Earnestness in Reference to Manner

I now pass from matter to maimer; and when I saymanner, I wish to be understood as including in that term, not simply the method of communicating truth by voice and gesture, but the cast of thought and the style of composition in reference to the truth so enunciated; and what is wanted for the pulpit is a vivacious, in opposition to a stiff, formal, and dull method. Style must of course to a considerable extent vary with the subject matter, and be regulated by it. In exegetical preaching, or in that part of a sermon which is merely expository, all that is required, and what is required, is a calm perspicuity, a flow of clear, limpid, quiet thought, which shall instruct the understanding, and gently draw after it the heart, without being expected to move, in any great degree, the passions. We have some beautiful specimens of this in the elegant discourses of Dr. Wardlaw. Well would it be if, after his manner, we could be critical without being pedantic; exegetical without being scholastic; and invest exposition with charms which should make it attractive to all our congregations. But though a careful analysis of the text should be the basis of almost all our sermons, there needs something more than mere exegesis, however clear or correct.

We have to do not only with a dark intellect that needs to be instructed, but with a hard heart that needs to be impressed, and a torpid conscience that needs to be awakened; and have to make our hearers feel that in the great business of religion, there is much to be done, as well as much to be known. We must give knowledge, for light is as essential to the growth of piety in the spiritual world, as it is to the growth of vegetation in the natural one: and then the analogy holds good in another point, for we must not only let in light, but add great and vigorous labor to carry on the culture. We must, therefore, rise from exegesis into exhortation, warning, and expostulation. The apostle’s manner is the right one, — -” Whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man, that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus.” There must not only be the directive, but the impulsive manner. All our hearers know far more of the Bible than they practice: the head is far in advance of the heart; and our great business is to persuade, to entreat, to beseech. We have to deal with a dead, heavy vis inertue of mind; yea more, we have to overcome a stout resistance, and to move a reluctant heart. If all that was necessary to secure the ends of our ministry was to lay the truth open to the mind; if the heart were already predisposed to the subject of our preaching, then, like the lecturer on science, we might dispense with the hortatory manner, and confine ourselves exclusively to explanation: logic, unaccompanied by rhetoric, would suffice. But when we find in every sinner we address, an individual acting in opposition to the dictates of his judgment, and the warnings of his conscience, as well as to the testimony oi Scripture; an individual who is sacrificing the interests of his immortal soul to the vanities oi” the world, and the corruptions of his heart; an individual who is madly bent upon his ruin, and rushing to the precipice from which he will take his fatal leap into perdition; can we in that case be satisfied with merely explaining, however clearly, and demonstrating, however conclusively, the truth of revelation? To borrow the allusion which I have already made, should we think it enough, coldly to unfold the sin of suicide, and logically to arrange the proofs of its criminality, before the man who had in his hand the pistol or the poison with which he was just about to destroy himself? Would exegesis, however clear and accurate, be enough in this case? Should we not entreat, expostulate, beseech? Should we not lay hold of the arm uplifted for destruction, and snatch the poison cup from the hand that was about to apply it to the lips? What is the case with the impenitent sinners to whom we preach, but that of individuals bent upon self-destruction, not indeed the present destruction of their bodies, but of their souls? There they are before our eyes, rushing in their sins and their impenitence to the precipice that overhangs the pit of destruction; and shall we content ourselves with sermons, however excellent for elegance, for logic, for perspicuity, and even for evangelism, but which have no hortatory power, no restraining tendency, none of the apostle’s beseeching entreaty? Shall we merely lecture on theology, and deal out religious science, to men who amidst a flood of light already pouring over them, care for none of these things?

It is a question of not a little difficulty, how far the usual rules and qualities of secular eloquence may be carried out in the composition of our sermons. The language of the apostle, in reference to his own preaching, has been thought to forbid all elaboration, — “Christ sent me to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect.” A right understanding of his circumstances and ours, will show us that there are differences which forbid too rigid and literal an application of this sentiment to us. Miracles gave a potency to his preaching, which is wanting, of course, in ours. Besides, the wisdom here forbidden was not the selection of the best words, and placing them in the best order for the statement of divine truth, but that combination of false philosophy and artificial rhetoric, which was the usual practice of the Grecian schools; in short, he forbade such a method of setting forth evangelical doctrine as would have brought it into conformity, both as to matter and manner, with the fashionable systems of philosophy. Provided the elaboration is carried on with a view to make the sermon at once perspicuous and impressive, to give it power to command the attention, and, at the same time, to instruct the judgment, engage the affections, and awaken the conscience; to render the subject clearly understood and deeply felt, it cannot be too perfectly done. No elaboration which causes the hearer to forget the preacher, and even the sermon as a production of art, and to think only of himself and the subject; which rivets attention, and makes every one feel that he is in the presence, not only of man, but of God; which lays open the way of salvation so clearly that the most obtuse understanding shall comprehend it, and, at the same time, so forcibly that the dullest heart shall feel it, cannot be wrong. If a preacher of the power of Demosthenes were to arise, he would, and must, carry that power into the pulpit, and ought to do so. But, on the other hand, an elaboration that is betrayed in every part of the discourse, and which makes it but too evident to any serious or observant mind, that it was the preacher’s aim, not to convert souls, but to catch applause; which, in the view of the fashionable, the giddy, and the frivolous, entitles the sermonizer to the highest rank among pulpit orators; which fills the discourse with flowery diction and gaudy metaphors, with elegant declamation, and fanciful descriptions, with tasteful addresses, and beautiful pictures; which, though it takes the cross for its subject, almost instantly leaves it, and runs out into the fields of poesy, or the labyrinths of metaphysics, for its subtle arguments or its sparkling and splendid illustrations; which, to sum up all, engages the judgment or amuses the imagination, but never moves the heart, or calls the conscience to discharge its severe and awful functions — such preaching may render a minister popular, secure him large congregations, and procure for him the plaudits of the multitude; but where are the sinners converted from the error of their way, and the souls saved from death? Verily I say unto you, if such a preacher has his reward only in the applause of the multitude, whose object and aim were as low as his own — it was what he sought, and all hje sought, and let him not complain if he have this, and nothing else. From such preachers may God Almighty preserve our churches, and may he give us men who better know their business in the pulpit, and better do it.

Simplicity of style, then, as opposed to the artificial and rhetorical, is essential to earnestness; for who can believe that man to be intent on saving souls, who seems to have labored in the study only to make his sermon as fine as glittering imagery and high sounding diction could render it? I could as soon believe a physician were intent on saving his fellow creatures from death, who, when the plague was sweeping them into the grave, spent his. time in studying to write his prescriptions in beautiful characters, and classical latinity. There are some judicious remarks on the style of the pulpit in two papers which came out some time since, one in the Edinburgh Review, and the other in the Quarterly, on Hare’s “Village Sermons,” those admirable models of simplicity.

The object of the reviewer in the Quarterly is to illustrate the nature, to prove the necessity, and to urge the cultivation of simplicity, especially in those sermons which are addressed to congregations which are composed in great measure of the poor. After giving a quotation or two in which Mr. Hare had made mention of “smugglers and poachers,” “tea and wheaten bread,” the critic remarks:

“We have preachers in our time who would have flinched from expressions so natural and straight-forward, and would infallibly have warned their poor people against holding any intercourse with the nocturnal marauder on the main or the manor; and have suggested to them the gratitude they owed for a fragrant beverage and farinaceous food. And so might Mr. Hare, if his taste had been less correct, and his desire of doing good less earnest. Affectation is bad enough anywhere; in the pulpit it is intolerable.”

In speaking of illustrations, the writer goes on to advert to the excessive quaintness which was one of the vices of sermons before and about the time of the Reformation:

“Accordingly, within a century after the Reformation, we find Thomas Fuller, the last man from natural temperament, one would have thought likely to offer a caution upon such a subject, saying of the faithful minister, ‘His similes and illustrations are always familiar, never contemptible. Indeed reasons are the pillars of the fabric of a sermon, but similitudes are the windows which give the best light. He avoids such stories whoso mention may suggest bad thoughts to the auditors, and will not use a light comparison to make thereof a grave application, lor tear lest his poison go further than his antidote.’ Preaching, therefore, now took an opposite tack, and from having been certainly once to succulent, by the time of John Wesley had become sapless. This was one cause which rendered the new style of preaching adopted by him and his followers so attractive. The standard, according to which the character of the imagery and diction of the pulpit of modern days was regulated, was not fixed before the divines of Queen Ann’s time; as the vocabulary of poetry, according to Johnson, was not determined before the age of Dryden. In both cases the restraint has been injurious to the subject of it. There was a Doric simplicity — i wood-notes wild ’ — in the poets before Dryden, for which the greater correctness, it may be, of those who have since lived, is but a poor substitute; and there was a homely vigor in the sentiments and phraseology of the pulpit of the first and second Charles, which has-been ill replaced by the decorous tameness of later times. Surely it is a morbid taste, and one that requires correction, which would kick at images that satisfied a Barrow; and yet we could point to numbers in his sermons which would now be rejected by the preacher, even the village preacher too, as mean and pedestrian. The familiar illustrations, therefore, by which a subject is rendered clear to persons slow to apprehend, and interesting to persons hard to be excited, is a figure not lightly to be renounced in deference to the false refinement of the magnates of a congregation — though doubtless capable of abuse. We say false refinement, for there are parables both in the prophets and in the gospels, against which the same parties might raise the same objection.”*

In a similar strain, and with a like object, though with still more expansion of thought, a masterly writer in the Edinburgh Review remarks:

“We have long felt that the eloquence of the pulpit in its general character has never been assimilated so far as it might have

* Quarterly Review, Article II., No. 117.

been, and ought to have been, to that which has produced the greatest effects elsewhere, and which is shown to be of the right kind, alike by the success which has attended it, and by an analysis of the qualities by which it has been distinguished. If we were compelled to give a brief definition of the truest style of eloquence, we should say it was ’ practical reasoning, animated by strong emotion;’ or if we might be indulged in what is rather a description than a definition of it, we should say that it consisted in reasoning on topics calculated to inspire a common interest, expressed in the language of ordinary life, and in that brief, rapid, familiar style, which natural emotion ever assumes. The former half of this description would condemn no small portion of the compositions called sermons, and the latter half a still larger portion.

“We would not be misunderstood. It is far — very far — from our intention to speak in terms of the slightest depreciation of the immense treasures of learning, of acute disquisition, of profound speculation, of powerful controversy, which the literature of the English pulpit exemplifies. In these points it cannot be surpassed. In vigor and originality of thought, in argumentative power, in extensive and varied erudition, it as far transcends all other literature of the same kind, as it is deficient in the qualities which are fitted to produce popular impression. We merely assert that the greater part of ’ sermons’ are not at all entitled to the name, if by it be meant discourses specially adapted to the object of instructing, convincing, or persuading the common mind”

After some admirably judicious remarks on the topics of the pulpit, designed to prove that these should be such as are calculated to inspire a common interest in the mass of a common audience, the writer goes on to speak of the manner of discussing them, and observes:

“Where the topics are not such as are fairly open to censure, a large class of preachers, especially amongst the young.

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grievously err by investing them with the technicalities of science and philosophy; either because they foolishly suppose they thereby give their compositions a more philosophical air, or because they disdain the homely and the vulgar. We remember hearing of a worthy man of this class, who having occasion to tell his audience the simple truth that there was not one gospel for the rich, and another for the poor, informed them,; that if they would not be saved on general principles,’ they could not be saved at all! With such men it is not sufficient to say, that such and such a thing must be, but there is always ’ a moral and physical necessity for it.’ The ’ will ’ is too old-fashioned a thing to be mentioned, and everything is done by ’ volition;’ duty is expanded into ’ moral obligation;’ man not only ought to do this, that, or the other, it is always ’ by some principle of their moral nature;’ they not only like to do so and so, but ’ they are impelled by some natural propensity;’ men not only think and do, but they are never represented as thinking and doing without some parade of their ’ intellectual processes and active powers.’ Such discourses are full of ’ moral beauty,’ and ’ necessary relations,’ and ’ philosophical demonstrations,’ and ’ laws of nature,’ and a priori and a fortiori arguments. If some simple fact of physical science is referred to in the way of argument or illustration, it cannot bo presented in common language, but must be exhibited in the pomp of the most approved scientific technicalities. If there be a common and scientific name for the same object, ten to one that the latter is adopted. Heat straightway becomes; caloric;’ lightning, ‘the electric fluid;’ instead of plants and animals, we are surrounded by ’ organized substances;’ life is nothing half so good as ’ the vital principle.’ Not Gnly is such language as this obscurely understood, or not understood at all, but even if perfectly understood, must necessarily be far less effective than those simple terms of common life, which for the most part may be substituted for them. The sermons of Augustus William Hare may serve to show how the abstract terms of philosophy may be advantageously translated into simple, racy English.”*

* Edinburgh Review, No. 145. On the British Pulpit.

So harmonious are the judgments on the best style of preaching of two writers belonging to very different schools of literature and religion, whose keen sarcasm it may be hoped will correct the pedantry at which it is aimed, and convince many an ambitious aspirant after popularity, that whatever may be the method which will secure the applause of the frivolous and the ignorant, simplicity is the only way to usefulness and to secure the approbation of the serious, the wise, and the good. An affectation of learning and science in the pulpit is not only a sin against good taste, but betrays an utter want of that watching for immortal souls, which is, or ought to be, the preacher’s steady and constant aim. To borrow the homely, but forcible language of Doolittle,- —

“The eyeing of eternity should make us ministers painful and diligent in our studies to prepare a message of such weight as we come about, when preaching to men concerning everlasting matters, and should especially move us to be plain in our speech, that even the capacity of the weakest in the congregation, that hath an eternal soul, that must be damned, or saved, might understand in things necessary to salvation, what we mean, and aim, and drive at. It hath made me tremble to hear some soar aloft, that knowing men might know their parts, whilst the meaner sort are kept from the knowledge of it; and put their matter in such a dress of words, in such a style so composed, that the most stand looking at the preacher in the face, and hear a sound, but know not what he saith, and while he doth pretend to feed them, doth indeed starve them. Would a man of any bowels of compassion go from a prince to a condemned man, and tell him in such a language that he should not understand, the condition upon which the prince would pardon him, and then the poor man lose his life because the proud and haughty messenger must his knack in delivering his message in fine English, which the condemned man could not understand?”

I shall not inappropriately introduce here a quotation from that great master of chaste eloquence, Robert Hall, whose opinion on any subject, but especially on that of the art of preaching, in which he was himself so extraordinary a proficient, is entitled to peculiar deference:

“A great diversity of talents must be expected to be found among them, (the evangelical clergy;) but it has not been our lot to hear of any, whose labors a good man would think it right to treat with indiscriminate contempt. As they are called, for the most part, to address the middle and lower classes of society, their language is plain and simple; speaking in the presence of God, their address is solemn; and, ’ as becomes the ambassadors of Christ,’ their appeals to the conscience are close and cogent. Few, if any, among them, aspire to the praise of consummate orators — a character which we despair of ever seeing associated, in high perfection, with that of a Christian teacher. The minister of the gospel is called to declare the testimony of God, which is always weakened by a profuse employment of the ornaments of secular eloquence. Those exquisite paintings and nice touches of art, in which the sermons of the French preachers excel so much, excite a kind of attention, and produce a species of pleasure, not in perfect accordance with devotional feeling. The imagination is too much excited and employed, not to interfere with the more awful functions of conscience; the hearer is absorbed in admiration, and the exercise which ought to be an instrument of conviction, becomes a feast of taste. In the hand of a Massillon, the subject of death itself is blended with so many associations of the most delicate kind, and calls up so many sentiments of natural tenderness, as to become a source of theatrical amusement, rather than of religious sensibility. Without being insensible to the charms of eloquence, it is our decided opinion that a sermon of Mr. Gisborne’s is more calculated to convert .a sinner from the error of his way,’ than one of Massillon’s. It is a strong objection to a studied attempt at oratory in the pulpit, thnt it usually induces a neglect of the peculiar doctrines of Christian verity, where the preacher feels himself restrained, and is under “the necessity of explaining texts, of obviating objections, and elucidating difficulties, which limits the excursions of imagination, and confines it within narrow bounds. He is therefore eager to escape from these fetters, and, instead of 1 reasoning out of the Scriptures,’’ expatiates in the fkwery fields of declamation.”

It appears to me that a want of powerful, eloquent, yet simple and unaffected exhortation, is among the greatest deficiencies of the modern pulpit. Let any one read the sermons of our great nonconformist ancestors, of Clarkson, Doolittle, Manton, Howe, Owen, Bates, Flavel, and especially of Baxter, and mark the all but overwhelming force of persuasion which is put forth in the application of their powerful discourses; let him see how these great men exerted the mightiness of their strength to make all they had said to the judgment, reach the heart and awaken the conscience. And to come to more modern times, let him read the sermons of Whitfield, Jonathan Edwards, and Davies of New Jersey; and to advance to still more modern productions, let them peruse the sermons of Mr. Parsons, of York, and many of the best preachers on the other side of the Atlantic, Spring, Barnes, Skinner, Beecher, Griffin, Clarke, and Sprague. Also Robert Hall’s sermon on “Marks of love to God,” and Bradley’s sermon on “Our lamps are gone out,” for fine specimens of this hortatory method; this bearing down with the truth on the sinner’s heart and conscience; this beseeching men to be reconciled to. God. Some specimens of this method will be given in the following chapter. Now this is earnestness in preaching; when a man is seen to feel the truths ho discusses; when it is evident to all that he believes what he says, in afSrming that his hearers are

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sinking into perdition, and that he is laboring to persuade them to forsake their evil courses; when his sermons are full of close, pointed, personal addresses; when, in short, through the whole discourse, the preacher is seen moving onward from the understanding to a closer and closer approximation to the heart in the conclusion, and the hearer feels at length the hand of the preacher seizing it with a mysterious and resistless power,