Harris and Beecher

Are you suffering from the effects of the last letter? If so, probably you would be glad to have an opportunity of returning the compliment I have taken such pains to pay you. No doubt you have instinctively turned to your sword because you have felt an abhorrent sense of a heartlessness and injustice which have baffled and defied your power of expression. You call me hypercritical; you see where I am wrong; you protest that I have misunderstood your meaning — in a word you regard yourself as an injured man. Do you? Do you take my remarks good-humouredly, or do you burn with an indignant desire to lay hands upon a sermon of my own? By-and-by you shall have a chance of repayment; but not to-day — to-day you are in a dangerous mood. Let us take a turn upon common ground, until your good temper is quite recovered.

You are too young to have known Dr. Harris, who was not in my opinion, according to a statement in a former letter, a preacherj but a most pleasant and persuasive reader of sermons. I propose to quote the outline of an eloquent sermon of his upon Christ Weeping over Jerusalem. And when He was come near. He beheld the city, and wept over it, saying. If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are bid from thine eyes” (Luke xix. 41, 42). Speaking of the Saviour as presented in this text, Dr. Harris says: —

“1. His comprebensive mind reverted to the ^ast; He remembered the days of old, when Israel was holiness to the Lord.’’ I think it is a mistake, in taste to say the least, to speak of Jesus Cbrist’s ‘’ comj)rehensive mind;’’ if the epitbet, wbicb is complimentary rather than reverential, bad been omitted tba sentence would have been purer and stronger.

“2. With the self-denying love of a. patriot and the grace of a Saviour, He looked beyond the spectacle of His own sufferings, and fixed His eye upon tbeirs — He could look at them only tbrougb the atmospbere of compassion.’’ Tbis too seems to me to be pitifully complimentary. If the first tbirteen words bad been omitted the sentence would have gained much.

‘^3. Tbe exclamation, regarded as a sentence, was broken and incomplete; but wbo does not see that it is in effect eloquently completed by the tears wbicb break it — tears wbicb are the natural language of compassion, and wbicb express its intenseness beyond all words?” I cannot see wby this should have been given as a separate bead, tbougb it is legitimate as a general remark. Homiletically, it is certainly not scientific; this is not unimportant to a student.

“From this amplification and general interpretation of the text, let us proceed next to consider its particular bearing on ourselves.” I should have liked a less formal transition; a curve would have been better than a right angle.

‘^1. There are things xvhich jpre-eminently belong to your peace. 2. The period allotted to you for attending to them is definite and brief — it is here called your day.’ 3. Should your day of opportunity close and leave you unsaved your guilt will be great and your condition remediless. 4. This is a spectacle calling for the profoundest lamentation. 6. Behold in the tears of Jesus a proof of His unextinguished compassion for them, and an inducement to apply to Him at once far salvation.-’^ The chief merit of these points is that nothing can be said against them if indeed an exception may not be made as to the use of the word ‘^ you “instead of” us,” A preacher should be careful how he separates himself from his hearers j by identifying his own spiritual condition with theirs he disarms criticism and conciliates confidence but by too marked a separation he exposes himself to the charge of priestliness and professional sanctimony. The whole sermon of which the outline is now before you is undoubtedly written with spirit there is no want of pleading terms or urgent expostulation; yet to my mind it is singularly inefi’ective, and it is so principally because of the impression that it is manufac tured, the pathos seems to have been got up for the occasion and to have been adapted to the requirements of artificial propriety; the appeal is entirely artistic, measured to order, and overshadowed by the imagined presence of the printer; while the very marks of exclamation carry with them a terrified look as if they had just seen a critic. I miss the freedom, the elasticity, and the sympathy of nature; I cannot shed tears even when the preacher delicately intimates that such a sign of emotion would be timely and becoming; I cannot tremble with mortal fear when the preacher tells me to ^’ reflect tJdrdly/^ tliafc the day of visitation is hastening to a close; no, no, I cannot ‘’’reflect thirdly;” the preacher should have constrained me to reflect by his gentle, sympathetic, earnest pourtrayal of the Saviour’s sorrow, and if his own grief had interrupted his smooth and rhythmic eloquence T might have caught the infection of his tears. Away with this trimly cut pathos’! if not to be condemned as blasphemy, it is to be abhorred as simulation, — it looks like mere stock in trade which the sermon-writer keeps in his inkhorn for business purposes.

Lying before me is a sermon on the same text, by Henry Ward Beecher, and a greater contrast it is impossible to find; Beecher’s sermon is full of life, spontaneity, and tender vigour j you feel throughout that the preacher derives his power over you from a deep acquaintance with the human heart and a rich experience of Christian truth in his own soul; he talks to you, not at you; there is nothing artificial, every sentence is natural; the preacher seeks your salvation, and stands as if he would not go away until you receive the Saviour. Starting with the inquiry ‘’What is a Divine visitation?” he prosecutes an analysis of the influences which operate upon human life, showing at how many points God attempts to reach the sinner’s soul. “It is a great mistake to suppose that only technically religious institutions and truths are Grod’s instruments, and that the world is abandoned of good unless there are technically religious influences brought to bear upon it. It is an error to regard the world as a vast labyrinth of evil, in which religion alone is recuperative. For I understand that the whole system of the world, from the outside shell to the inside core and seed, from the centre back to the remotest circumference. is part and parcel of one great attempt of God for the development of the human race; that the revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ, although it is transcend ently higher in its kind, is not more a part of religious culture than the revelation of God in the natural world, in social life, in business, in all the appointments in which man acts or in which he is acted upon. All these constitute, it is true, only subordinate parts, but nevertheless real and integral parts, of that general course of education and development which God superintends in this world. So that if a man had never seen a church, or never read a Bible, it could not be said that he was undeveloped or uneducated. He would be destitute of the best part of the educating system; nevertheless he would not have escaped out of the great, spacious academy of education which this world affords, until he had escaped out of life itself !^^ Around this proposition he gathers arguments and analogies most pressing and apposite; then come parables, figures, as true as they are ingenious and beautiful. “If,” says the preacher, ‘^ you look comprehensively, it may be said that the human soul lies in the body like the keys of a great organ, and that the great Organist has not left a single key untouched in the whole seven octaves; — touched, not once or twice, but many times; not in single melodies, but in the most massive harmonies; so that every person trained in a Christian family, brought up under Christian institutions, in Christian communities, in the midst of Christian visitations, has been the subject of special influences on every single one of his faculties from the top of the scale all the way down to the bottom.-’^ Referring to the changeful experiences of the soul in regard to Divine visitations.

Mr. Beecher gives the following simple but effective illustration: —

‘^ I suppose every man passes, at some time, into a kind of scepticism. I know I have had such times; I suppose everybody bas them. At my former mountain bome in Lenox there were days in August, when, altbougb I knew there were mountains near, they were so bazy that I could not see them. I looked to the nortb, where old Greylock stood, and be bad gone. I looked to the soutb for Mount Wasbington, and be bad gone. I looked to the east for the range of mountains that rose up there, but they bad stolen away. I looked to the west to see if any remained, but they too bad bid themselves, and all were invisible. But when I slept and woke, all the mountains the next morning, wasbed by night sbowers, came back, so clear and distinct that the old crag upon the ten-mile distant bill stood up, vivid as a line against the sky, and my eye could sweep over all the country round about, and the truant bills seemed to have travelled bome again stealtbily in the night. I think it is just so in the soul. There are times when a man goes grieving, saying, ‘Where are those aspirations wbicb I once felt? I am now sodded and stupid as a sponge. Where are those up-reacbings that I once enjoyed? Where is all that old enthusiasm of honour? Where are all those mountings of desire? Ah! they are all gone! Man is after all but a superior animal; he is but a part of the material creation; be is but the highest form in which matter develops, Man complains to himself, * I shall live, and, like an autumnal leaf, wither and die; something else shall grow out of me, and in turn something else shall grow out of that.’

‘^ But though there are, in every mans life, times of obscuration, of dulness, of deadness, that come over the soul, there is no man so bad, so worldly, so obstinately set in bis philosophic errors, so bound up in unbeliefs, that he has not certain other brighter and revelatory moments, in which he rises superior to his common life, in which his immortal nature mounts mountain-like above him, in which he stands upon the tops of his own soul, and, looking out, exclaims: ‘I born to fall like a sparrow and rot? I grow like a vegetable that goes back again into the earth? Never! This that is in me, so royally, shall live and mount far above the touch of decay! * He feels his affinity to God! He is, in his own consciousness, near heaven j and there is a throb of immortality in his soul! ^’

Again, what natural and charming talk is this: — “It is remarkable, in respect to these visitations of God, that they do not follow the telescope; they are rather like comets, that come when they please; for when you search for God, *” by searching you cannot find Him out, Often, when I have tried to prepare a sermon, and have ranged the heavens for higher conceptions of God, I could not find them; but at other times I have been walking along the street, never dreaming or thinking of God, when, coming in contact with some of my fellow-men, I would see some suggestive trait fall out among them, and all at once, from that little incidental circumstance, there would spring up such a luminous development of the Divine character that I have said to myself, ‘Oh, if I could only have such a thought as that in the pulpit I could then preach the truth of God! ‘But it came when I was out in the street, and where nobody would hear. I could only fill my own soul with it for a moment, and pass on, till it

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gradually faded away. Such thoughts have come to you unbidden, sometimes in your counting-room, or when you were on a journey, or on the sea;, sometimes when you have been in your house all alone, your family in the country; sometimes in trouble and adversity; in various ways, — often coming, though never twice alike, as if the Divine phases had sought to present, at different times, different aspects to you. And if, all the way along, you had treasured up these times — precious times of great treasure! if you had treasured them as you have when you have made a good bargain, or gained a new honour; if you had treasured all these interior peculiarities as you have the exterior, you would find them I think almost within speaking distance all the way from childhood to manhood; and, although you had never such a consecutive view of the whole, yet really all along you have been subject to such impressions! And they have come again and again, from childhood clear down to manhood. There is not a man in this congregation that has not been dealt with in that way! You do not know yomself I You have been the subject of culture when you did not know it! You were unconscious of it, because it was silent and modest, because it did not report itself like a bell! ‘’

This is preaching! When a preacher descends after this manner into the common experiences of life his dullest hearer cannot escape his stimulating influence; he widens his pulpit until it includes the whole world, and simplifies his theology until little children even catch the meaning of Grod’s living word. Apart from the richness and beauty of these quotations, does anything strike you as remarkable? It certainly strikes me that the preacher could not have read such passages; there is a freeness about the sentences which could hardly be attained by a writer; there is if you will pardon a whimsical expression, an air of s])olienness about these urgent and sparkling utterances, Harris’s sermon is an essay, Beecher’s is a speech; Harris reads at you, Beecher speaJcs to you; Harris is an artist, Beecher is an orator; Harris conducts you into a conservatoire of artificial flowers, Beecher leads you into a garden where all is life and bloom and fragrance. Most heartily do I commend Mr. Beecher’s sermons as the best models of pulpit addresses with which I am acquainted; they are full of matter; they are instructively and popularly philosophical, without being distractingly metaphysical; they abound in allusions to common life and the universal experience of mankind; they are rich with illustrations drawn from all quarters; they are conceived in the very spirit of the gospel and expressed with a pathetic sympathy which is often most subduing and persuasive. I have reason to speak gratefully of Mr. Beecher; his words, so natural, so human, yet so divine, have stimulated and blessed me when the refined analysis of Bushnell, the vehement eloquence of Chalmers, the waxen beauty of Harris, and the perspirational rhetoric of Melville were unsuited to my spiritual condition. Mr. Beecher’s outlines are seldom striking; in fact he does not as a rule care for a formal mapping of his subject; his mind and his heart are full of it, and this dictates his utterance. He has been accused of occasional extravagance, and not without reason; but such extravagance is the result of exuberant life, and is in my opinion much to be preferred to the tame propriety which is the chief characteristic of many sermons. Mr.

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Beeclier’s extravagance appears to me to be only such extravagance as may be found in nature; the carved cabinet may be exact in its proportions and convenient in its design, yet it should not be cited to the disadvantage of the irregular but living tree. Homiletics has become too much of a cabinet-carving art; the square and compass have been too much in requisition; it is quite time that we should follow a little more closely the logic of life and the poetry of nature. Mr. Beecher does this in a remarkable degree, and is therefore an example to all young ministers whose aim it is to preach with simplicity and effect. I wish my space would allow me to present another contrast which Mr. Beecher offers to Dr. Harris in a sermon upon Rom. i. 16. The sermon by Dr. Harris on this text contains many fine sentences and a good deal of careful painting; it is evidently the result of the minutest painstaking, and undoubtedly it reflects great credit upon Dr. Harris as a devout and contemplative essayist. I heard Dr. Harris preach the sermon in 1852 at the opening of a chapel in the suburbs of London, and my recollection of the preachers placid yet animated countenance, his sweet and tuneful voice, his grave and impressive manner, is very pleasant; his sermon was an admirable essay admirably delivered. In a literary point of view Mr. Beechers discourse is inferior to Dr, Harris’s, but as an address delivered to a miscellaneous assembly it is, in my judgment, much superior to it. Its argusment is close, its illustrations are vivid, and its appeal (as indeed is Dr. Harris’s) very practical. Mr. Beecher in this instance, as in the former, has the obvious advantage of sjpeaking; when will all ministers avail themselves of that advantage? You see how easily I am brought again to this point, it is because I attach to it an importance which cannot be exaggerated. Again and again, hoping that importunity will not be thrown away upon you, I urge you to be a preacher and not a mere reader of the gospel. Be resolute, and you will surely succeed!

‘’ Gret the substance of your sermon, which you have prepared for the pulpit, so wrought into your head and heart, by review and meditation, that you may have it at command and speak to your hearers with freedom; not as if you were reading or repeating your lesson to them, but as a man sent to teach and persuade them to faith and holiness. Deliver your discourses to the people like a man that is talking to them in good earnest about their most important concerns and their everlasting welfare; like a messenger sent from heaven, who would fain save sinners from hell and allure souls to God and happiness. Do not indulge that lazy way of reading over your prepared paper as a schoolboy does an oration out of Livy or Cicero, who has no concern in the things he speaks; but let all the warmest zeal for God and compassion for perishing men animate your voice and countenance; and let the people see and feel, as well as hearp that you are speaking to them about things of infinite moment, and in which your own eternal interest lies as well as theirs.’’^ — (Dr. Isaac Watts.) This is the counsel of true wisdom.- I grant that it is counsel which at first involves most serious difficulty to thoughtful and diffident preachers. There is a natural anxiety about the proper construction of sentences, the distribution of parts, and the unity of the whole discourse; and this anxiety is not favourable to the determined self-possession which is essential to effective public speaking. The young speaker (I do not

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mean the flippant gabbler) soon falls under the tyranny of fear; lie is nervous about the next sentence, lie is alarmed by the most trifling grammatical slip, and any unexpected circumstance distresses and enfeebles him. Yet this is only one side of the account; on the other must be put down the growth of power and its consequent ease, the development of sympathy with the varying conditions and moods of a congregation, and a happy independence of many possibilities which are the terror of artificial speakers. There is no finer sight than that of a great teacher addressing an assembly with a power self-conscious enough to secure perfect ease, yet selfmisgiving enough to invest the speaker with the holy and tender charm of devout reliance upon a strength that is not his own. Does not such a sight enkindle your best ambition? The way indeed into this kingdom is narrow, and the gate is strait; but do not be discouraged on that account, for it is true of all kingdoms that are worth entering: you cannot have a broad way and a wide gate into any of God’s kingdoms: the devil makes wide paths for his followers, otherwise he could never lure them into darkness; but Grod always sets the severity of discipline before the reward of glory.