Introductory Essay

A GREAT French Bishop, who has not

long since passed away, Mgr. Felix

Dupanloup, of Orleans, speaks thus of the object set before the Christian Preacher: "Men who undertake the ministry of the Word in a serious manner do not speak in the pulpit for the mere sake of speaking, but to teach, to convert, and to save souls." That is a function which has been needful in some form in every age of human history ever since the Fall, and it is tolerably sure to continue needful to the end. There have been ministries even in the Church of Christ which have had, as time went on, to be altered in form, or even dropped altogether, because of the change in the outward circumstances of the Church, or in the minds of men (1 Cor. xii. 7-10, 28). No such change is likely seriously to affect the ordinance of Preaching, and that for two reasons: first, because it is based on a fundamental fact in human nature, which cannot in any stage of civilization, be got rid of, i.e.: the influence of one human soul upon other human souls; and next, because it employs that principle in the very simplest form possible. There are many other and more highly specialized forms of it — the drama, the orchestra, the poem, and indeed, literature in general, especially the daily and weekly press. But each of these, it will be found, either limits its own aim or is limited by its necessary conditions. The drama, as presented in some crowded and brilliantly-lighted theatre, bends all the resources of art to create illusion. The audience is carried away to the mimic spectacle presented on the stage, and is absorbed for the moment in the personality presented before them of Hamlet or of Lear, of the "dainty Ariel" or the impassioned Juliet.

There is an illusion in the power of music, though it does indeed

" take the prison'd soul

And lap it in Elysium."

But what a mass of long and patient training in the performers, of costly and elaborate appliances of a highly scientific kind in the instruments does a powerful orchestra or band present! To a great musical performance, as to a drama fully rendered, belong, therefore, the expenditure of large pecuniary means, and of the efforts of many highly-trained and gifted performers; and the use of those great and important agencies, as a whole, is accordingly limited to the places and the occasions where and when those indispensable auxiliaries can be commanded.

Literature, again, and particularly that form of it with which we are so familiar, as the daily, weekly, or periodical press, differs from oratory in some degree as to its functions. It is the intellect which its conductors and its writers have principally to address. Their object is to inform, to delight, or to instruct. The calm perusal of a book occupies the mind, rather than arouses the feelings. It produces, perhaps, a more lasting effect than an impassioned address from a living voice; but does not make so powerful an impression at the time. Besides, the voice of the speaker is far more popular. Not all can read; not all who can have the leisure to read; while lastly, not all who have the ability and the leisure to read, are willing to do so. But all are capable of being approached and influenced through the ear, and by the living voice of an earnest speaker. No elaborate apparatus or lengthy training of musical performers, no dramatic illusion, laboriously prepared by the aid of all the arts are needful for this. The means are the simplest imaginable; or rather it should be said that no means whatever are necessary for oratory to produce its fullest effect. On the one side the auditory; on the other the single voice of the speaker or preacher. That is all that is required for eloquence to "do its perfect work," and to establish over the hearts and wills of those subjected to its power, a dominion which, if it be more or less transitory and passing, is complete and perfect while it lasts.

It need not,, therefore, be much feared that the orator, upon things secular, or the preacher, of things spiritual, will speedily find his "occupation gone," and himself deemed superfluous even in these times of daily news papers and multitudinous literature; always provided that the speaker or the preacher rise to the level of the occasion set before him, and be himself, in all points, equal to his task.

That leads us a step further to consider what is the task set before the preacher, and what does it require of him in order to its fulfilment more or less completely. Now S. Paul, when instructing Timothy, who was probably one! of the earliest preachers of the Word, lays down the object of preaching to be "godly edifying which is in faith'" (1 Tim. i. 4); and in a second reference to the subject, he bids Timothy "reprove, rebnke, and exhort" (2 Tim. iv. 2). The preacher is, indeed, to teach; but, in our own day especially, there are other agencies for teaching, and these are in some respects more effective than the pulpit. To read to a congregation a calm and reasoned essay, even upon some religious subject, is to trespass upon the territory of literature. A book that is under the eye, that can be read and reread, and slowly gathered, by repeated perusals, into the treasure-house of the mind, is a far more effectual instrument for detailed doctrinal teaching as such, than the '^a im-pocvTa, once heard and fleeting, of the preacher; not to speak of the catechetical class with its teacher, which is a more powerful agency than either for the mere imparting of knowledge. The preacher has to teach, indeed; but, as it were, incidentally. The Church of Christ has no esoteric doctrines held in reserve, to be doled forth from time to time by the lips of its ministers. He has no doctrinal novelties which it is his task to display to his hearers. He has a message to deliver, but it is the old message of the Fathers, the Faith "once delivered unto the Saints." He may not add to it, as he may not diminish aught from it in the delivering; yet he is so to deliver it that it shall come with an altogether new force and power to those who hear it. He has to evoke and call into action the imagination of his hearers by the powerful working of his own spiritual faculties, so that it shall acquire a new vision of the eternal realities; to act upon their memory, that it may bring to light the hidden things of their past experience; and most of all, upon their affections, that gratitude and remorse, and hope and fear may enlist the inert or wavering will upon the side of right, and carry the whole man away from evil, and along the paths of good. In short, it is the preacher's task to present, not religious truths in an abstract, or conventionalized, or uninteresting form; but religious truths touched with emotion; — winged with the energy, and power, and the dynamic force of the preacher's own mind and soul, that so they may strike other souls, and impress and influence them powerfully, and finally win them to good.

This is the task set before the preacher; and in the performance, with more or less of adequacy, of this task, lies the true power of the pulpit. It is, we maintain, the chief and most important task; not, of course, the only one. The preacher has to comfort, to warn, to soothe, to build up souls in the Faith; but all in constant remembrance of the primary work given him to do — to proclaim the simple message of salvation to sinful souls. "These ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone"

It would seem, then, that if the preaching of the Word be in any case weak and ineffective, it is to the absence from it of this qualification, or the neglect to direct it to this its chief object, that the weakness must be owing, No parish priest ought to be satisfied to deliver addresses to his people, Sunday after Sunday, which produce no apparent effect, and from which to all human perception, no result follows. Can he be said to have fulfilled his duty to his congregation as a preacher of the Word, after the reading to them of a Sermon¹ which has left their consciences and their feelings, their aspirations after good, and their repulsion from evil, wholly unaffected, strictly in static quo, and every pulse beating with its wonted calm? Would S. Paul have been satisfied with such a result at the close of one of his missionary addresses? Does it not seem that in such a Sermon, falling almost unheeded from the pulpit, there must have wanting that vital spark of spiritual life which could not have failed to give it power; and that element which we inferred above to be the especial and peculiar strength and endowment of the preacher, — religious teaching touched with emotion. Without this, that is to say, without an earnest love for souls and a conscious energetic effort to bring about their conversion, or their edification, "our exhortation lacks sincerity, and is no more, in truth, than a kind of falsehood, cold and frozen; it is an utterance of the mind, and not of the heart."²

The preacher in such a case will have his audience unaffected by what he is saying, because he himself does not feel it deeply enough. The religious emotion, that is to say, cannot be manufactured; it must be com municated from him who speaks to those who listen. To make them feel, you must feel yourself. The electric spark that shall make a great audience responsive to your appeals and ready to absorb and assimilate your teachings must first be generated in your own soul. This earnest sincerity of spirit in the preacher, bent upon doing a real work for and upon souls, is what the Fathers call unction; and it is that quality in a Sermon which is sure to make it effective for good to some soul and in some manner; while its absence in a Sermon, however learned or however eloquent, condemns that Sermon to be sterile; leaves it no better than husks, — "dry bread," upon which no soul can feed to its edification.

Victor Hugo says in one of his works: "Les Travailleurs de la Mer" when describing some nautical machine, that it was full of faults in construction, "but it moves all the same." So we may say of a Sermon which is inspired with this breath of life, with this strong throb of religious emotion and impulse, that, however full of faults it may be, it will, nevertheless, not fail to have its due effect. It is alive; and its spiritual energy will wake those who hear it into a corresponding throb of life and feeling. They may recognise faults of various kinds in it: limitations in the spiritual vision of the preacher, imperfections in his delivery of his message; but still, it will appeal to their minds and souls, as in its measure, being a true message from behind the veil — a voice from the unseen, "the telephone of eternity," as it has been said, "speaking in the ear of time." Then further, it is from this central and vital principle that all the splendour and warmth, all the exuberance and enrichment of lofty and powerful oratory may, under favouring circumstances, be born and shoot into luxuriant leafage and bloom. "When the tongue of fire sits upon, or uses as its vehicle, a high intelligence; when large powers are chambers through which celestial lights and fires stream; when language, thought, and imagination are equally and alike enkindled; it surely is not unnatural to expect effects and influences corresponding to the magnificent vocation."³

To promote this sincerity and depth of earnestness, this vital energy and force, this natural and unsophisticated utterance in the performance of the high function of the Christian pulpit, is substantially the object of the following dialogues. They will not, perhaps, be less useful to our generation because they reach that result by a road unfamiliar to us, or because the writer appeals to preachers and to precedents for the most part unknown to all but a few scholars. The essential justness of the views maintained by the author upon the eloquence of the pulpit, will enable the " Dialogues " to be still read with pleasure and profit, though we are far from defending certain prejudices or the bad taste of his time, in which, however, he naturally shared; such as, for instance, in asserting that the Gothic architecture came to us from the Arabs; that the enrichments of it are only "gewgaws"; and that it is far inferior to the Greek orders in simplicity, grandeur, and dignity. It is not upon such subjects that we shall take note of his opinion. But if we regard the "Dialogues" as a whole, and reflect upon the power and accuracy with which the great principles of evangelical preaching are set forth in them, we shall not be inclined to think that Bishop Dupanloup estimated them too highly when he styled the work " a prodigious achievement, which had not been excelled even by the greatest geniuses"; and declared that they set forth "the unchanging principles of reason and wisdom, the unalterable precepts of nature admirably explained ' '; and expressed the opinion that " if the precepts of Fenelon, here set forth, had been well understood, they would have long since fixed the character of sacred eloquence among us."

They are here presented for the consideration of the English reader; and it is hoped that the illustrative extracts, taken from a great number of contemporary writers, will have the effect of developing and completing discussions, which are, in some instances, too briefly touched upon by our author, and of supplying various considerations which he may have altogether omitted.

That both the one and the other may be of some use in promoting an increasingly earnest, simple, and effectual preaching of the Gospel of JESUS CHRIST, is the desire and hope of the Translator.

SAMUEL J. EALES.

Footnotes

1. The late Dr. Dollinger is said to have once observed to Mr. Gladstone: "Depend upon it, if the Church of England is to make way, and be a thoroughly National Church, the Clergy must give up the practice of preaching from written sermons." And not less remarkable is the opinion of Cardinal Newman upon this point: "I think it no extravagance to say that a very inferior sermon delivered without book answers the purpose for which all sermons are delivered, more perfectly than one of great merit if it be written and read." ↩

2. Bishop Dupanloup. ↩

3. Rev. E. Paxton Hood. ↩