 183 
 
 mode of placing the action foremost, gives (if it be 
 otherwise appropriate) the appearance of earnest 
 emotion actually present in the mind. And the 
 reverse of this natural order would alone be suffi- 
 cient to convert the action of Demosthenes himself 
 into ridiculous and idle mimicrv." 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 OF THE USE OF A PREACHER'S OLD 
 COMPOSITIONS. 
 
 fF it is the object of a preacher to give 
 to his people the best discourses, both 
 in matter, arrangement, and illustra- 
 tion, which he is capable of produc- 
 ing, it matters very little whether he has w^ritten 
 them for the occasion in hand or for some former 
 occasion, provided only that they are the best he can 
 produce, either his own original matter, or the 
 thoughts of other men, made his own by medita- 
 tion, and by being passed through the alembic of 
 his own mind. If, therefore, a sermon be a work of 
 time and thought it should never be thrown away, 
 but be made the starting-point for fresh labours on 
 the same theme. To give nothing but the old 
 staple is the work of an idle and a careless man, 
 who is contented with less than the best ; yet, on 
 the other hand, we cannot understand any one who 
 has bestowed pains on an original manuscript burn- 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 185 
 
 ing it as entirely worthless. With the busy lives 
 clergymen lead economy of time is at least a duty. 
 Might not a middle course be pursued between 
 burning the old sermon and preaching the old 
 sermon in its entirety ? Might it not be preserved 
 with blank pages left on every other side of the 
 sheet, on which might be interleaved, from time 
 to time, whatever of new matter or new illustration 
 presented itself? Who that, walks about his parish 
 as the thinking man walks, or who that reads as 
 the thinking man reads, lives a day without say- 
 ing to himself, I wish I had thought of this argu- 
 ment, or of that illustration, when I was writing 
 on such and such a subject ? Then, when the ser- 
 mons come round again, these things, being noted 
 down in the spare leaves, will come to his support, 
 and his sermons will, like old wine, improve by 
 time and keeping ; they will stand on new argu- 
 ments, and be graced with new illustrations ; for, as 
 Fuller reminds us, — " while reasons are the pillars, 
 similes are the windows of every structure." Some 
 such course as this would make the old manuscript 
 the most valuable book of notes, from which, as 
 from a rough copy, a new sermon should in after 
 years be compiled, which would make a student's 
 life a cumulative and progressive labour, combining 
 the earnest fresh thoughts of youth with the matured 
 experience of after years. And who can deny that 
 this is the surest way for the instructed scribe to 
 bring out of his treasure things new and old; and of 
 
186 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 letting slip no opportunity of improving the raw 
 material of the novice into the finished fabric of a 
 master in Israel ? ^^ Besides," says George Herbert, 
 " the work of composing being to be done in the 
 younger and preparatory times of the pastor, it is 
 an honest joy to look back ever after to well spent 
 hours." 
 
 The early years of a man's ministry are those in 
 which he has time for study, as well as the habit of 
 reading in a pains-taking way which the discipline 
 of school and college has taught him ; certainly he 
 has then freshness for his work, of which golden 
 stimulus youth alone is full. Afterwards the wear 
 and tear of parochial anxieties (the care of all the 
 churches) dull the edge ; his time is broken in upon 
 by family interruptions, and his course of study be- 
 comes desultory and fragmentary. Unless a man 
 becomes a sermon writer in his youth, he seldom be- 
 comes so in after-life. In most men, I suppose, the 
 sermons of the first curacy are rude and ill-digested, 
 and we never take them up in after-life without a 
 feeling of dissatisfaction. Yet they have their value ; 
 they are the rough material on which we have learnt 
 our trade : certainly they are the metre by which we 
 may be aware of our progress — itself the noblest and 
 most honest encouragement a man can have — to be 
 ever advancing — 
 
 Ai£V apiaTtvetv Kai vTrstpoxov tfifisiai aXXwi/. 
 
 With the change of hearers, and the change and 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 187 
 
 alterations which, by interleaving and interlining, 
 would naturally grow year by year on the MSS., 
 they would come round in cycles of two or three 
 years with sufficient freshness. There can be no 
 great object in writing over again what you have 
 once written well, and there is no shame in repeat- 
 ing what has cost you your best labour, and has 
 been once for all hammered out on the anvil of 
 thought. The council of Fuller here comes to my 
 help : — " As for our minister he preferreth rather to 
 entertain his people with wholesome cold meat which 
 was on the table before, than with that which is 
 from the spit hot, but raw and half roasted ; yet in 
 repetition of the same sermon every edition hath a 
 new addition, if not of new matter, at least of new 
 affections, of whom (saith St. Paul) we have told 
 you often, and now tell you weeping." 
 
 Some of the counsellors of young sermon writers 
 have advised, that, when a young man has two ser- 
 mons a week he should borrow one in its entirety, 
 in order that he may bestow his undivided attention 
 on the other ; thus to have one MS. worth keejnng 
 for stock instead of two hasty compilations. This 
 use of the labours of others is sanctioned by the 
 Homilies, which were for those unable to compose ; 
 and scarcity of time must be remedied as well as 
 scarcity of intellect. In the plan which we have 
 been advocating, the interleaved sermons would 
 serve as commonplace books of thoughts arranged 
 under texts suitable to the Christian seasons. 
 
188 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 Nothing is more certain than the way in which 
 abundance of matter is let slip in our daily reading 
 from want of a systematic repository in which to ar- 
 range it. Every book which we take up supplies 
 something which may be adapted to the pulpit by 
 him that has the seeing eye. Thus we shall con- 
 tinually water our flocks ^* from wells which we 
 digged not." Even our own old thoughts, with in- 
 creased knowledge and experience, become starting- 
 points for new ones, and from the old wells re- 
 opened there gush out fresh springs in abundance. 
 
 This, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter ; 
 as the very worst way of setting to work to write a 
 discourse is to take a bible and hunt for a text, and 
 then to take paper and write down one's thoughts on 
 that text without arrangement or forecast ; so the best 
 way is to have a set of subjects coming round of 
 which you have chewed the cud of meditation, and 
 to which you have referred all you have heard, seen, 
 and read. Without some such aid as this, a man 
 may often sit down in a desultory way, and write 
 without a starting-point and without a destination. 
 
 But it is in extempore sermons — which, where 
 they may be had, we have warmly advocated — it is 
 in extempore sermons that the old writings are most 
 available. Your old notes for assisting the memory, 
 and keeping the skein of ideas unravelled, combine 
 the advantage of well-considered matter, with the 
 freshness of new language. He who professes the 
 inestimable advantage of being able to speak from 
 
PAPERS ON PBEACHING, 189 
 
 skeleton notes, must, by the different language in 
 which he will clothe the skeleton, and the fresh 
 illustrations with which he will elucidate his subject, 
 give to an old skeleton all the freshness of youth and 
 novelty. There can be nothing very new in the 
 choice of subjects, because, in a course of two or three 
 years, the church services will have carried their 
 expositor tlie whole round of doctrine and practice, 
 and he must revert to the same again. Extempore 
 preaching from notes will, from the alterations in a 
 man's age and feelings, nay, from the very seasons 
 of the year, give new phases to the old trains of 
 thought. 
 
 Our series of papers is meant to be not without 
 design and connection, and this argument will be 
 useful in the chain, for this reason — that it removes 
 the argument which would arise against extempore 
 preaching on the score of want of time. We have 
 said that extempore address requires more prepara- 
 tion than a written discourse ; but then it will be a 
 saving in the end to have well prepared a course of 
 skeleton notes, because you are then furnished for 
 life. These outlines may be used oftener than written 
 discourses, because of the novelty with which un- 
 premeditated language will clothe them. Suppose 
 the preacher to have prepared for himself a set of 
 outlines for every Sunday in the year, like Nelson's 
 book on the Festivals, he can refresh his memory at 
 any leisure half hour, and the trains of long-ago- 
 elaborated thought will return at his bidding. The 
 
190 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 following advice occurs in TJie Sj)eaher at Home 
 (Bell and Daldy) : — " I cannot but remind candi- 
 dates for Holy Orders how amply the labour of one 
 or two years in the cultivation of extempore address 
 will be repaid through a whole life-time. In the 
 actual preparation of sermons their labour will be 
 lightened, because it will enable them to make use 
 of these same sermons without the fear of their 
 losing effect by repetition ; and yet the labour of 
 preparing them again will be very light, resolving 
 itself into merely reading them over, and thinking 
 out some portions with care and accuracy" (p. 32). 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 OF THE LEGITIMATE USE TO BE MADE OF 
 OTHER MEN'S WRITINGS. 
 
 ^^^^\^HE saying of the wise man, that there 
 
 is nothing new under the sun, true more 
 
 m (f^ ^^" ^^^^ ^^ literature generally, is espe- 
 
 ' ~ cially true of theology. In this very 
 
 limited domain — where the subjects are reproduced 
 as it were in a cycle — there must be to a great ex- 
 tent a repetition of thought and phraseology. 
 Bishop Jewel says, in his sermon on the text, 
 Let us cast away the works of darkness : — " This 
 portion of Scripture has been so often expounded 
 and opened to your hearing, yet shall it not be un- 
 profitable once again to entreat thereof. For albeit 
 the proportion and ground of the matter be one, yet 
 some difference may he in the manner of utterance^ ^ 
 {Parker Society's edit. p. 1035). If, in Bishop 
 Jewel's time, this text had been worn out, how 
 many sermons have been preached upon it since, 
 coming as it does in the services for one of the 
 
192 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 Advent Sundays ! " The Catholic truths of Chris- 
 tianity, presented in every form and aspect to our 
 consideration, by the most learned and inquiring 
 minds of eighteen centuries, must inevitably entail 
 upon any man in the present day (unless he be one 
 of those rare exceptions upon whom, from time to 
 time, nature lavishes her choicest gifts), a deep 
 conviction that while he has desired to devote all 
 the freshness of his own thoughts to their illus- 
 tration, what he imagines he has best said will fre- 
 quently be but a veri/ inferior j'ej^roduction of what 
 others have said before''^ {Preface to Mr. Bellew's 
 Sermons). 
 
 " It is the privilege," says John Foster, " the ex- 
 clusive privilege of genius to light its own fire." 
 The thousands and tens of thousands of sermons 
 that have been preached for eighteen centuries 
 have been but various editions of the same message 
 of glad tidings — God in Christy and th7'0ugh the 
 Spirit reconciling the world unto Himself Novelty, 
 therefore, in the subject-matter is not to be aimed 
 at ; and you shall be a lucky preacher if, by new 
 combinations, or by a happier style of illustration, 
 you shall cause men to look upon old truths with 
 new interest. 
 
 '•' Dixeris egregie, notura si callida verbum 
 Reddiderit junctura novum." 
 
 Still, it is anything but disheartening that so much 
 has been written and thought about theology — it is 
 anything but a subject of regret that printing has 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 193 
 
 preserved the thoughts of the good and the great in 
 all ages — we have a rich inheritance, mines of in- 
 finite depth in which to dig, and with the advan- 
 tage that much of the ore is purified and presented 
 ready to our use. Yea ! it is a blessed thought, 
 that all mankind, who have access to libraries, are 
 heirs of the labours and intellectual deposits of the 
 students of past ages ! It is a blessed thought, that 
 theological study, since printing, is a cumulative 
 process, that wisdom is justified of all her children, 
 which has been well expressed in these words : — 
 " Every man is a labourer for ^906'^mf?/, and makes 
 an addition to that great sum total of achieved 
 results, which may, in commercial phrase, he called 
 the capital of the human race^^ (Mr. Gladstone's 
 Speech at Edinburgh University^ '^ It is chiefly 
 through books that we enjoy intercourse with supe- 
 rior minds, and these invaluable means of commu- 
 nication are within the reach of all. In the best 
 books men talk to us — give us their most precious 
 thoughts — pour their souls into ours. God be 
 thanked for books. They are the voices of the 
 distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spi- 
 ritual life of all ages. They give to all who will 
 faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual pre- 
 sence of the best and greatest of our race" (Dr. 
 Channing). 
 
 It is happily conceived by Professor Blunt, in 
 his History of the Reformation, p. 109, that "the 
 art of printing, in this age of revival, was analogous 
 
 o . 
 
194 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 to the gift of ton/jues in the first promulgation of 
 the gospel. But even so, printing has the advan- 
 tage in that it preserves vrisdom for every succeed- 
 ing age, while the miraculous gift of speech con- 
 veyed it only to the existing generation of men." 
 
 It is this permanent possession which places the 
 diligent, but less gifted, student somewhat on an 
 equal footing with the brilliant man of less time 
 and opportunity for study. If he have only the 
 power of compiling, of adapting to his own audience, 
 of giving local tinges to general thoughts, then it 
 puts within his reach the power of being a useful if 
 not an eminent preacher — it takes away all excuses 
 for feeble and trashy sermons, enabling him to enter 
 into other men's labours, and to feed his flock with 
 the richness of other pastures. 
 
 If in an apostolic age — when books were none 
 and parchments were few — if, in an age w^hen in- 
 spiration was to supply in a great measure the de- 
 ficiences of study, the apostle did exhort the elders 
 to the duty oi giving attention to reading, how much 
 more is such an exhortation necessary when labour 
 is the chief requisite for success, when books are 
 easy of access, when the spirit of inquiry and in- 
 vestigation is abroad among the hearers, and should 
 therefore be followed by the teacher to keep pace 
 with the age. " Education has made men far better 
 judges and far less likely to be satisfied with a 
 weak, ill-digested sermon, than they were fifty 
 years ago" (J. C. Ryle). But is this the case? 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 195 
 
 " One dark spot there is," says an eminent prelate, 
 " amidst much that is bright, in regard to this sub- 
 ject. The number of men endowed with the highest 
 gifts of intellect, who give themselves to the Chris- 
 tian ministry, appears to me to be smaller than it was 
 fifteen years ago. There are many influences tend- 
 ing to this lamentable result, and threatening dan- 
 gerously to lower the standard of the English clergy 
 pre-eminently as to theological learning, and also 
 as to general intellectual attainments. May God 
 avert from us such an evil ! We shall, I trust, 
 never forget what our great Reformer so well re- 
 membered, that, for the support of the national 
 Church of Great Britain, we need not only a godly 
 hut also a learned clergy ^^ (^Bishop of Oxford^ s 
 Charge, 1860). 
 
 I remember to have heard a young writer express 
 himself thus boastfully of his originality — " Thank 
 God I never require to considt any writers, thoughts 
 come so readily to me that I only require a text 
 and a few sheets of pajjer.^' This suggested to 
 me a corresponding feeling of gratitude that I was 
 not one of his congregation. It requires a cer- 
 tain amount of knowledge to know one's own 
 ignorance ; and this intellectual Pharisee, thanking 
 God he was not, as other men, obliged to read 
 either for style or matter, had not arrived possibly 
 at that stage. As a man increases in wisdom so 
 does he increase in humility and self-distrust, and 
 it requires the mastery of all science, as in the case 
 
196 PAPERS ON PRE A CEING. 
 
 of Sir Isaac Newton, to enable a man to say with 
 that great philosopher : — " I have approached only 
 to the shores of the great ocean of knowledge, and 
 have gathered but a few pebbles on the strand." 
 On the other hand, we are warned that 
 
 " Fools step in where angels fear to tread." 
 
 Those who are our leaders in theology have 
 themselves drawn most largely on those who pre- 
 ceded them ; they are standard authorities, because 
 they did not write hastily, but after assiduous inter- 
 course with the great minds of the past ; they have 
 therefore warned us that theology should, like 
 what is said of a proverb, be " the wit of one and 
 the wisdom of many,^^ " Cranmer (for instance) 
 had diligently noted every one of the Fathers, and 
 had digested into particular chapters all the councils, 
 canons, and decrees" (Strype's Cranmer j p. 257). 
 The works of Jeremy Taylor, and indeed of all the 
 divines of that golden age of sacred literature, are 
 full to repletion of references to other men's ideas. 
 Their only fault seems to be that the flow of their 
 eloquence is so often interrupted by quotations ; still 
 how entirely do they exhibit to us mistrust of them- 
 selves and their own powers, and deference to the 
 opinions of that cloud of witnesses which their la- 
 borious reading had so plentifully supplied. The 
 library of Archbishop Leigh ton reveals to us, by the 
 frequent pencil-marks, how carefully all former 
 writers had been consulted. Among the moderns, 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 197 
 
 such books as Dr. Pusey's admirable parochial ser- 
 mons are full of appeals to patristic divinity ; while 
 among a different school of divines, such books as 
 Bickersteth's manuals, and Mr. Ryle's tracts, show 
 how each thought had been buttressed by parallels 
 from the writers of a different, but no less potent 
 school of theology. The use of sentences from the old 
 writers, thus beautifully introduced, as classic quo- 
 tations in the modern writers, is a confirmation of 
 the saying of Pascal, that " thoughts of a sickly 
 leaf and faint blossom in their native beds, become 
 verdant and blooming if transported into a kindlier 
 soil and sunnier climate." 
 
 " Miraturque novas frondes et non sua poma." 
 
 Since the time when the graphic pen of Addison 
 represented Sir Roger de Coverley as presenting 
 to his chaplain the best sermons then in print, with 
 a request that he would use them every Sunday, 
 there have never been wanting those who have ad- 
 vocated the wholesale borrowing of a good discourse 
 rather than the original composition of a feeble one. 
 On the other hand, many have maintained that an 
 original sermon, however bad, is to be preferred to 
 a borrowed one, however good. But, alas ! these 
 absolute decrees are not for feeble man ; they need 
 some modifying on either side ; and it will be found 
 that the expedient and reasonable course lies, like 
 Aristotle's virtues, in the middle between two vices. 
 In the first place, the Homilies, published as they 
 
198 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 were by high authority, show that it has ever been 
 admitted as a fact, that original composition was 
 not in the power of every one — that the Reformers 
 were considerate to the infirmities of the weak, and 
 not only sanctioned, but commanded the feeble to 
 enter into other men's labours, and to avail them- 
 selves of the weapons of the strong. This reading 
 of the Homilies was not to be hy stealth, but men 
 were to say, I am now going to read a homily or a 
 sermon by Cranmer or some other divine. These 
 Homilies were to be used in cases in which the ina- 
 bility and not the idleness of the individual pre- 
 vented his preparing a satisfactory discourse. Are 
 there not similar instances now-a-days, or at least 
 analogous ones ? When, for instance, a young man 
 is placed as curate in a sole charge, with two ser- 
 mons a week, and perhaps (as was my own case) a 
 weekly lecture besides — that is equal to three ser- 
 mons a week. A young man has not the knack of 
 composing readily — he has not thought over the 
 great problems of religion — he is therefore slow. 
 His time is, moreover, occupied with schools and 
 sick people; perhaps he is obliged to take pupils 
 to maintain himself, or in his first year to read for 
 the bishop's ordination as priest. Dr. Watts, in a 
 letter to a young divine, laments that he was so 
 soon after his ordination obliged to prepare two 
 discourses a Sunday, and strongly advises him to 
 make use of published assistance for one sermon, 
 and to write the other with the utmost care and at- 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 199 
 
 tention, that so he may at least have one worth 
 keeping for stock. This is speaking with due re- 
 gard to the difficulties which those who sternly for- 
 bid borrowing any have probably never felt. Those 
 who have gone through the difficulty themselves 
 are most considerate to the case of others. In a 
 sole charge, with two or three sermons a week, a 
 man could not be called idle who copied the whole 
 three, because that would take all his evenings to 
 do, unless he could write short-hand. And can any 
 one of you, my readers, say that you have all your 
 evenings clear, and without the interruption of 
 night-schools, &c. 
 
 " Cum tot sustineas et tanta negotia solus ?" 
 
 But in reasoning the thing out it comes to this, 
 whether you can make the borrowed garment fit 
 (the matter as well as the manner of a man's speech 
 will sometimes bewray him) — whether David can 
 fight in Saul's armour, not having essayed to try 
 it — whether the style will suit a man ? The long 
 sentences of Johnsonian phrase would not suit a 
 man of short, quick delivery, of brief sentences, 
 broken by frequent interrogation and terse appeals. 
 This style, used by such a man, would betray him 
 as much as the poetry of Jeremy Taylor, or the 
 witticisms of South, would betray a man of no 
 imagination. Fuller says, — " The good parishioner 
 inquireth not whether the sermon be new or old, 
 but, like good venison, if it be savoury, falls too to 
 
200 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 profit by it." Still, if the style fit so ill as to de- 
 stroy the effect of the matter, the parishioner has no 
 occasion to see whether the sermon be new or old, 
 for the thing is patent ; the venison in that case 
 is not savoury, but tough and insipid ; it nourish- 
 eth not — he has asked for bread, and they have 
 given him a stone. In this case borrowing is an 
 ill deed, because God's people are not fed ; but if 
 the sermon be that which an earnest, honest man 
 of simple style would write — the work of a kindred 
 mind, and written in kindred sentences — then the 
 young writer may throw himself into it as if he had 
 prepared it himself. The result will be satisfactory 
 and the motive good. The outcry against copying 
 sermons has arisen from the injudicious sources to 
 which men apply for help ; a young, beardless di- 
 vine finds himself talking in the words of a Father 
 in Israel, speaking of experiences which he has 
 never felt, and uttering words which he has no 
 unction to personate. He is then something in the 
 position of a London curate some ten years ago, who, 
 in the first month after his ordination, was unex- 
 pectedly requested by his rector (who happened to 
 be a very aged man), to supply a neighbouring 
 church, the incumbent of which was suddenly taken 
 ill, and unable to procure any other assistance. 
 The curate remonstrated that he had no sermon 
 ready; still the congregation was waiting, and he 
 must go at all hazards. * ' What is to be done ? " said 
 the aged incumbent. " Take one of my sermons and 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 201 
 
 do your best." Now, it went very well with the 
 borrowed sermon for a while ; but at last the curate, 
 reading literally, came to the following clause, en- 
 forcing a duty — " Need I urge this duty upon you 
 with any fresh appeals, since I have spoken of it 
 ever since I have been your resident pastor, which 
 is now nearly fifty years ? " The curate being only 
 twenty-three years and a few weeks old. 
 
 We must, however, apply these remarks to what 
 we have all through pleaded for, where it may be 
 had — namely, extempore address. Here, then, the 
 use of other men's sermons, which before would he 
 a danger, now is a positive safeguard. The fear 
 that the extempore preacher should be always re- 
 peating himself, and descanting on his favourite 
 topics, is greatly obviated by the liberal use of other 
 men's writings. Suppose the extempore preacher 
 to run over one of the well-divided sermons of Mr. 
 Charles Bradley, for example. With a skeleton, 
 formed after such well-arranged sections as he will 
 there find, the greatest repetitionist will not find it 
 easy to break away into his old commonplaces. 
 Thus, too, that which is the great drawback to ex- 
 tempore preaching, viz. that it consumes so much 
 time in preparation, which preparation has to be 
 repeated every time the sermon is preached, is ob- 
 viated. Since here is the preparation made and 
 kept ready for use, because a sermon once success- 
 fully adopted as the basis can easily be referred to 
 — the title being entered in a commonplace book 
 
202 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 under the Sunday to which it applies. Even an 
 interleaved penny Churchman^ s Almanack would 
 receive these references and act as an index. The 
 mind of the speaker would naturally throw in quite 
 sufficient originality of treatment and local applica- 
 tion to make it equal to a genuine composition, at 
 least as regards its effect upon the audience. It 
 might be compared to a new building raised by the 
 help of another man's scaffolding, and the language 
 and imagery in which the skeleton would be clothed 
 would necessarily bear the marks of the original 
 mind of the speaker. A dwarf, sitting on the shoul- 
 ders of a giant, can see farther than the giant him- 
 self j so, by entering into the thoughts and labours 
 of others, may the man of less intellect gain an in- 
 sight into the deep things of God and the manner 
 in which they may be taught. 
 
 The method of entering into the labours of other 
 men, which may be wisely adopted by those who 
 require a manuscript to preach from, is that middle 
 course between borrowing and originality which 
 may be called compilation. It is in the mean, 
 because it despises not the labours of others on the 
 one hand, nor follows them in a servile way on the 
 other. The writer, having decided on a subject, 
 consults those works in his library which bear di- 
 rectly or indirectly on the subject in hand; thus he 
 fixes arguments and illustrations clearly in his 
 mind, and makes his own previous conceptions come 
 out from a hazy form into a clear and compact 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 203 
 
 substance. He is then making a legitimate and 
 praiseworthy use of the stock-in-trade of his li- 
 brary. He no longer fears detection, but admits 
 his system of compilation, and thereby increases 
 the confidence of his hearers, who admire the hu- 
 mihty and care of a teacher who continues to be a 
 learner, and takes council with other minds before 
 he delivers his opinion. Swift defines the distinc- 
 tion between the theft of the scribbler and the loan 
 of the compiler by saying that " the lighting a 
 candle at a neighhow^ s fire does not affect our jjro^ 
 'perty in the wick and flame. ^' And Mr. Charles 
 Bridges reminds us that " what we learn from all 
 hooks we h or row from none J' 
 
 There can be no man who had carried the law of 
 self-sacrifice to a greater extent than Robert Suck- 
 ling. In using the labours of others we may pre- 
 sume that he was actuated by no idle or wrong 
 motives ; yet we find in the sermons, which were 
 published from manuscripts taken from his desk 
 after his death, discourses rendered after the style 
 of the masterpieces of Pusey and of Manning. In 
 the 3Iemoir of the Rev. H. J. Polehampton, his 
 brothers take pride in saying, " that, having little 
 reliance on his extempore powers, and his time 
 much occupied, he did not hesitate to avail himself 
 of the writings of others." " It is an ill mason," 
 says George Herbert, " that refuseth any stone, and 
 there is no knowledge but, in a skilful hand, serveth 
 either positively as it is, or else to illustrate some 
 
204 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 other knowledge. As he does not so study others 
 as to neglect the grace of God in himself j so doth 
 he assure himself that God, in all ages, hath had 
 his servants to whom he hath revealed his truth ; 
 and that as one country doth not bear all things, 
 that there may be a commerce, so neither hath God 
 opened all to one man, that there may be a traffic 
 in knowledge between the servants of God.'' 
 
 " Is not the preacher a middleman between the 
 original thinkers of theology and the people ? So, 
 that if a man be desirous of continued usefulness, 
 let him consult every discourse to which he has 
 access, to borrow from them whatever promises to 
 do more good than his own. The rule should be, 
 make your sermons as good as you can ; put your 
 own heart and soul into them ; whilst doing your 
 uttermost and best, the help of other men ^ill 
 enable you to do better still ; and therefore spoil 
 the Egyptians, as the Jews did at the Exodus, that 
 like them you may enrich the tabernacle with the 
 proceeds. This is the true place and power of 
 plagiarism" (^Baptist Magazine, Feb. 1860). 
 
 " In great authors you will see," says John Fos- 
 ter, " how mighty spirits have worked their progress, 
 and you will endeavour to be their companions — you 
 will stretch and strengthen your faculties with the ex- 
 ertion — you will acquire a dislike of discursiveness 
 and idle flourish — you will apj)ropriate the most 
 valuable thoughts 7iot for 7nere repetition, in the 
 words of their author, but they will be adopted by 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 205 
 
 the studenfs own judgment ^ mingled with his own 
 thinking , and expressed in his own words,'* 
 
 " Difficile est proprie communia dicere ; tuque 
 Eectius Iliacum carmen deducis in actus, 
 Quam si proferres ignota indictaque primus. 
 Publica materies privati juris erit, si 
 Nee circa vilem patulumque moraberis orbem ; 
 Nee verbum verbo curabis reddere fidus 
 Interpres, nee desilies imitator in arctum." 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 OE READING AND MEDITATION. 
 
 >'N an age pre-eminently one of litera- 
 ture, we must say a word about the 
 pastor's reading, although some of the 
 thoughts which might here be dis- 
 cussed have been anticipated in a previous chapter. 
 Let us follow the clergyman into his library, which 
 is his armoury; the shelves around us are filled 
 with those works which universal testimony has 
 called standard classics — these are the eternal foun- 
 tains of thought — the recognized repositories of 
 wisdom. From these the pastor has '^sucked the 
 marrow/' having read them carefully, pencil in 
 hand, and digested them. He has also made re- 
 ferences at the end of each volume, to such passages 
 as have struck him, as hereafter to be applicable to 
 pulpit exhortation. Having thus turned to account 
 his own books, and having commonplaced the pas- 
 sages which have struck him, in the books he has 
 borrowed, he is in some measure able to do battle 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 207 
 
 in behalf of God's truth, in an age when " men run 
 to and fro, and knowledge is increased.'^ Having 
 done all that lays in his power, he feels that God 
 will supply the rest, and will send His blessing upon 
 human exertions duly exhausted. 
 
 He refuses no kind of literature, if only it be the 
 best of its sort ; yet in all his reading he keeps in 
 his mind's eye the one great object of his life — that 
 he is " the deputy of Christ for the i^educing man 
 into obedience to God.'' Of Pliny it is recorded, 
 " that he read nothing without making extracts, for 
 he was wont to say no book was so bad that he 
 could not gain something from it." Of the late 
 Mr. Robert Anderson it was said — " He might be 
 always seen surrounded by the best authors on 
 every side. He read with the greatest care and 
 attention all that had been written by the most ap- 
 proved divines, yet he never needed written ser- 
 mons, for words and ideas in him flowed with great 
 rapidity." " In reading the Fathers and other like 
 books, Robert Suckling was always observing and 
 remembering matters that had a bearing on the one 
 great object he had at heart — not great principles 
 or dogmatic theology, but everything of interest 
 that would kindle thought." Of such men, and 
 there are many such, the force of the remark made 
 by Mr. Isaac Williams, his biographer, may be 
 felt : — " What is more valuable to a clergyman 
 than his own books with all their associations ?" 
 His chief reading, of course, is the Scripture ; 
 
208 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 not piecemeal, but in its entirety, so as to see a 
 passage in all its bearings — the text with the eon- 
 text; not in parts, as those who only read the 
 lessons for the day, but the less frequented portions 
 of the Prophets, as well as the most obvious pas- 
 sages, for Scripture read in its universality will 
 prevent any one from degenerating into verbiage or 
 commonplace. Prayerfully, for *' bene orasse est 
 bene studuisse/' and not without the invoked aid 
 of the Spirit ; knowing that, unless the Spirit help 
 our infirmities, " the well is deep, and we have no- 
 thing to drarc 7vith." With meditation, for, as John 
 Locke says, " our food will do us little good unless 
 we chew the cud of thought." 
 
 I do not deny, that, if a man have time, he may 
 derive great advantage from the study of Patristic 
 Divinity; he will provide himself with many happy 
 illustrations, and awaken many new trains of 
 thought. But the best possible is not always the 
 best probable way ; and, as I am writing for com- 
 mon men in country parishes, with only common 
 opportunities, it does not seem likely that the ma- 
 jority of hard-working country clergymen will ever 
 have time to peruse the Fathers in the original. If 
 they have only a certain portion of time to apply to 
 reading, the question seems to be an open one, 
 whether there are not other sources of information 
 of equal value, and far more accessible and ready to 
 hand ? If it were not for the opinion to the contrary 
 of Professor Blunt (a very high authority upon 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 209 
 
 such questions), I should be inclined, to one who 
 has little time for reading, to recommend the di- 
 vines of the Auo-ustan ag^e of the Reformation and 
 the Puritan writers, as containing very solid matter 
 in a style much more applicable to a modern con- 
 gregation. The remark which occurs in Mr. Py- 
 croft's Twenty Yeai^s in the Church, has a great 
 deal of truth in it as well as wit : — " Some country 
 clergyman, on being ashed whether he studied the 
 Fathers, said, ^ No ; the Fathers were generally at 
 work in the fields, hut he always studied the Mo- 
 thers r '*' 
 
 A country pastor must lay out his time with a 
 view to the greatest immediate results. No doubt a 
 study of Hebrew is good; but has a man, with 
 two sermons a week, time to get up Hebrew suffi- 
 ciently to do him any good ? It seems to me a 
 smattering of Hebrew would not justify a man in 
 departing from the received translation, and that 
 the advantage he would derive would but ill com- 
 pensate for the loss of time. Nevertheless, even 
 this I must say with deference, because the con- 
 trary has been held by some of the masters of our 
 Israel ; because it has been argued that by going to 
 the fountain-head the student grasps one master- 
 key, instead of many small keys, and that he pos- 
 sesses himself of the very quarry from which all 
 subsequent divines have derived their materials. 
 Yet, on my own side, I may quote Dean Milner, 
 who says, — " According to my views of the im- 
 
 p 
 
210 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 portance of time and the use of talents, a pastor 
 ought not to spend year after year in attending to 
 minute difficulties and refined speculations, but im- 
 mediately to begin the study of the doctrines of the 
 Bible and their application to practical purposes. 
 He should content himself with a Yery concise and 
 general account of the history and operation of that 
 biblical criticism which has brought the text of 
 Holy Scripture to its present state. In thus pro- 
 ceeding he would act upon the same rational 
 ground, on which navigators depend, for the nu- 
 merical calculations already made to their hand, for 
 avoiding rocks and shoals, without ever having 
 themselves gone through the process of ascertaining 
 the truth of a single logarithm, or a single longitude 
 of the moon" (^Dean Milner's Life, p. 319). 
 
 Though reading and meditation will not make a 
 dull man into a brilliant man, yet it will prevent 
 any one from being dreary and commonplace ; he 
 will get his wheels out of the ruts of his own thoughts, 
 and set them going in new directions. " You will 
 bring out, I believe, by reading the works of others, 
 thoughts and feelings which had been passing 
 within you half unconsciously, which never would 
 have been recalled and never caught, but for this 
 which seizes and detains them. Imitate not one 
 only but several, you may catch something from 
 each, while you must take care to be caught by 
 none. When you have something on hand which 
 you are engaged in writing, you will read anything 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 211 
 
 upon it, or on kindred subjects, reading only for 
 stimulus and excitement. You are not to read to 
 borrow and steal, but you may, and frequently must, 
 read for suggestion and inspiration. The thing 
 sought is, not what you will get out of the author, 
 but what the author will enable you to get out of 
 yourselves. A word or thought, a metaphor or 
 allusion, will excite your mind and set it off on 
 something which had occurred to you, or on some- 
 thing akin to it ; or may even suggest something 
 new, and you will thus come to enrich your work 
 and to adorn and perfect it, with some conception 
 novel to yourselves, which you had not thought of, 
 which the author you were reading had never 
 thought of; but which, nevertheless, never would 
 have been produced, but for the spur applied to 
 your imagination by what that author said. The 
 thing is not his but yours ; yet it would not have 
 been yours, or you would not have known that you 
 had it, or could create it, if it had not been for him. 
 This may account for things which look like thefts, 
 but it has done far more to adorn books by origi- 
 nality than to debase them by imitation" (Binney 
 on Authorship). 
 
 Nor must we despise light literature, if it be the 
 best of its kind. In his Lecture on Desultory and 
 Systematic Reading^ the late Professor Sir James 
 Stephens has shown at great length, and with ad- 
 mirable ingenuity, how the wise student reads every- 
 thing, but refers everything to one head. ^' A 
 
212 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 man," he says, " who has concentrated his reading 
 on some one systematic pursuit, may indulge with 
 advantage (if only he indulges with self-control) 
 those desultory habits, which would otherwise be 
 fatal to his learning and his wisdom." The Professor 
 shows how, taking the backbone of history, the 
 reading of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dryden, will 
 fill in the costumes and manners of the age, and 
 thus present a full picture of the time to the mind 
 of the student. It would not be difiicult to apply 
 the same reasoning to divinity which the Professor 
 applies to historical reading, and to confirm it with 
 parallel illustrations. " Cultivate, ^^ says Archbishop 
 Whately, '' the jileasure-gardens as well as the corn- 
 fields of your minds;'' with the end in view which 
 Doctor Johnson attributes to Isaac Watts : — ^^ Every 
 kind of information was, by the piety of his mind, 
 converted into theology.'' The reader of the Bible 
 alone will become a good textuary; but he may 
 weary his readers for lack of a wider scope of study, 
 which supply imagination and add richness to his 
 teachino;. " Even scholastic and academic learn- 
 ing," says Bishop Berkeley, " may serve when for- 
 gotten, like a crop when ijlonghed under , to fertilize 
 and enrich the soil." 
 
 If the old saying was, A great hook is a great 
 evil, certainly we may afiirm, no one gainsaying it, 
 of the literature of the present age, that a multitude 
 of books is our bane. The author of the essay 
 entitled The Vanity and Glory of Literature has 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 213 
 
 abundantly demonstrated the evil of this book-pro- 
 ducing age ; the grains of wisdom are diffused over 
 such a vast bulk of chaff, that, for lack of a guide, 
 men spend their time uselessly and to no profit. 
 It is, therefore, more than ever necessary for a man 
 to steer by the motto — '^ Non multa sed mnltumf 
 a few hooks carefully read. Next to living men 
 the society of good authors is to be desired. Through 
 books we hold communion with the master-spirits 
 of every age ; but, as in choosing his friends, a 
 man uses a just scrutiny before he commits his con- 
 fidence to them, so let it be with books; let us 
 select carefully, but from all classes ; a good poem 
 may do us more benefit (even as regards the pulpit) 
 than a bad sermon, and Sir Walter Scott is to be 
 preferred to a dry theologian. As there is no sta- 
 tion of life which does not afford a man here and 
 there worth calling by the name of friend, so there 
 is no department of literature which does not pro- 
 duce a book worth consulting. " Every one," says 
 Dr. Vaughan, " capable of appreciating the great 
 opportunities of his generation, or of estimating 
 aright the work which Christianity has to do with 
 it, must regard it as a solemn duty to equip com- 
 petently, with the knowledge of things earthly, 
 those who are to do battle in an age of inquiry and 
 of education, in behalf of a wisdom which descends 
 from above." 
 
 It really is astonishing how directly or indirectly 
 every book contributes something to the mind 
 
214 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 which is ready and attuned to receive it. While I 
 was writing the chapter in these papers on Gesture 
 and Actiorij I happened to take up the Bridgewater 
 Treatises, to rest my pen awhile, and there I found, 
 in Bell on the Hand, the very passages which 
 seemed to me to be the most happy illustrations of 
 what I had been trying in my own poor words to 
 describe. 
 
 Even in works of fiction (provided they be the 
 best of their kind) there is a knowledge of the 
 human heart revealed which may discover to the 
 preacher the counterpart in real life ; these works of 
 imagination are valuable only in proportion as they 
 resemble real life. If writers of fiction are not useful 
 to theologians, there can be no doubt that sermons 
 are useful to writers of fiction. The sermon in My 
 Novel, by Parson Dale, is as good a specimen of 
 persuasive kindly eloquence as the Squire Hazle- 
 dean's speech, in the same work, is of good- 
 humoured oratory, such as countrymen w411 suffer 
 themselves to be led by. I know of no sermons 
 in the English language so thoroughly master of 
 heart-stirring appeal as the two sermons which the 
 novelist has put into the mouth of the gaol chaplain 
 in Never too late to Mend. In Hyjmtia, The Scour- 
 ing of theWhite Horse, Adam Bede, Ten Thousand 
 a-year, and What will he do with it, the preacher and 
 his arguments, like the chorus in a Greek play, is 
 made to help out the plot of the story. Thus we shall 
 confess with Dr. Hammond, " that there is no book 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 215 
 
 out of which something may not be gleaned for the 
 preacher's store ;" with George Herbert, " that there 
 is no knowledge but serves either directly or indirectly 
 in a skilful hand to serve the pastor's purpose ;" and 
 with Professor Blunt, " that you will make many 
 works which chance may throw in your way tribu- 
 tary to your purpose. You will treasure up one 
 feature or other that may strike you of the Church of 
 the time, in Chaucer or Langland ; in Ellis's col- 
 lection of letters from the State Paper Office ; in the 
 lives and memoirs of distinguished men of genera- 
 tions gone by, especially in their correspondence ; 
 in ballads and rhymes, in the numerous antiquarian 
 relics which in those days find their way to the 
 press, even as it fared with Sir W. Scott in his 
 walks of literature, who, by the means I am de- 
 scribing, arrived at that vivid knowledge of the 
 times he treats of in his works of fiction, that they 
 quite assume the aspect of history written by a 
 contemporary. And you will thus be able to make 
 even the casual glimpses of a book, picked up on a 
 journey, at a watering-place, or in a drawing-room, 
 furnish a contingent, and often a very valuable con- 
 tingent, some item, the want of which had puzzled 
 you, to the fund of facts you are accumulating; 
 and thus will you eventually work up shreds from 
 all quarters and of all colours, into a sober coat 
 without a seam." Something also might be said of 
 reading before sitting down to compose, of reading 
 to stimulate stvle as well as to accumulate matter. 
 
216 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 There could be few who had respect unto the one 
 thing needful, in comparison with mere style and 
 ornament of language, more than Charles Wolfe, 
 yet he advised before writing a sermon to read 
 jioetry and oratory. This is doing for the preacher 
 what Lord Brougham, in his letter of 1823 to Zachary 
 Macaulay, spoke of as his custom : — " I composed 
 the peroration of my speech for the Queen in the Lords, 
 after reading and repeating Demosthenes for three or 
 four weeks, and I composed it twenty times over at 
 least, and it certainly produced a very extraordinary 
 effect far above any merits of its own." Certainly 
 the Bible is our model for style as for everything 
 else. The words of the sacred volume seem not so 
 much selected from any particular choice, as from a 
 sort of antecedent necessary fitness to express the 
 thoughts they contain. It is very remarkable how 
 the most familiar objects lose their familiarity when 
 clothed in the language of Scripture ; they are at once 
 elevated and sublime. We, as preachers, may 
 handle vulgar thoughts sublimely, if we know how 
 to use this language. Next to the Bible, Shakespeare 
 seems to be the great depository of whatever is 
 strong in words. We sometimes hear a speech of 
 such nervous language, so different from every-day 
 talk, that we wonder where the speaker obtained his 
 words. If we turn to Shakespeare we shall cease to 
 wonder, for, in our measure, we shall be masters of 
 the same potent idiom, '^ There reeve two boohs," 
 says Archbishop Sharp, " rrhick made me an Arch- 
 
PAPEBS ON PREACHING. 217 
 
 bishop, and they were the Bible and Shakespeare.'^ 
 Kossuth made a powerful speech on landing at 
 Southampton, and being told that his language was 
 such as an Englishman would admire for correct- 
 ness, and asked how he learnt it, he said he had 
 asked what books he should study to obtain a com- 
 mand of pure English, and he had been told the 
 Bible and Shakesjware. 
 
 That style is most appropriate to aman which keeps 
 pace with, and does not outrun his ideas. Words 
 sometimes hurry a man away beyond the staple of 
 his thoughts, and carry him whither he would not. 
 The most ridiculous instance of this was told, I be- 
 lieve, on the authority of the Archdeacon of the 
 Cape : — a speaker was describing the horrors of the 
 Caffre war, and its desolating effect on his own 
 estate ; but wishing to finish up his sentence with a 
 good sonorous cadence, he ended thus, in words 
 which certainly could not be predicated of any living 
 man, — " A7id wheri I got home to my house I found 
 my chiklren fatherless and my wife a widow J ^ 
 
 The following description of style occurs in Dr. 
 Newman's £'5^(2?/s on University Subjects : — " Since 
 the thoughts and reasonings of an author have a per- 
 sonal character, no wonder that his style is not only 
 the image of his subject, but of his mind. That 
 pomp of language, that full and tuneful diction, 
 that felicitousness in the choice of words, which, to 
 prosaic writers, seems artificial, is nothing else but 
 the mere habit of aloftv intellect. A narrow critic 
 
218 PAPERS ON PREACHING, 
 
 may call it verbiage, when really it is a sort of ful- 
 ness of heart. A great author is not merely one 
 who has a copia verhormn, whether in prose or 
 verse, and can at his will turn on any number of 
 Splendid phrases and swelling sentences, but he is 
 one who has something to say, and knows how to 
 say it; and I ascribe to him, as his characteristic 
 gift, in a large sense the faculty of expression. He 
 writes passionately, because he feels keenly; forcibly, 
 because he conceives vividly ; he sees too clearly to 
 be vague ; he is too serious to be otiose ; he can 
 analyse his subject, and therefore he is rich ; he em- 
 braces it as a whole and in its parts, and therefore 
 he is consistent ; he has a firm hold on it, and there- 
 fore he is luminous. When his imas^ination wells 
 up, it overflows in ornament; when his heart is 
 touched, it thrills along his verse ; he always has the 
 right word for the right idea, and never a word too 
 much. If he is brief, it is because few words suffice ; 
 if he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark, 
 and aids not embarrasses the vigorous march of his 
 elocution. He expresses what all feel, but all cannot 
 say ; and his sayings pass into proverbs among his 
 people, and his phrases become household words 
 and idioms of their daily speech, which is tesselated 
 with the rich fragments of his language, as we see 
 in foreign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur 
 worked into the walls and pavements of modern 
 palaces. Such is Shakespeare among ourselves, 
 Virgil among the Latins ; such in their degree are all 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 219 
 
 those writers whom we call classics. To particular 
 nations they are attached from the peculiarities of a 
 language ; but so far they have a catholic and ecu- 
 menical character that what they express is common 
 to the whole race of mankind, and they alone are 
 able to express it." 
 
 Surely the pleasures of reading are sufficient to 
 make the task as acceptable as it is assuredly neces- 
 sary to make the complete and efficient teacher. The 
 joy to be derived from reading is well described in 
 the anecdote told by Mr. Aris Willmott in his 
 Pleasu7'es of Literature : — " An affecting instance of 
 the tenderness and compensations of learning is fur- 
 nished by the old age of Usher, when no glasses 
 could help his failing sight, and a book was dark 
 except beneath the strongest light of a window. . . 
 Hopeful and resigned, he continued his task, fol- 
 lowing the sun from room to room of the house he 
 lived in, until the shadows of the trees disappeared 
 from the grass, and the day was gone. How 
 strange and delightful must have been his feelings 
 when some brilliant sunbeam fell upon some half- 
 remembered passage, and thought after thought 
 shone out from the misty words, like the features of 
 a familiar landscape in a clearing fog." 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 REALITY. 
 
 'OW comes it," asked a bishop of Gar- 
 rick the actor, *' that I, in expounding 
 ^ divine truths, produce so little effect, 
 ?5E?B while you so easily rouse the deepest 
 feeling's of your audience by the representation of 
 fiction ?" *' Because," replied the actor, " I recite 
 falsehood as if it was truth, while you deliver truths 
 as if they were fictions." This is a story never too 
 old to tell, because it contains, in the smallest pos- 
 sible compass, the answer to a question which 
 preachers, as well as congregations, are evermore 
 asking each other, — why preaching produces so little 
 effect? It is a story which shivers to atoms the 
 notion of borrowinfj a discourse which in thou2:ht 
 and language does not become the reader of it, and 
 into the spirit of which he has never entered. It aims 
 a death-blow at the satisfaction which some may be 
 tempted to feel in the servile adhering to a MS., 
 with a tedious uniformity of sentences, to which 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 221 
 
 the eye and hand impart no animation, and the 
 voice no cadence. It exposes the folly of men 
 seeking to convert the world, who preach because 
 they have half an hour to fill up, instead of because 
 they have a message to unburthen themselves of, who 
 are functionaries and not pastors — " who," to use 
 Archbishop Whately's expression, " preach because 
 they want to say something, not because they have 
 something to say." 
 
 Add to the moral of this story, by way of com- 
 mentary, Professor Blunt's fine description of ear- 
 nestness : — " Eloquence must be the voice of one 
 earnestly endeavouring to deliver his own soul — it 
 must be the outpouring of ideas rushing for a vent. 
 It must be the poet's experience, — 
 
 . . . . ' thoughts that rove about, 
 
 And loudly knock to have their passage out.' 
 
 It must be the Psalmist's experience, — the untutored 
 effort of a heart hot within, till the fire kindles, 
 and at the last he speaks with his tongue. It must 
 be the prophet's experience, — ' a word in the heart 
 as a burning fire shut up in his bones, so that he is 
 weary of forbearing and cannot stay' {Jeremiah xv. 
 9). It must be the patriarch's experience, — " I am 
 full of matter; the spirit within me constraineth 
 me : behold my belly is as wine which has no 
 vent ; it is ready to burst like new bottles ; I will 
 speak that I maybe refreshed' " (Blunt's Parish 
 Priest). 
 
222 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 " When you preach be real," says the Bishop of 
 Oxford, in one of his addresses to candidates for 
 ordination ; " say to yourself, now I must get into 
 this heart some truth from God — strike as one that 
 would make a dint upon their shield of hardness — 
 yea, and smite through it to their heart of hearts — 
 speak straight to them, as you would beg your life, 
 or counsel your son, or call your dearest friend 
 from a burning house, in plain, strong, earnest 
 words." 
 
 Freedom, fire, force, are the three qualities re- 
 quired of a man who is to speak with effect ; but, 
 instead of these attributes, effeminacy, /astidiousness, 
 and a cold propriety have become the order of the 
 day. What Mr. Jay of Bath says of one of his 
 contemporaries applies to many a well-meaning 
 man — especially to young men in their first attempts 
 at sermon writing : — " It was too much the aim of 
 
 Mr. , not only as a writer but as a preacher, 
 
 to render his language correct and refined, rather 
 than bold and free. His concern here was extreme ; 
 and what Gray said of the lyenury of his CJmrch- 
 yard pea.m?it may be applied to the fastldiousjiess 
 of our preacher, — 
 
 * Fastidiousness repress'd his noble rage, 
 And chill'd the genial current of his soul.' 
 
 A dread of little mistakes and improprieties, like 
 the sword of Damocles, hung over his head, and 
 prevented the relish of the banquet he would other- 
 svise have enjoyed. A preacher's great and obvious 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 223 
 
 attention (and where it is great it will usually be 
 obvious) to minuteness in his composition and ad- 
 dress weakens the sympathy of his audience, and 
 often hardly allows a frigid approbation to what is 
 deserving of praise. On the other hand, when a 
 man is absorbed in his subject, little improprieties, 
 should they occur, will either be unperceived, or, as 
 being more than atoned for, will be disregarded by 
 a riveted audience. And what should be the anxiety 
 of the man of God — to gain admiration or to secure 
 profit? To appear the chaste classic from the 
 schools, or the able minister of the New Testament 
 full of grace and truth?" 
 
 Mr. John Foster, in his Fourteenth Lecture, on the 
 fifth verse of the third chapter of the Revelations, 
 shows at some length that '^ the Supreme Being did 
 not, in the sacred Scriptures, subject himself to con- 
 sult any niceties of criticism or literary refinement. 
 The bible," he says, *^ shows numerous instances of 
 metaphors and illustrations of a character very 
 homely, unpolished, and sometimes even repulsive. 
 Hence some more trivial of the infidel tribe have 
 attempted to detract from the sanctity of the bible : 
 talking of its dealing in coarse language and images. 
 All the teaching of the bible comes with no manner 
 of design to please the taste and fancy, but appears 
 as most simply spontaneous from the subject." 
 
 Bunyan says, in his work called Grace Abound- 
 ing, — " I could have used a more adorned style, but 
 I dared not; God did not play in tempting me. 
 
224 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 neither did I play when the pangs of hell gat hold 
 upon me, wherefore, I may not play in relating 
 them, but be plain and simple, and lay down the 
 thing as it was." Bunyan's works contain many 
 elegant poetical expressions, such as, when speaking 
 of easy times when religion is fashionable, he says, 
 — "When religion walks in her silver slippers." 
 He seems to me to be the greatest master of terse 
 pointed Anglo-Saxon that we have, and to the 
 younoj writer is invaluable as an instance of how a 
 man may be plain without degenerating into com- 
 monplace, and witty without fallinginto buffoonery. 
 
 There is something offensive to our ears in the 
 coarseness of old Latimer ; yet Fuller says of him 
 that his reality prevailed : — " His downright style 
 was as necessary in that ignorant age as it would be 
 ridiculous in ours. Indeed he condescended to 
 people's capacity ; and many men unjustly count 
 those low in learning who indeed do but stoop to 
 their auditors. Let me see any of our sharp wits 
 do that with the edge, which his bluntness did with 
 the hack of the hnife, and pei'suade so many to res- 
 titution of ill-gotten goods" {Ilohj and Profane 
 State, p. 237). 
 
 This want of earnestness in modern sermons 
 might be illustrated by a comparison of passages in 
 any part of the discourse; but perhaps it is nowhere 
 more observable than in the beginning of various 
 sermons.y Many writers begin with a weak intro- 
 duction, as if afraid to come directly face to face 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 225 
 
 with the subject, as if it was necessary to wile away 
 a certain amount of time before coming to the point. 
 Cecil's precept about exordia of sermons is to be re- 
 membered — " You have only a certain amount of 
 attention to work iqwn, make the most of it while it 
 lasts." 
 
 If we look at secular publications, and see how 
 writers who understand their craft (such as the 
 writers of leading articles in the Times newspaper) 
 constrain men to be attentive to what they have to 
 say, we shall find that they begin ex ahriqjto. Their 
 attacks upon the reader's convictions are like the 
 attack which Nelson made on the French ships, 
 making his own vessels fast to those of his oppo- 
 nents, and then carrying the position by a rush of 
 British swordsmen. So the Times' articles gene- 
 rally begin either with a story or fable, to be un- 
 folded and applied to the case in hand, or a direct 
 statement to be proved as the article opens, or with 
 some quaint saying or startling paradox which en- 
 chains the mind of the reader, and makes him 
 readily yield himself up to the stream of the essay. 
 Whatever the beginnings may be, they are always 
 striking, and so answer the purpose of taking the 
 peruser by the button-hole, and saying, " Listen to 
 me for ten minutes," and we do listen. 
 
 In strongest contrast to these stand out the tame 
 commonplace exordia of many sermons. Not a 
 few begin thus : — " This text occurs in the second 
 Lesson for this morning's service, and contains a 
 
 Q 
 
 / 
 
22G PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 great truth worthy of our consideration ;" or, " The 
 words of my text are from the Gospel of to-day, and 
 we shall find them to contain much interesting and 
 instructive teaching.'' But the great preachers of 
 every age set us a different example. In his Mediceval 
 Preaching, Mr. Neale has shown us some forcible 
 introductions to ancient sermons, such as this one 
 of an Advent sermon : — " Our King is coming, let 
 us go out to meet him." 
 
 Bishop Andrews, on the text, " Is it nothing to 
 you, all ye that pass by ?" begins, " At the hearing of 
 which there is none but will presently conceive it to 
 be the voice of a party in great extremity ; in great 
 extremity two ways, &c." Bishop Atterbury, on the 
 text, " Blessed is he who shall not be offended in 
 me !" begins, ^' And can any one be offended in 
 thee. Blessed Jesus, who hast done and suffered so 
 much for us men and for our salvation V So the 
 Bishop of Oxford, in a sermon descriptive of Elijah's 
 victory over the 450 prophets of Baal, begins, "It 
 was a wonderful sight which was this day seen upon 
 Mount Carmel." So Mr. Melville, after the text, 
 " Felix trembled," commences, " And why did he 
 tremble ?" So again, Mr. Charles Bradley, on the 
 text, " They drank of that rock that followed them," 
 begins, '^ Rocks are common in Judea, &c." Mr. 
 Jay of Bath, on the text, " What is truth ?" begins, 
 " It is a truth, Pilate, that thou art a cowardly, 
 guilty wretch, in surrendering Christ to be crucified 
 when thou wert convinced he was an innocent man," 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 227 
 
 Here is another instance from Mr. Jay ; on the text, 
 " He that despised Moses' law died without mercy," 
 he begins, " What do we read, — a much sorer 
 punishment than dying without mercy ! This is 
 fearfulness beyond the power of language to realize 
 or convey/' Again, on the text, " A broken and 
 contrite heart thou wilt not despise," he begins, 
 " We have heard a great deal of people dying with 
 a broken heart, I will tell you to-night how you 
 may live with one." Mr. Enoch Miller, on the 
 text, " Ye are not your own," begins, ^' This truth is 
 so unfamiliar to our hearts, that, when announced in 
 its naked form, it startles us. Our first impulse is 
 to set ourselves at issue with it. We have so long; 
 nursed the notion of self-proprietorship, that for the 
 moment we are roused into a petulant posture of 
 self-defence when we are told that ^ we are not our 
 
 Such writers as Professor Archer Butler, and 
 Mr. Robertson of Brighton, as also Mr. Kingsley, 
 are good instances of the manly outspoken style in 
 opposition to the namby-pamby compositions of the 
 last century of divines. 
 
 Dean Alford, in his lecture on The Pulpit Elo- 
 quence of the Seventeenth Century, delivered at 
 Exeter Hall in 1858, has drawn together passages 
 from John Donne, Joseph Hall, Jeremy Taylor, 
 and Richard Baxter, which, as a body of extracts, 
 serve admirably to illustrate what I mean. Of this 
 earnest outspoken style, thus illustrated by quota- 
 
228 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 tions, he says, — " The reader in these extracts con- 
 tinually finds expressions, and even trains of 
 thought, which offend against what would be now 
 thought good taste in the pulpit. Believing, how- 
 ever, as I do, that this conventional good taste has 
 been the ruin of our English preaching, I own I 
 should like to see (though not exactly in the lan- 
 guage of those days) our common life and common 
 faults. For what the pulpit has gained in decent 
 equilibrium and propriety, it has lost in fervour and 
 spirituality. Polished and able as men of a later 
 period are, their tones sound like those of men in a 
 dream to any who shf Jl compare them with the holy 
 earnestness of a preceding age. When I think on 
 these, and such as these, and see the stir that is hap- 
 pily taking place about preaching, I am tempted to 
 breathe a fervent wish for my church and my coun- 
 try, that God may send us the like of them again." 
 
 There may be a few things noticed in which our 
 pulpit seems to lack reality. 
 
 " Religion," says Mr. Caird, "is not so much the 
 doing religious things, as doing secular things in a 
 religious way ;" consequently, teaching religion is 
 not so much the inculcation of abstract piety as 
 handling the cares, the offices, and the duties of 
 every-day life, as being things which must be done, 
 and which may be done well or ill, according to the 
 end kept in view in the performance of them — 
 " Whether we eat or drink, or whatsoever we do, 
 let us do all to the glory of God." I can bring for- 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 229 
 
 ward no better illustration of what I mean to 
 convey, than by instancing Mr. Caird's sermon 
 on The Religion of Common Life, In that dis- 
 course he says, — " The planets have a twofold action 
 in their orbits and on their axes, the one motion not 
 interfering, but carried on simultaneously, and in 
 perfect harmony with the other ; so must it be that 
 man's twofold activities round the heavenly and the 
 earthly centre, disturb not nor jar with each other; 
 so that man may be at once diligent in business and 
 fervent in spirit^ serving the Lord." 
 
 I think it is Cecil who observes that " the terra 
 incognita of preachers is ordinary life ; the learned 
 have scarcely set out to discover that region of re- 
 puted desert." It certainly would add to the force 
 and reality of preaching if men showed themselves 
 better acquainted with the commercial classes. We 
 seldom see sermons which could be entitled, as some 
 volumes of Chalmers are, " commercial discourses." 
 The clergy mix with the upper classes as com- \ 
 panions, and keep the lower as butts for their pa- j 
 rochial visitations ; but how few are acquainted with 
 the great middle class which runs between the two 
 
 " To the preacher who has constantly to deal 
 with men immersed in trade, it is of an importance 
 not to be calculated that he should know the life 
 which all the week long his hearers are leading, its 
 temptations, its glosses, its rivalries, its depressions, 
 its joys, its anxieties, which cast the care of the soul 
 into the shade ; its ambitions, which outweigh the 
 
230 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 claims of truth and rig-bt. Ifrnorant of these he 
 must leave many to flounder in temptation whom he 
 might be the means of extricating; many to be 
 worried with care, when he might win their atten- 
 tion to better things ; many to sink under their 
 load, to whom he might have given a timely solace. 
 Too often the man of business feels that the remarks 
 from the pulpit only show his case is not understood. 
 There are few preachers of whom it could be said, 
 what I have heard said of M^Neile, that after some 
 of his sermons his hearers felt as if he had served 
 his apprenticeship to every trade in the town" (Tlie 
 Successful 3Ie7'cha7it, p. 24). 
 
 A preacher should speak out of the depth of 
 humanity ; — " David claims to be heard on affliction 
 because he had been through it ; and Solomon 
 invites our attention when he says all is vanity, 
 because, having drained the cup of pleasure, he could 
 best tell the taste of its dregs." '* On the other hand," 
 says John Foster, " how thoughtless is a modern 
 preacher's enumeration of what pain a pious mind 
 may bear with patience or even complacency, as 
 disease, pain, reduction of fortune, loss of friends, 
 calumny,yb/' he can easily add woi^ds. Alas ! how 
 opjwessive is the steady anticipation of any one of 
 these ills /" 
 
 We shall find that preachers have been successful 
 in proportion as they have been real. Here is a 
 portrait of the Rev, Wm. Jay's preaching by the 
 editors of his autobiograpliy : — '^ He spoke from his, 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 231 
 
 own nature to the nature of others. He was him- 
 self a most inartificial man. He knew human nature 
 well. He studied it in himself and in others. He 
 knew mauj how he thinks, and feels, and acts. He 
 drew his knowledge not from copies and books, but 
 from the living original. Men felt when they heard 
 him, that they were listening to a preacher who 
 knew not only books and theories and systems, but 
 humanity, both in its fallen and its restored state : in 
 its wants, woes, diseases, remedies, and varieties ; 
 one who could sympathise with them as well as 
 teach them. When on a Sunday morning they 
 came worn and weary with the trials, toils, and cares 
 of the six days' labour, and placed themselves under 
 the sound of his mellifluous voice, they felt sure of 
 not being tantalized and disappointed with a cold in- 
 tellectualism, or a mere logical demonstration, or a 
 metaphysical abstraction, or a wordy nothing, which 
 would have given them a stone when they asked for 
 bread ; or with something religiously poetic, which 
 would have been offering them flowers, when they 
 wanted meat ; but he fed them with food convenient 
 for them, and satisfied the cravings of their nature 
 with what satisfied his own" (Autobiography, p. 
 549). 
 
 Let us hear another minister, outside the estab- 
 lishment, spoken of in somewhat similar language 
 by another writer : — " It is pitiful to see in the pul- 
 pit, one who has never had a doubt, or a hope, or a 
 noble aim, who enunciates your condemnation with 
 
232 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 the same heartlessness with which he tells you that 
 two and two make four. It was not so in the grand 
 apostolic times, when the disciples preached of the 
 things which they had heard and seen. It is not 
 so with Binney of the Weigh-house chapel. You 
 see all that man has to go through the preacher 
 must himself also have experienced ; you see that 
 scepticism must have stared him in the face — that 
 passion must have appealed to him in her most 
 seductive forms — that the great problem of life he 
 has not taken upon trust, but unriddled for him- 
 self — that he has gone through the ^ Slough of 
 Despond/ passed by ^ Castle Doubting,' and sees 
 the gilt and the rouge in ^Vanity Fair/ or, as 
 he says himself in his Life, ^ The man has con- 
 quered the animal, and God the man.' Such a man 
 has a right to preach to me. If he has known, felt, 
 thought, suffered more than I, he is master and I 
 listen. Such a man is Binney. I can yet read in 
 his face the record of passion subdued, of thought 
 protracted and severe, of doubt conquered by a 
 living faith" (^London Pulpit, hy James Ewing 
 Ritchie, p. 80). 
 
 Another fault, as it seems to me, which many 
 preachers fall into, is that of separating themselves 
 from their hearers in the expressions they make use 
 of. They do this unintentionally and from thought- 
 lessness, still it is a trick which injures the reality 
 of their addresses. They say, *^ You ought to do 
 so and so," when they might say, " We ought to 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 233 
 
 do so and so/' If you put yourselves in the cata- 
 logue you can say things much more plainly, and 
 without any of the sort of finding-fault mannerism 
 which is so offensive. Besides, the sympathy which 
 you then create is the very bond of all influence — 
 " the bands of a man," by which you can draw all 
 men unto you. I have often heard a young 
 preacher, fresh from college, speaking, as it were 
 " ex catliedra^^ to the men on the benches, as if 
 his own case was different from theirs ; as if he was 
 out of the vortex of temptation, safe on the shore, 
 and was cautioning others who were still buffeted 
 by the billows. Of course it was done from inad- 
 vertence, but how much it must injure the useful- 
 ness of such men. 
 
 Nor can I enforce this important point better than 
 by the concurrent testimony and example of good 
 men of all shades of opinion. In their practice we 
 shall find them coming down from the pedestal of 
 any superiority, to speak to others from the common 
 level of struggling human nature, so that they could 
 say with the Apostle, " Who is weak, and I am not 
 weak ? who is offended, and I burn not ?" 
 
 Of Mr. George Wagner it was recorded by a 
 lady : — ** I could not but remark how he taught 
 fallen penitents through himself, and this was always 
 his way with the many poor wanderers with whom 
 he prayed. They could not but feel — ^ How this 
 minister feels for me ! when he puts himself so near 
 me, taking a common standing-place to pray from. 
 
234 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 So different from the Pharisee ! ' " (3femoirj hy 
 SiMPKiNSON, p. 262.) " Robert Suckling's great 
 power was over the very highest and lowest of the 
 daughters of our race — saintly women and poor 
 fallen girls. With these last he could identify him- 
 self completely. He could throw himself, heart 
 and soul, into their sad case, and divest himself of 
 all sense of superiority 5 he could go down hand- 
 in-hand with them into the lowest pits of sin and 
 misery, and then bring them hand-in-hand, step by 
 step, as brother sinner leading sister sinner up 
 again" (llemoir, hy Isaac Williams, p. 170). 
 When Wesley speaks, in his journal, of having to 
 turn one offender out of his class-meeting, he thus 
 describes his own feelings : — ^* I felt that it was the 
 act of one criminal condemning another." Another 
 divine, who was a contemporary of Wesley's, says, — 
 " A preacher should always utter a divine threaten- 
 ing, as a judge would pronounce death upon his 
 son." A boy's impression, at hearing Dr. Arnold's 
 first sermon, is thus recorded : — " It was not the 
 cold, clear voice of one giving advice and warning 
 from serene heights, to those who were sinning and 
 struggling below, but the warm, living voice of one 
 who, fighting for us, and by our sides, and calling 
 on us to help him and ourselves and one another" 
 (Tom Brown's SchooldaySy p. 158). 
 
 This entering into every man's special case, and 
 making ourselves one with him, will also make our 
 sermons more real for another reason — because. 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 235 
 
 standing with him, in imagination, we shall sur- 
 round ourselves with his trials and peculiar tempta- 
 tions. 
 
 The law of England is, that every man should 
 be tried by his peers or equals. Now a clergyman, 
 with all the advantages of education, and all the 
 guards and fences of social life, is not the peer to 
 sit in judgment on the poor man's sins of drunken- 
 ness, petty theft, &c. unless he come down and 
 place himself in the poor man's station and exact 
 circumstances of temptation. If he be inclined to 
 exult over such, and say with the Pharisee, " I 
 thank God that I am not as other men are," &c. let 
 him beware how, by uncharitable thoughts, he 
 break down the bridge behind the penitent and 
 prevent his return ; let him study and enter into the 
 spirit of Mr. Robertson of Brighton's sermon, in 
 the second series, on The Restoration of the Erring, 
 and he will confess with him, " That the rich cut 
 crystal, which stands on the table of the wealthy 
 man, protected from dust and injury, must not 
 boast itself that it has escaped the flaws, the cracks 
 and the fractures, which the earthen-jar has sus- 
 tained, because it has been subjected to rough and 
 general uses." 
 
 There is room for improvement, as regards reality, 
 both in manner and in matter. 
 
 As regards manner of delivery Archbishop 
 Whately says, — " It cannot be denied that the elo- 
 cution of most readers, when reading their own 
 
236 PAPERS ON PBEACHING, 
 
 compositions, is such as to convey the notion at the 
 very best, not that the preacher is expressing his 
 own sentiments, but that he is making known to 
 his audience what is written in the book before 
 him ; and whether the composition is professedly 
 the reader's own, or not, the usual mode of delivery, 
 though grave and decent, is so remote from the real 
 energetic style of natural speech, as to furnish, if 
 one may so say, a kind of running comment on all 
 that is uttered ; which says, — * / do not meariy 
 think, or feel all this; I only mean to 7'ecite it with 
 proj^riety and decorum;^ and what is usually 
 called fine reading only superadds to this a kind 
 of admonition to the hearers, that they ought to 
 believe, to feel, and to admire, what is read." 
 
 Then, again, as to matter: we must not say 
 things which are only allowed to pass uncontra- 
 dicted in the pulpit, because there can be no re- 
 spondent; which deceive the preacher himself as 
 well as his hearers, because of the phraseology in 
 which they are wrapped up. For instance, how 
 often one hears the thing stated, in all its baldness, 
 that whatever we ask in prayer we shall be sure to 
 receive ; but to a poor man's mind, who feels that 
 his daily necessities and daily bread are not sup- 
 plied, this must often fall with a great deal of un- 
 reality. And I take this as an instance of the way 
 in which truth is injured by a careless, general 
 statement; because I remember to have heard a 
 sermon, preached by Canon Car us some years ago, 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 237 
 
 in which the subject of prayer seemed to come out 
 more as a reaHty than I had ever felt it to be, be- 
 cause its efficacy as a means of grace was confined 
 within its proper limits. The text was the 16th of 
 St. John, verses 23, 24. The preacher limited the 
 universal promise — " Whatsoever you shall ask,' 
 by the four following passages of Scripture: — 
 " Only the things ashed according to God's wiW 
 (1 John V. 14) ; " The things which are asked in 
 faith without wavering'^ (James x. 5) ,* " They must 
 he asked continually'^ (1 Thess. v. 16) ; " Must he 
 accompanied with efforts to ohey'^ (1 John iii. 22). 
 " It should be our aim to vindicate the essential 
 humanness of the Gospel ; not to confine it to an 
 eclectic circle; not to exhibit it as a narrow and 
 exclusive system ; as something sealed and shut up 
 to all who have not part in certain limited and con- 
 ventional sympathies ; making Christianity to be a 
 thing which requires its followers to live in a world 
 of their own, and implying that to take up the cross 
 the Christian is to lay down all that is distinctive 
 in the man. The word we have to preach must be 
 presented in all its wide and universal adaptation to 
 popular sympathies ; to the carnal as well as to the 
 spiritual — to the great human heart. Do we, there- 
 fore, weave into our discussions enough of the 
 secular mundane common-life element, pressing 
 into our service the stirring incidents of the day ; 
 and by a discreet glancing at topics, foremost in all 
 companies and loudest on every tongue, trying to 
 
238 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 gain the ear of the times ? Beyond the 
 
 frontier-line of debated politics there is a large do- 
 main of worldly territory, which we may occupy 
 and improve for God ; such as subjects of economic 
 science, or the achievements of inventive art, or 
 shifting phases of the national mind, or events of 
 mark and emphasis in our commercial history, or 
 openings for intercourse with foreign nations — all 
 these having a bearing on the great interests of 
 human progress, and being a part of that great 
 providential lesson-book, out of which, as well as 
 out of the Bible itself, it is a part of the preacher's 
 office to instruct mankind. But we claim this li- 
 cence only for those who may be conscious of the 
 power of using it well" (ThoKghts on Preachinrf, 
 by the Rev. Daniel Moore). 
 
CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 SECULAR LECTURES. 
 
 'WO questions have lately been mooted 
 in the Guardian newspaper, in 1858, 
 with regard to secular lectures in vil- 
 lages: — "Are they in themselves desir- 
 able and useful?" And, secondly, " Howfaris it pos- 
 sible for the clergy to work them efficiently ?" The 
 Mechanics' Institutes throu«:hout Eng-land have for 
 some years past fairly settled down to their winter 
 session of classes and lectures ; the demand for lec- 
 tures has created the supply ; lectures are now kept 
 on hand ready made, as one may say, and lecturing, 
 to judge from the annual list of the Society of Arts, 
 is become a regular profession. That which was 
 twenty years ago the exception is now the rule, and 
 the tourist in every town of any size is as sure to 
 find the Institute or the Athenaeum as he is to find 
 the Post-office or the Town-hall. Villages, too, 
 imitating on a smaller scale the fashion of their 
 betters, aim at their course of lectures. Either the 
 
240 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 parish schoolroom must be bespoken, or the club- 
 room at the village inn must be hired. For lectur- 
 ing is one of the features of the present age, and the 
 winter evenings of the nineteenth century would not 
 be complete without something of the kind. And 
 whenever the population of a village is sufficiently 
 large and compactly arranged to admit of such a 
 union for social instruction, how could the people 
 better legislate for themselves ? Possibly the de- 
 velopment of after-ages may alter or improve upon 
 this thought, which the first quarter of the present 
 century struck out, and the second quarter has so 
 universally adopted : at present, we know of no 
 system which unites equal relish with similar ad- 
 vantages. It is the best system of adult education 
 which the people will willingly come into, and 
 therefore the most practicable system for those who 
 are beyond the adult night-school ; and here it is — 
 viz. in the Mechanics' Institute, either in its news- 
 room, library, or lecture-room — that those who have 
 attended the parish night-school will feel that the 
 power of being self-educators is indeed a privilege, 
 and that it is the avenue leading to fields of pleasure 
 limited only by their own appetite and perseverance. 
 We may say of these Institutes what Sir J. Mack- 
 intosh has said of laws — " They are the invention 
 of no one man or age, but, by little and little, grew 
 up to meet the necessities of society and the require- 
 ments of the times." 
 
 It was the demand for something of the sort that 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 241 
 
 forged the scheme which has been so vigorously and 
 almost universally adopted, and which will not, 
 therefore, be easily suffered to drop into disuse. 
 How far the parochial clergy may take advantage 
 of the present movement is what we now propose to 
 consider. 
 
 In the starting such a project in a village, the 
 clergyman, as possessing the literary element 
 (though less exclusively than formerly, whenclericus 
 and clerk were synonymous), is sure to be amongst 
 the first that are applied to and solicited to put him- 
 self at the head of the movement. If he think fit to 
 decline, and allow it to pass out of his control into 
 other hands, he will be throwing away one of the 
 influences, one of the cords whereby he may guide 
 his people. 
 
 For who shall gainsay the fact, that the lecture- 
 room, properly used, is just the ally which the pul- 
 pit requires to follow up its pleadings ? Surely 
 there are many questions falling just outside the 
 margin of the pulpit which may here be opened up 
 and ventilated. Cervantes tells us that those who 
 could claim the dignity of knighthood were exposed 
 to the ire of Don Quixote ; but those whose stand- 
 ing made them beneath the lance of a gentleman 
 were handed over to the cudgel of Sancho Panza. 
 In some such relation as the attendant squire to the 
 knight-errant should the lecture-room stand to the 
 pulpit, to follow up with its more homely cudgel 
 those subjects which fall below the notice of the 
 
 R 
 
242 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 cassocked preacher. How numerous are the sub- 
 jects under the discussion of pubhc opinion which 
 the pastor may be glad of a chance to discuss with 
 his parishioners ; how numerous the opportunities 
 offered in the lecture-room for guiding men's minds 
 to form a right judgment in all things. How in- 
 finite are the questions of morals and policy — second 
 only in importance to direct pulpit teaching — which 
 here find their legitimate arena for discussion; 
 questions the proper solution of which tends, 
 though by an indirect path, to the great end the 
 pastor has in view of making his people happier and 
 better, and " which strike the more home (to borrow 
 an expression from the late Professor Blunt) by re- 
 bounding from a cushion.'^ Here may be elucida- 
 ted all the questions of the day, save those which, 
 savouring of controversial religion and politics, are 
 abandoned by common consent. Nor can there be 
 any excuse for entering on subjects of strife when 
 questions of a more useful character claim to be 
 answered. Statute fairs, harvest homes, cottage 
 economy, the strikes of operatives, sanitary laws, 
 colonisation, savings-banks, and life annuities, may 
 here be discussed, varied at times by subjects of 
 graver import — such as a quarterly paper on colo- 
 nial or home missions. Only, we would say, let 
 not the choice of subjects be too exclusively dry and 
 utilitarian, but seasoned with those of a lighter cha- 
 racter, for the people collected desire amusement as 
 much as instruction. The hearers have earned a little 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 243 
 
 recreation by a hard day's work ; they have had their 
 toil and they want their play, and red-letter days do 
 not often occur in the calendar of a country labourer. 
 
 What men have said that the informal services of 
 Exeter Hall would be to our cathedrals — viz. 
 porches to the temples to invite men to enter in — 
 this, surely, the lecture-room would be to the church. 
 Many proselytes of the gate, having taken up a posi- 
 tion from which there was either progress or retreat, 
 have advanced to become proselytes of the inner court; 
 many who never kept Sunday have been led by an 
 attendance on these semi-secular lectures to frequent 
 the parish church. The lads of the village are con- 
 fessedly the most difficult class to exercise control 
 over ; but once drawn into these outer courts, a great 
 part of the difficulty is overcome. Their prejudices 
 melt before the kindly interest the clergyman takes 
 in their welfare and amusements, and in an age 
 when men choose their doctrines by the men that 
 preach them, his credentials as a pastor will be most 
 readily accepted who shows himself the follower of 
 One who turned and said to His disciples, " But I 
 have called you friends.^^ This should not be for- 
 gotten ; it is of more value than many rubrics. In 
 the fable of^sop, the sun made the traveller take 
 ofFhis cloak, which the wind failed to do ; and the 
 proverb says that more flies are caught with sugar 
 than vinegar. 
 
 Society demands that, in the intercourse of every- 
 day life, social distinctions should be observed, but 
 
244 PAPERS ON PEE ACHING. 
 
 admits that on certain privileged days tlie barriers 
 should be removed, and all classes mingle together. 
 This used to happen once or twice a year, either at 
 the annual club feast or at the school gathering, or 
 at the coming of age of the squire's son ; on all such 
 occasions the drift of the speeches is to set forth the 
 inestimable pleasure that results to all parties from 
 this interchange of good feelings. The clergy of the 
 present day have made good use of this mixing 
 freely with all classes to win the affections of the 
 people for the Church of England ; it would not be 
 difficult to point to instances of some who have 
 thrown open their houses, at some personal self- 
 sacrifice, in order to obtain access to their people. 
 Here, then, the evening lecture, wdiere all classes 
 meet, comes into the clergyman's assistance. Here, 
 without any inconvenience or expense, all classes 
 meet. The squire takes the chair — the educated 
 address the less educated — the master meets his ser- 
 vants — the farmer his labourers — and all think the 
 better of each other for the social gathering. 
 
 But, again, one of the confessed evils of a coun- 
 try place is gossip. Men frequent the village inn 
 not because its parlour is sanded and its pewter cups 
 brio-ht, but for the sake of hearing the news. Here 
 every new comer brings his quota of information ; 
 here the newspaper is to be read gratis ; and, indeed, 
 a good new^spaper, which is an epitome of all the 
 news worth recording, is a blessing in a country 
 place, because it diverts men's tongues from gossip- 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 245 
 
 ing about their neighbours to discuss questions of a 
 more solid nature. 
 
 In large towns, where business is rife and the 
 battle of life rages, gossip cannot get a footing ; it is 
 only the resource of the idle, and its great antidote 
 is activity. When people have talked out all they 
 have to say they begin to slander their neighbours, 
 not from vice, but from sheer idleness ; and in coun- 
 try places they have soon discussed all their topics 
 of conversation and betake themselves to gossip. 
 Cervantes, who was no badjudge of human nature, 
 puts into Sancho Panza's mouth the following ex- 
 pression : — " Is not this Tom Cecial, my neighbour 
 and gossijy ?" 
 
 A lecture on some entertaining topic once a fort- 
 night provides a village with something to talk of 
 until they meet again for the same purpose ; not 
 only those who attend, but the members of the 
 family who are left at home, and have the informa- 
 tion retailed to them by those who were present at 
 the lectures, are set talking and thinking, and so 
 they work out among themselves trains of thought 
 and reasoning which have been started by others. 
 Their talk over the winter fire and over their work 
 is of the gossip of history and biography, and the 
 simplest beginnings of science ; and if the lecture- 
 room shall have persuaded them to discuss such 
 things instead of the latest piece of scandal, who 
 shall deny that it may fairly claim its share of the 
 clergyman's time ? . 
 
240 PA PEES Oil PREACHING. 
 
 A wise lecturer will generally mention the sources 
 from which he has derived his information, and 
 particularly will point to any books in the village 
 library where the subject may be continued. If he 
 inquires next week he will find probably that there 
 have been several applications for these books. 
 Even if there be a written or printed catalogue of 
 the books in a village library — which there often is 
 not — still, what a dreary thing is a book-catalogue 
 to a rustic ; it is but little guide as to what reading 
 will suit his taste or fall within his comprehension. 
 The lecturer may guide his hearers into any train 
 of reading he chooses, and who shall say that in 
 these days of reading this is not a power which the 
 clergyman should welcome? If the lecture be 
 simple, clear, and comprehensive, how will it ar- 
 range and methodise many a subject which a rustic 
 had endeavoured to study, but which had proved 
 too diffusive for the grasp of an uneducated mind. 
 
 Secondly, — Let us suppose the pastor to see be- 
 yond a doubt the desirableness of aiding in such a 
 course of lectures, and to feel that, if he refuses to 
 assist, this great engine for good will pass into other 
 hands, and, perhaps, be turned against him ; then 
 comes the question which he revolves in his honest 
 mind, *^ How far can I put my hand to this without 
 impairing my health or neglecting my more peculiar 
 duties?" 
 
 This is the question we will endeavour to answer 
 from our own experience for some years, and from 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 247 
 
 what we have gleaned from conversations with 
 others, who have tried courses of winter evening 
 lectures. 
 
 It cannot be denied that the willing workers will 
 always find their energies overtaxed even in coun- 
 try parishes, because so much work which might 
 be done by the laity, if their sympathies were en- 
 listed, is done by the clergyman. A great deal of 
 time is taken up in taking pence for shoe-clubs 
 and clothing-clubs, for instance, and in other ways 
 *^ serving tables ;" but surely the interests of the 
 lecture-room are not inferior to these. Let us take 
 the case of a man of average ability in a parish of 
 average size, not forgetting that in a parish where 
 Bufficient people can be collected for a weekly lec- 
 ture the clergyman of the parish is seldom single- 
 handed. We speak of a man of average readiness, 
 who can accommodate matter to his hand quickly, 
 and who manages at his spare hours to keep him- 
 self fairly well up in the best books of the age. 
 Read, for instance, the Life of Bishop Armstrong, 
 as an instance of a clergyman who never neglected 
 his duties, but still found ample time for his pen, as 
 his reviews and tracts abundantly testify. A care- 
 ful economy of time will enable a busy clergyman 
 to read at least some of the pleasing and solid litera- 
 ture of the day, and if he read, pencil in hand, with 
 a commonplace book, to note down things worthy 
 of observation, he will soon find materials for such 
 lectures as will be required in a country parish. 
 
248 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 Men mistake when they think a lecture must be 
 an elaborated thing — its simplicity will more often 
 commend it — just a few simple thoughts spoken in a 
 conversational tone. Its very elaboration, like the 
 extra polish of a sermon, will unfit it for the men 
 it is written for; hence the complaint that Me- 
 chanics' Institutes are attended by every one except 
 mechanics. A lecture in the village schoolroom 
 may be made of very simple materials, the audience 
 is not critical if those attend who are wanted, viz. 
 the working men. The black board with a piece 
 of chalk will do a great deal in dexterous hands. 
 Any recent book of travels in China or India, even 
 the events of these stirring times out of the news- 
 papers, by the aid of a map, have made many an 
 evening pass pleasantly. We have seen the hearty 
 way in which a rustic auditory assembled to hear the 
 Times read at the time of the Crimean war. Any 
 average week's reading in modern literature would, 
 with a few notes, afford half an hour's conversational 
 lecturing. To reduce the literature of the day down 
 to the understanding of the villagers would be 
 enough ; originality is not necessary ; as it has been 
 well remarked, " The chief end of popular lecturing 
 is to be a medium of communication between the 
 highest minds of the age and the people at large." 
 Let us remember that these lectures are derived 
 from the humble beginnings of a magic lantern or 
 an orrery travelling through the villages on the back 
 of a showman : — 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING, 249 
 
 " Ignotum tragicse genus invenisse Camoense, 
 Dicitur, et plaustris vexisse poeraata Thespis, 
 Quae canerent agerentque peruncti fsecibus ora." 
 
 These lectures, if the people take an interest in 
 them as they should, will be worked by the people 
 themselves ; the clergyman will not do well to take 
 the matter too much into his own hands, but only 
 to set the engine rolling, and feed it from time to 
 time. If he include his two quarterly papers on 
 missions, he may surely, without being overtaxed, 
 be ready one evening in the month during the 
 winter session. 
 
 If at any time he should find time would not 
 suffice for the preparation of a lecture, let him give 
 a reading instead — a paper from The HouseJwld 
 Words, or Knighfs Half-hours with the Best 
 Authors, may supply all his need. A reading from 
 one of Dichens' Christmas Carols will be very po- 
 pular and not without its moral — viz. the happiness 
 which exists in the humbler ranks of life. 
 
 Nor is it difficult to find lectures in print which 
 may be delivered as the avowed production of other 
 heads. Some there are, given as specimens, in the 
 Parochial Paj)ers, edited by Mr. Armistead, of 
 Sanbach. The volume of Lectures on Great Men, 
 delivered at Keswick, by the late Rev. E. Myers, 
 are very vigorous. Moral Heroism, by Mrs. Bal- 
 four, is the title of a series of biographical sketches 
 assorted under that title. A course of lectures on 
 biographical and other subjects, published weekly 
 
250 PAPERS ON PREACHING, 
 
 like the Tracts for the Christian Seasons, would 
 surely be a great boon if well executed, and there 
 are abundance of such in existence if they could be 
 collected from different men, and a tone of unity 
 given them by a competent editor. 
 
 But the great beauty of the lecturing system is 
 that it brings men together who would not otherwise 
 meet. It is not the work of one man, but the work 
 of many, who interchange the courtesy of a lecture. 
 Just as the courses of Lent and Advent sermons 
 have been worked by guilds of men who have made 
 common cause — so it generally is at lectures. Now 
 that lecturing has become a system, if a man has a 
 good lecture it becomes known, and he is asked to 
 deliver it over and over again. Thus by a subdi- 
 vision of labour the public profits, and the difficulty 
 of providing a lecture week by week does not fall 
 on one clergyman. A pastor should, like a bishop, 
 be given to hospitality, and while it is debated 
 what society is worldly and what is not — what may 
 be indulged in and what eschewed — there can be no 
 doubt that some of the happiest evenings have been 
 when the vicarag-e has entertained a neig-hbourinoj 
 clergyman or layman to give his famous lecture to 
 the parish. Then at least hospitality lies in the 
 direct path of parish work and social kindly inter- 
 course; then at least, party being forgotten, men 
 may strengthen each other's hands for good. 
 
 The preparation of a lecture is in itself (if it come 
 easily, as it will to a ready man) a recreation. It 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 251 
 
 gives point to the pastor's reading, and prevents it 
 from becoming desultory, and when volumes of 
 intrinsic and lasting worth, like Stanley's Memo- 
 rials of Canterbury, and Dean Trench's Work on 
 Proverbs, have arisen out of the necessity of giving 
 a lecture, who shall say that lecturing is a frivolous 
 or a transitory pursuit? Who shall say that the 
 clergy may not find it both desirable and possible to 
 assist in this popular movement of secular lecturing 
 on long winter evenings ? 
 
CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 UNITY OF THE PAROCHIAL SYSTEM. 
 
 ^^§\^ HOUGH I have hitherto confined my 
 ^^ attention in this little work to a de- 
 W^Qi If^ scription of preaching considered as 
 '^n^^h^^ an art, yet it would come quite within 
 my plan to say a few words about the relation of 
 preaching to the other sections of parish work. If 
 there were a numerous body of pastors assembled 
 together in the charge of one parish, they might ad- 
 vantageously divide their work, each individual un- 
 dertaking that for which he had a particular gift or 
 calling; for by a subdivision of labour every de- 
 partment of labour is brought to perfection. If, I 
 say, there were many pastors in one charge (as 
 there were wont to be in the institutions of the 
 mediaeval days) it would be well, if, after every 
 member had served his apprenticeship in the whole 
 parochial course, so as to gain an insight into hu- 
 man nature by mixing with humanity in every 
 phase, there were to be a body of preachers chosen 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 253 
 
 out of the whole number for clearness of thoufrht 
 and eloquence of delivery who should give them- 
 selves more entirely to study and pulpit addresses. 
 We know, however, that, though a case like this 
 may occur in a collegiate or cathedral body, it is 
 only an exceptional instance. The generality of 
 clergy have to compete single-handed with all the 
 spiritual and many of the temporal requirements of 
 a parish. They, as Coleridge says, are often in out- 
 of-the-way country villages, the only centres of light ; 
 they are the only persons to whom the poor, the 
 ignorant, and the oppressed can run for succour, for 
 advice, or for justice, and to them especially may 
 the salutation be applied — 
 
 " Cum tot sustineas et tanta negotia solus " 
 
 It is on this ground that I would, in my last 
 chapter, describe the unity of parish work. The 
 way in which, if it be granted me to put preaching 
 as a centre, the other parochial constellations revolve 
 around this their sun; and I shall endeavour to 
 show how the strength of a good preacher is en- 
 hanced by his being a good pastor. 
 
 That the strength of the parochial system consists 
 in its entirety, I shall quote the following passage 
 from Mr. Munro's parochial work : — " The paro- 
 chial system is one, and each part of it must bear 
 some relation to the rest. It has been the use of 
 one portion to the exclusion of another that has 
 caused the imperfect and unsatisfactory results we 
 have so often witnessed. Different parties in the 
 
254 PAPERS ON PREACHING, 
 
 Church have thrown energy into single portions of 
 this system, and men dissatisfied at some meagre or 
 disproportioned result have doubted the power of 
 the whole as a scheme capable of effective applica- 
 tion, while on the other side the use of parts of the 
 machinery by schismatics with energy and effect has 
 given to them the appearance of a success at times 
 over the people, which has tended to throw discredit 
 and doubt upon the Church. The use of preaching, 
 to the depreciation of the sacraments and prayer, 
 tends to promote an unreal and superficial character, 
 while on the other hand the exclusion of earnest and 
 simple preaching, and the attempting to work 
 through the higher means of grace alone, will re- 
 sult in a formal and heartless whole. In this way 
 fragments of the parochial scheme have been used 
 by men who seem to forget that if the whole being 
 is to be affected, the whole system, which is formed 
 to embrace that being, must be used and applied. 
 The reliofious tendencies of the nation set in one 
 direction in the reign of James the First, and the 
 counter movement of Charles the First was its cor- 
 rective, which again needed and received a check in 
 tlie succeeding periods. The deadness resulting 
 from this last movement received its remedy in a 
 large development of the spiritual in the last cen- 
 tury, and that in turn is receiving its check in 
 the fuller development of the Church's formal, to 
 which another check may be needed yet" (P«- 
 rochial Work, p. 35). Those remarks are but an 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 255 
 
 expansion of Bishop Jeremy Taylor's advice to his 
 clergy, when he says, — " Let no man compare one 
 ordinance with another, as prayers with preaching, 
 to the disparagement of either, but use both in their 
 seasons, and according to their appointed order." 
 
 There may be some who would find fault with me 
 for putting preaching in the middle of the parochial 
 system, though I have only put it so as princeps 
 inter cequales. There are some who have described 
 this growing partiality for preaching as based upon a 
 " worldly system," as " not conducing to a healthful 
 and reverential tone of feeling in respect to the 
 blessed sacraments," and as " the undue exaltation of 
 an instrument which scripture, to say the least, has 
 never much recommended" (^Tracts for the Times, 
 No. 87. p. 75). Yet, as a writer in the Christian 
 Observer, No. 2b6, remarks, " this inferior place 
 assigned for preaching, in relation to sacraments, 
 does not seem to be borne out by that language of 
 the apostles — * For Christ sent me not to baptize, 
 but to preach the gospel.' Or by a command en- 
 forced in such a solemn strain as this — ^ I charsre thee 
 therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, 
 who shall judge the quick and dead at his appear- 
 ing and his kingdom : preach the word' (1 Cor. i. 
 17, and 2 Timothy iv. 1)." The opinion of Hooker 
 {Eccles. Pol. B. V. 22) is on this wise:—" We shall 
 greatly wrong so worthy a part of divine service if 
 we do not esteem preaching as the blessed ordinance 
 of God 5 sermons as keys to the kingdom of heaven, 
 
256 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 as wings to the soul, as spurs to the good affections 
 of men, unto the sound and healthy as food, as 
 physic unto diseased minds." Hooker is here defend- 
 ing preaching in the widest acceptation of the term. 
 The pulpit, indeed, has lost somewhat of its supre- 
 macy since the printing-press has become so active. 
 The printing-press addresses far greater congrega- 
 tions than the preacher ; and if the latter, like Saul, 
 has slain its thousands, the former, like David, may 
 be said to have slain its tens of thousands. (See 
 remarks on this head in the Preface to Mr. Angel 
 James' Ea7'nest Ministry). 
 
 Still, I believe I am justified in putting preaching 
 as the centre of the parochial system, because of all 
 parochial ministrations it works the most fully and 
 the most universally. People have come far and 
 near perhaps, prepared to listen to the preacher, 
 their hearts previously prepared by the prayers and 
 songs of the sanctuary, to profit by what is said ; 
 at all events, the world, as it were, removed from 
 them for an hour, that "they may acquaint them- 
 selves with God, and be at peace." " Remember," 
 says Professor Blunt, " the prodigious opportunity 
 for doing good which the pulpit on Sunday presents ; 
 how far greater than any other whatever of that 
 kind ! The whole mass of your parish met together 
 in one place ; Christ Jesus more especially present — 
 pledged to be so in the assembly ; the Sabbath-day 
 more especially blessed and hallowed, i.e. per- 
 haps God's Spirit disposed even to be more active in 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 257 
 
 the work of sanctification on that day than on other 
 days. It was on the Lord^s Day that St. John 
 was in the spirit {^Revelation i. 10). Your words 
 probably discussed one amongst another by the par- 
 ties present, whilst they are in the way together, and 
 conveyed by them to members of their respective 
 families, whom age, sickness, or even indifference, 
 may have kept at home, your hearers again volun- 
 teers, prompted by devotional feelings to repair to 
 the house of God ; and so far surer of profiting by 
 your admonitions than the careless, the idle, the 
 hardened spirits to whom your weekly visits would 
 be chiefly, and very properly, directed" {Parish 
 Priest, p. 141). 
 
 Besides, in the pulpit you can discover a man's 
 particular case to him most plainly, and at the same 
 time with the least possible offence. Like Nathan 
 to David, you can speak to a man in parables about 
 himself, and utter dark sentences which will set him 
 thinking and musing in his silent hours. Many a 
 man will almost suspect you know tlie history of his 
 spiritual life, while you are only drawing from your 
 general notions of human nature ; and he will say to 
 himself, " Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet." 
 " That sermon hath no salt in it," says Thomas 
 Fuller, " under which some galled horse doth not 
 wince." 
 
 In the celebrated John Foster's Lectures, there is 
 one. On the Institution of Preaching (Jjectiire 64), 
 which is worth every one's perusal. I must hazard 
 
 s 
 
258 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 a long quotation from it : — " It is just worth notic- 
 ing what an advantage living instruction has over 
 the other forms. This is true of instruction gene- 
 rally. We may remark that it falls in with the 
 social propensities of mankind. They have a won- 
 derful delight in coming together in large numbers ; 
 they are always first in readiness to come together ; 
 they seem the least to like themselves when alone ; 
 they are pleased therefore with anything that 
 gives a fair occasion or pretext for doing so. Not 
 that they so much love one another ) but there is, 
 perhaps, a feeling as if human nature were magni- 
 fied, and therefore the individual's own little portion 
 of it. A better feeling is, that the business, the sub- 
 ject seems magnified. The institution of preaching 
 avails itself of this, whatever may be the principle of 
 the feeling. The people hear religious truth under 
 the influence of a large sociality. Each hears it as 
 that which a great number more persons think 
 worth hearing, and with the more serious deport- 
 ment that these persons at any time display. While 
 adverting thus to the number of the persons that 
 hear the preacher, we may notice the grand advan- 
 tage there is in this circumstance, in respect to 
 economy of exertion on the part of teachers ; how 
 much is done with a little comparatively speaking. 
 One mind at one act conveys ideas into a multitude 
 and diversities of minds like a shower. The mul- 
 titude consents to become as one person to hear one j 
 suspending all their diverse individual employments 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 259 
 
 that they may in a large company meet him an in- 
 dividual. What a vast expense of the teacher's 
 labour it would have been to have said so much to 
 so many persons taken individually, or in families. 
 An immeasurable labour which must have worn 
 months and years away ! And indeed if the in- 
 structor could (according to some of the wild fan- 
 tasies of the Hindoo mythology) become many men 
 for the work, there would not be found any oppor- 
 tunity for the private instruction of all these auditors. 
 With how few of them could he find any fair oppor- 
 tunity. Besides he can say what he thinks may be 
 useful to each one, far more freely and boldly when 
 he is to say it to hundreds than he could to almost 
 any individual. It is mainly by the institution of 
 preaching that religion is kept a conspicuous thing, 
 a public acknowledged reality ; so much being said 
 about it, in so many people's hearing, and so often. 
 There is one more advantage of this administra- 
 tion of religious instruction to a great number 
 together. It makes all be witnesses to all that they 
 have heard it. Each one hears all the assembly 
 told the same truths, and put under the same obliga- 
 tions. The individual has a certain indistinct sense 
 that a great number can testify what he ought to 
 be; how solemnly he has been warned. Some- 
 times the solemn idea will strike the mind of a 
 hearer when he happens to look over the assembly, 
 * We shall all of us be witnesses at the last day, one 
 against the other, that all of us heard these things.' " 
 
260 PAPERS ON PREACHING, 
 
 I would ask any one, who is disposed to doubt 
 the power of the pulpit as a moral engine, to con- 
 sider, first, how little it is studied as an art, and, con- 
 sequently, how far short preaching falls, taken as a 
 whole, from what might be expected of it if it were 
 used in the perfection of which it is capable ! And 
 then, secondly, to imagine what parish work would 
 be without it — to picture to themselves a parochial 
 system from which the pulpit was blotted out ! It 
 would then, I imagine, be seen, that, without the 
 opportunities of pulpit address, a minister would be 
 powerless, and his system of ministration an arch 
 without a key-stone, having in it indeed elements of 
 strength, but disorganized elements. What now 
 would a parochial system avail, in which there 
 were sacraments and prayers — say, if you will, 
 daily prayers and weekly communions ; add to this 
 good schools, active house-to-house visitation, with 
 clubs, and those other smaller items which make 
 up the sum total of parochial work ? Would they 
 not want the Sunday pulpit exhortation to cement 
 them together ? 
 
 Take the sacramental part of the system. How 
 are men to be exhorted to attend on these ordinances, 
 or to be instructed in the " Holy living" of which 
 these are the seals ? Is not the preacher the mes- 
 senger sent out in the highways and byways to 
 compel men to come in that the feast may be fur- 
 nished with guests ? True, there are exhortations 
 and addresses prefixed to the communion service ; ^ 
 
PAPERS ON PEEACRINQ. 261 
 
 but these would soon lose their force by repetition, 
 if they were the only appeals the clergyman could 
 use. 
 
 Or, if we pass on to liturgies, would our congre- 
 gations be half so numerous without a sermon ? I 
 think experience shows us that they would not. 
 Not only would people not be able to understand 
 the phraseology of our liturgies, and the duties of 
 the offices required of church-people, but the very 
 fact of prayer, through the name of Jesus, accept- 
 able to God, will never be understood by the com- 
 mon people without frequent sermons on the person 
 and offices of Christ — without often -repeated ex- 
 planations of His manhood and His godhead ; so 
 that, being both God and Man, He is the only fit 
 person to stand between man and God — between 
 the creature and the Creator. 
 
 Or, if we turn to schools and the religious educa- 
 tion in them imparted, to catechizings both in and 
 out of church, we shall admit that, as a founda- 
 tion of saving knowledge, they cannot be too highly 
 prized, or purchased at too great a cost. Yet, with- 
 out going on unto perfection, what good are the 
 elements of learning ? The " Feed my lambs" must 
 be followed by " Feed my sheep." Thus, the 
 elementary teaching of schools, and catechizings, and 
 habit of acquiring knowledge so obtained, are of 
 little use, and would not be likely to lead to results 
 except for the continuous education and instruction 
 which the pulpit supplies. The piles of dusty 
 
262 PAPERS ON PRE A CHING. 
 
 Bibles carried home as prizes, and chiefly useful 
 for writing the births of the family in, testify to the 
 fact that the poor are not self-educators, and that 
 without the Sunday sermon their religious know- 
 ledge would be much more deficient than it is now. 
 
 Or lastly, if we turn to " visiting from house to 
 house,'^ which has been aptly called the aggressive 
 part of the parochial system, because it carries the 
 war to the very hearths, and delivers there to the 
 individual or the family the same message which 
 the pulpit does to the congregation ; still, we shall 
 say that even this, excellent as it is, even this can- 
 not supply the place of preaching. The stragglers 
 are looked up by the occasional visits of the 
 pastor, and the whole parish are better disposed to 
 attend to his ministrations, who knows the way to 
 their cottages, and can call their little ones by name ; 
 and so is that proverb true — " A house-going parson 
 makes a church-going people. '^ 
 
 Thus, though preaching alone is but a poor sub- 
 stitute for a parochial ministry, yet it can exist 
 alone, and single-handed, better than any other part 
 of the parochial system, because it is more complete 
 and self-sufficient than any other part. It is the 
 beginning, as it is the end of missionary work; 
 and that not only in countries of an advanced and 
 ancient civilization, like our own country, but in 
 missionary advances to the heathen, a commanding 
 address is very necessary, as Dr. Livingstone re- 
 marks, iu his lectures at Cambridge : — " The na- 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 263 
 
 tives of North America and of Central Africa are 
 fluent, natural speakers ; therefore, a missionary, 
 as one of his first requirements, should be a good 
 speaker and a ready debater." 
 
 But granting the fact that preaching is the key- 
 stone of the parochial arch, then, to show how other 
 portions of work fit round the ordinance, till the 
 whole be aptly conjoined and cemented together, 
 will be to reflect lustre upon the pulpit, while it 
 teaches the preacher to be diligent in all the other 
 ordinances of parish work. 
 
 The pastor labours after completeness in his 
 work, pursuing his ministry into all its branches, 
 cementing everything which he has done in the 
 week by what he says from the pulpit on Sunday. 
 By schools and catechizing he lays a good founda- 
 tion of knowledge, and by the greater familiarity 
 with which he can address people in any weekly 
 lecture, whether it be an Advent or Lent cottage- 
 reading, or whether it be a Bible- class or a com- 
 municant lecture ; in all these he supplies width 
 and solidity to the knowledge which he is, to a cer- 
 tain extent, obliged to assume that all his hearers 
 are in the possession of, when he addresses a mingled 
 audience from the pulpit. I have shown, in a 
 separate paper, how the house-to-house visitation 
 supplies the materiel for sermons ; and how, by 
 conversing from time to time with his people, he 
 gauges, as it were, their intellects, and ascertains 
 how far his own work is telling upon them. In the 
 
264 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 weekly lectures of the Mechanics' Institute, if such 
 there be, he can supply any information, which, 
 though not scriptural, is desirable to be understood 
 by the people ; such, for instance, as modern dis- 
 coveries which confirm the truth of Scripture, and 
 books of travels which illustrate the manners of the 
 nations mentioned in Holy Writ. By a pastoral 
 letter to his parishioners — say, for instance, at the 
 end of the year — a clergyman may explain any 
 things which may have been misunderstood or mis- 
 interpreted. He will find this also a convenient 
 channel for conveying any information about benefit 
 clubs, savings-banks, &c. He may take a review of 
 the parish history during the past year. Above all, 
 he will be able to give a general circulation to the 
 state of his school finances, and will thus con- 
 veniently audit any charities which have passed 
 through his hand, the monies which he has re- 
 ceived as sacrament-money, from collections in 
 church, for missionary purposes, or for the clothing 
 club. People often are disinclined to subscribe to 
 these things, from being kept in ignorance of how 
 the money is spent. The pastoral letters of Mr. 
 Robert Anderson of Brighton, Mr. Henry Blunt, 
 &c. are of a purely religious character ; but there 
 are not wanting instances of what I mean. The best 
 which I ever saw was addressed to the parishioners 
 of Hagley in Worcestershire, but I believe that 
 was only printed for private circulation, by the Hon. 
 W. Lyttelton. 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 265 
 
 Everything which comes even into routine work 
 will be, by the painstaking pastor, turned to ac- 
 count ; the list of sick to be prayed for in church 
 will remind him of the houses to which he must 
 turn his steps in the week ; while the repetition of 
 the sentences, in administering the elements, will 
 be regarded as a special prayer for the spiritual 
 welfare of each communicant. 
 
 Even from such " serving-tables"as taking money 
 for shoe-clubs and clothing-clubs, even a glance at 
 the daily attendance register at the parish schools, 
 will enable the pastor to read the character of punc- 
 tuality, or the reverse, in the children ; and he will, 
 by the habits of the children, arrive at the habits of 
 the parents. By uniting others with him in his 
 parochial ministrations he will enlist their sympa- 
 thies. People are beginning to see that a church is 
 not necessarily composed of clergy, but that there 
 is such a thing as lay co-operation. If some help 
 as district-visitors — some as school-teachers — some 
 as singing in, or perhaps in training, the choir — 
 how many will have their sympathies enlisted and 
 become, as it were, a body-guard to the clergyman. 
 The great strength of the dissenters is that they 
 have so many office-bearers. In days when popu- 
 lation outruns the reach of the clergy, tliey can only 
 overtake the population by self-multiplication — by 
 being the big wheel which turns other wheels. 
 "He gave some apostles, and some prophets, and 
 some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers ; 
 
2QQ PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the 
 ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ" 
 (^Ephesians iv. 12). 
 
 " The country parson," says George Herbert, 
 " is a lover of old customs if they be good and 
 harmless ; and the rather because country people 
 are addicted to them, so that to favour them therein 
 is to win their hearts, and to oppose them therein is 
 to deject them. If there be any ill in the custom, 
 he pares the apple, and gives them only the clean to 
 feed on." Our harvest-home feasts, which were 
 revived so generally the last two or three years, 
 contain much resemblance to the old custom of 
 " Procession," which he then goes on to mention. 
 Remembering how few " red-letter days" there are 
 in the poor man's calendar, we should endeavour to 
 extend to the country-labourer what the " Saturday 
 half-holiday" and " Early closing movements" are 
 doing in towns. 
 
 If the clergyman be a receiver of tithes, let him 
 remember what a power he has to do good by acting 
 on George Herbert's rule : — " The pastor's money 
 for the poor, his table for those of his parishioners 
 who are above alms." The history of titlies re- 
 minds us that the stream from which these are de- 
 rived was used of old time to water the earth in a 
 threefold stream, — by the maintenance of priests, — 
 by the education of deserving poor, — by the main-, 
 tenance of the needy, before poor-rates. He, there- 
 fore, into whose treasury this threefold stream flows, 
 
PAPERS ON PREACHING. 267 
 
 should remember the mighty sources of good of 
 which he is the almoner. The clergy should be 
 above all greed, especially in the matter of fees. 
 How many are driven to chapel to avoid '' the 
 accustomed offering,^^ which is often supposed by 
 the poor to be a fee for churching, and even some- 
 times for christening. I remember hearing of a 
 clergyman, I think the rector of one of the Grays 
 in Kent, who, taking the wedding-fee from the 
 bridegroom, whenever the parties were poor, pre- 
 sented it to the bride, saying, " No woman is ever 
 married by me without a dowry." 
 
 Though we should guard against being con- 
 sidered "relieving officers," yet our liberality, if 
 we have the means, should be beyond suspicion, 
 " even to a wonderino^ that the world should so 
 much value wealth, which in the day of wrath hath 
 not one dram of comfort in it." Hooker, in his 
 quaint way, tells us how comforting the body is 
 akin to comforting the souls of men : — " Destitu- 
 tion in food and raiment is such an impediment as 
 suffereth not the mind of man to admit any other 
 care." And again : — " Inasmuch as a righteous life 
 presupposeth life, inasmuch as to live virtuously is 
 impossible unless we live, therefore, the first impe- 
 diment which we naturally endeavour to remove is 
 penury, and want of those things without which we 
 cannot live." "Poverty," saysDr. Johnson, "makes 
 some virtues difficult and others impossible." 
 
 A preacher, proving himself in all these things a 
 
268 PAPERS ON PREACHING. 
 
 true pastor, will fulfil George Herbert's definition, 
 that he is " the deputy of Christ, for the reducing 
 of man into obedience to God ;" and will find that 
 he realizes the saying of Fuller, that, " like Mel- 
 chisedek, he is not only a priest, but also, by the 
 influence he possesses, a king at the same time." 
 
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 Lectures on the Tinnevelly Missions. By the Rev. Dr. Caldwell, 
 of Edeyenkoody. Reprinted, with additions, from the " Colonial Church 
 Chronicle." Crown Svo. 2s. 6rf. 
 
 Three Months' Visitation Tour, in the Autumn of 1855. By the 
 Bishop of Capetown. With an Account of his Voyage to the Island of 
 Tristan d'Acuuha, in March, 1856. Illustrated by 7 Original Sketches 
 by Mrs. Gray ; printed in Colours. Fcap. Svo. 4s. 6c?. 
 
 The Kafir, the Hottentot, and th 3 Frontier Farmer. Passages 
 of Missionary Life from the Journals of the Ven. Archdeacon Merriman. 
 12mo. 3s. 6a?. 
 
 Indian Missions in Guiana. By the Rev. W. H. Brett, Mission- 
 ary in Connexion with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. 
 Fcap. 8vo. 5s. 
 
 LONDON : BELL AND DALDY, 186, FLEET STREET. 
 
 

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