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be entirely forgotten among the crowd of contemporary sermonizers. And yet that is the fate which has befallen even the greatest among them. Few people in this generation have ever heard of Rollock or Bruce; and if Robertson and Erskine are known to anybody, it is probably to the readers of Guy Mannering. But for that very reason we must postpone the history of the Scottish pulpit, and confine ourselves for the present to the English side of the Border. To complete our task it is still necessary to take note of two remarkable occasions of "excitement" in religious oratory, which in our own and our fathers' days have taken place outside the English Established Church, but within the sphere of English life. These are, the oratory of the Scottish minister, Irving, in 1823, and of the Baptist Spurgeon, within the last ten years.

reason at which they pointed, is a question of
opinion into which we need not here enter;
but as regards his pulpit ministrations, this
was the fulcrum from which he worked his
lever, and no man ever wielded it with a
more unfaltering hand. Men and boys were
to him alike fitted for its application. The
human mind, so he held, should take up its
right position when first able to reason and
to pray at all. Thence the fault so often
found with him, that he sought too early to
form the opinions of his scholars, and left
them really less guarded against opposite
impressions than if the process had been
more gradual and unforced. Cherished by
all who can recall it is the remembrance of
that high-souled Mentor, speaking his earnest
yet familiar thought to the young auditory
assembled within his well-loved chapel walls.
The keen eye, the knitted brow, the animated
but somewhat measured cadence-a little in
the "spouting" method of delivery, distinc-
tive of old-fashioned academic training-the
sudden grating of the voice, which denoted
ever and anon' that his own warm, anxious
feelings were moved by the argument
he was enforcing, to hear him and to watch
him thus, one hardly wondered at the rapt
attention which held fast the restless limbs
and wandering glances of three hundred boy-in
ish listeners. If sincerity and self-forgetting
earnestness ever made an orator impressive,
it was so in the case of Arnold. To his com-
position we have already adverted. It was
novel to his generation, as exhibiting the use
of unadorned language chosen entirely for
its power of expressing meaning, and not
from any traditional association with, or
supposed fitness for, sacred themes.

We must not linger on special developments of the mere oratorical faculty in our own time. Nor may we turn aside, at the end of our long journey, to do for the great preachers of our own Northern Church what we have just endeavoured to do for those of England. The temptation is strong; for, besides the striking parallels which might easily be drawn, after the manner of Plutarch, we persuade ourselves that we should deserve well of our readers were we to brighten for them the faded memory of many venerable names, scarcely known at any time beyond the Border, and little remembered now, even by our own countrymen. Most of us, to be sure, know how Knox used to "ding the pu'pit in blads;" and the immense practical influence of Chalmers would keep his memory fresh for generations, even if his fervid and majestic eloquence ran any risk of oblivion. But the centuries which divided Knox and Chalmers produced great masters of sacred eloquence, who scarcely deserve to

Hatton Garden, near which was situated the Caledonian Chapel, in which Irving officiated, was thronged at the first period referred to by the learned and the fashionable; by statesmen and wits, lawyers and noblemen. The carriages of the royal family even were wont to mingle with the other coroneted vehicles that crowded the narrow street where the stern prophetic preacher held forth

periods of glowing rhetoric upon the worldly and hollow principles of the professing Christians of the age. Much has been written about Edward Irving of late. His name is familiar to all who have read the very interesting record of his life by Mrs. Oliphant. But it may not be superfluous here to quote the manuscript notes of one— a man of taste and a scholar-who thus sets down his impressions on each occasion after hearing him in those earliest days of his London notoriety, when none could say whither the eccentric meteor would direct its flight, and opinions were divided as to its betokening the mission of an apostle or a charlatan :

66

Enthu

Sunday, June 29, 1823.—I certainly never witnessed such a combination of all the qualities of an orator in such high perfection. Countenance, gesture, voice, all grand and imposing in the greatest degree. Frequency and force of words and structure of sentences perhaps more In flow of imagery equal to Jeremy Taylor. resembling Barrow. A vehemence which, with less dignity of action and impressive seriousness of demeanour, would have been rant. siasm, not misplaced on mere matters of speculative doctrine, but exerted in the cause of genuine Piety and Virtue. A sustained and habitual reverence of human learning and attainonly kept in due subserviency to the great end ments, of the powers of imagination and genius, of religion. To conclude, a tone and manner inspiring the hearers with a conviction of truth and sincerity, and of a belief in the preacher of

his own divine appointment to the office of per- | education and study. Spurgeon had little of suasion and reformation. I saw Lords Liver- the one, and probably has no turn for the pool, Lansdowne, Aberdeen, Essex, Canning, other. Nevertheless, it is certain that he Heber, and many more persons of distinction has attracted to his open air or his "Taberwhose persons were unknown to me, and many nacle" orations innumerable crowds both of the ignorant and the wise; of Dissenters putting a blind faith in his doctrines; and of fashionable critics, seeking merely for a new sensation.

ladies of the first rank and fashion.

"July 13.-This morning I again crowded in to hear Irving, and am confirmed in my opinion of his most extraordinary powers, though I detected a greater mixture of bad taste than at the first hearing. The sermon was on God's mercy and justice. He exposed, with most expressive and solemn eloquence, the perilous folly of those who quiet their consciences with the opiate of unlimited and unconditional forgiveness; exposed its utter inconsistency with the true character of God's providence and the scheme of creation; and said that such a conception was making of heaven a sort of Whitefriars or Alsatia-a receptacle of everything profligate and abandoned on earth. This was bad, because the allusion necessarily carries the mind to the light works of imagination-plays and romances-in which alone the prototype of the image is now to be found; and it is therefore an unreasonable disturbance of our thoughts, and an abstraction of them from the solemn subject which it is brought forth to illustrate. But it was still worse when, assuming the tone and character of an immediate delegate from heaven, he uttered, in the language of a king's writ, All men to wit! the Almighty God, Maker of Heaven and Earth commands,' etc. This would be merely and shockingly ridiculous in a common preacher, and Irving's grandeur of voice and gesture could not redeem it. Even with the defects I have noticed, there is something most powerful and persuasive in the matter as well as the manner of his sermons, and I cannot listen to them without feeling some of the same enthusiasm which inspires the Preacher, and makes him regard himself as the commissioned Reformer of the great, and rich, and worldly-minded who flock together to

listen to him."

And as in the time of Wesley, so now in the time of Spurgeon, the Church of England, by its natural sympathies always resting more upon the upper ranks, has begun to shake herself, and inquire how she may fulfil that almost forgotten part of her duty which consists in the evangelization of the lower stratum of society. Hence evening services, cathedral naves thrown open for worship, services shortened, and every effort made to render the teaching of the pulpit more intelligible, more attractive, and more "sensational."

But the Church of England has a double mission to perform; and in this lies, and always has lain, her chief difficulty. Methodists and Baptists consist in greatest part of the classes below the highest cultivation. The Church has to keep her hold on the most advanced intellects of the land as well as on the humbler orders. To use the phrase of Donne, "she must preach to the mountains, and preach to the plain likewise." It is not always easy for a man of first

rate education to focus his addresses on the poor. It is still less easy for one whose time must be much spent in the practical duties of his profession, to deliver sermons which can reach the reason and conscience of men of practised intellect. The consequence is that the general preaching of the Church of England is a sort of midway compromise, utterly ineffective for both purposes. This is the complaint of the day, and it deserves being looked into.

But much as he was admired by all classes before sectarian extravagance overmastered him, and fine as his orations still appear to our judgment on reperusal of the written page, Irving made no special mark on the Church of England. Spurgeon, with marvellous fluency, aptness of illustration, ready" humour, sweetness of fancy, and with the most perfect conceivable organ of speech, is altogether a more vulgar type of orator, yet he will probably be more noted in the remembrance of posterity for the impulse he has given to the energies of the Establishment; and it is on this impulse that his future fame will be founded, rather than on any abiding monuments of his own eloquence. He is far more of a preacher for the common orders than Irving was. Irving was all solemnity his very colloquialisms were of a quaint and stately order. Spurgeon revels in daring homeliness. Irving was a man of

We will first glance at a few of the sug gestions which have been offered for improv ing the ways and means of pulpit instruction. Something must be done," is the cry from newspapers, synods, and drawing-room coteries alike. Dulness has passed all legitimate bounds, says the British public. It is an infliction little short of tyranny to make a man of sense sit through such commonplaces as he is weekly pelted with from the preacher's post of vantage. Go from church to church, what do you hear? The rector's pompous platitudes in the morning, the curate's offensive dogmatism, or more offensive would-be impressiveness in the afternoon. The duller the matter, the longer the discourse: and then how utterly unenlivened, in most cases, by any taste in elocution or

delivery! For ourselves, we confess to thinking the curate-infliction the greatest penance of the two; particularly in the metropolis, where, partly from ambition, and partly from the fear of being detected in plagiarism, a young performer will generally parade themes of his own composing, and indulge in varied experiments of mannerism. For the chance of an edifying discourse, we had really rather on the whole encounter a chance sermon in an obscure rustic village than in a London afternoon congregation. The possibility always is, in the first case, that the parson has not given himself the trouble of composing, or even " compiling," a discourse at all, but has taken some ready printed article into the pulpit with him, secure that the theft will not be discovered by his people; and odd enough the contrast often appears between the intense homeliness, the "hawking and chopping" manner of the delivery, and the superior character of the thoughts and imagery. And this brings us to the first amendment that we would suggest. Let the re-preaching of old and approved discourses be much more frequent and acknowledged and systematic than it is. Let there be no shame or misconception about it. A popular reciter of profane literature attracts crowds merely to hear him read passages from Dickens or Shakespeare or Sterne, or any of our good prose writers, of whatever age. A well-chosen discourse, even of as old a date as Leighton or as Paley, would probably afford far more useful food for meditation and assimilation than any hash the neophyte could produce from his own brain.

Sir Roger de Coverley was a wise man, we think, when he made his chaplain a present of all the good sermons which had been printed up to his time, with the condition that he should preach one of them every Sunday. "As Sir Roger was going on in his story," says the Spectator, "the gentleman we were talking of came up to us; and upon the Knight's asking him who preached to-morrow, for it was Saturday night, told us, the Bishop of St. Asaph in the morning, and Dr. South in the afternoon. He then showed us his list of preachers for the whole year, where I saw with a great deal of pleasure Archbishop Tillotson, Bishop Saunderson, Dr. Barrow, Dr. Calamy, with several living authors who have published discourses of practical divinity. I no sooner saw this venerable man in the pulpit, but I very much approved of my friend's insisting upon the qualifications of a good aspect and a clear voice; for I was so charmed with the gracefulness of his figure and delivery, as well as with the discourses he pronounced, that I

think I never passed any time more to my satisfaction."

Dr. Mason Neale sneers in his most contemptuous fashion at this sample of missionary lukewarmness; but we only wish Sir Roger's method were more commonly followed at the present day. A good aspect and a good voice, and a good ready-made sermon, are requisitions which most patrons would, for their people's sake, do well to insist upon. We can testify to this from an example within our own experience, where the clergyman is one of the most zealous, and his pulpit ministrations some of the most impressive we know, and where the practice of preaching borrowed sermons is openly avowed. For what is the sense of the matter? An active parish priest whose heart is in his work, is busily occupied during the week with attending to his parishioners far and near-praying with the sick, counselling the perplexed, rebuking the sinful. How can he command time and energy to compose thoughtful and wise discourses for his Sunday services? The days are past of the hunting parson of Herrick's verse:"Old Parson Beanes hunts six days of the

week,

And on the seventh he hath his notes to seek. Six days he hollows so much breath away, That on the seventh he can nor preach nor pray."*

But the round of a serious clergyman's weekday labour is not less absorbing than when he followed the huntsman's horn and halloo.

No doubt there are those who have the gift of ready utterance as well as fervid thought, whose natural impulse is to speak out from their own bosom the truths with which they are laden. Such, if hard-worked men, with plain congregations, might ponder the advice of a French priest, the Abbé Mullois, chaplain to the present Emperor. It occurs in a work entitled "Cours d'Eloquence sacrée populaire."

"The sermon should be short,' says the Abbé; at all costs it must not weary the hearers. Besides, what good, what motive is there in so much talk? I know not how it is that we have been drawn into these long discourses. Our Saviour's instructions were brief. His Sermon on the Mount, which has revolutionized the world, does not appear to have taken up half an hour. The homilies of the Fathers too were generally short; and St. Ambrose says, Nec nimium prolixus sit sermo, ne fastidium dat. pariat, semihora tempus communiter non exce

specimens lingered in our own days on the borders Not so long past however. Some of the latest of Dartmoor, and were scarcely less literally true to their type than Parson Beanes himself.

"It would undoubtedly benefit religion were | indefinitely abused. No doubt the line is a we to abridge our sermons and our services fine one between a strained interpretation also. As regards the former, this may be done and an interesting elucidation of unusual easily, and without the least detriment. Omit all generalities from the exordium, all useless texts. Still, a little fancy and ingenuity demonstrations from the body of the discourse, might be employed in drawing out the meanall vague phrases from the peroration. Cut off ings and possible applications of pregnant all superfluity of words, admitting only such as words that do not belong to the regular run triple the force of the substantive. Be chary of those hackneyed passages the very utterof words and phrases: economize them as a ance of which so often seems to bar our miser does his coin. in the commentary that is to ensue. hope of anything that will arrest attention A text may fairly enough be propounded as a motto for a theme, and not necessarily as a problem for solution.

"When about to compose your sermon, first study your topic, seizing the salient points of the truth you are going to expound, and then write. But do not stop there-begin afresh. Supposing you have written four pages, reduce them to two, retaining all the thoughts and vigorous ideas of your first draft. On ascending the pulpit, place a watch by your side, and begin thus: On Sunday last we said so and so, let us proceed.' Then enter at once upon your subject, cutting it short when the appointed time arrives. People will say that you do not preach long enough, that you tantalize your audience, and rob them of a real pleasure by being so brief. Heed them not, but remain inflexible, for such persons are unconsciously real enemies to religion. Adhere more strictly than ever to your prescribed rule; then rest assured that your discourses will be talked of; every one will be anxious to witness a seven minutes' sermon; the poorer classes will come, and the rich will follow. Faith will bring the one, novelty will attract the other, and thus the Divine Word will have free course and be glori

fied."

A seven minutes' sermon is, it must be confessed, rather a homoeopathic prescription. Most English constitutions are tough enough to stand a quarter of an hour, or even twenty minutes, and would, we fancy, with their innate loyalty to the pulpit, scarcely think themselves properly dosed with less. But concentration, instead of dilution of thought, system, point, purpose, directness of language, these are recommendations that cannot be too strongly enforced.

As a minor matter, we have often wondered why a text being the recognised necessary condition of every sermon-more advantage is not taken of the great variety the Bible affords, to raise legitimate surprise and expectation in an audience. We do not admire such eccentricity in the choice as was evinced by the preacher who launched a sermon from the "nine-and-twenty knives" of Ezra i. 9. We consider, too, that it was rather too daring an experiment in the manipulation or manufacture of a text which a late highly esteemed divine ventured upon when he puzzled a St. Paul's congregation three or four years since by giving out as the motto of a very eloquent discourse the words, "We may, we must, we will," brought together from sections of three different verses of the Bible. The practice might be

On the indispensable necessity, for all purposes of really effective preaching, of a good manner and elocution, it is impossible to lay too much stress. We all know what unpretending addresses may become impressive from taste and animation in the delivery, what fine orations dull from wanting them. As this is, it would seem, an accomplishment which requires no genius, but only simple painstaking, to acquire, the wonder is how egregiously it is often neglected. Surely it would be well to make it a subject of severe test-discipline in all aspirants to the ministry.

Much is to be said for the device adopted in several metropolitan churches of interposing a pause between the prayers and sermon, so as to permit the withdrawal of those whose attention to the service is already fatigued, or who flinch from the possible dreariness or objectionable doctrine of the next half hour. Moreover it would have the effect, if generally adopted, of keeping the clergy more alive to the responsibilities of their position, and making them more anxious to interest their audience. Elocution, we take it, would have a better chance of being studied, and self-conceit might find its zeal for original composition abated.

But shame and pity it would be, we most emphatically pronounce, if, in this age of enlightenment and cultivation, religious topics should be held unequal to any further developement of oratorical ability, and men be everywhere content with the prepared efforts of the past, or with spasmodic appeals calculated to attract the vulgar for the

moment.

We hold the study of pulpit eloquence to be a most noble and important object, demanding the highest faculties of thoughtful men; only it should not be left to those overburdened already with practical cares. Why should not the Church resort to the methods pursued in the early days of the reformation-originally indeed exemplified by the better type of Friars Predicant under the older system-and have preachers regularly trained and educated for the task, and

sent round at stated seasons to give parishes, town and country, some revival in the style and mode of their instruction. There would be the advantage of curiosity and change; for one great cause of the inefficacy of our pulpit oratory is the weary monotony of hearing one and the same voice and manner from year's end to year's end. There would be the opportunity of stimulating the intellect; for it may be supposed that such missionaries, examined and licensed for their task, would have cultivated the intellectual aspects of theology more than the parish pastor has time to do. Variety of views and treatment there might be; but in these days of much thought and much reading, where is the sense of supposing that a congregation must needs be kept in a beaten track by its spiritual guides? It must never be forgotten that in a case like that of sacred oratory, where the same topics have to be handled from age to age, where, according to La Bruyère's eloquent description, the preacher has to walk by well-worn paths, to say what has been said before, and what (within limits) every one knows he is going to say; where, important as his subject-matter is, it is nevertheless trite and hackneyed-sound as his principles are, the conclusions to which they lead are obvious at a glance to the auditors,gether too narrow ground for their standing; before whom he is about to expound them; in such a case, we say, and our survey has gone to prove it, human nature will crave for novelty in some shape or other; and as the substance of a sermon must always be in a certain sense "used up," they will seek it in the mode of treatment. Hence enthusiasm, pedantry, argument, rhetoric, mystic heat, prudential coolness, all may have their turn of popularity, all will pall upon the taste when their fashion is over.

| Neale nine years ago, and of Mr. BaringGould during the last year, aim at exalting the preaching of the mediaval and post medieval i.e., post-Reformation friars and Jesuits, in contemptuous disparagement of the oratory of the English Protestant pulpit. As signs of the advanced position which Tractarian sympathies have taken up of late years, and which so many other symptoms of religious taste reveal, these publications deserve a passing notice here. They call our thoughts back to the general course of that High Church movement which has been so striking a feature of modern times, and of which the recent ritualistic development is but as it were a second stage.

We have spoken with approbation of the practice of delivering old sermons of tried and acknowledged merit: but this is a very different thing from the attempt to resuscitate the dry bones of antiquated oratory by a recurrence to those types which represent the special theological fashions of a time gone by, or a creed not in accordance with current convictions. It is, we hold, a pitiful mistake to sneer at modern "enlightenment," to praise the "ages of faith," in their least estimable qualities, their childishness and superstition, to try to make children of us again by resorting to the lisping words and nursery tales which disciplined society in its earliest stages,

"When all was gospel that a monk could dream."

Yet this is what some of our modern divines would do. The publications of Dr. Mason N-7

VOL. XLV.

Let us for a moment consider the different qualities of the two phases. The first was grave, measured, controversial; seeking to establish the validity of tradition and of apostolical succession, and the authority of the early Fathers before Papal corruptions set in. The via media of Newman, Keble, and Pusey thirty years ago, was asserted as strongly againt Rome as against the "popu lar Protestantism," of the English Church. Hurrell Froude revealed a stronger bias; and then came the numerous perversions to Rome of those who found the via media alto

and for a while Tractarianism seemed at a discount. It was not till within the last two or three years that the outside world became fully aware of the very strong vein of Ritualism and Romanizing sentimentalism that was permeating the Establishment. Its influence was no doubt extended by the sensation consequent on the appearance of the Essays and Reviews. The "Essayists" stood in startling antagonism to the "Tractarians;" and through the newly stimulated dread of scepticism gave an impulse to the success of the latter party analogous to that which weariness of evangelical theology had afforded in the first instance.*

In this new fructification of High Church affinities, identity of feeling with Rome in all the sentimental part of her creed and worship is much more generally and openly avowed than was the case before. We are no longer taught to reserve our reverence for the Fathers of the first few centuries. The

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