Class _XjKj^ 

Book JVis 

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COPYR'GHT DEPOSir. 



HOMILETICS s^ 



By JAMES M/^HOPPIN 

PROFESSOR IN YALE COLLEGE 



o5 Kai tKdvuaev rjfiaZ dtOKovovi Kaivfj's dtaQr/Kf/'s, ov jpajujuaro's, a/ila 
rrvtvfiaToi' to yap ypdfifJLa airoKThveL, to 6i Trvevjua ^uottoieI. 

2 Corinthians 3 : 6< 



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NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 

Publishers 






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Copyright, i88i 
By DODD, mead & COMPANY. 



UP 



TO 

THE ILLUSTRIOUS MEMORY 

OF 

DR. AUGUST NEANDER 

WHO 
BY HIS PROFOUND GENIUS AND VAST LEARNING 

MA DE TO SPEA K AGAIN 

THE ANCIENT PREACHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN 
CHURCH 

THIS VOLUME IS LOVINGLY INSCRIBED 

BY 

A FORMER PUPIL 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 



Truth, bom of God, does not change ; but the forms 
in which it is apprehended, and its modes of influencing 
the mind, are continually undergoing development. The 
old gospel contains many new systems of theology, 
and it is capable of producing many new methods of 
preaching. 

The human method of presenting divine truth so that 
it may be received to the welfare of the soul, must be 
adapted to the soul, and to the soul of an age. Preach- 
ing is a progressive art, and in this aspect it is worthy of 
profound study. Preaching has not lost its power (as 
some assert) over the human mind, any more than the 
gospel has lost its power, for truth always demands an 
interpreter, and the soul always yearns for a teacher in 
divine things ; but there are times, when, from inexplica- 
ble causes, preaching passes through new phases and 
modifications, and in that process of transition its power 
is obscured. The present is such a period. This is con- 
fessedly an unsettled age : theories of society, education, 
and science are evolved and tested with astonishing rap- 
idity ; and it would be indeed strange if preaching did 
not feel the influence of the breath that has come over 
the intellectual world. Much that is merely extrinsic 
and conventional must disappear ; but the free thought 
and philosophic culture of the day will, in the end, pass 



iv PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 

into, instead of diminishing, the power of preaching, and 
Christianity will work in and through them for its own 
higher ends. 

The preacher cannot hope to lead and guide minds if 
he does in no manner comprehend the wants of an ad- 
vancing age, like the present, which is one of real inter- 
est, though of fearless inquiry, in theological questions, 
and of the bold reconstruction of religious philosophies. 
The preacher can no longer successfully deal in dull 
learning and trite ideas, without fresh thought, original 
and conscientious exegesis, noble and true literary form, 
and, above all, practical earnestness and spiritual life. 
Not that the want of these has characterized the past 
age, but that the time has come when their absence is a 
marked deficiency. 

Still, too much ought not to be made of the intellec- 
tual aspects of the subject, important as they are ; for, 
of the two classes into which Pascal divided preachers, 
into those who belong to the order of intellect, and those 
who belong to the order of love, the greatest preachers, 
as Pascal thought (among whom he counted Augustine), 
have ever been of the latter class ; for to love God is the 
only way to know Him and to teach Him. Truly, for 
one to be a great preacher, he must have a deep and per- 
vading enthusiasm ; he must have an inward harmony 
with the object which interested the heart of Christ, and 
in which every selfish feeling is absorbed and lost. The 
main impulse of the preacher must be from within, from 
sanctified affections, from the real sympathy of his soul 
with God. Thought and expression — the profoundest 
thought and the most fit expression — are of little mo- 
ment, if there is not the true, glowing heart behind them. 
Men, indeed, for the service of the Christian ministry, 
may be dwarfed by becoming accomplished scholars and 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. V 

polished orators, if they are not also rendered large- 
hearted, courageous, spiritual, consecrated men. 

While I believe that divine truth should be presented 
to men's minds in fresh, powerful, and beautiful forms, 
no less so than should scientific and literary truth, there 
are, nevertheless, certain principles of preaching which do 
not vary, and which are always true, for " the church 
must light its candle at the old lamp ;" and an endeavor 
has been made in the following pages to set forth some 
of those true and essential principles. 

This work is chiefly designed as a text-hook in Homi- 
letics and Pastoral Theology, for those who are in a reg- 
ular course of training for the Christian ministry. While 
I hope that pastors may find in it something of value to 
themselves, it is mainly intended to be used by theologi- 
cal students in the class-room, for the purpose of recita- 
tion ; and that will account for the broken-up and analyt- 
ical style of the work, being necessitated by the treat- 
ment in condensed, rather than expanded forms of dis- 
cussion of so many and varied themes. 



I have had another aim in publishing this book ; and 
that is, to free myself in some measure from the routine 
of lecturing, and to secure time for that direct, familiar, 
and informal method of instruction which is peculiarly 
needed in treating the subject of preaching with begin- 
ners ; and, indeed, I have meditated upon some new 
metjiods of teaching homiletics, which promise at least 
(though the result may not prove it) to be of a more 
quickening and truly philosophical nature than those 
sometimes pursued ; but, at the same time, I fully recog- 
nize the necessity of a systematic course of training in 
this important department. "And so in art and relig- 



VI PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 

ion. First in point of time, submit to rules ; but first in 
point of importance — the grand aim, indeed, of all rules 
— ^^rise through them to the spirit and meaning of them. 
Write that upon the heart and be free ; then you can use 
a maxim, not like a pedant, but like an artist, not like a 
Pharisee, but like a Christian." 

Though happily, the true tendency of the times is to 
the real unity of all Christians and Christian churches, yet 
not because of this popular current (which is as apt to be 
false as true), but from deeply cherished convictions on 
this subject, I grow ever more inclined to honor the 
name of Ch7'istian above that of every other earthly 
name; and to hold the one "holy catholic church" 
above any particular portion of it, however loved and 
deserving of love ; and I hope, therefore, that nothing 
of a narrow spirit will be found in these pages. May the 
time be hastened when each section of the Church shall 
impart to every other freely of whatever gift or portion 
of truth may be committed to its keeping, and when the 
Holy Spirit may "gather together in one all things in 
Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on 
earth." 

In the second part, which treats of Pastoral Theology, 
I have not intended to dictate what a pastor should be, 
but only to offer friendly suggestion and advice to young 
men ; thinking that, though this subject is to a great ex- 
tent a matter of personal experience, much may be done 
to prepare candidates for the ministry for their pastoral 
work. That kind of preparation has been, perhaps, too 
much neglected heretofore in our seminaries, which have 
laid themselves open to the charge of rearing scholars (or 
attempting to do so) rather than pastors ; but it is the 
pastoral work which is the true test of ministerial charac- 
ter. I have endeavored to set forth a high ideal of this 



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. vii 

character — that though no aureole surround the head of 
the true Christian pastor and preacher, as in old pictures, 
yet that sanctity and truth should crown his life with a 
heavenly light ; and that to the work of saving souls 
from the power of sin, through the preaching of the 
Word, the rarest faculties of mind, heart, and spirit may 
be devoted. If the counsels herein contained shall in 
the slightest degree tend to produce those strong, hardy, 
cross-bearing, cheerful, hopeful, wise, loving, and single- 
minded pastors, who are willing to labor among the poor 
as well as among the rich and the educated, who are will- 
ing to go anywhere, and to do anything which is required 
for the highest good of men, such pastors, in fine, as 
Christ would bless as the spiritual guides of His people 
into a nobler life in Him, that result would be the great- 
est reward I could ask. 

New Haven, Conn., May, 1869. 



PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION. 



This work, which has been kindly received by the 
pubHc and honored by being adopted as a text-book in 
several theological schools, has run through two ordinary 
editions, and a third smaller edition ; but in its present 
form it is greatly enlarged, and, in some parts, wholly re- 
written. There is much of it which is entirely new. In 
the course of nearly twenty years of instruction upon 
these themes, there has been wrought, naturally, con- 
siderable modification of views. Certain aspects of truth, 
especially as regards the theory of preaching, tending to 
a more thoroughly biblical and at the same time freer 
spiritual expression, have presented themselves. There 
has seemed to be opened a profounder philosophy in the 
interpretation of the divine mind through preaching, that 
has led me to ponder deeply a remark made to me by the 
late Dr. Horace Bushnell, that " of all the branches of 
instruction in a theological seminary he should prefer that 
of Homiletics as being one which dealt most directly with 
what God would say to men" — as if he had said that this 
department is one of vital importance, that it is the con- 
summation and test of the other departments, that it 
goes to the root of things and nearest the spirit and work 
of Christ ; and which, therefore, should not be conducted 
drily, nor technically, nor incidentally by being left to 
irregular methods, but scientifically in the best sense of 



X PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION. 

the word, and with the whole energies of a mind studious 
of God's teachings, and inspired by the sagacity of a 
higher Christian wisdom and faith. It is indeed the crown 
of ministerial education — the preparation of men for the 
prophetic office. 

The original title of the book was " The Office and 
Work of the Christian Ministry;" but in the present 
edition I have thought best, for many reasons, to treat 
the whole subject in two separate volumes, each of them 
complete in itself, so that this first volume upon " Homi- 
letics" will, it is intended, be followed by another upon 
" Pastoral Theology," thus comprehending the two prin- 
cipal themes of Practical Theology. 

I then send forth this book once more with the earnest 
hope that it may be of aid to young men who honestly 
give their strength to the service of Christ in his min- 
istry. 

New Haven, Conn., October ist, 1881. 



CONTENTS. 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 

PAGE 

GREATNESS OF THE WORK xv 



PART FIRST. 
HOMILETICS PROPER. 



INTRODUCTION. 

Sec. I. Literature of Homiletics and Rhetoric i 

Sec. 2. Definition of Homiletical Terms 6 

1. Homily 6 

2. Homiletics 9 

3. Preaching 9 

4. Sermon n 



FIRST DIVISION. 

HISTORY OF PREACHING. 

Sec. 3. Introduction 13 

Sec. 4. Pre-Apostolic Preaching 19 



Xll CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

Sec. 5 . Preaching of Christ and of the Apostles 27 

Sec. 6. Preaching in the first two Centuries after Christ 48 

Sec. 7. Preaching in the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Centuries.. .,. . 58 

Sec. 8. Preaching from the Sixth Century to the Reformation.. . . . 114 

Sec. 9. Preaching in the Reformation Period 140 

Sec. id. Preaching in different Lands since the Reformation 153 



SECOND DIVISION. 

OBJECT OF PREACHING. 

Sec. II. Object and Design of Preaching 243 

1. Instruction 245 

2. Persuasion 252 

3. Edification 257 



THIRD DIVISION. 

PREPARATION FOR COMPOSING SERMON. 

Sec. 12. Considerations preparatory to the Work of Preaching 261 

1. Difficulties of Preaching 261 

2. Faults of Preaching 266 

3. Process of Composing a Sermon 276 



FOURTH DIVISION. 

AN.\LYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 

Sec. 13. The Text 287 

Sec. 14. The Introduction 334 

Sec. 15. The Explanation 353 

Sec. 16. The Proposition 368 

Sec. 17. The Division 380 

Sec. 18. The Development 398 

Sec. 19. The Conclusion 427 



CONTENTS, XIU 

FIFTH DIVISION. 

CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 

PAGE 

Sec. 20. Classification of Sermons according to their Treatment 

and Form 4^4 

Sec. 21. Classification of Sermons according to their Method of 

Delivery 479 

1. Written Sermons 481 

2. Memoriter Preaching 491 

3. Extempore Preaching 497 



PART SECOND. 
RHETORIC APPLIED TO PREACHING. 



FIRST DIVISION. 

GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF RHETORIC. 

Sec. 22. Definition of Rhetoric 526 

Sec. 23. Uses and Sources of Rhetoric 546 

Sec. 24. Use of Reasoning to the Preacher 561 

Sec. 25. Study of Language 583 

Sec. 26. Taste in Preaching . 612 

Sec. 27. Rhetorical Criticism 635 

Sec. 28. Elocution 652 



SECOND DIVISION. 

INVENTION. 

Sec. 29. Definition and Sources of Invention 673 

Sec. 30. Qualities of the true Subject 677 

I. Unity of Subject and Object 677 



XIV CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

2. Originality 679 

3. Christian Truth 684 

(i.) Christian Doctrine 687 

(2.) Christian Morality 691 

(3.) Christian Experience 718 



THIRD DIVISION. 

STYLE. 

Sec. 31. Definition of Style 720 

Sec. 32. Absolute Properties of Style 724 

1. Oral Properties of Language 725 

2. Grammatical Properties of Language 730 

Sec. 33. Relative Properties of Style 733 

I. Subjective: as depending upon the speaker himself. 734 

(i.) Appropriate Thought 734 

(2.) Consecutive Thought 736 

(3.) Individuality 737 

Sec. 34. Objective: as depending upon the speaker more particu- 
larly in his relation to the audience 739 

(i.) Purity 740 

(2.) Propriety » 749 

(3.) Precision 75° 

(4.) Perspicuity 75^ 

(5.) Energy 773 

(6.) Elegance 793 

Sec. 35. Conclusion 797 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 

Greatness of the Work. 

Young men who have been scientifically educated, and 
who are accustomed to look at questions in a purely 
scientific way, on coming to the preparatory studies for 
the Christian ministry are sometimes at a loss to know 
what is the nature of their duties, and how to classify 
themselves and their work. Their work cannot, in truth, 
be classified. It does not come directly under any of the 
sciences ; for it does not primarily concern knowledge, 
to which true science absolutely belongs, but has to do, 
first of all, with those things that belong to revelation 
and form the object of faith. These are, in some sense, 
indefinable. The sphere of the preacher, tp-express it in 
general terms, is man in his moral and spiritual relations 
to God ; and the task of the preacher is to know the real 
grandeur and vast extent of his work, and yet not to be 
discouraged by it. 

I. The greatness of the preacher's work is seen in that 
he is an ambassador of God to man. 

If the New Testament contains a rule of faith and con- 
duct for men, essential for their salvation, we should 
expect to find in the same record that contains the faith, 
the appointed means of its ministration. 

We could not conceive of God's giving a revelation of 
such import to men without at the same time distinctly 



XVI GENERAL INTRODUCTION, 

ordaining the best method of making it known to them. 
He would not leave this to loose, uncertain methods. If 
no regular divine agency had been appointed to publish 
the message of reconciliation between God and man, we 
should be apt to think that God is not in earnest in this ; 
or, that it is no true revelation. If there be a word of 
peace from the higher government to our souls, there 
would be also, we should suppose, a permanent embassy 
of peace established in the foreign government of an 
alienated world. God could have converted the world 
by the preaching of Christ ; he could have regenerated it 
by a pure act of power ; but why is it that twenty cen- 
turies have passed, and but a fraction of the earth is 
Christian ? Is it not because God sees fit to commit this 
work to men — to involve human effort, trial, sympathy, 
responsibility, in this circle of human redemption ? 

We clearly recognize the fact that all Christians are in- 
volved in this circle of responsibility to win souls to the 
subjection of the kingdom of God, and we claim for the 
ministry no exclusive right to teach or to work. We do 
not forget for a moment that there is no essential dis- 
tinction between the people and the preacher in point of 
responsibility. The preacher is but one of the people, 
as a captain is but one of an army, whom the army has 
chosen out of -its own body to perform a certain duty. 
All who love Christ are called to the work of making him 
known ; and tliis universal duty of all Christians is now 
better understood ; or, rather, the Church is returning to 
this primitive idea of Christianity. God speed the prog- 
ress of this idea, until all the energy and working talent 
of the Church, of whatever kind, shall be developed. 
We are no sticklers for ministerial prerogative in doing 
good. The minister has no monopoly in preaching, or 
praying, or working. The church of God is the people 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. XV il 

of God, and not the nninistry. Still, there is a ministry 
of the gospel, and it has a great work to do, which other 
men in their worldly occupations and business cannot do 
so well. It is the entire consecration of some to the 
highest good of others and of all. 

Augustine says that this ministry was not given to 
angels, because then " human nature would have been 
degraded. It would have been degraded had it seemed 
as if God would not communicate his word by man to 
man. The love which binds mankind in the bond of 
unity would have no means of fusing dispositions, so to 
speak, together, and placing them in communion with 
each other, if men were not to be taught by men." 

Yet Augustine himself had so profound a conception of 
the greatness and responsibility of this work that when 
the eyes of the Christian world were fastened on him, he 
would go to no assembly or council which could ordain 
him a minister ; and at last, when almost by accident he 
was chosen to a small spiritual charge, he received it with 
expressions of great affliction, so that his opposers said 
he was troubled because so small a place had been given 
him.' In like manner Chrysostom, at the age of twenty- 
six, could not possibly be persuaded to take up the pub- 
lic service of the ministry, because he felt his unfitness 
for it/ 

God, in other things also, works by secondary agencies 
— himself the originating power of all things, and yet the 
only invisible One. He loves to hide himself in his in- 
strumentalities and to manifest himself through them. 
He who made the light before he collected it into the 
sun, and hung that in the heavens to be the steady reser- 

' " Aug. Confessions," B. XI. See also Epist. XXI., ad Valerium. 
' " Neander's Chrysostom," Eng. ed. p. 22. 



4' 



xviu GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 

voir and distributer of the light, seems to prefer, for his 
own wise ends, this instrumental method of working ; 
and we should therefore expect, in the revelation of a 
new Faith from the skies, the simultaneous ordaining of 
special agencies to make known this new message of truth 
and life. 

We actually do find in the Scriptures of God's revealed 
will, this work of making known his word committed to 
the human instrument. As Christ gave the bread to his 
disciples to be distributed to the famishing multitudes, 
so God distributes the bread of life to men through the 
hands of his believing children and ministers ; they are 
not priests, but ministers ; they are not mediators, but 
simply servants. 

Acts 20 : 28. ** Take heed therefore unto yourselves, 
and to all the flock over the which the Holy Ghost hath 
made you overseers, to feed the church of God." 2 Cor. 
5 : 18. " And all things are of God, who hath reconciled 
us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the 
ministry of reconciliation." Col. 4 : 17. "And say to 
Archippus, Take heed to the ministry which thou hast 
received in the Lord, that thou fulfil it." Tit. i 13. 
" But hath in due times manifested his word through 
preaching which is committed unto me, according to the 
commandment of God our Saviour." The Gospel is a 
word, even as Christ is the Word. He was the perfect 
expression of God's nature. In his preaching, character, 
life, and death, he spoke the word of God ; and he com- 
missions his preachers to continue to speak this word. 
One of the most extraordinary passages in the Bible, 
fitted to fill every Christian preacher's mind with awe, is 
that contained in 2 Cor. 5 : 20, " Now then we are am- 
bassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by 
us : we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. xix 

God." True preachers (and of these \vc speak) are here 
made to stand in loco Christi ; they not only testify of 
Christ, but they represent him ; they continue his work 
in his spirit and power ; they are clothed in his repre- 
sentative authority. As ministers of Christ they exhibit 
both the love of God and the love of man. In the gospel 
which they announce, setting forth the way of union by 
faith, and bringing God into sinful humanity, they sustain 
and carry on the blessed "ministry of reconciliation." 
And so long as they truly love God and man, God speaks 
purely and powerfully through them to men ; they per- 
suade men to love God, even as they love him ; they 
give God's invitations from hearts stirred by his love ; 
they hold forth the means of a divine life ; they stand 
half in the light of heaven and half of earth ; they are, 
not physically nor officially, but morally, instruments of 
converting men to God ; they do not effect conver- 
sion, but they are the means of its production ; they use 
the truth to produce it, taking the Bible out of the dead 
letter, and making it a living word. 

While they thus speak his word, and manifest his spirit 
and his love, they are the living ambassadors of God as 
truly as were Elijah and Elisha, Paul and John ; and no 
man may despise them, for they speak with a divine 
authority — they speak the word of God to man. " If 
any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God." 
God said to an ancient preacher, " Be not afraid of their 
faces ; for I am with thee, to deliver thee, saith the 
Lord. Thou, therefore, gird up thy loins, and arise, and 
speak unto them all that I command thee : be not dis- 
mayed at their faces." This sense of his divine commis- 
sion is indeed the preacher's strength. He centres him- 
self in God. He speaks out of the consciousness of 
God's choice of him, and of God's will expressed through 



XX GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 

him ; and here is the source of his eloquence. The 
moment he loses this divine presence, and is conscious 
that he is delivering his own message, that he is speaking 
a human word, he becomes an ordinary man, an ** earthen 
vessel" indeed. 

This whole subject of the divine appointment of the 
ministry will be treated more thoroughly when we come 
to speak of the Pastoral Office ; but it is a good oppor- 
tunity here, though not rightly belonging to the intro- 
duction, to say a single word on this mooted point of the 
preacher's authority, as one who speaks the word of God. 
As a practical matter, young preachers find this trouble 
— that they have the feeling often that many in their 
audience do not receive the Bible with the reverent faith 
that they do themselves ; and they think, therefore, that 
they cannot, like the lawyer at the bar, point them to 
the word of God as final authority, saying, " This is the 
law on the subject, this is the statute, this settles the 
question." In answer to this we would say that the 
preacher has a right, or, to put it stronger, is compelled 
to take for granted two things. First, that the Bible is 
the word of God, and therefore is final in its authority. 
This he must do to have a right to preach at all ; here is 
his own commission. Christianity is, above all, a word, 
the word of God. He should preach as if he believed 
this ; and here he finds his authority for what he says, 
and here is his standing-point to heave the minds of men 
from their deep-rooted sinfulness and sensuality. And 
he has to assume, secondly, that the audience before him 
do also believe that the Bible is the word of God, and 
that they may be spoken and appealed to as those who 
believe this. If the audience is composed of professed 
believers, as at the communion-table, the difficulty van- 
ishes. If the audience is a common mixed one, com- 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. xxi 

posed of believers and unbelievers, still the unbelieving 
portion put themselves in the position of believers by 
coming to the house of God to hear the gospel preached. 
They know that it is the house of God, where the Bible 
is preached as the word of God. There are, in any case, 
few in our congregations on the Lord's day who do not 
yield an outward respect to the Bible as the revealed 
word of God. Even a sceptical writer like Strauss con- 
cedes the historical value of a great portion of the Bible, 
and the value also of the religion which Christ, who he 
believed actually did live, taught. At all events there 
will not, probably, be one in the audience who does not 
believe in a God ; and if one does believe in a God, he 
must also believe that God has created him and cares for 
him, and that he has somewhere or somehow expressed 
this care and love for him. The preacher then has a 
right to assume that the Bible is that good word and 
message of God to man ; for if it is not, where can such 
a word be found ? 

The apostles, when they preached to pure heathens 
and infidels, planted themselves on the simple word of 
God, and they appealed to the primary laws of God 
written in the conscience to confirm what they spoke. It 
was " by manifestation of the truth to every man's con- 
science in the sight of God," that they preached. The 
authority of the word of God was final with the apostles, 
while at the same time they cast themselves upon men's 
reason and consciousness to confirm the word preached. 
The apostles' preaching was thus both authoritative and 
persuasive. " Knowing the terror of the Lord, we per- 
suade men." "Abstain from fleshly lusts which war 
against the soul :" here, while a command is uttered, a 
reason is also given ; and a preacher may develop this 
reason to any extent, and show how inordinate appe- 



xxil GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 

tites injure the spiritual nature. Times, it is true, have 
changed, and the authority of the preacher has appar- 
ently diminished ; other influences have now come in to 
compete with the pulpit ; and the preacher's faith and 
patience are tried more than formerly to sustain his 
heaven-delegated authority ; but he should plant himself 
the more firmly on the word of God. He should awaken 
a deeper faith in his people in that word which '* en- 
dureth forever, " though the human preacher soon van- 
ishes away. In the struggle between the authority of 
divine revelation and that of human consciousness, while 
Christianity admits both, and brings both to utter the 
same thing, it founds its final authority on the will of 
God ; and here the preacher should stand, where Luther 
stood, and where the apostles stood. 

2, The greatness of the preacher's work is seen from 
the nature of the truths with which he deals. These 
truths may be generally summed up under the one name 
of divinity. *' And what is divinity," says Robert 
South, "but a doctrine treating of the nature, attri- 
butes, and works of the great God, as he stands related 
to rational creatures, and the way how rational creatures 
may serve, worship, and enjoy him ? And if so, is not 
the subject of it the greatest, and the design and busi- 
ness of it the noblest, in the world, as being no less than 
to direct an immortal soul to its endless and eternal 
felicity ? It has been disputed to which of the intel- 
lectual habits mentioned by Aristotle it most properly 
belongs ; some referring it to wisdom, some to science, 
some to prudence, and some compounding it of several 
of them together ; but those seem to speak most to the 
purpose who will not have it formally, any one of them, 
but virtually, and in an eminent, transcendent manner, 
all. And now, can we think that a doctrine of that 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. xxiu 

depth, that height, and that vast compass, grasping 
within it all the perfections and dimensions of human 
science, does not worthily claim all the preparations 
whereby the wit and industry of man can fit him for it ? 
All other sciences are but handmaids to divinity ; and 
shall the handmaid be richer adorned and better clothed 
and set off than her mistress ? In other things the art 
usually excels the matter, and the ornament we bestow is 
better than the subject we bestow it upon ; but here we 
are sure that we have such a subject before us as not only 
calls for, but commands, and not only commands, but 
deserves our application to it ; a subject of that native, 
that inherent worth, that it is not capable of any addition 
to it from us, but shines both through and above all the 
artificial lustre we can put upon it. The study of divinity 
is indeed difficult, and we are to labor hard and dig deep 
for it. But then we dig in a golden mine, which equally 
invites and rewards our labor." ' South says again, 
" For I reckon upon this as a great truth, that there can 
be no endowment in the soul of a man which God him- 
self is the cause and giver of, but may, even in its highest 
and choicest operations, be sanctified and employed in 
the work of the ministry."^ But let us consider this 
more particularly. The high and difficult nature of the 
truths with which the preacher deals appears in the fact 
that they are (a) metaphysical truths. The preacher's 
work is necessarily intellectual ; he deals with men's 
minds and rational nature ; he must adapt the divine 
word to the human mind ; he must know how to inter- 
pret it according to men's intellectual nature. True 
preaching is addressed first to the intellect, for men must 
know the truth before they can be expected to obey or 



* " South's Sermons," Phil, ed., vol. ii. p. 79. « Id. p. 70. 



XXIV GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 

love it. The intellect, conscience, affections, and will 
are so blended that they form one spiritual nature, and 
we cannot tell where are the lines of separation. The 
importance to the preacher of understanding the human 
mind is thus spoken of by Sir William Hamilton : 
*' Theology is not independent of philosophy. For as 
God only exists for us as we have faculties capable of 
apprehending his existence, and of fulfilling his behests, 
nay, as the phenomena from which we are warranted to 
infer his being are wholly mental, the examination of 
these faculties and of these phenomena is consequently 
the primary condition of every sound theology." ' This 
must be so. How can the preacher approach the mind 
God has made with the truth of which God is the author, 
if he has no clear conception of those mental laws which 
affect the reception of truth, which turn it to sweetness 
or bitterness, to life or death ? How can he reach the 
conscience, the real man of the heart, if he does not com- 
prehend the relations of conscience to the faculties of 
knowledge "^ How can he influence the judgment or 
sway the reason, if he is totally untaught, by either edu- 
cation or observation, in the great principles of causahty ? 
Or how can he move the affections, if he knows nothing 
of their proper place in the mind, and what and where 
are the true springs to touch ? Besides, we cannot know 
God's mind if we do not understand our own. We rea- 
son from our own nature to God's nature. All reasoning 
upon strictly natural theology depends upon the clear 
apprehension of metaphysical axioms, and upon a sound 
philosophy. Everything, in fact, in the world of mind 
is subservient to the preacher's work. He works through 
ideas, reasons, motives, penetrating the depths of the 



* Metaphysics," p. 44. 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION: xxv 

mind. The first preachers, if they were illiterate men at 
the beginning, became learned in the Scriptures, in the 
human heart, in the gift of tongues, and in the incom- 
parable instructions and impartations of Christ and his 
spirit. Robert South has a characteristic passage which 
may apply here, in which he vents his scorn against un- 
learned persons who crept into the ministry during the 
commonwealth, some of them, without doubt, better 
men than himself. " Many rushed into the ministry as 
being the only calling they could profess without serving 
an apprenticeship. Had, indeed, the old Levitical 
hierarchy still continued, in which it was part of the 
ministerial office to flay the sacrifices, to cleanse the ves- 
sels, to scour the flesh-forks, to sweep the temple, and to 
carry the filth and rubbish to the brook Kidron, no persons 
living had been better fitted for the ministry, and to serve 
in this nature at the altar. But since it is made a labor 
of the mind, as to inform men's judgments and move 
their affections, to resolve difficult places of Scripture, to 
decide and clear off controversies, I cannot see how to 
be a butcher, scavenger, or any such trade, does at all 
qualify and prepare men for this work. We have had 
almost all sermons full of gibes and scoffs at human learn- 
ing. Hereupon the ignorant have taken heart to venture 
upon this great calling, and instead of cutting their way 
to it according to the usual course, through the knowl- 
edge of the tongues, the study of philosophy, school 
divinity, the fathers and councils, they have taken 
another and shorter cut, and having read perhaps a 
treatise or two upon the Heart, the Bruised Reed, 
the Crumbs of Comfort, Wollebius in English, and some 
other little authors, they have set forth as accomplished 
divines, and forthwith they present themselves to the 
service ; and there have not been wanting Jeroboams as 



XXVI GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 

willing to consecrate and receive them as they to offer 
themselves." South was not a believer in lay-preaching. 
Indeed, in view of the greatness of the work, much is to 
be said on both sides of that question, and there may be 
extreme views taken on either side which are injurious to 
the cause of truth and religion. While all Christians 
should "preach the gospel," and many an unordained 
preacher, like the great lay-preacher who suffered for his 
boldness twelve years in Bedford jail, may be a hundred 
fold more effective than one who is regularly appointed, 
yet even the lay-preacher should be fitted for the work 
both by human and divine preparation ; he should not 
be a "novice;" he should be "apt to teach." The 
fitness for this work, in fact, lies more in quality than in 
quantity. But there are also (<^.) moral truths with which 
the preacher has to deal. As our moral nature is deeper 
than our intellectual, so the preacher's work, which has 
to do chiefiy with moral truth, is superior to all merely 
intellectual professions. The preacher is called upon to 
study those laws of God's government which underlie the 
whole system of truth ; and his field is that vast moral 
system which God has opened to the human mind — that 
law which is " exceeding broad ;" which is eternal be- 
cause it is the manifestation of God's nature ; which is 
perfect because it is the expression of his will ; which is 
the law of the intelligent universe, one and simple in 
essence, but infinitely manifold in its applications. 

To harmonize moral truth into a living whole is the 
preacher's work ; for every man who deserves to be called 
" a preacher of righteousness" should, like Bunyan and 
Luther, have his own system of theology ; that which he 
has himself drawn from the word, and which he preaches 
and lives. It is a want of reverence for moral truth not 
to strive, by one's own thought, in communion with the 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. xxvil 

divine mind, to discover the laws of order, arrangement, 
and beauty stamped upon it ; and one cannot preach 
with the highest clearness and power who does not pos- 
sess some well-ordered system of moral truth for his 
groundwork of reasoning and appeal. Moral truth has 
also an intimate and special relation to man's nature and 
duty. It enters the complex sphere of human life, and 
whatever bears directly or indirectly upon the common 
good of humanity belongs to the preacher's domain. He 
deals with the wonderful world of the human heart, its 
mixed good and evil, its affections that are so tender, its 
hate, passion, and crime, its joy and despair, its hopes 
and fears, its desires that are never satisfied but in God. 
Nothing is shut out from the preacher in mind, nature, 
morals, letters, art, science, government, the endless rela- 
tions of society and human life, which influence moral 
character, and enter into the schooling of this lower life 
for a perfect life in God — in a word, that human 
theology concerning which Neander loved to quote the 
words, " Pectus est qitod facit tkeologtim.'' But there is a 
still higher sphere of truth to which the preacher must 
ascend. He deals {c.) with spiritual truths. He must 
rise from the seen to the unseen, from the natural to the 
spiritual. In i Cor. 4 : i it is written, " Let a man so 
account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards 
yof the mysteries of God." In 'Eph. 6 : 19 it is also 
written, " That I may open my mouth boldly, to make 
known the mystery of the gospel." In these passages, 
TO /ivffTfjpiov means literally a secret, a thing not obvi- 
ous, not explained, or not explained to all, and perhaps 
impossible to be known by human reason ; for there is a 
true as well as a false mysticism. Vinet says, " Z^ don 
mysticisme est la viaiine cache'e des verities dvaiigeliques ; il 



xxviu GENERAL INTRODUCTION, 

fait scntir ce que ne pent pas se dire, ce que V analyse est 
impuissant a expliquer.'' ^ 

In divine truth there is that which is obvious and that 
which is more spiritual and hidden, but of which much 
may be known by the spiritual mind. A telescope ap- 
plied to the heavens brings to view objects which for 
thousands of years were not known to the simple, unaid- 
ed human mind ; and Christian faith is, as it were, the 
application of a telescope to the spiritual firmament ; it 
reveals things " hidden from the foundation of the 
world." Christian faith is not a mere continuation or 
extension of natural religion, nor is it a system of re- 
ligious truth which may be reached by, or is on a level 
with, our natural reason. It is above the level of natural 
religion. It is revealed by the Spirit. We could, of 
ourselves, never have arrived at the truth of Christ's re- 
dem.ptive work, although there is a profound preparation 
for it in man's history, and in the intimations and wants 
of his nature. Now, into this higher sphere of revealed 
truth, of those spiritual verities which comprehend the 
love and perfections of God and the truths of eternal life 
— the whole unseen world of faith — the preacher of Christ 
has to rise by the steps of faith, meditation, and prayer, 
so that he may become the interpreter of the hidden 
things of God ; for it is no easy or common thing to 
" rightly divide the word of truth ;" it shows that one 
has himself entered into it and apprehended it. It pre- 
supposes something more than scholarship, viz., spiritual 
insight, or the habit of communion with God and holy 
things. To be the guide of others in these regions of 
the higher truth, one must have had some true inward 
experience of the renewing power of truth ; as Tholuck 



^ " Histoire de la PrMication des R6formes," etc., p. 624. 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. xxix 

says, " Truth must have been revealed to him through 
the divine h'ght of the cross shining upon his heart. " 
Such preaching entering into hearts by " the power of 
the spirit of Christ," comes from a true knowledge of 
the saving and purifying power of the grace of Christ in 
the heart. 

3. The greatness of the preacher's work appears from 
its results. These would be seen negatively were the 
pulpit stricken out of existence ; or by the comparison of 
Christian lands with heathen lands, or even with coun- 
tries where the pulpit is chiefly an engine of hierarchical 
and political power. A superior condition of morality, 
education, and civilization is never found in lands where 
the Christian pulpit is not found ; and wherever, even, 
the pulpit has been shorn of its power, there is to be seen 
a corresponding moral deterioration among the people. 
Chalmers complained of the " dormancy of the Scottish 
popular mind," and we know the degraded character of 
the Scotch pulpit when he first entered public life ; and 
this same dulness and moral stupor were seen across the 
Tweed in the popular mind, when the English pulpit had 
in a great measure lost the power it possessed in the days 
of Howe, Owen, Baxter, Leighton. The quickening in- 
fluence of the pulpit upon the American mind is too 
obvious to be denied. Daniel Webster said that he first 
learned how to reason from the preaching which he heard 
in his native village. Dr. Wood, the minister of Bos- 
cawen, fitted him for college ; and his tribute to the 
American ministry, in his argument on the Girard Col- 
lege case, is a proof of his intense convictions on this 
subject. The preacher goes deeper than the book in 
moulding the intellectual habits and tastes of his people ; 
for he begins earlier than the author, and exercises a 
more vital sway upon mind. Almost the only true elo- 



XXX GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 

quence that now reaches the popular mind in Germany 
is the eloquence of the pulpit ; and where are the men in 
any other profession who may be compared with those 
spiritual sovereigns in our own land, who, from their 
thrones, send forth a life-giving, shaping influence far 
around them ? Some of the views of such a theologian 
as Dr. Horace Bushnell may be considered to be open to 
attack ; but his stimulating power upon American 
thought will not soon pass away. All the colleges in the 
land, with one or two exceptions, owe their life prin- 
cipally to ministers ; and how many a young man, edu- 
cated at college, and afterward distinguished for great 
intellectual attainments and wide influence among men, 
was sent from some obscure village through the agency 
of his minister, who had awaked in him the thirst for 
knowledge ! Many of our cities and towns were founded 
by ministers in the wilderness : New Haven by John 
Davenport ; Hartford by Thomas Hooker and Samuel 
Stone ; Providence by Roger Williams ; Salem by Fran- 
cis Higginson ; Cambridge and Dorchester by John 
Warham ; and we need not repeat the well-proved fact, 
that our democratic institutions and republican form of 
government were modelled upon the practical working 
systems of that primitive New England church polity 
which was the fruit of the thought and wisdom of 
these minds. The intellectual, social, and moral influ- 
ence of the preacher is too broad a theme to be entered 
upon in these introductory remarks ; and as Oberlin, in 
the barren Ban de la Roche, among the Vosges Moun- 
tains, elevated his parish in a physical and moral scale 
of being, and taught them how to make roads and raise 
crops, as well as to seek the kingdom of heaven, so 
every true minister raises the scale of being about 
him. He forms a central power in the moral world. 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. XXXI 

Sitting in his study, or standing in his pulpit, he wields 
a formative influence upon public opinion. Pie is the 
guardian of public virtue. He is the elect champion of 
the law of righteousness, as well as of the law of love. 
Wrong cannot withstand a free and faithful Christian pul- 
pit. Every form of vice — intemperance, licentiousness, 
slander, covetousness, dishonesty, law-breaking — feels its 
restraining hand. The importance of the Christian pul- 
pit is comprehensively shown in the fact that it so effectu- 
ally resists the power of the kingdom of evil in the 
world ; that it sets itself in opposition to this great cur- 
rent ; that it so holds the passions of men in check ; 
that it speaks to men as with the voice of God, and bids 
them do what is right, and not do what is wrong. It not 
only resists but attacks evil. A true preacher is aggres- 
sive. He has taken up the battle for truth. He assails 
the power of evil wherever it shows itself, and seeks it 
out in its deepest hiding-places. In the reproof of sin he 
is terrible as Elijah and stern as Amos ; though he trusts 
more to the gentleness of Christ, and to " the still small 
voice" that finds its way to the heart. 

Yet these results which have been glanced at are but 
the incidental and almost accidental side-issues and over- 
flowings of the preacher's work ; the direct fruits of his 
labors, under God, are inner and permanent, being 
wrought upon the soul itself. His work tells on char- 
acter ; and, viewed in this relation, it is not to be esti- 
mated by gross standards ; we cannot weigh spiritual 
results ; faith, hope, joy, holiness, everlasting life, are 
incommensurable in quantity. To be a spiritual counsel- 
lor and consoler, one to whom men turn instinctively in 
their sorrow for strength, for Christian consolation — 
what office so blessed ! To speak the word of sympathy 
to the soul, to be its guide through the darkness and 



xxxu GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 

doubt of life, and to conduct it to the gates of everlasting 
life — what work is so great ? He who can say of a single 
being, "whom I have begotten in the gospel," has 
** saved a soul from death," and has hid an innumerable 
and ever-increasing ** multitude of sins." One soul, that 
of a child, brought to the knowledge of the Saviour, and 
shielded from the evil of the world, is a result which 
would infinitely more than outweigh the toils and suffer- 
ings of a whole ministerial life. It is difficult to make a 
statement like this look natural and true, although so 
easy to make it ; but if the apostle believed what he de- 
clared, that it is through the foolishness of preaching 
that men are saved, then such a statement is true. 
What words, truly, were those spoken by Christ to Paul 
at his conversion ! " Rise and stand upon thy feet : fof 
I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee 
a minister and a witness both of these things which thou 
hast seen, and of those things in the which I will appear 
unto thee ; delivering thee from the people and from the 
Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee, to open their 
eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from 
the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive 
forgiveness of sins and inheritance among them which 
are sanctified by faith that is in me." 

Does not Christ say these words to every true preacher 
now ? and if not only the enlightening of one soul, but 
of hundreds of souls, may follow his labors, how can he 
sufficiently magnify the greatness of his work ? While 
Luther was still a monk, he was urged to accept the 
office of ** Preacher and Doctor of the Holy Scriptures ;" 
he drew back with terror. " Seek one more worthy of 
it," he said ; but when the vicar-general pressed it, 
Luther, trembling, declared that " the Holy Spirit could 
alone make a Doctor of the Holy Scriptures ;" and when 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. xxxiii 

at last constrained to accept the charge, he took this 
simple oath : " I swear to defend manfully the truth of 
the gospel ;" as if this were all he could do, or dared to 
undertake, and that God must do the rest. The earnest, 
homely words of Philip Henry, on the day of his ordina- 
tion, cannot be too often quoted to those entering the 
ministry : " I did this day receive so much honor and 
work as ever I shall know what to do with. Lord Jesus, 
proportion supplies accordingly." 

4. The greatness and dignity of the preacher's work 
are seen from the fact that Jesus was a preacher. It 
seems strange that we do not, as a general thing, seem 
to think of the Saviour as a preacher, nor set his preach- 
ing before us as a model for our own ; for while there 
may be, it cannot be doubted, a profound truth in this 
negative sentiment of all reverent minds, arising from the 
fact that our Lord is above all human comparison, and 
also in the blended fact that our Lord furnished the 
material and was " the truth" that we, as preachers, are 
to use and proclaim, as in another's words : ** Thus he 
spoke to them of the kingdom of heaven ; and when he 
wielded the powers of his kingdom, they felt more and 
more that he governed the secret heart of nature and of 
man ;" ' yet, notwithstanding all this, if we take the 
Saviour's own testimony upon this point, he claimed to 
be a preacher, and made this a main part of his earthly 
work. We have but to recall the scene in the synagogue 
at Nazareth, where he applied to himself Isaiah's words, 
" The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath 
anointed me, to preach the gospel to the poor, he hath 
sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliver- 
ance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, 



' F. D. Maurice, Theol. Essays. 



xxxiv GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 

to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the ac- 
ceptable year of the Lord." And it is said in Matt. 
II : I, " And it came to pass, when Jesus had made an 
end of commanding his twelve disciples, he departed 
thence, to teach and preach in their cities." And in 
Mark i : 38, 39, " And he said unto them. Let us go into 
the next towns, that I may preach there also : for there- 
fore came I forth. And he preached in their synagogues 
throughout all Galilee." The power of Jesus' preaching 
may be estimated by its effects. Great multitudes fol- 
lowed him. He drew them after him in a triumphal 
train wherever he went. The Pharisees said, *' If we let 
him alone, all the people will believe on him ;" and it 
was from his deadly enemies that the remarkable confes- 
sion came, ** O, sirs, never man spake as this man." The 
fears, hope, love, hate, of the multitudes who thronged 
him were touched. If eloquence consists in moving the 
soul, this was eloquence. He made men look into their 
hearts, and they rushed upon him to destroy him, or cast 
themselves at his feet to adore him. He swayed men at 
his will. He made men look to him for help. They 
brought their real wants, doubts, and sorrows to him. 
They asked him questions with that popular instinct 
which, in some sense, is the voice of God, because it is 
the voice of nature, perceiving in him a divine truth, see- 
ing that he was a true teacher. And how many cases are 
mentioned in the Gospels of immediate conversion follow- 
ing his words ! The more remote results of Christ's 
preaching is a theme beyond the power of imagination to 
conceive ; for the few recorded discourses and words of 
Christ have formed the staple of divine truth and of all 
true preaching, ever since. It may be that the Occi- 
dental mind demands a treatment of truth different from 
what the Oriental requires, and that the ages differ ; but 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. xxxv 

truth is the same, and man's mind is the same now as 
then ; and the intrinsic quahties of our Lord's preaching 
may be studied, even if his preaching was that of Om- 
niscience. The dignity and greatness of the preacher's 
work is, at all events, confirmed and crowned by the fact 
that Jesus was anointed to preach the gospel to the poor. 



PART FIRST, 

HOMILETICS PROPER, 



INTRODUCTION. 

Sec. I. Literature of Homiletics and Rhetoric, 

The object of this section is not to give to the student 
a comprehensive view of the extensive literature of 
Homiletics, but only to present, in the briefest possible 
form for practical uses, the names of some valuable 
books which are most available to the theological stu- 
dent, and to the ordinary preacher and pastor while 
actively engaged in his work, by the faithful study of 
which he may be introduced and led on to a more 
thorough knowledge of the rich field of homiletical 
literature. 

Among ancient classical authors upon rhetoric, there 

are four works that may be regarded as forming the 

head-sources of knowledge in this art, 

viewed simply as an art, unconnected with ncien 

• /- , 1 11 Works on 

Its specific use by pr,eachers and other pro- Rhetoric 

fessional speakers and writers ; these are 

Aristotle's " Treatise on Rhetoric" (Tex'^V^ 'Pr^roptHtj;), 

Cicero's " De Oratore," ** Quintilian's Institutes" (Insti- 

tutiones), Horace's " De Arte Poetica. " 



2 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

The principles of eloquence, or the art of influencing 
men through public discourse, drawn from nature and 
illustrated by the best examples of oratory in the most 
intellectual nations of antiquity, are reduced by these 
writers for the first time, and one might say for all time, 
to something like a science. In them we find exempli- 
fied what a German writer calls, ''die waJire Norm der 
AttiscJicn Bei'cdsamkeit,'' or that true law of eloquent and 
persuasive speech, which is similar in all ages and lands, 
since humanity everywhere is subject to the same in- 
tellectual laws, and swayed by the same moral forces. 

Aristotle, highly condensed and obscurely elementary, 
plants the seeds which, in Quintilian, bear ripe and 
noble fruits. Quintilian has not been surpassed in 
ancient or modern times as a guide in oratory. In a 
word, it may be said that almost all that has been 
taught on the subject of public discourse since their day 
is but a reproduction or a development of what these old 
masters enunciated. 

The eloquence of the Christian pulpit, however, pre- 
sents a new field, which, though it draws from the com- 
mon principles of logic and rhetoric, has laws of its own 
that are derived from higher sources than any human art. 

Among the numerous works in the English language 

upon rhetoric and homiletics may be mentioned (for 

their practical qualities and uses) Campbell's 

English " Philosophy of Rhetoric" and Campbell's 

Works on .. Lectures on Pulpit Eloquence ;" Whate- 
Rhetoric and ,,,,-^, ^t-., -'.t^^- , 

Homiletics ^^ ^ Elements of Rhetoric ; De Cjumcey s 

" Essay on Style ;" Herbert Spencer's 

'* Essay on Style ;" Porter's " Lectures on Homiletics 

and Preaching;" Ripley's " Sacred Rhetoric" (containing 

Henry Ware's ** Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching") ; 

Zincke's " Duty and Discipline of Extemporary Preach- 



IN TR on UC TION. 3 

ij^g ;" J- ^' Alexander's "Thoughts on Preaching;" 
Moore's " Thoughts on Preaching ;" Kidder's " Treatise 
on Homiletics ;" Shedd's " Homiletics and Pastoral 
Theology ;" Day's " Rhetoric" and Day's "Art of Dis- 
course ;" "Christian Rhetoric," by G. W. Hervey ;' 
" Principles of Rhetoric," by A. S. Hill. 

An additional fruitful source of homiletical instruction 
is found in English sermon literature, especially the 
sermons of Wyclif, Hugh Latimer, John Howe, Robert 
South, Isaac Barrow, Jeremy Taylor, Archbishop Leigh- 
ton, Archbishop Tillotson, John Bunyan, Richard Bax- 
ter, Bishop Butler, Philip Doddridge, Robert Hall, 
Thomas Chalmers, John Wesley, Henry Melville, J. H. 
Newman, F. W. Robertson, Thomas Binney, Canon 
Mozley, Canon Liddon, Jonathan Edwards, Dr. Dwight, 
Dr. Emmons, Dr. Channing, John M. Mason, Horace 
Bushnell, and Phillips Brooks. 

Among French works are Vinet's " Homiletics, or the 
Theory of Preaching ;" Fenelon's " Dialogues on Elo- 
quence ;" Claude's " Essay on the Com- 
position of a Sermon ;" Abb6 Maury's 
" Essai sur I'eloquence de la chaire ;" 
Athanase Coquerel's " Observations pratiques sur la Pre- 
dication ;" Monod " On the Delivery of a Sermon ;" 



* This author's design deserves special notice as following the lead of 
Rudolf Stier in his *' Keryktik," and Sikel in his " Halieutik," to build 
up a system of sacred rhetoric entirely on the biblical side, disregarding to 
a great extent the rules of rhetoric, and seeking for power to work upon 
the souls of men exclusively in the divine oracles, and by studying the 
methods of the prophetic and apostolic preachers. It is an interesting 
work, perhaps too elaborate for practical use, but worthy of study. Its 
idea of " inspirational rhetoric" was a favorite one of Origen, and other 
great preach'ers of past ages, who did not, however, call it (as this author 
does) by the name of " sub-inspiration," but claimed lor it an essentially 
prophetic character. 



4 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Bautain's " Art of Extempore Speaking.' Of the host 
of illustrious French pulpit orators we would mention 
only the names of Bossuet, Massillon, Fenelon, Bour- 
daloue, Claude, Saurin, Alexandre Vinet, Lacordaire, 
Athanase Coquerel, the brothers Monod, and De Pres- 
sense. 

Among the more common and well-known German 

works, are Ammon's " Handbuch der Einleitung zur 

Kanzelberedsamkeit ;" Palmer's ** Evange- 

German j.^^j^^ Homiletik ;" Reinhard's *' Briefe ;" 
Works. 

Schott's "Theorie der Beredsamkeit ;" Mar- 

heinecke's "Grundlageder Homiletik ;" Henke's ** Nach- 

gelassenen Vorlesungen iiber Liturgik und Homiletik ;" 

Hagenbach's " Liturgik und Homiletik ;" Rudolf Stier's 

** Grundriss einer Biblischen Keryktik ;" Klein's "Die 

Beredsamkeit des Geistlichen ;" Theremin's ** Die 

Beredsamkeit eine Tugend. " 

Of German sermons, among those specially valuable to 
the student and preacher may be named the sermons of 
Tauler, Luther, Zwingli, Mosheim, ZoUikoffer, Reinhard, 
Schleiermacher, Nitzsch, Jul. Miiller, and Tholuck. 

To the above brief list might be added such works as 

Vinet's ** Histoire de la Predication de I'Eglise Reformee 

de France, pendant la siecle dix-septieme ;" 

Historical p^niel's " Pragmatische Geschichte der 
Works. 

Christlichen Beredsamkeit ;" Ludwig Stie- 

betz* *' Zur Geschichte der Predigt in der EvangeHschen 
Kirche von Mosheim bis auf die Gegenwart ;" Lentz' 
** Geschichte der Christlichen Homiletik ;" Neander's 
" Life of Chrysostom ;" Moule's " Christian Oratory 
during the First Five Centuries ;" Neale's ** Mediaeval 
Preachers and Preaching." 

Works like these, giving a penetrative and empirical 
view of preaching, enable us to compare the great 



INTRODUCTION, 5 

preachers of the different historic periods of the Chris- 
tian Church, and to note the similarity in diversity, or 
the common qualities which belonged to them all, and 
which constitute their main sources of power and suc- 
cess. 

The judicious study, also, of the preachers of the ancient 
Greek and Latin churches is to be com- 
mended, as forming a most valuable and, , at"stic 

.,,,,, Literature, 
m our country, a comparatively fresh field 

of sacred eloquence, as well as of theological learning. 

Augustine, in his treatise " De Doctrina Christiana," 
devotes a chapter to sacred rhetoric which is of priceless 
worth. The discourses of Augustine and Chrysostom 
are, incomparably, the most important, homiletically con- 
sidered, of all patristic sermons and writings ; and when 
it is considered that some five hundred and ninety ser- 
mons of Augustine are extant, and that through their 
ancient Latin garb the fire and living soul of the true 
preacher of Christ glow, this department of sermon litera- 
ture is by no means to be overlooked. It is a garden 
rank indeed with luxuriant vegetation and useless weeds, 
but this fact shows the depth of the original soil and its 
proximity to the primitive springs of spiritual life and 
growth. 

To this list the best modern works upon the study of 

the English language, such as those of Trench, Alford, 

Max Muller, Marsh, Craik, and Whitney, 

might be added ; and, in fact, all English ^^^^^ °° 
1. r .,.,,., the English 

literature of a genuine kind, which em- Laneuace 

bodies the moral power and vital qualities 

of the English tongue, is an indirect but important 

auxiliary to homiletical studies. 

In the most comprehensive treatises upon Pas- 
toral Theology, from Chrysostom 's "Treatise on the 



6 HO MILE TICS PROPER. 

Priesthood" down to the latest modern works like 

„ ^. Van Oosterzee's " Practical Theolos^y" and 
Preaching ^ ^-^ 

treated in Otto's " Evangelische Practische Theolo- 

Works on gie," there are elaborate discussions upon 

Pastoral the subject of preaching, because this sub- 

eo ogy. j^^^ jg identical with a minister's entire 

work and influence. 

It need hardly be suggested that the study of the 

Scriptures — of the prophetical writings, which were 

originally bold popular addresses ; above all 

o '. of our Lord's own discourses ; of the apostle 

Scriptures. ' ^ 

Paul's orations and his epistles, which are 
evidently in the style and manner of his accustomed 
earnest speech to the people — that this study is funda- 
mental in a homiletic point of view. Throughout the 
Pauline epistles there are scattered special instructions to 
preachers which, taken together, form a complete system 
of Pauline homiletics, being in fact the first work, and 
that an inspired one, upon this great theme. 

Sec. 2. Definition of Homiletical Terms. 

Before treating the practical subject of Homiletics, it 
will be necessary to define some of the more familiar 
terms that are in constant use in this science. 

I. Homily. — This word has a clearly scriptural origin. 

It is true that "homily" was not at first, in the New 

Testament or in immediately post-scriptu- 
Homily. , . .,.,., , 

ral times, identical with our modern term 

" sermon." It was more nearly assimilated to the primi- 
tive meaning of "discourse," or "conversation." It 
implied literally " question and answer," and thus the 
familiar address or discussion of truth in an informal con- 
versational way. It is derived from ojj-ikoi, meaning a 
crowd, whence 6jj.iX£gd, "to be in company with," " to 



introduction: 7 

have intercourse or communion with," as in Luke 24 : 14, 
15, and Acts 20: 11, and in i Cor. 15 : 33, signifying 
" converse," " asking and answering questions," whence 
the interlocutory address, or the conversational style of 
address upon the facts of Christ's life and religion among 
Gentiles and Jews, and especially in the primitive Chris- 
tian assemblies. 

Originally it was doubtless a literal answer to a literal 
question. The " homily" which afterward came to be 
the Greek term in the Eastern Church for public address, 
or preaching upon religious themes, and which long con- 
tinued to be the form of preaching both In the Eastern 
and Western Churches, was, subsequent to the apostolic 
age, a simple exposition or continuous explanation of 
the passage of Scripture read in the sacred assembly. It 
consisted almost entirely of explanation, and had little of 
the character of a formal oration. Thus we see that 
"homily," having a scriptural origin, grew to be the 
term, and more than that, with some considerable modi- 
fication, the idea of the "sermon," as we use it. But 
still it is well to bear in mind (and this is an important 
fact which looks toward the biblical intention, simplifica- 
tion, and rectification of preaching) that the " homily," 
as originally found and employed in the early times of 
the Church, differs In some marked respects from the 
modern " sermon." Vinet says : 

" If the homily is not as greatly different from the 
ordinary sermon as we commonly suppose, it has yet a 
character of Its own. This character belongs to it not 
only from its having to do most frequently with recitals, 
or from any familiarity peculiar to this kind of discourse, 
but rather from this, that its chief business, its principal 
object, is to set in relief the successive parts of an ex- 
tended text, subordinating them to its contour, its acci- 



8 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

dents, its chances, if we may so speak, more than can be 
done in the sermon, properly so called. 

" Nothing distinguishes, essentially, the homily from 
the sermon, except the comparative predominance of 
analysis, in other terms, the prevalence of explanation 
over system. " * 

In fact, the " homily" is the simpler, older, and more 
scriptural method of preaching, or of the continuous ex- 
position of the truths and facts of the gospel, springing 
up at first in a most natural way in the congregations of 
Christian believers, and then developing into something 
of a systematic nature. 

In order to make this description of the " homily'' 
complete, it would be necessary to add that, ecclesiasti- 
cally, the " homily" came to be regarded as a peculiar 
form of " sermon," chiefly expository, being an explana- 
tion of shorter or longer passages of Scripture prepared 
to be read in the public assemblies for worship. 

The earliest " homilies" known are those of Origen, 
and the ** Clementine Homilies," the last being of later 
date. The " homilies" of Clement of Alexandria, Chry- 
sostom, Augustine, Athanasius, Gregory the Great, and 
other fathers, are strictly expositions of Scripture, and 
sometimes are of great value. 

In mediaeval ages, '* Homilaria," or books of homilies, 
were widely circulated among the clergy. The "Homi- 
laria" of Paulus Diaconus is well known. The " Festi- 
vale" or " Liber Festivalis," was also such a collection, 
and was printed by Caxton in 1482. The " Homilies" 
issued in the reigns of Edward VI. and Queen Elizabeth, 
and afterward those published from time to time by the 
authority of the Established Church of England, are 



" Homiletics" (Am. ed., Skinner's trans.), p. 148. 



IN TROD UC TIOiV. 9 

familiar examples. But it is to be observed that even 
in this strictly ecclesastical and technical use of the word, 
the idea is chiefly that of exposition, the homily being, 
in fact, a brief expository sermon. 

2. Homiletics. — This word, derived from ''homily," 

but taking a broader meaning, as comprehending in one 

term the whole subject and science of 

, , ,. , , -1 Homiletics. 

preaching, or of formal public address in the 

pulpit of an organized Christian Church, may be thus de- 
fined : Homiletics is the science that teaches the funda- 
mental principles of public discourse as applied to the 
proclamation and teaching of divine truth in regular 
assemblies gathered for the purpose of Christian worship. 
It does not concern private, but it does apply to public 
discourse, for the purpose of instruction, renewal, and 
edification in divine truth. It does not have reference 
to a discourse of an informal and accidental character, but 
it is that which is connected with the regular worship of 
God in the stated assemblies of the Christian Church. 

3. Preaching. — This also is a scriptural term, and its 
true meaning must therefore be sought for chiefly in the 
Bible. Although xr/pvaaGj, or Krfpvyfxa^ is 

the word commonly employed for " preach- 
ing" in the New Testament, there are other words which 
are used for the same general purpose, such as 8vay- 
yeXi^oj, KarayyiXXoo^ SiaXtyofxai, XaXtao. 

The uses and meanings of these different terms, so 
nearly identical, and which, in comparatively few cases, 
together and severally, might be made to signify what 
we now generally mean by the term " preaching," have 
been thus comprehensively summed up : 

AaXlco probably meant no more than colloquial or 
household instruction, as in Mark 2 : 2. 

^iaXeyo}.iai^ as the word imports, may have been open 



10 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

discussions with opponents, or a kind of dialectic dis- 
course after the Socratic manner ; though in Acts 20 : 7 
we have the word appHed to what would seem to have 
been an approximation to our modern sermon. 

The two words rendered " to preach," which are 
found most frequently, are EvayyeXil^oa and KrfpvaaoD. 
** Each of these, in various forms, occurs upward of fifty 
times, and must be allowed to describe a teaching which 
should be both public in its character and duly author- 
ized {KTfpv^) in the manner of proclaiming it. " ^ 

While this last remark is true, that the mjpv^ was 
commonly an authorized, or well-recognized " herald,^' 
yet the term " preaching" is evidently used in the New 
Testament in the most general sense, as signifying a her- 
alding in every manner and mode of the word of God to 
man, to one man as well as to the people. 

Preaching thus is not necessarily a popular address, or 
a regular discourse in a regular assembly, but may be ap- 
plied to all kinds of " proclaiming" or " publishing" of 
Christian truth in whatever way, in private conversation, 
in the interviews of missionaries with the heathen, in the 
addresses of evangelists, in the common intercourse of 
men, in the daily life and example of believers — in fact, it 
is making known in any and every effectual way, by 
one's conduct, precept, or personality, the message of 
God to men. 

Thus our Saviour preached not only in the synagogue 
but by the wayside, in the conversation by the well, on 
the mountain and in the household, at the table, upon 
the walk through the fields, by word, look, action, and 
life. " Preaching" is thus a more comprehensive term 
than " homily" or " sermon." 



Moore's "Thoughts on Preaching," p. 6. 



INTRODUCTION. II 

4. Sermon. — The Latin word "jrrw^," signifying " dis^ 
course, " " discoursing or talking' ' with one, and which also 
originally, implied question and answer, and 
the fact of an audience whose questions are 
real or implied, is, indeed, as near an equivalent to the 
biblical Greek word ofuiXia^ or "homily," as could well 
be found ; but, as has been seen, it somewhat differs from 
it. It does, in fact, by common usage, mean a more fin- 
ished address, a more formal treatment of a passage of 
Scripture, or theme suggested by such a passage, than 
does "homily," and certainly than does "preaching." 
It implies not only analysis but synthesis ; and it presup- 
poses a set discourse, or sacred oration, complete in its 
parts, delivered to an assembly of Christian people 
brought together for the purpose of public worship. It 
is a deliberate address to a religious assembly. It is the 
familiar " homily" become or grown up into a regular 
discourse with plan and method ; and it may be consid- 
ered to be in some measure, in these later days, falsely 
formalized and stratified into the rigid shape of an ora- 
tion artistically viewed. 

But this stratifying process was early begun. One of 
the Latin fathers writes : 

''Theologi Christiayii, et nominative ex vctcribus Ch7ysoS' 
tontus, Basilius, Macarius, et alii, bjxikiai vocant serinones 
ad eoctnin Jiabitos. Atqiie ita ofxiXia et Xoyoi differiint.'' 

The " sermon," however, whether it be scriptural or 
unscriptural, true or false, in its form, combines the sim- 
ple idea of " preaching," or publishing the word of God, 
or the more familiar idea of explanatory address, with 
the idea of a thoughtful, even philosophical and method- 
ized style of discourse adapted to instruct the people in 
divine truth. 

Vinet's definition of the " sermon" is excellent ; and 



12 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

we could adopt it as, on the whole, the best we have seen : 
*' The sermon is a discourse incorporated with public 
worship, and designed, concurrently or alternately, to 
conduct to Christian truth one who has not yet believed 
it, or to explain and apply it to those who admit it." ^ 



^ " Homiletics," p. 28. 



FIRST DIVISION. 

HISTORY OF PREACHING. 

Sec. 3. Introduction. 

Inasmuch as the spiritual nature of man is the highest 
measure of his moral and intellectual, and, we might even 
say, his physical being, there can be imag- 
ined no standard which marks so delicately pi-gachinp- an 
and truly as preaching does the character of expression of 
a period, since preaching, in all cases where the spirit of 
it Is genuine, is one of the most appreciable ^" ^^^* 
expressions of the purely spiritual in man. 
Study the sermons of a period and you will reach, 
as nearly as can be done, the height and depth of the 
spirit of that period. The preacher can rarely go far 
in advance of or remain far behind the intellectual 
and moral appreciation of the people to whom he 
preaches ; and while therefore the fundamental truths 
or principles of preaching remain the same, the style 
of preaching, both in its spirit and form, becomes a 
sure though ever-changing index of the varied phases 
of the religious life of great Christian epochs. Have 
we not, then, in this a kind of guiding law, or princi- 
ple, in the investigation of the history of preaching ; 
and have we not also some reason to believe that 
preaching in all its varying styles and methods has been 
providentially guided by the Spirit of God, so that it 



.14 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

shall be a powerful influence in the world, and a fit in- 
strument of divine wisdom for the highest welfare and 
advancement of every age of the Church ? 

In the history of preaching there are thus, as in relig- 
ion itself, the permanent and variable ele- 

Permanent j^^j^^s. While the underlying subject of 
and variable , . . , , ^ . , . , 

elements pfeachmg is the same, the forms m which 

truth is appreciated, and its modes of in- 
fluencing the popular mind, are constantly undergoing de- 
velopment ; and he surely is the preacher best fitted to in- 
fluence the age in which he lives, who, while sincerely loyal 
to the truth, is still intelligently alive to the influences of 
the time of which he forms a part ; and as a necessary cor- 
ollary to this, the preacher's own responsibility to his age 
is great. He should not only be one keenly 
A preacher's susceptible to the outward influences of his 
responsibility ^j^^^^ ^^^ ^ Vi^^x^x responsibility still is laid 
to his own . i . i 

aee upon him to exert his best powers to go be- 

neath the surface of things, to study the 
hidden tendencies of thought and opinion, to discover 
those deeper causes that are ever at work in the spiritual 
world. He should strive to come at the elemental forces 
which originate and control the philosophy as well as his- 
tory of his age. This present age, whose questions go 
under the form to the substance of truth, is an age in 
which the laity are well educated and have independent 
opinions, and are not disposed to take their creeds sec- 
ond hand. This shows that the time is one transitional 
to something higher and better. It is difficult but still 
it is good to live, and be a preacher of Christ, in such a 
time. Robert Hall said, "As the Christian ministry is 
established for the instruction of men, throughout every 
age, in truth and holiness, it must adapt itself to the 
ever- shifting scenes of the moral world, and stand ready 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 1$ 

to repel the attacks of error, under whatever form it may 
appear." We are not called upon as preachers to fight 
bodiless ghosts that have been long laid to rest, but liv- 
ing forms and powers of unbelief. We should under- 
stand fairly what these are. There are problems that 
trouble this age. There are questions in regard to the 
adjustment of philosophy and inspiration, science and 
religion. There is a strong and unreconciled strife be- 
tween the facts of human consciousness and those of 
supernaturally revealed religion. In this thinking age, 
can the preacher, on any reasonable grounds, hope to 
maintain his influence, who rests back on antedated or 
really unlearned and superficial systems of interpretation, 
who does not appreciate the deeper spirit of critical 
research that prevails, who is unsympathetic with the 
scientific thought of his times, or who, intellectually, 
lags behind ? 

The gospel must be applied to the mental condition 
and actual wants of men. So far as the mere form of 
preaching is concerned, he who would now preach to the 
people in the childishly allegorical style of the Middle 
Ages, or the superlatively theological method of the later 
scholastic period, or even the quaintly rigid manner of 
our Puritan fathers, with their innumerable topics and 
endless elaboration of method, would be regarded as an 
obsolete anomaly ; and although it is easy to pass be- 
yond the truth here, and to lay down a wrong principle 
from over- statement, yet we might apply the remark to 
the age of the reformers, so full of rude polemic theology 
as well as of the energy of faith ; we might even extend it 
to the apostolical age, for Christ may be preached under 
varying forms, and with new styles of argumentation and 
new clothing of words and illustration, and it would be 
Jesus Christ, " the same yesterday, to-day, and forever." 



l6 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

The preaching also of every man differs, or should do 

so, from that of every other man. He speaks out of his 

personal knowledg-e of Christ, or he will not 

Personality. , ^ ^ , i . • ^ , 

greatly mfluence men and his times. God 

tells a man to preach the gospel according to the concep- 
tion of his own soul — as Christ is to him and has been to 
him in the truest experiences of life, and through the 
channels of his own nature and power of expression. 
One man will address with more force the intellectual 
side, the other the emotional. John did not preach like 
James, nor Chrysostom like Augustine, nor Luther like 
Melancthon. Each knew something of the love of 
Christ, and each had obtained some partial though true 
view of the whole system of truth. The personality of 
the preacher, if he is a genuine man, is transfused by the 
divine spirit of the word which he preaches, but not 
destroyed. Every true man speaks as he is taught, not 
of men, but of Christ. 

While this truth of the importance of the principle of 
adaptation is to be duly considered, it should not be 

Invariable Pressed beyond its real value. The preacher 
element may easily overestimate it, and become sub- 

the most servient to the phenomenal and regardless 

important. ^^ ^j^^ essential. He thus tends to the sen- 
sational and superficial. He may seek only to interest 
rather than rectify and save. The permanent element in 
preaching which is founded upon the absolute laws of be- 
ing and the moral constitution of the universe, is, after all, 
its great power. This is not to be lost sight of, like the 
everlasting stars to the mariner. The relations of the 
moral being of man to the government of God and the 
intimate revelation of the divine nature in the work and 
spirit of Christ, the principles of righteousness and love 
which come from these, form the groundwork of all true 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 17 

preaching in every age. They lend strength, authority, 
and assured success to the message of God to humanity 
through the voice of the living preacher. They speak to 
the nature of every man, whatever his position or educa- 
tion. As a being who has a conscience, and who is made 
for better things than the pursuit of selfish happiness, 
who is capable of sin and at the same time capable of 
holiness, who is created for all that is implied in the 
name of God — he will and must respond to the laws of 
moral being in whose environment he is irresistibly estab- 
lished. The preacher should partake in some measure of 
the unchangeable character of those divine principles 
upon which the kingdom of God itself is founded. Then 
he becomes a truly apostolic preacher. 

When we thus study the permanent and the change- 
able elements in preaching, its philosophy, and its practi- 
cal adaptation to the wants of humanity, we find that 
the history of preaching, becomes a most valuable study in 
its living lessons to the preacher in his own great art ; 
revealing to him, if he reads it aright, the secret of divine 
influence upon mind, and of the application of human 
thought and skill directed by the Spirit of God. 

But we see also that to carry out the perfect plan of a 
history of preaching would require an immense sweep of 
philosophical investigation. It would de- 
mand an examination of the religious What 
thought and life of different periods of the required 
Church ; of the progress and development of i,- f t 
religious opinion, and the genesis of creeds ; preaching, 
of the history of popular morals and man- 
ners ; of the systems of philosophy that have been domi- 
nant or current in various epochs ; of the contemporary 
secular events that have had their influence upon preach- 
ing, such as the changes of government, the characteris- 



1 8 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

tic phenomena of national mind, popular education, law, 
and civilization ; and, above all, of the homiletical works 
and the particular training, under the providence of God, 
of great representative preachers, since every man has 
been shaped for his work by that Spirit who chooses his 
instruments with consummate skill/ 

The history of preaching forms, in fact, an essential part 
of the history of the Christian Church — for preaching be- 
gan with the earliest beginnings of Christianity, and was 
one of the main instrumentalities of its growth ; and it 
has never ceased to exert a shaping influence upon Chris- 
tian life. We have but to think each for himself of his 
own religious experience, in order to recognize the vast 
power over his own spiritual life, which has been exercised 
by the minds of preachers with whom he has come in 
contact. They have from our infancy moulded our inner 
nature as by powerful hands into the forms they wear, so 
that it is difficult for us ever to get away from the influ- 
ence of these teachers. 

Viewing church history in a homiletical light, of the 

earliest ages after the apostolic age, the fourth and fifth 

centuries form the richest epoch in the works 

_ and lives of sfreat preachers of the Christian 

The richest ^, , , , , ^ 

and the Church ; while the first three centuries sue- 
most barren ceeding the times of the apostles are more 
ages in barren in the materials of illustration. The 
history of mediaeval period, when sacerdotalism almost 
killed out the life of preaching, though ex- 
tremely interesting in some respects, is 
greatly wanting in the substance and spirit of evangeli- 
cal preaching. It has been said that for a thousand years, 
from Augustine to Wyclif, the eloquence of the pulpit 



^ Paniel's " Prag. Gesch.," p. 4. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 1 9 

waned. Though this is too sweeping a statement, yet 
with some modifications and notable exceptions it is 
lamentably true ; and not until the period of the Refor- 
mation, and immediately succeeding it, did there appear 
again great, original, apostolic preachers. With the aids 
of ecclesiastical history, of references to the writings and 
sermons of eminent preachers, and of the works of ap- 
proved wTiters upon Christian eloquence, we shall 
endeavor to give a rapid survey of the history of preach- 
ing from the earliest beginnings to the present time, 
sketching some of the principal preachers in the light of 
models more or less to be imitated, and endeavoring to 
arrive at their sources of power as instruments in the 
hand of God of interpreting his truth, and of guiding 
souls into the kingdom of his Son.' 

Sec. 4. Prc-apostolic PrcacJiing. 

From the beginning of the race, notwithstanding its de- 
cadence from perfect holiness, there has ever been a com- 
munication maintained between the Creator and his crea- 
tures. His Spirit has always spoken to men and striven 
with them. He has never left himself without a witness 
of his truth. There has been a revelation of the divine 
will both to the consciousness and the reason of men, that 
has been interpreted, conveyed, and enforced principally 
through an intelligent and independent though super- 
naturally guided human agency. The interpreters of 



' The author would acknowledge his obligations especially to Paniel's 
Geschichte der ChHstlichen Bercdsamkeit for assistance derived in the 
history of the five first centuries of Christian preaching. He has not 
only followed the general order of this author in discussing topics, but 
also sometimes quoted his words. This, whenever done, has been 
noted. 



20 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

the will and word of God, sometimes interpreting more 
darkly and sometimes more clearly, we may freely call 
"preachers," for they heralded God's truth to men. 
Righteous Noah, early in the life of humanity, but 
after the world had lapsed from the knowledge of 
God, is thus called (2 Peter 2 : 5) diKaioavvrji Krjpvna^ 
"a preacher of righteousness." He proclaimed the 
righteous will of God to an evil generation. Moses, 
who could lead an exodus, and free men from the yoke 
of political servitude, who was essentially a statesman 
and organizer, felt himself, on the other hand, un- 
equal to the task of teaching divine truth by public ad- 
dress, being " slow of speech and slow of tongue," and 
transferred that ofifice to Aaron. 

In Jehoshaphat's time we read (2 Chron. 17:9) of 
those " who taught in Judah, and had the book of the 
law with them, and went throughout the cities of Judah 
and taught the people." 

The '* prophets" of the Old Testament are, above all, 
noticeable in this regard ; who resembled, far more than 

Prophets ^^^ " priests" of that dispensation, the 
of the preachers of the Christian Church ; they 

Old Testa- were the real teachers of the people in the 
"'^"*- ways of God. 

** Schools of the prophets" were established very 

early in the history of the Jewish nation. In these were 

gathered young men, who were instructed for 

Schoo s ^j^^ office which they were afterward to fill, 

. , so that from the time of the prophet Sam- 
propnets. ^ ^ 

uel to the closing of the canon of the Old 
Testament there seems never to have been wanting men 
for the prophetic office. Their chief study was the divine 
law and its interpretation, the oral as distinct from the 
ceremonial law. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 21 

The functions of the prophet, as thus trained in these 
schools, were more specifically : 

1. Moral instruction, especially that of messengers sent 
directly from God to men with messages of righteousness. 

2. The recording of inspiration, or of what God taught 
them for the benefit of the people ; and we are chiefly in- 
debted to them for the word of God comprised in the 
Old Testament Scriptures. 

3. Sacred music and poetry, which were made the vehi- 
cle of inspiration for the instruction of the people.* 

These schools were at Gibeah and Ramah ; at Gilgal, 
under Elisha ; and at Bethel, Jericho, and Mount 
Ephraim. The number of students in these institutions 
are spoken of in 2 Kings 4 : 43 and 2 Kings 2 : 16. 
Their method of support, poverty, and self-denial are 
described in 2 Kings 6:1-7; 2 Kings 4 : 38-44. 

These institutions had no invested funds, nor perma- 
nent sources of supply, but the scholars depended on 
temporary aid and even upon miracles for their main- 
tenance. Their instruction in music and the spirit of 
prophecy, and the relations of music to prophesying, are 
delineated in i Sam. 10 : 5, 6 ; 19 : 18-24 ; i Chron. 
25 : I. 3. 6; 13 :8 ; 2 Sam. 6 : 5. 

Their culture, to enable them to become the annalists 
of the religious history of the nation, and the recorders 
of revelation, was an important though subsidiary quali- 
fication to the prophetic gift. 

The most ancient meaning of the Hebrew word 

" prophet,*' in its earliest use in the Bible, 

is not so much " foreteller' ' as "spokesman, ' ' waning o 

*' prophet." 
or "interpreter." The Hebrew verb N^j, 

" to prophecy," means literally *' to bubble up like a 
spring." 



See Cowles's "Hebrew History," p. in, seq. 



23 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

The prophet was a God-filled man, pouring irrepressi- 
bly forth the declarations of God. 

TIpocprjrrii in classical Greek is '* one who speaks for 
another," especially one who speaks under supernatural 
influence, and so interprets the will of his God. 

In the true prophet God speaks directly, disregarding 
regular forms and channels. In him the moral, the spir- 
itual, the divine, prevailed over the ritual element. He 
interpreted the divine law. Being filled by its potency, 
he was forced to utter its commands. He is called, in so 
many words, a " preacher ;" thus the denunciation of 
Jonah against Nineveh is spoken of in Matt. 12 : 41 as 
to Ki'jpvy^a lGDva~thQ preaching of Jonah. 

When the priesthood degenerated, the prophet ap- 
peared in order to teach men ; and the prophetic order 
of teachers was as truly recognized and established as the 
priestly order. 

The prophets sprang, as a common rule, from the 
people, but they belonged to no class or caste, and 
princes and nobles as well as shepherds and tillers of 
the ground sometimes appeared in the line of the 
prophets. 

The prophet represented the universal soul of human- 
ity that responded to the law of God written in the con- 
science, not regarding the political, social, and ecclesias- 
tical differences that separate men. They told the peo- 
ple their sins without fear or favor — as God's spokesmen, 
responsible to him alone. They sternly rebuked wicked 
men. They taught the truth, or the true faith, though 
morally and spiritually rather than dogmatically, and 
often with mighty eloquence, as with lips touched by a 
coal of fire from off God's altar. Elijah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, 
have never been surpassed in boldness, sublimity, and 
force, by uninspired men. They taught commonly by 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 23 

the method of direct oral address, and were looked upon 
as authorized by God to speak to the people. 

Thus, at the very end of the old dispensation, John the 
Baptist was recognized as a prophetic teacher sent from 
God. 

Jesus himself, as " the Anointed," or the One " sent" 
from God, came in the regular line of the prophets, and 
was so accepted by minds susceptible to righteousness ; 
and, in like manner, all true Christian preachers, through 
Christ, are, in some sense, in the line of the ** prophets," 
or are " prophets ;" and if they be genuinely holy men, 
God speaks through them as proclaimers of his law and 
preachers of righteousness, interpreting, like the older 
prophets, the letter by the spirit. But Christian preach- 
ers should take heed also to the warning in the New Tes- 
tament, that if they prophesy, " let them prophesy ac- 
cording to the proportion of faith." This is a most in- 
teresting point of resemblance, and later on we shall 
speak more fully of this relation. 

After the Captivity there was renewed enthusiasm for 
the teaching of the law, and schools were established to 
raise up skilful interpreters of the Hebrew moral code, 
who were afterward the " lawyers" mentioned in the New 
Testament. 

Synagogues also were founded, in which were regular 
expositions of the ** law and the prophets" on the Sab- 
bath ; and in the time of the introduction of Christianity, 
according to Philo, the services of the large and splen- 
didly adorned Jewish synagogues consisted chiefly of oral 
instruction and free, extended speaking. 

Notwithstanding, however, all that has been affirmed 
concerning the prophetic office in the Old Testament, it 
must be said that ** preaching," in the New Testament 
sense of the term, was not the main or even prominent 



24 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

instrumentality of spreading divine truth and building 

up the kingdom of God in the former dispensation ; yet 

p , . we ought not to consider preaching to be so 

not the peculiar to the Christian economy that there 

main instru- are to be found no suggestions or even true 

mentality examples of it in the older church ; for it 

belongs rather to the needs of our common 
Dispensation. 

human nature, to the divine method of rea- 
son and love, to the character of a reasonable religion, 
and to the most eflficient mode of communicating spirit- 
ual truth to men. That preaching is not wholly confined 
to the biblical dispensation and appointment, whether of 
the Old or New Dispensation, but is a natural method of 
communicating truth, is illustrated, for instance, by the 
example of the Greek philosophers. 

Like the older philosophers, Thales, Pythagoras, and 

Anaxag-oras, who preceded him, Socrates 
Socrates. & ? x- ? 

might be mentioned as an eminent example 

of the power of oral instruction. His teaching, which has 
had so wonderful and indestructible an influence upon 
human thought, was wholly oral. He seems to have written 
nothing. When asked why he did not write out his instruc- 
tions, he is said to have replied, '* Iwould rather write 
upon the hearts of living men than upon the skins of dead 
sheep." There is, in fact, a vital power in the immediate 
contact of the living teacher with living minds, an im- 
pression made upon the sensibilities and dispositions of 
men, which leaves an influence that written words and 
books cannot do, and that propagates itself and does not 
die. The great fact that our Lord, above all, did not leave 
one written sentence, but trusted his words of everlasting 
import and saving power to oral communication, shows 
that preaching is the natural a$ well as the divine method 
of imparting truth. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 2$ 

Easy as the talk of children, fleeting as the passing 
breath, oral preaching is yet the strongest and most en- 
during instrumentality in the world, because the Spirit 
of God and the spirit of man are in it and wield it. 

A peculiarly interesting illustration of the fact that 

preaching is the natural method of propagating truth 

and moral life is to be found in the exam- 

r 1 r- . 1 -1 1 1 -11 '^^^ Stoic 

pie of the Stoic philosophers, and especially philosophers. 

of the sect of Roman Cynics. 

" Education fell in a great degree into their hands. 
Many great families kept a philosopher among them, in 
what in modern language might be termed the capacity 
of a domestic chaplain, while a system of popular preach- 
ing was created and widely diffused." 

" Of these preachers there were two classes, who differed 
greatly in their characters and methods. The first, who 
have been happily named ' the monks of Stoicism,' were 
the Cynics, who appear to have assumed among the 
moralists of the pagan empire a position somewhat re- 
sembling that of the mendicant orders in Catholicism. 
In a singularly curious dissertation of Epictetus, we have 
a picture of the ideal at which a Cynic should arrive, and 
it is impossible in reading it not to be struck with the re- 
semblance it bears to the missionary friar." 

'* The Cynic should be a man devoting his entire life to 
the instruction of mankind. He must be unmarried, for 
he must have no family affections to divert or dilute his 
energies. He must wear the meanest dress, sleep upon 
the bare ground, feed upon the simplest food, abstain 
from all earthly pleasures, and yet exhibit to the world 
the example of uniform cheerfulness and content. No 
one, under pain of provoking the divine anger, should 
embrace such a career unless he believes himself to be 
called and assisted by Jupiter. It is his mission to go 



26 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

among men as the ambassador of God, rebuking, in season 
and out of season, their frivoHty, their cowardice, and 
their vice. He must stop the rich man in the market- 
place. He must preach to the people in the highway. 
He must know no respect and no fear. He must look 
upon all men as his sons, and upon all women as his 
daughters. In the midst of a jeering crowd he must ex- 
hibit such a placid calm that men may imagine him to be 
of stone. Ill-treatment and exile and death must have 
no terror in his eyes, for the discipline of his life should 
emancipate him from every earthly tie, and when he is 
beaten he should love those who beat him, for he is at 
once the father and brother of all men." ^ 

Even the use of texts by these philosophers is notice- 
able. 

** They acquired the habit of never enforcing the sim- 
plest lesson without illustrating it by a profusion of 
ancient examples, and by detached sentences from some 
philosopher, which they employed much in the same way 
as texts of Scripture are often employed in the writings 
of the Puritans." ^ 

Judaism in its relation to Christian preaching is a theme 
upon which we cannot now dwell ; but although Juda- 
ism had infinitely higher ideas of God and 

Judaism in q{ ^1^^ than heathenism ever did, yet it 

1 s re a ion ^Q^JJ ^^^ teach man the way of redemption 
to Christian ^ ^ . , ,, ,^,.. 

oreaching- ^^'^ ^^^ savmg knowledge of God, smce it 
was, to the sinful soul, rather the letter that 
kills than the spirit that makes alive. Yet it was a sys- 
tem preparatory to the gospel. It formed historically, 
through its synagogue teachings, the prelude to the model 
of both Christian worship and Christian preaching. It 



Lecky's " Hist, of European Morals," v. i. p. 328. *Id. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 27 

set forth, above all, the primary truth of the righteous- 
ness of the law. It awaked yearnings after God, and the 
profound sense of sin as well as the sense of God's dis- 
pleasure against sin. But the Pharisees quenched the 
true life of the Mosaic faith in externalism, and a dog- 
matic self-righteousness ; the Sadducees, pretending to 
restore Judaism to its original life and spirit, and to re- 
lieve it from the bondage of forms, brought in a chilling 
rationalism ; the Essenes, the ascetics and mystics of 
Hebraism, sought to find religion in the subjective feel- 
ing which disregarded the outward life and the act of 
duty.' Could these, in their exclusive, minute, and 
arbitrary system, preach the spiritual message of God to 
men ? Could they, who shut out all but themselves from 
Jerusalem, establish the universal city and kingdom of 
God ? Yet they were, in their narrowness and perversity, 
the precursors of this kingdom, and of the preachers of 
this kingdom, as seen in an eminent degree in John the 
Baptist, who was a preacher of repentance. They showed 
men their need of God, and they proved to men their 
own inability to lead them to God and eternal life. If 
they could not do it, who could ? The pagan world had 
lost the torch of natural religion, and had sunk into the 
darkness of atheism. The full time for the preaching of 
the gospel of life and salvation through Jesus Christ had 
come. 

Sec. 5. Preaching of CJirist ajid of the Apostles. 

There had then truly come to be an absolute necessity 
for the pure word of truth in the world, in order that men 
might be instructed in a spiritual religion. Human 
means of making men better and of bringing them to 



Paniel's " Prag. Gesch.," pp. 25, 26. 



28 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

God through the administration of ordinances had failed, 

and would continue to fail, and the only way left to win 

„ , . and save men was by the manifestation of 
Preaching ^ 

the peculiar -the truth in pureness and love. The means 
Christian appointed to do this, viz., preaching, was so 
instrumen- simple that it might be called spiritual. 

^ ^' Its method of operation was by reason, 

sympathy, and love. It was psychological, and not phy- 
sical. It was the instrumentality of the word speaking 
to the soul. The preaching of the word, addressed ob- 
jectively to the understanding and reason of men, and 
enforced subjectively in the heart by the Holy Spirit, who 
is called the " Spirit of God," the " Spirit of Christ," 
was the divinely appointed means of converting the 
world. 

The preaching of Christ, historically considered, must 

be regarded as the initiative, and the model of Christian 

preaching. Peter said to Cornelius (Acts 

Preaching iq : 37), " That word ye know, which was 

° "® published throughout all Judea, and began 
historically ^ 7-/ ., • 1 1 , , 1 r ^ 

*d d f^^^^^ Ganlce, with doubtless neartielt rev- 
erent allusion to the preaching of Christ. 
Our Lord himself relied upon and practised this simple 
means of establishing and diffusing the kingdom of God. 
As has been already set forth, Christ was not ashamed to 
be, and to prepare himself to be, a preacher. 

In his preparation for the work of preaching, Christ did 
not, it is true, frequent the Jewish theological schools, 
and he opposed the teachings of the recog- 
nized Hebrew instructors of the day : but 
preparation. ^ 

he built himself upon the Scriptures of the 
Old Testament, coming not to destroy the law, but to 
fulfil it. He dwelt also upon the divine thoughts of 
his own heart, meditating upon the needs and sorrows 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 29 

of a world that had departed from God. May we not 
also suppose that he studied the revelation of God in 
nature? In the vale of Nazareth, as in a quiet mountain 
chapel or sanctuary, 

" His daily teachers had been woods and rills, 
The silence that is in the starry sky, 
The sleep that is among the lonely hills." 

The deeper consciousness of a higher nature once awaked 
and constantly growing within him constituted him the 
interpreter of God's word and its infallible teacher. 

After thirty years of silent preparation he came forth 
as a preacher ; and in his preaching he proceeded upon a 
certain method. He grafted the new truth 
upon the old letter, thus bringing forth His method; 

thmgs new and old, accommodatmg him- ^^ nreachine: 
self to the point of view of his hearers. 

Christ preached from the Old Testament as his text, 
bringing Christian truth into true relations to the ancient 
revelation. He based his teachings upon the moral law, 
both revealed and natural. 

The form of his preaching was varied, and was in ac- 
cordance with the character and culture of his hearers. 
In the fiist place it was, as we have seen, oral address or 
preaching. He wrote not but upon men's hearts. He 
trusted to the spoken word. " The words that I speak 
unto you, they are spirit and they are life." " He sent 
forth his word and healed them." Then it is noticeable 
that the principle of adaptation was exquisitely mani- 
fested in all that he said. " He knew all men" (John 
2 : 24). He put himself upon their level. He never 
made a mistake as to the character of his audience. 
Before the learned Pharisees he spoke of the law and the 
way of righteousness ; with the common people he de- 
scended to familiar illustrations. To the soldier he spoke 
5 



3° HOMILETICS PROPER. 

of duty ; to the rich man of benevolence ; to the corrupt 
Samaritan woman, of nationality and of infidelity of liv- 
ing ; to those who were to suffer persecution, of the 
glories of the kingdom of heaven. 

Again, his divine skill as a preacher was shown in that 
he set forth the spiritual truth in a concrete form, having 
life in itself, and as a seed -truth to be fructified by the 
thought and experience of the hearer. To sum up the 
great characteristic of Christ's preaching, it might rever- 
ently be thus expressed : that essential truth — truth which 
is necessary for the soul's life — was conveyed by him in 
such a way, or with such clearness, naturalness, and 
vivid illustrative force, that this truth came to be appre- 
hended, not only by the minds or understandings, but in 
the hearts of those who heard him. In his words they 
looked upon the very countenance of truth. His preach- 
ing mirrored the thoughts of their minds and the disposi- 
tion of their hearts — the man of the heart. It was 
spiritual preaching. They saw the truth, and loved it or 
hated it. He penetrated to the true character or real 
love of those whom he addressed. He possessed in its 
full power the efficiency of sympathy. He reached every 
one, because he loved every one ; and no preacher can 
do much with hearts unless he is in vital union with 
Christ — with his spirit of love. This will teach him 
how to reach the hearts of different men. When Christ 
preached to his disciples, it was one thing ; when to the 
unbelieving Jews, it was another ; but there was ever a 
fundamental truth, a fact concerning God and man's rela- 
tion to him, a principle of divine life which was already 
acknowledged by the conscience, or revealed in the Scrip- 
tures ; and this fact, principle, or truth, be it terrible or 
joyful, was set before the people in a way that showed a 
mastery of the human heart. He not only had, in a per- 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 3 1 

feet degree, that gentleness which belonged, for exam- 
ple, in some lower sense, to the character and preaching 
of Fenelon, and which causes men to love the truth, and 
mildly insinuates itself into the soul and awakens the 
most tender thoughts and affections, creating the con- 
sciousness of reconciliation and peace, but he had also 
in a perfect degree the virile force of John Knox and of 
the old prophets — the terrible majesty of justice, the 
wrath of the purest Being in the universe against sin or 
whatever is opposed to goodness. But this quality of 
terribleness was in some sense accidental, though neces- 
sarily so. Love was the underlying power of all his 
preaching, its essential nature, as it was also the attract- 
ive power of his life and of his death, " drawing all men 
unto him." Neither his hearers, nor any men after 
them, will ever forget or really disbelieve the truth of 
the forgiving mercy and love of the Heavenly Father, as 
set forth in the parable of the " Prodigal Son." There- 
fore the teachings of Christ, in a higher sense than the 
words were originally used, are a xrv/^a £S aei. They 
will not drop out of the world's heart. 

May we not, as preachers, profit from Christ's preach- 
ing ? Should we not earnestly study him as a preacher ? 
Should we not strive after his sympathy, popularity, life, 
truth, naturalness, adaptation, and variety ? 

He indeed is our exemplar in preaching that word of 
God which is able to make wise unto life eternal. 

But Christ's personal instruction was brief. It was of 
the utmost importance that instrumentalities should be 
reared up whereby to transmit Christ's teaching, and 
publish abroad this "word of healing." One of the 
objects, therefore, of Christ's thought and care was to 
prepare preachers who should come after him — who were 
to learn to teach the same word of God that he taught. 



$2 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

*' teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have 
commanded you." 

As to the form of their preaching he did not particu- 
larly prescribe, leaving it to the promptings 
Christ Qf ^]^Q Spirit and of their own minds, and 

of the circumstances and wants of the age. 
prescribe 

form of -^^^ ^^^ material of their preaching, the sub- 
preaching, stance of the faith they taught, was to be the 
"gospel" {to evayyeXiov). They were to 
preach this gospel of the kingdom to all men, to all the 
world until Christ came. 

*' Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to 
every creature" {ur/pv^are ro evayyeXior'). 

Let us now ask, What is the " gospel" which the first 
disciples of Christ were to herald to all men, and which 
we also are to preach ? 

The "gospel" is usually interpreted to mean "glad 
tidings." This is correct, but does not quite express the 

^, .. full force of evayyeXiov. This word is com- 

The gos- ^ ^ , 

pel" the posed of two words, ^v, which is strictly the 
subject of neuter of ev<i, good, and ayyeXo^, ayysXia^ a 
Christian " niessenger, " a "message," which latter, 
preac mg. -^ ^^^^ compound, takes the termination ov ; 
so that the full meaning of the word is '* a good mes- 
sage," or a message that must be delivered to men for 
their highest good —something implicitly needful to be 
delivered, something that has an element of responsibil- 
ity, necessity, impulsion in it, but for which, if the mes- 
senger delivers it aright, he is to be crowned. 

What, then, is this *' good" or '* cheering" " message** 
from God' — this " Gode-spell " (gospel), as the old 
Saxon phrase is — this message that is of such a nature 
that it must be heard by men, and if heard aright will 
bring them everlasting joy and peace ? 



HISTORY OF PREACHIXG. ZZ 

Originally it was a message of unmixed delight, uniting 
heaven and earth in the joy. It was a gospel of *' large 
toleration, of tender sympathy, of cheerful hope, of joy- 
ous thanksgiving," of divine love; and let it never be 
made a narrow gospel, a discouraging gospel, a merely 
human gospel ! It was sent to all men, for their good 
and eternal hope. " Behold I bring you good tidings of 
great joy. Unto you is born a Saviour, which is Christ 
the Lord. Glory to God in the highest, and on earth 
peace, good will toward men." It is the announcement 
of the wondrously inspiring truth that " the Word was 
made flesh and dwelt among us ;" that " in the fulness 
of time God had sent forth his Son, made of a woman, 
made under the law, to redeem them that were under the 
law, that they might receive the adoption of sons." It 
was the announcement of the Son of God, who, uniting 
the divine and human elements in his nature, was made 
fit to be the Redeemer. The "gospel," then, or the 
" glad message," is the annunciation of Christ, the Son 
of God, come in the flesh, comprehending in its scope his 
transcendent birth, his teaching, acts, miracles, death for 
men's sins by transferring the burden of them to himself 
as a suffering sin-bearer, resurrection and ascension, and 
the establishment in men's lives by his immanent Spirit 
of a kingdom of righteousness, truth, and peace, and all 
this as immediately connected with and forming the 
means of our salvation. The " gospel" is thus both a 
message and a means of salvation. By it a new race is to 
be created out of the seed of fallen man. Such texts as 
John 3 : i6, " For God so loved the world that he gave 
his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him 
should not perish, but have everlasting life" ; i Tim. 
1:15, " This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all ac- 
ceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save 



34 HO MILE TICS PROPER. 

sinners, of whom I am chief"; and that inexhaustible 
passage, i Tim. 3 : i6, " And without controversy, great 
is the mystery of godliness : God was manifest in the 
flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached unto 
the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into 
glory "^ — such texts set forth the nature of the gospel in 
comprehensive words, epitomizing the freeing of man 
from the power of evil, solving questions concerning his 
spiritual estate, satisfying his soul's needs, and implying 
the moral perfection of the race. This " gospel" does 
not grow old, and is the gospel of " eternal life," because 
it springs from divine love, and is fitted to meet the con- 
stantly recurring wants of men ; for while it is one in the 
unity of Christ, it is of varied application to all minds, 
and to all spiritual conditions. 

This, evidently, was what the New Testament writers 
and apostles called the "gospel," as referred to i Cor. 
15 : I, 2 : " Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the 
gospel which I preached unto you, ■\\'hich also ye received, 
and wherein ye stand ; by which also ye are saved, 
if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless 
ye believed in vain" — the apostle then going on to state 
definitely what he had received, and declared as the chief 
things, viz. : Christ's death for our sins, according to the 
Scriptures, and his resurrection and ascension for our 
justification and eternal life. Let it be remembered 
that the gospel is Christ. It is wholly and entirely 
Christ. 

With this cheering message of the redemptive work of 
the Son of God — this gospel of salvation to men — the 
apostles were put in trust. They very soon began to 
preach, as is proved by Peter's words to Cornelius the 
centurion, already quoted : " That word ye know, which 
was published throughout all Judea, and began from 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 35 

Galilee, after the baptism which John preached." It 
was a preaching under the new baptism of the Holy- 
Ghost. The apostles preached the " word" 

.11 1 r . 1 1 . 1 . Apostles' 

with that earnestness and faith which is ac- chine- 

companied by the converting power of the of the 

Spirit. They trusted " to the power of gospel, 

Christ, not to human wisdom and elo- *" what 
, , 1 peculiar. 

quence. *^ 

The apostles' preaching differed from that of preachers 
who came after them, and from the preaching of the pres- 
ent day, in this — that their preaching was principally 
designed to give men the truth, to proclaim to men the 
original "gospel," which when given other preachers 
were to take up, interpret, and enforce, in the sense of 
teaching (dida^KaXia) ; but theirs especially w^as the 
office of " heralding" the gospel {K?jpVK6ia). They went 
everywhere as " messengers" and " evangelists" to pro- 
claim the coming of the kingdom of God. They were 
named {la'^pvKs; nai anooroXoi) (i Tim. 2 : 7). Paul 
declares himself to be a teacher, not of " believers" and 
of "saints," but of the "Gentiles." The missionary 
spirit pervades the whole " Acts of the Apostles "; it is 
aggressive, like the sunrise, and it insists on perpetual 
advance.^ 

Whenever these " heralds" had gathered a congrega- 
tion, or church, of believers together, they left them and 
went on to new fields. Nevertheless the apostles, and 
above all Paul, were true preachers, even in the com- 
monly accepted sense. They ministered for years to- 
gether to particular churches, as did Paul to the Ephe- 
sians, and James to the church at Jerusalem. We must 



' De Pressense. 

' Dean Howson's " Acts of the Apostles," p. 161. 



36 IIOMILETICS PROPER. 

gather from their recorded Instructions what was the 

general style and spirit of their apostolic preaching. 

Peter's preaching on the day of Pentecost has been 

called "the first Christian sermon" ; but we prefer to 

date, as we have done, Christian preaching 

reac ing fj-Qj^ a hisrher source — from the preachin^^ 
of Peter. , ^, . fc> 

of Christ. 

Peter's address was forcible, while at the same time it 
was artless and spiritual. The characteristics of it are 
fully seen in his letters, so rugged in form, but so full of 
passionate fire and sublimity ; although the gravity and 
sobered zeal of the apostle who sinned and repented and 
was made ** a pillar in the house of God," are also ap- 
parent. 

James had a more calm, careful, measured, and author- 
itative utterance, moving on the even plane of Christian 
life with the moral element in predomi- 

Preaching nance— the ethos rather than the pathos of 
of James. ^. . . . 

Christianity. 

John's preaching, we sometimes think, was all love, and 

so it was ; but we mistake him if we suppose that it was a 

superficial excitation of the emotional nature 

reac ing — ^^^ ^^^ drawn from the deepest sources, 

of John. ^ 

where sleeps also the thunder of power. It 

was certainly characterized by what we would now call 
subjectiveness ; but the subject lay not only in the 
depths of his own mind, but rather of the divine mind. 
He searched the mind of the Spirit, who reveals the deep 
things of God. He realized the truth of his own pro- 
found saying, that "He that loveth is born of God." 
He seemed to care little for the form or language, and 
more for the essential spirit of truth. 

Paul's preaching, which is worthy of special study as a 
model, and of which we have undoubtedly literal exam- 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 37 

pies in his epistles — the ipsissima verba of his ordinary 
addresses — was assuredly no rude or rambling speech ; 
if his discourses were not framed upon the 
rules of classic eloquence (though there may ^^^^ ^"^ 
be some question here), they had method, 
and they exhibit often in their fragmentary forms (as in 
the address on Mars Hill) the graces of the introduction, 
the vehement logic of the argument, the pathos and 
direct appeal of the close. His language has a marked 
rhetorical as well as spiritual element. It takes hold of 
the imagination, the sensibilities, and the conscience. 
Luther said of Paul's preaching : 

" His words are not dead words ; they are living creat- 
ures with hands and feet." 

His style (if we may thus speak of it) is highly peri- 
phrastic, and at times so involved as to be loose in con- 
struction, and it cannot be called formally logical, though 
there is a train of strong reasoning running through it, 
with what may be termed a natural or rational connec- 
tion of parts, that appeals both to the head and the heart. 
It is argumentative, but at the same time not abstruse. 
Though brought up "at the feet of Gamaliel," he does 
not seem to have caught the endless dialectics of the 
Jewish doctors. The orator never loses sight of the main 
end, however tangled and obscure through frequent 
digressions his way may be. Though carried by a vehe- 
ment energy of expression hither and thither, he never 
fails of his one purpose. In this the noble individuality 
of the man is seen — his singleness of mind that scorns 
rules, though few perhaps of his day were better ac- 
quainted with them, and his resistless feeling, that bursts 
through the bounds of calm discussion, which is addressed 
purely to the judgment. 

Although Paul as an orator had probably but few 



38 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

physical advantages, and was small of stature, and with- 
out a winning or commanding presence, yet he had 
amazing tact and knowledge of human nature. Like his 
Master, he did not mistake his audience. He was a Jew 
to the Jews, and a Greek to the Greeks. But his chief 
power as a preacher lay in his through-and-through con- 
viction of the truth of the gospel, with which he believed 
himself to be intrusted. 

The gospel was for every man, and was to be preached 
to all, without respect of persons. He sought to impart 
a knowledge of Christ to all men, and to convert the 
world. To do this his instrumentality was preaching ; 
but in preaching he placed no supreme reliance upon skill 
of reasoning or those forces which are purely human and 
partake of human art, but upon the gospel's inherent 
power, the power of the Spirit of God accompanying the 
truth preached. He was eloquent because he did not 
aim to be so. Although he understood the laws of 
thought, yet he wielded the sword of the Spirit, which is 
the word of God, so that his preaching was apodictic or 
divinely self-evidencing. He knew that wisdom and 
learning could not save men, but Christ could. He knew 
nothing among men comparatively but the Cross. The 
Cross comprehended all that Christ had done for men. 
From that centre radiated all the life-giving truths of 
Christianity. The Cross was his theme, presented essen- 
tially in a hundred ways. That was the message which 
w^as to be given. All was sacrificed to that. The love 
of God in Christ comprehended all truth. He gave up 
everything else, counting all things but loss that he 
might preach Christ and him crucified. There is much 
indeed in the natural gifts^ or the personality, of this 
preacher which is to be studied— his tireless will, his 
sagacity, his adaptation, his magnanimity, his mental 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 39 

fertility and wondrous resource, his tenderness, pathos, 
tact, and robust common-sense, as well as his acquire- 
ments and peculiar modes of thought — his psychology ; 
but these all seem as nothing when compared with his 
faith in the power of the gospel his grasp upon divine 
sources of power. 

His dependence was upon the Spirit of Christ. Some 
sects of Christians, who languish to know why they do 
not make progress while they feel that rationally they 
are superior to their neighbors, have not yet grasped the 
secret of the apostle's faith which brings the heart of 
God in vital contact with the heart of man in this divine 
humanity and self-sacrifice of the Son of God. His 
power was in this " mystery of godliness." 

His preaching " was in the demonstration of the Spirit 
and of power.'' His faith was literally boundless, even 
as his message was an unlimited one of the grace of God 
— that Christ came into the world to save sinners, him- 
self the chief. The gospel was an unwearying theme to 
him, because it was the manifestation of the divine love. 
He fed upon this heavenly bread as the nourishment of 
his own soul — it was Christ for him to live — and he 
would give these riches of the knowledge of the Son of 
God to other men, with the hope that all would receive 
Christ as offered in his fulness, and that there should be 
built up in the world an ennobled and redeemed human- 
ity. 

Was the gospel, to Paul, a lifeless dogma compre- 
hended in theological formulas and received by the mere 
cold assent of the reason as an orthodox creed ? No. 
It was a word of life to the world. It was a direct mes- 
sage of the power and love of God to his human chil- 
dren, which it was worth losing life to proclaim. Such 
was Paul as a preacher. He was pre-eminently the 



40 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

preacher among the apostles. He was, it is true, an edu- 
cated man, and had experienced the influence of both the 
Greek and Roman cuhures, as well as that of the Hebrew 
and Rabbinical schools ; and in this respect he was dis- 
tinguished from the other disciples, who were, most of 
them, illiterate men ; but he was distinguished more than 
they all by the evangelic fervor of his faith, considering 
himself to be charged personally of Christ with the gos- 
pel, and desiring above all things to preach the gospel 
to every man to whom he was debtor in love. There- 
fore he is, of all human examples, perhaps, the^est_for 
preachers ; and in saying this let us not be understood as 
disparaging the preaching of the other disciples. Though 
not learned men, they were men who, like Paul, sacrificed 
all for their Master ; and they were specially gifted to 
persuade men to be reconciled to God ; they were men 
originally of sound minds ; they were versed in the He- 
brew Scriptures ; they had a popular magnetic power, 
and knew how to talk to the common people — that is, the 
common heart of humanity. Above all, they were in- 
structed by Christ himself, and inspired for their work by 
his Holy Spirit. Their preaching was the foundation on 
which the faith of the Church rested and was built, even 
as the apostle Paul declared, " Whether it were I or they, 
so we preached, and so ye believed." 

The nature of the apostolic preaching might be gath- 
ered also from the peculiar circumstances and history of 
„. . the primitive church ; and we shall now 
institution Proceed under this general head of apostolic 
of preaching preaching to discuss more in detail the his- 
in Apostolic torical origin and rise of the regular institu- 
^^^ ' tion of preaching in the primitive apostolic 
church, or as far as the New Testament narrative and 
testimony enable us to do so. This, it will be admitted. 



HISTORY OF PKEACIin\G. 4 1 

is an important inquiry, bearing immediately upon the 
work of preachers. 

After the Pentecost, the Christians, though still Jews, 
worshipping in the temple, naturally separated them- 
selves more and more from the Jews in re- 
ligion, and assembled daily in their, own ^"^^ 
1 • ^1 - 1 u f " meetings 
liouses, m the upper chamber ot prayer . 

{to VTtspGJov), for Christian worship, "break- worship, 
ing of bread," and prayer. It lay in the 
nature of these assemblies that much should be said 
in the way of admonition, encouragement, and instruc- 
tion in the things of Christ. Christian brethren could 
not come together without speaking much of him in 
whose name they were assembled. They gathered up 
their precious memories of his words and life, and re- 
hearsed them often to one another. They talked about 
this theme, holding familiar intercommunications {ojui- 
Xiai) and conversations upon this absorbing topic. The 
apostles, however, could not always be present on these 
occasions, although when present they doubtless led in 
the speaking and instruction, going about from assembly 
to assembly, in the temple, in the synagogues, and in 
private houses, teaching and preaching Jesus Christ 
(Acts 5 : 42). But in the apostles' absence those best 
fitted to answer questions and make addresses were 
called upon ; and when by degrees the suspicion of the 
priests and leaders of the synagogues drove out the Jew- 
Christians from the Jewish assemblies, then, as has been 
said, in their own exclusive assemblies the gospel (to 
evayytXiov) began to be preached by the apostles, and 
by the more competent private members, though in a free, 
informal way, not at regular services of public worship 
only, but at all meetings for prayer and brotherly social 
intercourse, and at the "agapai," or ''feasts of love." 



42 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Let US now endeavor to trace historically the earliest 
springs of this institution of preaching as we find it 
recorded in the New Testament writings. 

The three actual head-springs of Chris- 
Historical ^j^^ preaching were : 
head-springs 

of Christian ^ ' Speaking with tongues, 
preaching. 2. Prophesying. 

3. Teaching, 
(i.) Speaking with tongues {y\ooa6aiz\a\s.iv). This 
sprang from devotional enthusiasm, sometimes amounting 

to ecstasy, or something that was wholly 
Speaking ^^^^^ ^^ ^^-^j^ .^^^j^ ^^^ ^.^j^ ^^^ ^^ ^^^^ 

tong-ues ^4 * ^)* ^^ ^^^ often pure praise and thanks- 
giving. The form of this ecstatic and ex- 
alted spiritual praise was so far removed from the com- 
mon modes of expression that it was not always under- 
stood ; it was in strange forms of expression — ** groanings 
that could not be uttered," and even sometimes in 
foreign, unknown, and unspeakable words ^ (Rom. 8 : 26 ; 
I Cor, 14 : 27, 28). 

(2.) Prophesying {TtpocpTjrsveiv), This was speaking 
as freely moved by the Holy Spirit, for the exhortation, 

comfort, and encouragement of the brethren 
Prophesying. 

(i Cor. 14: 30, 31). 

The New Testament ** prophet" spoke of God's power 
and goodness, Christ's love and atoning death, man's 
perishing estate through sin (Acts 10 : 46 ; 19 : 6). As 
the '' evangelists" spoke of the simple facts of Christ — ■ 
the essential gospel — the ''prophets" spoke in inspiring 
terms of the triumphs and glories of the gospel, its con- 
quest of heathenism, and the future reign of Christ. 

Prophesying was more or less uniform, and was a more 



Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 40, seq. 



HISTORY OF rREACIIING. 43 

calm and comprehensive method than " speaking with 
tongues." It had less of exaltation, and was governed 
by that divine spirit which is the spirit of order and not 
of confusion. 

I Cor. 14 : 1-5 (literally translated) : " I beseech you 
to follow earnestly after love ; yet I would have you de- 
light in the spiritual gifts, but especially in the gift of 
prophecy. But he who speaks in tongues, speaks not to 
men, but to God ; for no man understands him, but with 
his spirit he utters mysteries. But he who prophesies 
speaks to men, and builds them up, with exhortation and 
with comfort. He who speaks in a tongue builds up 
himself alone ; but he who prophesies builds up the 
church. I wish that you had all the gift of tongues, but 
rather that you had the gift of prophecy ; for he who 
prophesies is above him who speaks in tongues, unless he 
interpret the sounds he utters, that the churches may be 
built up thereby." 

But although better fitted for edification than speaking 
with tongues, and wonderful In their awakening power, 
yet these prophesyings had nevertheless an extraordinary 
and irregular character. They were like, and were, im- 
mediate inspirations of the Spirit. They inwardly 
strengthened the faith of believers by the very words 
given by the Holy Spirit. 

(3.) Teaching {pi(^a(yK(x\ioc), To meet, however, a 

deeper want than feeling or imagination could supply, 

there was need of a more calm consideration 

f 1 r 1 • . . ,. . , , Teaching, 

ot and careful mstruction m divme truth. 

The unlearned asked of the wise about Christian faith, 

and the interpretation of the Scriptures. The gift of 

teaching, or, as it was sometimes called, of " knowl- 



Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 47, 



Correction 



44 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

edge," and of "interpretation," became at length a 
recognized charisma in the Church. The first Christians 
were Jews built upon the Old Testament, and their new 
Christian consciousness worked through the medium of 
the Old Testament revelation. Thus there sprang up, 
as in the Jewish synagogues themselves, questions and 
answers, explanations and interpretations, and here lay 
the germs of the first " homilies." 

There was thus a great variety in the manner of teach- 
ing and speaking in the primitive Christian assemblies, 
the ecstatic speaker of tongues, the awakening prophet, 
the calm teacher and interpreter. There was the emo- 
tional expression and the thoughtful exposition. 

But gradually the varieties and irregularities of speak- 
ing in the early Christian assemblies were 

done away by the apostles, as they felt not 
of irregular!- , , , . . , i r 

t' b th only the need of encouragmg, but also of 

Apostles, instructing or building up believers in the 
faith, and of presenting to the educated 
classes among the unbelieving Jews and Gentiles the 
reasonable aspects of Christian faith. 

Undoubtedly, too, the " gift of tongues" had been 
abused ; and then *' interpretation" (Jpjirjveia) was intro- 
duced, and the " proving of spirits" {diaupiai^ ttvsv- 
jddroDvy^ and more clear, discriminating and comprehensi- 
ble teaching took the place of the uncertain and irregular 
utterance of those who had gifts of tongues, and the 
prophets, until the apostles at length seem to have con- 
cluded that nothing which was not clearly understood, 
which was not rational, and appealed to the sound under- 
standing and healthy Christian consciousness, which could 
not be interpreted and applied to immediate instruction, 
was admissible.' 



- Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 53. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 45 

I Cor. 14 : 18, 19 (freely translated) : " I offer thanks- 
givings to God, speaking in tongues to him ; more than 
any of you. Yet in the congregation I would rather 
speak five words with my understanding, so as to in- 
struct others, than ten thousand words in a tongue." 
" Let all be so done as to build up the church." 

This calm preaching capacity, which involved a more 
careful interpretation of the Scriptures and a more pro- 
found insight into the plan and theory of the 

Christian faith, was comprehended under the ® "^^ 7 

Apostles to 
name, as we have already seen, of teach- ^i^acKaiia 

ing" i^didaanakia),^ 

This teaching charisma was a common good for the 
benefit and instruction of the Christian assembly (i Cor. 
14:26). But even this must finally have its limits. 
Although all had a right to teach, yet in each assembly 
there were but a few who possessed (at first the apostles 
alone) this gift or power of teaching. The uncultivated, 
it is true, sometimes spoke as they were moved by the 
Spirit, but few were capable of regularly instructing 
the assembly in Christian truth. 

In this way there naturally arose the regular teaching 

or preaching office in the Church, exercised by those who 

had the gifts and the character that fitted 

them to teach. What the 

The preaching office was still free, yet the P^^^^^^^S 
11 11 ,. , , ^ office in the 

assembly naturally listened to the most fit church 

and gifted teacher. The best approved represented. 

teacher, Avho knew most about the facts of 

Christ's life, and who had studied most deeply the 

theory of his religion — he was the one who was expected 

to speak. 



' Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 58. 



4^ HOMILETICS PROPER. 

While the primitive Christian assembly and Church 
were democratic, yet, without anything like the monarch- 
ic or aristocratic idea in their worst sense, tJie represen- 
tative teaching ability in the Church gradually assumed 
prominent place and rule. 

Clement of Rome cites the following rule as one which 
had been handed down from the apostles relative to the 
appointment of Church offices : " That they should be 
filled according to the judgment of approved men, with 
the consent of the whole community." 

It may have been the general practice of the presbyters 
themselves, in case of vacancy, to propose another of the 
community in place of the person deceased, and leave it 
to the whole body either to approve or decline their se- 
lection for reasons assigned. Where this asking for the 
assent of the community had not yet become a mere 
formality, this mode of filling church offices had the 
salutary effect of causing the votes of the majority to be 
guided by those capable of judging, and of suppressing 
divisions ; while, at the same time, no one was obtruded 
on the community who would not be welcome to their 
hearts.^ 

It was, in fact, the rule of the selection of the fittest ; 
and this was probably the first historic step toward the 
establishment of a permanent teaching, or preaching 
office, which, though it thus grew up naturally, was still, 
with the sanction of the apostles, under the guidance of 
the Holy Spirit, and is to be regarded as a divinely in- 
stituted office. 

The influence of preaching (both by the apostles and 
other accredited teachers) upon the early Christian 
Church was, as there is every evidence, extraordinarily 



^ See Neander's " Ch. Hist.," Torrey's ed , 1852, v. i, p. 189. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 47 

great. The Divine Word never had more marked power 
than in those days of the struggles and triumphs of primi- 
tive Christianity, although this was but the 
promise of things to come. An ardent sen- Influence of 

timent of personal love toward Christ was P^^^^ ^"S 

1 . 1 A-1 1 1 1 1 on the early 

mamtamed m the Church by the prophet, christian 

the exhorter, and the speaker of tongues. church. 
Christ as a person rather than Christ as a 
simple creed, was cherished. A mighty influence of the 
Spirit frequently accompanied the speech of these early 
witnesses for Christ, and an absorbing conviction of the 
truth as an inspiration of heaven seized upon men. The 
regular teacher, or preacher {didaaKokoi), however, even 
more than these, founded the people in a deep-ground- 
ed and intelligent faith ; in the " sound doctrine" spo- 
ken of by Paul in first chapter of i Timothy ; and, above 
all, in charity and holy living — as in (Acts 2 : 42-47 ; 
Acts 4 : 8-13 ; Acts 4 : 32-35 ; Acts 6 : 1-4 ; i Tim. 

i:S). 
This was not only true of the Church in Jerusalem, but 

of the Gentile churches, and of the mixed Jewish and 
heathen churches of Asia and Europe. Such noble fruits 
of preaching were not, it is true, without admixtures of 
evil fruit springing from corrupt teaching, from the 
ostentation and pride of speakers of tongues, and from 
false prophets and teachers. Many of these were totally 
illiterate persons {idic^ra-i). Notwithstanding, however, 
these drawbacks, the great influence of the preaching of 
the gospel, in the earliest times of Christianity, every- 
where wrought its wonderful results in the conversion of 
souls, and in the bringing of men and of nations in three 
continents under the sway of Christian faith.* 



' See De Pressens6, " Early Years of Christianity," p. 216. 



48 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Sec. 6. PrcacJiing in the first tzvo Centuries. 

The business of the " preacher" or " teacher" in the 
Church having now become a recognized fact, and cer- 
tain persons being regarded as better fitted 
Preaching than others for this work of pubHc instruc- 

^ ^ tion, all this went to confirm and establish 
regular place 
in o blic ^^^^ regular preaching office, which came to 

worship, have its distinct and important place in pub- 
he worship. 

Speaking of the period somewhat later than this imme- 
diately post-apostolic period, one author says : " The 
reading of the Scriptures, and, above all, the administra- 
tion of the sacraments, had a more important place (than 
preaching) in the hearts of those earnest worshippers. 
It was desirable that every Christian should be familiar 
with the sacred writings ; and when manuscripts were 
costly, and the bulk of every congregation consisted of 
poor persons, hearing the word was a necessary substitute 
for private reading, and was therefore one of the most 
important parts of public worship. And, on the other 
hand, baptism, the sign of the first admission into com- 
munion with the Redeemer and his Church, and the 
Lord's Supper, the sign of a constant growth" ^ — these 
also had a prominent place. 

Notwithstanding the truth of these remarks, preaching 
obtained and held an acknowledged place in all Christian 
public worship. It was early introduced in about the 
same place and order that it now occupies ; for example, 
there were the same elements of worship then as now — 
viz., psalmody ; reading the Scriptures (the law and the 
prophets, and the Gospels and Epistles when these came 
into vogue) ; teaching or preaching, which was chiefly 



Moule's " Christian Oratory during the first five Centuries," p. 51. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 49, 

expository and drawn directly fiom the scriptural lessons 
of the day ; prayer, both liturgical and spontaneous ; and 
the partaking of the Lord's Supper ; the last was an 
invariable incident, in the earliest times, of public wor- 
ship. 

Preaching, it is true, had not as yet a very definite 
form beyond the general fact or name of StdacxaXia, 
although, as we have already hinted, we find the word 
ojuiXsco used casually in the Scriptures, as in Luke 24 : 14, 
15 ; Acts 20 : 1 1 {ofxiXijaa^ axpi^ avyf/i) ; and in the first 
two centuries preaching addresses were sometimes called 
" homilies," and even " sermons," as those of Valentinus 
and Clemens Romanus. We learn the style and matter 
of these earliest '' homilies" from the remains of the writ- 
ings and of the sacred orations of the apostolic fathers 
and the earliest preachers. 

Some of these names of the first two centuries, which 
are familiar as those also of theologians, are 
Clemens Romanus, Ignatius of Antioch, Great 
Polycarp and Barnabas, the philosopher Jus- Preachers 
tin Martyr, Tatian, Athanagoras, Theoph- c 4. t 
ilus, Clemens Alexandrinus, Irenasus, and centuries, 
the fiery-minded Tertullian. 

The addresses of the preachers of this period were 
chiefly of three kinds : 

1. Simple and artless relations concerning 

the crucified and risen Saviour, without , . , ^ 
much of a deeper spiritual or even rhetorical early 
comprehension of the truth, perhaps in run- Christian 
ning comment upon the Gospels and Epistles Pleaching, 
read, or in answers to questions. 

2. Philosophical treatment of divine truth by men who 
had imbibed the influence of the Oriental philosophies, 



5o HOMILETICS PROPER. 

oftentimes mingling the greatest absurdities with what- 
ever of truth they possessed. 

3. The instructions of some really educated men among 
the members, who were yet truly pious minds, and taught 
the pure gospel in a more systematic and comprehensive 
way, and often with real eloquence/ 

But the condition of Christians and Christian assem- 
blies in these first centuries was, as a •general rule, ex- 
ceedingly humble. 
Humble Xhe first disciples were commonly people 

c arac er fj.Qjjj ^]^g more obscure walks of life, and, as 
of the . , ,. . .. ' . / 

first ^^ ^ apostolic times, not many mighty, 

preachers, i^ot many noble were called." 

Celsus derides the early Christians, call- 
ing them " wool-dressers, shoemakers, the most illiterate 
and rude men, zealots who proclaimed the gospel, first 
of all, among women and children "; and yet there were 
never wanting people of higher culture among the Chris- 
tians, who were amply able to instruct and preach. Yet 
even these often openly scorned the aids of human learn- 
ing, and declared the gospel to be wholly in the power 
and Spirit of God. 

Some Christian assemblies refused to receive men of 
rank as their instructors, and in preference chose poor 
and pious men, as in the third century one Firmus, a 
tradesman, was elected " presbyter ;" also Severus, a 
clothier, and Alexander, a charcoal-burner, whose black- 
ened face excited laughter among the young, were ap- 
pointed preachers.* 

Still, those illustrious preachers whom we have pre- 
viously named, and many others, were chosen on account 
of their fitness for the work of instruction. Teachers, 



Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 87. " Id. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 51 

too, began to undergo "proving" in regard to their 

capacities. The apostles themselves, we have reason to 

beheve, instructed some men especially to 

^ 1 ^1 f r^ Eminent 

be teachers : thus Clement of Rome was , . 

exceptions. 

probably taught by the apostle Peter ; Ig- 
natius by Peter, Paul, and John ; and Polycarp by John. 
About the year 170 A.D. the system of catechumenical 
instruction was introduced, and toward the end of the 
second century the distinction between 
Kkrfpoi and \a6z was begun to be made, distinction 
-KT 11 • 1 • 1 1 • 1 between 

JNevertheless, it must be said that m these .,, 

first centuries the didaajtaXoi and nposa- ^nd Aa6g. 
r(^Tes were generally like from like— men 
freely chosen out of the whole body ecclesiastically their 
equals in rank. 

But later it came about that skill in preaching was 
esteemed to be a requisite of the presbyteral office. It 
lay indeed in the very nature of things that as the Church 
increased and its wants were developed, the necessity of 
having trained and skilful teachers should be felt. 

Public Christian worship after the Church had come out 
from Judaism was at first held, as we have seen, in pri- 
vate houses, without temples, altars, or stat- p ... 
ues.' The Jewish and Gentile Christians worship 
must have felt a certain loss in these out- and 

ward things connected with worship, which Church 
was, however, more than made up to them ^ ^ "^' 
in the truth that every Christian was himself a spiritual 
temple to the Lord, and that where two or three were 
gathered together there was Christ, the Lord of souls, in 
the midst of them. But from the increased size of the 
assemblies, and probably in imitation of the Jewish syna- 



* Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 



52 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

gogue, or more probably the Jewish " houses of prayer," 
Christians at the end of the second century began to 
have their own houses of worship. In the year 202, for 
example, a beautiful church edifice is known to have 
been reared in Odessa. 

The smaller places of worship, or ** houses of prayer," 
£vri)pL(Xj 7rpo:jevrr]pia^ and Kvpiaxa^ were furnished in a 
simple and unostentatious manner — a wooden table for 
the feast of bread and wine, and a higher seat or stand 
for the reading of the Scriptures and preaching. Those 
who gathered in these assemblies were called, from a 
classic Greek word for public assemblage, iKHXrjalai^ 
and hence the buildings themselves took the name of 
" churches." 

There is no doubt that in these early assemblies for 
worship, at first held daily, then on stated days for the 
celebration of the Lord's Supper, and then regularly on 
Sunday, preaching, though of that artless and spontane- 
ous sort which has been mentioned, formed a regular 
part, but not yet so uniform and established as in the 
fourth and fifth centuries. It occupied a prominent 
place on fast and feast days, such as Pentecost, Epiph- 
any, Advent, Good Friday, and the days appointed for 
the commemoration of the deaths of saints and mar- 
tyrs. On these occasions preaching assumed a more for- 
mal and oratorical character. 

It may seem to be a somewhat extraordinary fact that 

few or hardly none of the actual sermons of this first 

_. period of the Church have come down to us. 

Few ^ 

sermons This probably was due to the fact that 

of this preaching was so spontaneous, so purely a 

period moving of the Spirit, that it did not take 

on a literary form that could be handed 

down. And it must also be said that the first preachers 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. S3 

trusted little to human art ; but, as Greek culture pre- 
vailed, the necessity of more attention to form is ap- 
parent. 

We will notice, and that in a very brief manner, but 
three examples of the more noted preachers of this 
period — viz., Clement of Rome, Clement of Alexandria, 
and Tertullian. Yet let us not forget the first artless, 
spontaneous, free and varied forms of Christian preach- 
ing, nor consider that our formal sermons or regular ora- 
tions from the pulpit on the Lord's day are the only, or 
even the most primitive and apostolic way, of preaching 
the gospel of the kingdom of God to men ; and this fact 
steadily borne in mind may keep us from becoming 
stereotyped, formal, and scholastic preachers of the living 
word of God. We should strive to be free men in 
Christ Jesus, though all the rules of all the schools be 
broken. 

Clement, Bishop of Rome, has been supposed to be 

the same Clement who is spoken of in Philippians 4 : 3, 

and to have lived in close intimacy with the 

1 1 -1 r 1 TT Clement 

apostles, or at least with two of them. He , p 

was probably the third bishop of Rome. 
Within these last yearshis very house is said to have been 
discovered, under whose roof the apostle Paul may have 
met the little church that was planted in Rome ; and in 
much that he says we catch a glimpse of the earlier times 
of the Christian Church, and its trials, persecutions, and 
customs. He w^as a teacher in whose discourses and let- 
ters (we do not refer to the so-called Clementine Epistles, 
which were undoubtedly wTitten by some Ebionitish 
Christian) there is a pure evangelic spirit. He is eth- 
ical rather than doctrinal. His epistle to the church of 
Corinth is evidently more of a " homily" or " sermon" 
than an epistle, and is perhaps the oldest form of a Chris- 



54 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

tian homily extant after the time of the apostles. That 
which is named the Second Epistle of Clement is mani- 
festly nothing but the fragment of a homily/ These dis- 
courses, as well as the discourses of the earliest Christian 
preachers after the apostles, are remarkable for their pop- 
ular setting forth of the virtue or holiness or divine char- 
ity of the Christian life — of the very spirit and essence of 
the Gospels. Some of his sentences in praise of Christ's 
divinity are of considerable pov/er and eloquence.^ He 
deprecates strife over the bishop's office which had 
already arisen, and is strenuous with almost an apostle's 
strength in regard to the purity of the ministerial func- 
tion. He is at times full of burning vigor of language. 
He says : '* Let him that hath love in Christ fulfil the 
commandments of Christ. Who can declare the bond of 
the love of God ? Who is sufficient to tell the majesty 
of its beauty ? The height whereunto love exalteth is 
unspeakable. Love joineth us unto God ; love covereth 
a multitude of sins ; love endureth all things, is long- 
suffering in all things. There is nothing coarse, nothing 
arrogant in love. Love hath no divisions ; love maketh 
no sedition ; love doeth all things in concord. In love 
were all the elect of God made perfect ; without love 
nothing is well-pleasing to God ; in love the Master took 
us unto himself ; for the love which he had toward us 
Jesus Christ our Lord hath given his blood for us by the 
will of God, and his flesh for our flesh, and his life for 
our lives. Ye see, dearly beloved, how great and mar- 
vellous a thing is love, and there is no declaring its per- 
fection. Who is sufficient to be found therein, save 
those to whom God shall vouchsafe it ? Let us there- 



' Neander's " Ch. Hist.," v. i, p. 659. 
2 Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 106. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 55 

fore entreat and ask of his mercy that we may be found 
blameless, standing apart from the factiousness of men. 
All the generations from Adam unto this day have 
passed away, but they that by God's grace were perfect- 
ed in love dwell in the abode of the pious ; and they 
shall be made manifest in the visitation of the kingdom 
of God." 

Clement of Alexandria was born about 150A.D., and 
lived during the reigns of Severus and Caracalla. His 

works, as now existing^ are very frag^ment- 

t . r, r 1-1 Clement of 

ary, and are chiefly of an apologetic charac- Alexandria 

ten His style is discursive and wants 
method, but there are passages — probably first delivered 
as sermons — of extraordinary vigor. The literary and 
philosophic elements are kept in subordination to the 
Christian and spiritual. But the philosophical element 
is marked : thus he dwells with some force of reasoning 
upon the influence of the " Logos," or ** Divine Word," 
as the image of God in man, as God's essential wisdom, 
as the light leading to a higher knowledge of divine 
things, or the true yvooGi^, He was engaged mind and 
soul in fighting gnosticism. He is occasionally declama- 
tory and repetitious, as if his addresses were originally 
extemporaneous. Origen was his disciple, and he is 
thought to have given the stimulus to Origen's mind, 
even as Tertullian did to Cyprian's mind, showing the 
sway exerted by one great preacher over another down 
the ages, as was also marked in the influence of Augus- 
tine upon Luther. 

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, who belongs 
to the later half of the second century, exerted an im- 
mense mouldinf]^ power upon the discipline 

1 r , XT. ^, , Tertullian. 

and moral culture of the Western Church, 

which afterward developed into the asceticism of the mo- 



56 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

nastic systems. He was the son of a proconsul stationed 
at Carthage, and was bred a rhetorician, or advocate. 
He did not embrace Christianity until the full age of 
manhood, and then he confessed it with the whole energy 
of his being. Tertullian was well acquainted with philos- 
ophy, but at the same time he despised it as an endless 
source of error and heresy ; and (until his own partial 
defection from the faith) he sought his inspiration from 
the word of God and the best Christian writings. " What 
must render this man a phenomenon presenting special 
claims to attention is the fact that his Christianity is the 
inspiring soul of his life and thoughts ; that out of Chris- 
tianity an entirely new and rich inner world developed 
itself to his mind ; but the leaven of Christianity had 
first to penetrate through and completely refine that 
fiery, bold, and withal rugged nature. We find the new 
wine in an old bottle, and the tang which it contracted 
there may easily embarrass the inexperienced judge." 
His dogmatic or doctrinal teaching was free, and perhaps 
of no great theological weight, but his ethical teaching 
was of the most earnest character, and into that he threw 
his whole energy. He outdid in severeness the m.oral 
standard of the gospel itself. He carried his ideas of 
the supreme virtue of chastity to such a pitch that he 
regarded marriage as a degradation of the soul. It is 
worth noticing that those of his writings which bear the 
false stamp of Montanism may be easily distinguished 
from his purer Christian writings and discourses.^ As a 
preacher or orator he had a sharp penetration and a fiery 
phantasy, which gave him vivid and original conceptions 
of spiritual truth. ^ He had wit, irony, sarcasm, and a 



1 Neander's " Ch. Hist.," v. i. p. 683. » Id., p. 684. 

^ Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 124. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 57 

rough positive assertion that carried all before it — in fine, 
great qualities and great faults. 

His style was mixed, obscure, profound, full of dark- 
ness as well as light, of glowing depth as well as celestial 
height. His Latin is pervaded with Punic corruptions, 
but through all shines his great genius resplendent. He 
was a tower of strength to his friends, and a terrible 
adversary to his enemies. His most eloquent sermons 
were those De Spcctaculis, in which his soul was moved 
against the licentiousness of the heathens, and especially 
against the gladiatorial shows of the ferocious Roman 
civilization. As a brief illustration of the vivid and fervid 
character of his pulpit eloquence Vv'e give the close of one 
of his sermons on " Repentance," in which he employs 
the tremendous illustration of the recent destruction of 
Pompeii and Herculaneum by an eruption of Mount 
Vesuvius ; and he applies this in way of warning to 
catechumens, and says to them : 

" Think much on hell-fire, which this repentance alone 
can quench. Set before you the greatness of the punish- 
ment of hell, so that you shall not delay to lay hold of 
the salvation which Heaven stretches out to you. What 
a prison-house of eternal fire that must be, if even by one 
of its flues such flames burst forth that cities are totally 
destroyed, or lie in constant peril of destruction ! The 
highest mountains, pregnant with fire, are rent asunder, 
and who can fail to see in these heaving and devouring 
mountains the symbols of everlasting hell ? Who can 
fail to regard such sparks as messengers of an endlessly 
great multitude, and as threatening foretokens of the 
' wrath to come.' " ' 



' Paniel's "Gesch.," p. 133; see also Moule, " Chr. Or.," pp. 83, 
84, 86, 87. 



58 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Singularly enough (or perhaps not singularly), in Tertul- 
lian and other preachers of the first and second centuries 
there is a mingling of pagan ideas and pagan elements 
of culture with the pure Christian doctrine and morality. 
Christian faith does not yet seem to have asserted its ex- 
clusive and authoritative place in preaching ; but what- 
ever is drawn from the Scriptures is pure doctrine, yet not 
so much in the shape of theological as ethical doctrine, 
the Spirit of Christ being irresistibly infused into the 
teaching and into the manners and life of disciples. 

Sec. 7. Preaching of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Cen- 
turies, 

While among the earliest preachers the influence of 
the education and philosophy in which they had been 
trained (as was remarked at the close of the last section) 
is plainly perceptible, yet one of the most important 
facts in the histoiy of the first Christian preaching is 
Founded that it was directly drawn from the Scrip- 
upon the tures. There never seemed to be a doubt 

Scriptures. \^^^ ^hat the interpretation of the Holy 
Scriptures, the word of God, was the main source of 
preaching. Though there was much of the irregular 
style of address, yet the speaker even more and more 
began to confine himself to the explanation of the por- 
tion of Scripture which was read as the lesson of the day 
in the public service, either from the Old Testament or 
the New. But it was not until Origen's time that preach- 
ing began to be founded upon any definite hermeneutical 
basis — viz., that a passage of Scripture should be taken 
and consecutively explained. Preaching was more 
diffuse, varied, and accidental, and although expository 
in style was not so methodically. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 59 

Tlie expository method of Origen characterized the 
preaching of the third and succeeding centuries. In- 
stead, however, at first of there being much 

unity in the treatment of the text, Origen ^"^"^"" 

of Origen s 
and his school followed the habit of parcel- method 

ling out and dismembering the original text, 

in this way making many distinct homilies upon every 

member or separate clause. There was no formal unity 

in the discourse, no grouping together of the whole 

chapter or book. 

The expository method of Origen was also combined 

with an allegorical mode of treating the Scriptures. The 

allegory was indeed used by Christ himself 

and by his apostles ; it was a favorite ^ . 

allegorical 
method of the Old Testament prophets, nor method 

was it opposed to the usage of classical 
teaching, as may be seen pre-eminently in the writings of 
Plato ; but never was this method carried to such an ex- 
tent as by Origen and his school, who seized especially 
upon the fruitful field of the Old Testament, from a New 
Testament point of view. This allegorizing interpreta- 
tion ran into the greatest extravagances, often going 
through whole books of Scripture. It must be said, 
however, of Origen himself (of whom we shall speak 
more circumstantially) that he was a true Christian 
preacher, striving earnestly to come at the original truth 
of Scripture, and making the word of God the ground- 
work of a certain prophetical and spiritual analogy, or 
allegory, not being content with the literal truth. 

The riches of Christian philosophy began also to be 
opened, and the rationale of the system of divine re- 
demption to be discussed. The theory of Christianity 
was viewed in the light of a new philosophy. Conflicts 
with heathen systems and schools, and also attempts to 



6o HOMILETICS PROPER. 

harmonize Christianity with Greek philosophy, increased 

this tendency ; and we see, especially in the sermons of 

the Alexandrian school, as well as in the 

^ discourses of Hippolytus, this marked ten- 

philosophical , , ., , . 1 , . ^, . . 

J , dency to philosophical preaching. Christian 

thought met pagan thought, and annihilated 
it when false, or assimilated and sanctified it when true. 
In the hands of less serious teachers, preaching already 
began to admit of the admixture of corrupt speculation ; 
there sprang up the custom of public and private teach- 
ing of exoteric and esoteric truth, until at length the 
pure character of early evangelical preaching was much 
obscured. 

Although the laity retained for a long time their right 
to preach, " they were at length circumscribed in many 

Preaching ways, and were not permitted to preach in 
of the the church itself, but in the baptistery or 
laity. some building connected with the church," 
and only in the presence of the bishop. But preaching 
gradually began to be confined to the *' presbyters," 
and in many cases the bishops themselves strove, often 
with success, to monopolize altogether the preaching 
office. 

Already in the reigns of the emperors Philip, Alex- 
ander Severus, and Galerius, Christians were permitted 

^, , to build and occupy church edifices of con- 
Church ^•' 

edifices— siderable size and beauty, as the one built in 

times of 280 in Nicomedia, and in 320 at Tyre.^ They 

preaching— clid not, singularly enough, take possession 

posture of ^^ ^j^^ pagan temples when permitted after- 
audience. , . 1-1-11 r ^ 

ward to do so, which indeed were unfitted, 
by their closeness and narrowness, for Christian popular 



' Moule, p. 53. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 6i 

worship, but rather of the basilicas, which afforded large 
spaces for the gathering of great assemblies, and which, 
it is a familiar fact, became the architectural type of the 
Christian church edifice down to the present day. 

As to the times and seasons in which preaching was 
held, when Christianity acquired more power and free- 
dom, the number of festival days was greatly multiplied. 
At the beginning of the third century and in the earlier 
times, preaching in many assemblies, as we have already 
said, was held every day ; but as the societies of Chris- 
tians became more scattered the number of days on 
which service was held grew less. 

In addition to the Sunday services and the regular 
feast and fast days, baptismal services, commemoration 
occasions, saints' and martyrs' days, all were accompanied 
by preaching.^ The preacher was the central personage, 
and the preaching service began to be of considerable 
length, as was the case with Origen's sermons. Several 
consecutive sermons were often delivered by different 
preachers to the same assembly, the sermons being brief. 
The people during the preaching, as was the case in the 
ancient Jewish synagogue, stood — or if occasionally they 
were seated they all rose at the reading of the Gospels — 
while the preacher sat. 

During the third and fourth centuries there were great 
changes wrought in the method of preaching — in fact, in 
its very theory. From its being of an art- 
less character, preachinc: beg-an to be built anges 

' ^ b & wrought in 

upon an oratorical form. It took more and preaching; 
more the shape of the intellectual produc- 
tions of the highest classical civilization of the day. It 
began to vie with the performances of the Greek rheto- 



' Paniel's " Gesch.," p. i6i. 



-6"2 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

rician and orator, bringing in all the helps to be derived 
from learning and eloquence. 

Gregory Thaumaturgus, of Origen's school, deliberately 
constructed many of his sermons upon approved Greek 
models of eloquence, in which not only the rhetorical but 
the philosophical element was introduced ; and yet the 
original idea of the spiritual character of preaching, and 
of dependence upon the Spirit, was not yet altogether 
lost sight of/ 

Origen speaks even of a true "prophesying" being 
still to be found or hoped for in preaching, but not as 
taking the place entirely of human gifts and studies. He 
says, " Sed in his qucBritiir^ si potest esse aliquid in nobis 
vcl ex nobis propJieticB species, quce non totum habeat ex 
Deo sed alignantiilum etiam ex Jmmanis studiis capiat. 
Paul, he thought, spoke of this kind of prophesying 
(i Cor. 12 : 31) : " But covet earnestly the best gifts" ; 
which, according to 14 : i, meant prophesying : " Follow 
after charity, and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that ye 
may prophesy." This is not the prophecy spoken of 
in Luke 16 : 16 : " The law and the prophets even until 
John," but in i Cor. 14 : 3 : '' But he that prophesieth 
speaketh unto men to edification, and exhortation, and 
comfort." 

This ability of " prophesying" could be won, accord- 
ing to Origen's belief, through study, on the condition 
that the study be earnestly and believingly pursued to 
the end of preaching God's truth, and to its human re- 
sults God would add what comes directly from him — the 
prophetic gift, or literally in his words (Commentar. ad 
Rom.) : '' Et ideo adhibcrc studiiun ad Jmjiiscemodi pro- 
phetiarn possibile nobis est, et est in nostra potestate, tit 



^ Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 166. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. (i^ 

nobis in Jicec operant dantibus, se secujtdum rationcni vel 
mesiiram fidei facinius, addatur et ilia^ qua ex Deo est, 
prophetia/' ^ 

Thus Origen laid the groundwork of Christian elo- 
quence — of the inspired eloquence of the pulpit — on the 
theory that unto the most earnest, the most skillful, and 
the most conscientious use of the human powers in the 
interpretation of God's word and the preaching of his 
truth to men, the spiritual gift from God — the prophetic 
gift — would be added ; and every true preacher, even the 
humblest, might thus obtain this gift of prophecy. This 
is a pregnant thought, and might be applied to modern 
times and to all time. 

In regard more particularly to the Western Church 
during the third and fourth centuries, although preach- 
ing was kept up, yet it was more irregular 

and rare than in the Eastern Church, But P^^^^^^^^g °^ 
. . the Western 

that it was mamtamed we have many proofs. church 

Thus Cyprian admonishes bishops not only 

to instruct others, but to learn themselves, in order that 

they may the better instruct others. He speaks of the 

preaching {tractare) of the bishops, and he 

complains that the presbyters and deacons ^ irregu- 
11 110- 1 larity and 

neglected to expound the Scriptures, and to variety 

exhort, which duty belonged to their office. 
And so toward the end of this period Lactantius speaks 
indirectly of Christian preachers, although he says they 
are seldom cultivated and eloquent men ; and immedi- 
ately after this epoch (350), Hilarius in his homiletical 
writings gives us a long list of preachers. During this 
period there was a great strife between the "bishops" 
and the " presbyters," on this very question of the right 



* Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 167. 



64 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

to preach, which ended in the presbyters yielding up 
the right to preach without the consent of the bishops, 
Strife ^^ ^^^ great detriment of preaching and of 
between Christianity.' In such circumstances pulpit 
bishops and eloquence could not thrive. While parties 
presbyters. ^^^ ^y^^ clergy strove for the very right to 
preach, it was not likely that preaching itself would be 
much cultivated and ennobled. And when at last the 
presbyters had succumbed to the bishops on this point, 
the bishops had drawn upon themselves so much of other 
ecclesiastical power and business that they had no time 
to study and improve their preaching ability. The ordi- 
nary membership of the Church became more and more 
used to receive from their clergy the offices of outward 
ceremonials, of prayers and forms, and thus they them- 
selves gradually lost the desire to hear preaching. The 
feast and fast seasons began also to be so multiplied 
that the physical effort to sustain these ceremonials 
made the preaching service very short, and sometimes 
altogether prohibited it, as says Sozomenus somewhat 
later in regard to the Western Church. 

The most important feature in the preaching of the 
Western Church was doubtless the moral element. 
What was in Origen and the Oriental 
Moral preachers a kind of mystical or ideal virtue, 
element ^^^ j^^ ^j^^ Western Church a more outward 
.^ and practical quality, having relation to 

Church. church life and discipline, and running at 
length into asceticism, or the idea of sancti- 
fying the soul through bodily mortification. 

The fourth and fifth centuries present a field for Chris- 
tian eloquence opened through the previous influence of 



Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 219. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 65 

Origen upon the style and method of preaching, which, 
with all its marked faults, was rarely if ever surpassed ; 
and this was the epoch of the great patris- 
tic preachers ; but it was, after all, a tran- A transition 

sition period, in which the former simpler P^"° *" ^ 

1 1 M 1. 1 r 1 • ^^^^ o^ *^^ 

and more biblical system ot preachmg- 

■^ r t> sermon. 

culminated (perhaps in some respects we 
might say fossilized) into the regular sermon. Yet the 
sermon was long in reaching the idea (rhetorically) of a 
perfect discourse pervaded by a law of unity, and spring- 
ing from a deeper insight of the theme. It continued to 
be for a long time in the form, of a running exposition, in 
which thought was awakened and the heart was warmed, 
and an oratorical element was gradually introduced. 
But as the Church emerged into more freedom and open- 
ness of belief, and persecution was lifted, the style of 
preaching became naturally more and more in harmony 
with the current forms of persuasive address, and in ac- 
cordance with rhetorical rules and Greek culture. 

When, in the time of Constantine, Christianity became 
the religion of the state, a new era was inaugurated 
for the eloquence of the pulpit, in some 
respects marking an advance, in others a Influence 

decadence. Christianit}^, in Constantine's ° 

,r , 1 outward 

reign, got rest for itself, and spoke out more events 

calmly and boldly from the pulpit ; but 
heathen and philosophical opposition was still active, 
and preaching was more and more forced into a dialectic 
and polemic current. Especially in the reign of Julian 
at the end of the fourth century, the ideas of heathen 
philosophy received a new impulse, and the Christian 
preacher, while he preached now without fear, yet felt 
himself called upon to meet every objection, to harmo- 
nize faith and reason, and to develop a higher philoso- 



66 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

phy. This had its evil and its good effects upon preach- 
ing, while a speculative spirit was thus engendered, yet 
at the same time there began to be a more 

eo ogica systematic teaching of the doctrines of 
type of . . . 

preaching- Christianity, and the theological or dog- 
matic element was developed. Gregory 
Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa, Athanasius, and Cyril 
of Jerusalem, and other illustrious preachers of this 
period, were eminently theological preachers. The con- 
troversies upon the Trinity and the Person of Christ, 
engaged the minds both of preachers and people. It 
was, in fact, distinctively the theological age. The ethi- 
cal, or perhaps in m.any instances the higher spiritual 
element did not flourish as in the earlier ages, when men, 
suffering persecution, went for courage and hope to the 
pure fountains of biblical truth ; and even in the greatest 
preachers Christian spirituality seemed to be over- 
borne by the dogmatic element. In the practical Chry- 
sostom, who came after, and who recognized the freedom 
of the will as the foundation of morality, the ethical ele- 
ment predominated ; and in all true preachers since his 
time the dogmatic and moral elements have been more 
or less bound together, and have not suffered such an un- 
natural divorce. 

Few sermons as yet had one definite theme, and the 

preacher was only careful to explain the connection of 

the verses ; or, if he discoursed upon a 
The theme. , 11-1 1 , • r 

theme, he aid not always draw it trom a 

particular text. Gregory Nazianzen commences a ser- 
mon on peace in this way. He addresses to his hearers 
the apostolic form of benediction then in use — " Peace be 
unto you ! " and they respond, " And with thy spirit." 

He then proceeds at once to discourse on his theme, 
upon this peace which had just been pronounced : " Be- 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 67 

loved Peace, thou sweet word that I have just spoken to 
the people and heard in return from them. I know not, 
it is true, if it has been spoken with an honest and wor- 
thy heart, and if the open bond of peace now formed has 
not been broken in the secret sight of God ; but, dear 
Peace, thou that art my daily thought and my ornament, 
that art inly bound up with the being of God — since we 
read in the Scriptures of * the peace of God ' and ' the 
God of peace,' and ' he is our peace ' — and yet which we 
so little honor ; thou beloved Peace, praised by all and 
possessed by few, how long thou hast left us ! when w^ilt 
thou return !" ' 

This bold and winning freedom, this artless speak- 
ing from the heart, this extempore and spiritual manner 
of address, is something worthy of notice in the earliest 
preachers, before everything had become formal and sys- 
tematized in the style of sermonizing. 

In many instances, however, the theme of the dis- 
course was distinctly announced. Thus Basil says, at the 
beginning of one of his discourses : " On account of all 
the incidents which I have witnessed in the foregoing 
days, I will speak against the vice of drunkenness, and 
let your ears be astonished." "^ 

He says again, in preaching upon the twenty-third 
Psalm : " If thou wilt hear what holy fear is, attend now 
to me." Chrysostom, in his homily upon John, 15 : 26, 
27, commences thus : " Since it is not unknown to any 
of you that prayer is the first of all good things, so I was 
greatly pressed with inward desire to speak to you who 
are accustomed to worship here, upon that theme, in 
order that I might make you still more zealous in 
prayer. ' ' 



^ Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 271. » Id., p. 272. 



68 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

In the panegyrical discourses the theme was often an- 
nounced, and in a highly rhetorical manner. Thus Chry- 
sostom begins a panegyrical sermon upon the martyr 
Stephen with these words : *' Let us crown Stephen with 
the flowers of eulogy, and let us bestrew him with the 
roses of praise. For he has long before received the 
real crown of righteousness which belongs to those who 
are victors in the good fight of faith." ' 

We have already more than once suggested that the 
evidences of rhetorical culture had begun to appear even 
in these early times in preaching, and, in fact, 
Evidences during the latter part of the fourth and fifth 
of Art— centuries it reached its height. Of course in 
uni y o ^j^^ earliest Christian preaching, certainly 
oratorical ^i^til the period of the fourth and fifth centu- 
diction. ries, we cannot look for much of art, although 
there was eloquence without the conscious- 
ness of it. The preachers were generally earnest men, 
confessing their faith at the peril and often the cost of 
their lives, impelled by a lofty purpose which made the 
mere idea of art seem insignificant. The moral element 
in preaching was then, as it always will be, of infinitely 
more importance than the artistic. Preaching was per- 
suading men to secure their eternal interests by accept- 
ing the grace and salvation which Christ the incarnate 
Son of God brought them. With these early preachers 
the end absorbed the means. They were too much taken 
up with the real claims and the transcendent truths of 
Christianity to be attentive to the mere art of discourse, 
or oratory ; yet there was then, and is now, such a thing 
as eloquence in the pulpit, because all the skill of man, 
all his powers of thought and art, were made for the 



Pariiel's " Gesch.," p. 273. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 69 

glory of God, and should be freely consecrated to his 

service. Both in form and diction, sermons began to 

assume the appearance of art. The oratorical period of 

the preaching art, with all its merits and all its faults, is 

to be found in the fourth and fifth centuries, from the 

time of the establishment of national Christianity, in 

about the year 324, to the fall of the Western Empire. 

There were, however, then as in all ages of the Church, 

different kinds of preachers — some who were especially 

theological preachers, such as Athanasius 

and the two Grefjories, and also in many ^"^ ^ *" 

style of 
respects Chrysostom. There were also the nreachine- 

practical and ethical class of preachers, such 
as was eminently Chrysostom. There were likewise mys- 
tical preachers like Macarius, and ascetic preachers, as 
Tertullian. 

But all these were more or less affected by the Greek 
culture ; some of them, who were rhetoricians before they 
became preachers, carrying their rhetorical style to an 
extravagant pitch, as did Gregory Nazianzen, 

As to the topics of preaching during the middle and 
latter parts of these centuries, one author thus sums 

them up : " The nature and destiny of the 

If 1 . . 1 1 Topics of 

soul, future rewards and punishments, the , . 

^ ^ preaching- 

perfections and mercies of God, repent- 
ance, baptism, forgiveness of sins, the creation, the 
nature of man, angels, the desperate condition of evil 
spirits, the true faith, the triumphs of the Church, and 
damnable heresies." 

A comprehensive passage from Neander's '' Church 
History" gives us a graphic picture of the preaching of 
this brilliant period of the fourth and fifth centuries. 

" As to the relation of thesermon to the whole office of 
worship, this is a point on which we meet with the most 



70 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

opposite errors of judgment. Some, who looked upon 
the clergy only as officiating priests, and who considered 

Neander's ^^ rnain parts of Christian worship to con- 
view of the sist in the magical effects of the priestly 
preaching of services, were hence greatly inclined to 
IS period, overvalue the liturgical element of worship. 

" The gift of teaching, they regarded, as something for- 
eign from the spiritual office, as they supposed the Holy 
Ghost, imparted to the priestly ordination, could be 
transmitted to others only by his sensible mediation. 
Others, however, and on account of the rhetorical style 
of culture which prevailed among the higher classes in 
the large cities of the East — this was especially the case 
of the Greek Church — gave undue importance to the 
didactic and rhetorical part of worship, and did not at- 
tach importance enough to the essentials of Christian 
fellowship and of common edification and devotion. 
Hence the church would be thronged when some famous 
speaker was to be heard, but only a few remained be- 
hind when the sermon was ended, and the church 
prayers follov\^ed. 'The sermon,' said they, 'we can 
hear nowhere but at church ; but we can pray just as 
well at home.' Against this abuse Chrysostom had 
frequent occasion to speak in his discourses preached at 
Antioch and Constantinople. Hence, too, without re- 
gard to the essential character of the Church, a style 
borrowed from the theatre or lecture-rooms of declaimers 
was introduced into the church assemblies, as these 
were frequented for the purpose of hearing some orator 
celebrated for his eloquent language, or his power of 
producing a momentary effect on the imagination or the 
feelings. Hence the custom of interrupting such speak- 
ers, at their more striking or impassioned passages, with 
noisy testimonials of approbation {Kporoi), Vain eccle- 



HISTORY OF PREACHIXG. 7 I 

slastics, men whose hearts were not full of the holy cause 
they professed, made it the chief or only aim of their 
discourses to secure the applause of such hearers, and 
hence labored solely to display their brilliant eloquence 
or wit, to say something with point and effect. But 
many of the better class, too — such men as Gregory 
Nazianzen — could not wholly overcome the vanity which 
this custom tended to foster, and thus fell into the mis- 
take of being too rhetorical in their sermons. Men of 
holy seriousness, like Chrysostom, strongly rebuked this 
declamatory and theatrical style, and said that through 
such vanity the whole Christian cause would come to be 
suspected by the heathens. 

" Many short-hand writers largely employed themselves 
in taking down, on the spot, the discourses of famous 
speakers in order to give them a wider circulation. The 
sermons were sometimes, though rarely, read off entirely 
from notes, or committed to memory ; sometimes they 
were freely delivered after a plan prepared beforehand ; 
and sometimes they were altogether extemporary. The 
last we learn incidentally, from being informed that 
Augustine was occasionally directed to the choice of a 
subject by the passage which the * praslector ' had se- 
lected for reading ; when, as he tells us, he was some- 
times urged by some impression of the moment to give 
his sermon a different turn from what he had originally 
proposed. We are also informed by Chrysostom that his 
subject was frequently suggested to him by something 
which he met with on his way to church, or which sud- 
denly occurred during divine service."^ 

We will now mention the names of some of the great 
preachers of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, and 



' Neander's " Ch. Hist.," v. ii. p. 316. 



72 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

comment on the style and method of a few of them, par- 
ticularly of Chrysostom and Augustine. 

Belonging to the third century are Origen, Hip- 
polytus, Gregory Thaumaturgus, Dionysius of Alexan- 
dria, Methodius of Tyre, and Cyprian. Of 
Eminent ^ rr ^ ■ ■ ^ 

oreachers ^ fourth and hfth centuries, m the order 

of their lives, are Eusebiusof Caesarea, Atha- 

nasius of Alexandria, Meletius of Antioch, Macarius, 

called "the Great," and also "the Ascetic ;" Cyril, 

Bishop of Jerusalem ; Ephraem the Syrian, Basil, called 

"the Great," Bishop of Caesarea; Gregory Nazianzen, 

Gregory of Nyssa, Amphilochius of Iconium, Epiphanius 

of Salamis, Severianus of Gabala, Theodosius of Mop- 

suestia, John, surnamed Chrysostom, Archbishop of 

Constantinople ; Ambrose of Milan, Liberius of Rome, 

Hilary of Tours, Zeno of Verona, Jerome, Aurelius 

Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. 

Origen deserves the first notice, and comes also first 

in time, and one might say in dignity and worth — a 

representative preacher, and, as to method 
Origen, as a 

cher ^^^ style, the father of an innumerable 

multitude of preachers to this day. Origen, 
some authorities state, was born A. D. 185. His earnest and 
resolute character as a champion of the faith made him 

many bitter enemies, who strove to annihi- 

oreacher ^^^^ ^^^"^ ^^^ ^^^ works, so that some of his 
most important writings have either been 
destroyed or come down to us in a garbled shape. 
Coleridge lamented the loss of his complete " Hexapla" 
as being greater than any other loss which biblical litera- 
ture ever sustained. He calls Origen the only scholar 
and genius combined, among the fathers — a somewhat 
prejudiced opinion. His "Answer to Celsus" was one 
of the ablest early apologies of the Christian religion.^: 

' Moiile, pp. 78, 79. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. ys 

Until his sixtieth year he laid his prohibition upon his 
clerks not to take down his discourses, but then relent- 
ing, above a thousand of his homilies were taken down. 
While a great and eloquent preacher, he was in fact 
only a lay preacher ; although it is said by Ruffin that 
Demetrius, Bishop of Alexandria, authorized Origen to 
teach as a catechist in the Church, which, however, cannot 
be understood as one teaching publicly, or preaching in 
our sense of the term. " As a lecturer to young men 
his ability must have been of first-rate order, 
inasmuch as he succeeded Clemens (Alex- Theological 

andrinus) in the managrement of the Cate- ^^ ^^^^ 

1 .11, 1 1 . . 1 rather than 

cnetical school at the early age of eighteen, oreacher 

recalling to our minds the early eminence of 
]\Ielancthon in another age of the Church ; and also 
after his removal to Palestine a circle of youths was 
always about him, being trained under his influence to 
fill the posts of theologians and preachers to the 
Church." ' Origen, in fact, must be looked upon as a 
theological teacher rather than a preacher ; but he was 
nevertheless a preacher both eloquent and vastly influ- 
ential upon the preaching of his time and of succeeding 
ages. 

His homilies arc imbedded in his voluminous writings 
and commentaries, numbering some thousands, which, 
though they have come down to us in the form of 
commentaries, have still a homiletical char- 
acter, and were most of them undoubtedly ^°'""' °^ ^'^ 
, -. , , , , homilies 

delivered as sermons, so that we have in , ,. . 

them true transcripts of his preaching. His preparation, 
preparation for the work of teaching and 
preaching was of the widest and most generous kind. 
"The collation of manuscripts," he said of himself, 



' Moule's "Oratory," p. 8o. 



74 HOMILETICS l^ROPER. 

** leaves me hardly time to eat, and after meals I can 

neither go out nor enjoy a season of rest ; but even at 

these times I am compelled to continue my philological 

investigations and the correction of manuscripts. Even 

the night is not granted me for repose, but a great part 

of it is claimed for these philological inquiries. I will 

not mention the time from early in the morning till the 

ninth and sometimes the tenth hour of the day ; for all 

who take pleasure in such labors employ these hours in 

the study of the divine word and in reading." ^ Above 

all, the heart of a true Christian, which proved itself in 

firmly enduring persecution and in innumerable trials, 

was in Origen. The groundwork of all his preaching was 

the interpretation of the word, and this, 

Groundwor gy^j^ \^ ]^jg widest and wildest allegorizing, 

, . saved him as a Christian preacher. He was 

perhaps in style and manner not equal as a 

pulpit orator to Basil, the Gregories, and Chrysostom, of 

the next century. His illustrations, for instance, show 

little invention, and are drawn almost exclu- 

His style sively from the figures and pictures found in 

simp e j.j^^ Scriptures ; perhaps this was a matter of 

rather . . / . ,\ . %, , . 

than prmciple with liim. Jout his style is not, 

ornate. rhetorically, a rich or eloquent one, but sim- 
ple and classic. Though his tendency was 
to philosophical speculation, yet his reverence for the 
Scriptures and his passion for interpretation made him 
the founder of expository preaching, which had also a 
strong moral aim, and which exerted a vast though ir- 
As an regular and in some instances not altogether 
interpreter, beneficial influence. ** Ubi bene nei7to melius 
iibi male nemo pejus.'' But the Bible, to Origen, was an 



^ Moule's "Oratory," p. 80. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 75 

inexhaustible treasury of moral and spiritual instruc- 
tion, though drawn, it must be said, sometimes arbitrarily 
from the word. The Bible had, he conceived, a three- 
fold meaning — the literal, the moral, and the 

spiritual— corresponding to the body, soul, ^^^ ° 

, . . , 1 . , 1 meaning in 

and spirit, and having an analogy to the interpretation. 

threefold distinction of the divine nature.' 
He held not only to the privilege of the most unlimited 
freedom of interpretation, but thought this freedom to 
be the vital point of true preaching. From heavenly 
revelation as well as from earthly events — from the his- 
tories, laws, and biographies of the Old Testament and 
the facts and utterances of the New — he gathers spiritual 
signification and teaching. According to his main axiom, 
that " in every tittle of Holy Scripture there must be a 
higher sense," he makes every part of the word a theme 
for developing a higher knowledge of God, The higher 
or spiritual "gnosis." Wherever he could sense, 
surmise the likeness of spiritual things he did this, not 
only gladly and fearlessly, but as a true principle of her- 
meneutics. For example, in a sermon on the history of 
Lot fleeing from Sodom, he interprets the narrative as 
signifying the escape of the soul out of its natural and 
unregenerate state to the appointed salvation in Christ. 
Lot's wife is the soul looking back, or its yearning 
toward worldly pleasure-— in fact, as meaning the fleshly 
or carnal mind which is left behind. " Carno est cnim 
qitcB respicit semper ad vitia, qiicB cum animus tcndit ad 
sahitem ilia retrorsnm respicit, et voliiptates reqnirit." 
The pillar of salt in which Lot's wife is enveloped is the 
barren folly, the bitter unsatisfactoriness of worldly 
pleasures and pursuits. The story of Lot and his 



' Paniel's " Gesch.," p. i8i. 



76 HO MILE TICS PROPER. 

daughters signifies the dangers that follow the Christian 
whose face is turned Zion-ward, from carelessness, the 
intemperate use of wine, or any inordinate indulgence, 
whether of the body or mind, which, while he thus sleeps 
overcome him ; and whatever is produced in such a con- 
dition is as vain and accursed as the race of Moab. The 
close of this homily is characteristic, and is a good speci- 
men of the " conclusion" of a sermon, in 
Specimen of , ^ <• ^ • , , . . .< -r^ 

his preaching. ^^^ "^^^^ ^^ Origen and his times. Do 

not fail to remember, my hearers," he says, 
"what I have said to you in respect to the moral sense 
of this history. Remember that thou too flee from the 
earthly fire and consuming heat of wicked lusts, and 
that thou seek the height of true knowledge {ad scientice 
altitudinem), like the height of a mountain summit ! Be- 
ware lest thou be accompanied by those two sisters. 
Ambition and her greater sister Pride, who will go even 
up the mountain with you in order to lure you to destruc- 
tion ! Beware lest these daughters of your own sinful heart 
make you drunken and destroy you with their embraces ! 
They are indeed our own daughters, because nothing 
outside of us can do us evil, but only what proceeds from 
our inmost heart and thought. But wouldst thou beget 
aright, beget in spiritual things, for whosoever sows to 
the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting. 
Wouldst thou embrace, then embrace Wisdom, and name 
Wisdom thy sister, so that Wisdom may say to you (Matt. 
12 : 50), ' For whosoever shall do the will of my Father 
which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, 
and mother.' This Wisdom is Christ our Lord, to whom 
be glory and dominion for ever and ever. Amen." ^ 
Passing over Hippolytus, who was a pupil of Origen, 



Paniel's "Gesch.," p. k 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 77 

and took him for his model, and who possessed distin- 
p-uished iearnincf and great warmth and 
hvehness of imagmation, and also Gregory 
Thaumaturgus, a wonder-working preacher, we will speak 
a few words of Cyprian, chiefly as a preacher. Thascius 
Ciicilius Cyprianus, Bishop of Carthage, was Cyprian as a 
born at the beginning of the third century, preacher, 
of illustrious parentage. He had a careful education, 
and chose the profession of rhetorician, and w^as em- 
ployed occasionally as an advocate in pro- His 
cesses of law. biography. 

After a long time spent in heathenism he became 
deeply impressed with the virtuous and elevated life of 
many Christians in his neighborhood, and through the 
special instructions of the presbyter Cacilius (whose 
name he took), he became a Christian in the year 246. 
His experience of sin, and the worthlessness of a trust in 
human righteousness, were strong. He put great faith in 
his Christian baptism, and the earnestness and devotion 
of his after life show^ed that the change in him w^as a real 
one. To make the contrast between his former luxuri- 
ous style of living and his Christian life more marked, he 
parted with his property, distributing it among the poor. 
His zeal and education led him to desire the office of a 
preacher. In 247 he was made presbyter, and in 248 
Bishop of Carthage. He was beheaded as a martyr in 
the persecution under Valerian, about the year 258. 
Cyprian was a good man, but too fond of power ; and he 
stirred up the envy and enmity of his presbyteral col- 
leagues, which brought upon him many woes. He com- 
menced, in fact, a life-long war with the college of pres- 
byters, and was one means of building up the hierarchical 
power of the episcopate, which was originally only that 
of priums mte7' pares, and of bringing down the standard 



7« HOMILETICS PROPER. 

of ''presbyters" or simple "pastors." He adopted in 

its entireness the Levitical idea of the priesthood as 

being superior to all other classes, and as 

His hierarchi- st^j^jj^g next to God himself. In his most 
cal views. 

reasonable moods he himself contended for 

the rights of the people as a co-ordinate governing power 
in the Church, but his whole life strengthened the pre- 
rogative and power of the bishops. He also contended for 
the outward unity of the Church, and the salvability of 
those alone who were in the pale of the visible Catholic 
Church. In spite of these views, which foreshadowed the 
rise of the papacy, he accomplished a great work as a 
preacher. He had extraordinary natural gifts as an 
orator. He united to a strong practical in- 

is gi s teiiect, rich in original ideas, an Oriental 

as an 

o ator imagination and great warmth and depth of 

feeling. He was of a fervid temperament, 

which sometimes carried him beyond the sway of reason, 

so that he considered some of his own utterances to be 

by the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Without a 

tendency to profound doctrinal speculation, he was yet 

highly intelligent in this respect, and was edifying as a 

teacher of truth {SidaaKaXoi). He had clear conceptions, 

and was able to make the truth stand forth vividly. 

While he had something of the fiery temperament and 

fancy of Tertullian, yet, on the whole, he was more mild, 

pleasing, and tranquil than Tertullian. Gregory Nazian- 

zen, in his eulogy of him, said, " Cyprian's style is natural, 

varied, and pleasing, and, what is of more importance, 

the predominant qualities of his thought are plainness 

and correctness — the fundamental qualities of an orator. 

And you would find it difficult to decide to which of his 

qualities you would assign the palm, his ornamental 

diction, his happy exegesis, or his art of powerful persua- 



HISTORY OF r REACHING. 79 

sion/* Lactantius bears witness that the heathen them- 
selves, though they despised the Christian teaching, were 
in wonder at the eloquence of Cyprian. Jerome is un- 
qualified in his praise, and says, " Cyprian's 

1 A . \^ " 'TV. His style, 

works are radiant as the sun. 1 hey are 

not, however, free from faults. He employed Scripture 
in too loose and fanciful a manner, making unimportant 
particulars bear the most precise and weighty meanings. 
No meaning seems to be too strained. He makes, for 
example, the deluge a type of baptism ; Melchizedek's 
bringing of bread and wine to Abraham is a symbol of 
the Lord's Supper ; the four streams of paradise are the 
four gospels, etc. While, as a general rule, he speaks in 
noble language, yet he is often florid and fantastic. The 
ethical and ecclesiastical mostly predominate over the 
spiritual. Obedience to the priesthood, the praise of mar- 
tyrdom, the supreme virtue of virginity, are his favorite 
themes. One of his most eloquent discourses was upon 
death (dc inortalitatc), preached in the period 

of a "-reat pestilence. It abounds in vigor- 

^^ ^ of his style, 

ous language. " He who fights under God 

{qui Deo militaf), and as a soldier in the heavenly camp, 
already has conceived a godlike hope, and must be pre- 
pared to meet the tempest of this worldly life fearlessly. 
For with provident voice {providcc vocis) has the Saviour 
foretold whatever shall come to pass. For the instruc- 
tion of his people he has plainly taught them that they 
must endure war, hunger, earthquake, and pestilence. 
And that these vanishing things may not too greatly dis- 
turb us he has predicted that these afflictions should 
more and more increase in the last days. Behold how 
the Lord has foretold what has even now come to pass. 
And he has said (Luke 2i), ' But when ye see these 
things, know that the kingdom of God is near at hand.' 



8o HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Beloved, the kingdom of God is near at hand. Already 
the passing away of this world, the recompense and the 
joy of everlasting life, and the possession of the early-lost 
paradise, are nigh ; already heavenly things succeed 
earthly, great things small, eternal temporal. Where is 
there reason for anguish and fear ? Who that does not 
fail in all hope and all faith can be sorrowful and trem- 
bling under such circumstances ? He alone should fear 
death who will not come to Christ ; for he who comes to 
Christ hopes also to reign with him." ' ' 

Eusebius of Caesarea strove after elegance and splendor 
of diction, and lacked plainness and practical directness. 

. . Athanasius was " the practical informing: 

Athanasius. . 

mind of the first half of the fourth century." 

He was a man of most commanding personality, indomi- 
table will, and remarkable power over other minds. We 
think of him rather as a church leader, a 

eo ogian ^y^qq\Xq\2M and a theologian than as a 
rather than , ^, , ., i /- i i 

oreacher preacher. Though a terrible fighter, he 

showed Christian generosity at the death of 

his arch-foe Arius, and feared lest he might seem to 

triumph over the death of his adversary. " Death," he 

said, " is the common lot of all men. We should never 

exult over the death of any man, even though he be our 

bitter enemy, since no one can know but that before the 

day is done the same fate may be his own." He was an 

acute reasoner, and combined a keen logical power with 

a fiery zeal, not unmixed with earthly passion. As a 

preacher he was didactic rather than expository. His 

life, however, was too stormy and broken to admit of 

his sustaining the work of a steady instructor or preacher 

of God's word. 



^ Paniel's "Gesch.," p. 234. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 8 1 

Ephraem the Syrian was one of the greatest though 

most peculiar preachers of his times. His rich poetic 

nature was highly cultivated by all the 

• 1 1 1 r 1 11- Ephraem 

rhetorical methods of the age, and his more ^^^ Svrian 

than Oriental imagination was brought by 

monastic discipline into a state of the keenest sharpness, 

so that he had an almost prophetic penetration into 

spiritual things, and the power of bodying them forth 

with vividness, which won for him the names of the 

** Syrian prophet," " harp of the Holy Ghost." 

We will now dwell a little longer on three or four other 

preachers, more profitable for our consideration in a homi- 

letical view. Basil, Bishop and Archbishop 

of Caesarea, called the Great, was born be- ^^^^ Great 

tween 329 and 331, and died in 379, hardly 

fifty years old. He was of illustrious parentage. Gregory 

of Nyssa and Peter, Bishop of Sebaste, were his brothers. 

He was also an intimate friend of Gregory Nazianzen, 

with whom he studied in Csesarea in Cappadocia. He 

early became distinguished for learning and piety. He 

studied philosophy and rhetoric at Antioch with the 

heathen teacher Libanius, and finished his classical 

education at Athens. " In the Greek Church it was 

the practice, as we may see in the examples of Basil 

and of Gregory Nazianzen, for such young men as were 

destined, by the wish of their families, to consecrate 

themselves to the service of the Church, to visit the 

schools of general education, then flourishing at Athens, 

Alexandria, Constantinople, Ceesarea in Cappadocia, 

and Coesarea in Palestine. Next they passed some time 

in pursuing the study of ancient literature, either with 

particular reference to their own improvement or as 

rhetorical teachers in their native towns, until, by the 

course of their own meditations or by some impression 



82 IIOMILETICS PROPER. 

from without, a new direction of more decided Chris- 
tian seriousness was given to their life. In this case 
it now became their settled plan to consecrate their 
entire life to the service of the faith and of the Church ; 
whether it was that they entered immediately into 
some one of the subordinate grades of the spiritual 
order, or that they preferred, in the first place, in silent 
retirement, by sober collection of thought, by the study 
of the Holy Scriptures, and of the older church fathers, 
either in solitude or in some society of monks, to pre- 
pare themselves for the spiritual office. That previous 
discipline in general literature had, in one respect, a 
beneficial influence, inasmuch as it gave a scientific 
direction to their minds in theology, and thus fitted them 
also for more eminent usefulness as church-teachers ; 
as becomes evident when we compare the bishops thus 
educated w^ith others. But, on the other hand, the 
habits of style thus contracted, the vanity and fondness 
for display which were nourished in these rhetorical 
schools, had on many an influence unfavorable to the sim- 
plicity of the gospel, as may be seen, for example, after a 
manner not to be mistaken, in the case of Gregory of 
Nazianzus. " ^ 

In a journey through the East Basil became dis- 
gusted with the Christless lives of the monks, and he 
himself was led to found a Coenobite order of monks. 
At the death of Eusebius, in 370, he was chosen Bishop 
of Caesarea. He labored for the orthodox faith with 
the zeal of an Athanasius. His character was stead- 
fast and strong, as is seen in his intrepid resistance of the 
persecution of Valens ; and he was also earnest in 
Christian discipline and morality. He had at the same 



Neander's " Ch. Hist.," v. ii. p. 150. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 83 

time great moderation, and by his mingled firmness and 
tact successfully resisted the persecution of Valens and 
the Arians. He was a hard worker in a hard field. 

As a preacher he had received every aid from the high- 
est culture of the time, and was, above all, inspired by 

an uncommon zeal for the truth, which he 

, . , . , ^^, His culture. 

derived from his mother. His contempora- 
ries speak of his eloquence in unmeasured terms of praise, 
and the homilies he left behind partially bear this out. 
His nine homilies on the " Six Days of Creation" {Hex- 
cumeroii) are the most renowned. There are also thirteen 
discourses on the Psalms, twenty-four sermons on moral 
subjects, and four martyr eulogies. The homilies are 

practical, animated, and searching;. He 

,. , ; , ^ . Style. 

studied human nature, and was a sagacious 

master of the human heart. He almost always preached 
from a text, either one independently chosen or one that 
formed the scriptural lesson that was read in the public 
service, which last was Origen's method, and that of 
nearly all the preachers of those centuries. In regard to 
this interesting point of reading the Bible in the churches, 
Neander remarks : '* As to those kept from studying the 
Scriptures themselves (chiefly by poverty, which pre- 
vented the purchase of MSS.), the reading of the Scrip- 
tures in the church was to serve as a remedy for the 
want ; for on those occasions not single passages merely, 
but entire sections and whole books of the Bible were 
read in connection. Hence many who could not even 
read were able, by a constant attendance upon church, 
and by carefully listening to the portions read each year, 
to treasure up in their memories a familiar knowledge of 
the Sacred Scriptures." ' 



Neander's " Ch. Hist.," v. ii. p. 282. 



84 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Neander also says : " Chrysostom frequently, both in 
private conversation and his public discourses, exhort- 
ed his hearers not to rest satisfied with that which they 
heard read from the Scriptures within church, but to read 
them also with their families at home ; for what food 
was for the body, such the Holy Scriptures were for the 
soul — the source whence it derived substantial strength. 
To induce his hearers to study the Scriptures, he was often 
accustomed, when there was yet no set lesson of the 
sacred word prescribed for every Sunday, to give out 
for some time beforehand the text which he designed to 
make a subject of discourse on some particular occasion, 
and to exhort them, in order that they might be the bet- 
ter prepared for his remarks, in the mean time to reflect 
upon it themselves." ^ 

Basil spoke also on definite themes, among which 

sermons are those upon Anger and Drunkenness. The 

last are powerful temperance sermons for any time. The 

length of those homilies is moderate. He evidently was 

an extempore preacher, as is proved by many 

" internal evidences, although the general 

extempore , r i • i- i -1,1 

preacher style of his discourses shows considerable 

method and careful finish. But he often 

breaks his train of thought as a new impulse comes upon 

him. He says in one place that he did not finish the 

sermon the day before, and will begin where he left off. 

He is not so spiritual and lofty in style as Ephraem the 

Syrian, but more solid and practical. He speaks like a 

thoroughly educated, observing, and thoughtful man, on 

human life, its dangers, temptations, sorrows, sins, and 

spiritual redemption. His style is excellent, without 

affectation, simple, clear, and in good taste. He had a 



Neander's " Ch. Hist.," v. ii. p. 282. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 85 

quick intuition, and spoke with directness to the con- 
science. Basil, with the two Gregories, present us per- 
haps the first instances of poHshed and thoroughly trained 
classical orators in the pulpit. They have 
the merits and faults of such. They are too Basil 

ornamental and elaborate, Basil, however, 

Gregories, 
the least so of the three. They all give the classical 

impression that, though good and earnest orators. 
men, they sought to be orators, which am- 
bition the former preachers, even such men as Origen 
and Hippolytus, did not seem to have, and which the 
greater preachers who came after them, Chrysostom and 
Augustine, did not apparently have, or to such a marked 
extent. Basil was the most solid sermonizer of the 
three ; but even in his discourses the glitter of false 
ornament and sentimentality are seen. In the sermons 
of Basil there is to be found much of the science of his 
day, especially in the sermons upon Creation. They are 
in fact scientific treatises on " Nature" and " Provi- 
dence," comprehending essentially many of the ques- 
tions now discussed in regard to the relation of science 
and religion, and are composed in a grave and stately 
style. His ethical discourses, however, are pungent and 
faithful, and, supported as they were by a life of stern 
piety, they had powerful influence in their day. ^ 

Gregory Nazianzen, was commonly called " the Theo- 
logian" — ^Eokoyo^^, because '^Eokoyia, in the stricter 

sense, Avas the term applied to the doctrine 

r /-M • » T . • 1- • • ^ ^ Grcgory 

ot Christ s divmity as contradistmguished jjazianzen 

from oiKovof-iia^ the doctrine of his incarna- 
tion." In fact, with this father and with others of his 



* Paniel's "Gesch.," p. 464 ; see also Moule's " Chr. Or.," p. 
^ Neander's " Ch. Hist.," v. ii. p. 415. 



S6 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

day, dogmatic truth is carefully distinguished from the 
province of morals. They were strictly theologians. 
This highly-praised champion of the Nicene confession, 
the intimate friend of Basil the renowned preacher, 
was born about the year 330, in an obscure town of Cap- 
padocia, though of wealthy and influential parentage, his 
father being a bishop. He studied first in Caesarea with 
His his friend Basil, under the rhetorician Thes- 

philosophical picius. His philosophical tendency, his 
tendency. \q^jq of Plato, his admiration for Origen, 
and above all his intense reverence for Athanasius, led 
him to Alexandria. After remaining there for awhile he 
travelled to Athens, where he completed his classical 
studies, and seemed, while in Athens, to have no higher 
ambition than to be considered an accomplished rhetori- 
cian and sophist. Afterward he pursued exegetical and 
theological studies more diligently, and was made bishop 
of the small city of Sosima by Basil, who had been pre- 
viously elevated to the see of Caesarea. This call to so 
insignificant a place caused him great discontent. Though 
a good man and a great man, he had weak points. 
While gifted with extraordinary oratorical powers, his 
style as a preacher was built upon the 
elaborate and false rhetorical system of the 
Greek sophists. Five theological discourses, in which he 
defended the doctrine of the Trinity, and which exhibit 
considerable dialectical acuteness, gained for him the title 
(to which reference has been made) of Theologian ; and 
there is no doubt that Gregory's preaching contributed 
largely to the victory of the orthodox faith over Arian- 
ism, while his method of viewing doctrine had a marked 
influence upon the creed of the whole Catholic Church. 
One of his noblest pulpit efforts was his " Farewell Ser- 
mon," preached in the Church of St. Sophia, which re- 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 87 

suited In the triumph of the orthodox faith in Constanti- 
nople. His oratory, though more brilliant, had not the 
solidity and grasp upon the conscience that Basil's preach- 
ing had. It was philosophical and dialectical, and these 
qualities were strongly pronounced, and did not entirely 
harmonize with the higher qualities of preaching. He 
was also, as has been said, greatly inclined to ornament. 
He was captivated by the style of the Greek 

orators, and, unfortunately, of Isocrates, ° ^^^ ^ 

florid Greek 
and the later and more florid school of the orators 

Greek panegyrists. His sermons, as a gen- 
eral rule, have no definite text, and have long oratorical 
exordiums. They abound in repetitions, exclamations, 
interrogations, antitheses, and artificially constructed 
sentences. But among these flowery sacred orations there 
was much that was practical, vigorous, truly eloquent, and 
even at times profound. His sermon on " Love to the 
Poor," is one of his best and simplest homilies. He in- 
dulged often in unwarrantable sarcasm, and indeed his 
spirit had much of mundane bitterness and unsatisfied 
ambition ; but mingled with these were loftier and nobler 
qualities. He had rare intelligence in doctrinal truth — 
the fine theologic sense {TJieologische Geist). Neander 
says : "It is also the merit of Gregory that he did 
not, like other church-teachers of this period, who had 
been drawn into the field of controversy, forget, in his 
zeal for those views of doctrine which he found to be cor- 
rect, that the essence of Christianity does not consist in 
speculative notions, but in the life ; that he did not suffer 
himself to be misled by an exclusive zeal for orthodoxy 
of conceptions to neglect practical Christianity. Much 
rather did he make it a matter of special concern to com- 
bat that exclusively prevailing tendency to speculation 
in religion which leads to the injury of a living, active 



88 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

Christianity— a tendency which was so very agreeable to 
the mass of worldly men, because it made it easy for 
them to put on the appearance of zeal for piety and 
orthodoxy, and to deceive the judgment of others, and in 
part also their own conscience, while they spared them- 
selves from the contest with sin in their own hearts and 
in the world without them. He often declared strongly 
against the delusive notion that all manner of frivolity 
might be united with zeal for sound doctrine, and often 
presented before his hearers, with pointed earnestness, the 
truth that without a holy sense of divine things men could 
have no understanding of them ; that sacred matters 
must be treated in a sacred manner. He often preached 
against the perverse manner of those who -looked upon 
discussions upon divine things as any other conversation 
{csoanEp ra iTtnina nai ^sarpa^ ovroo xod ra S'sia 7raic,8iy\ 
on topics of ordinary discourse, and often declared that 
the full and perfect knowledge of divine things was not 
the end of the present earthly life, but that its end was 
" by becoming holy, to become capable of the full intui- 
tion of the life eternal." ^ 

These noble thoughts and apprehensions were, however, 
mingled with much of the vanity of learning and the love 
of oratorical display. His panegyrical sermons, or rather 
orations, are full of the most unqualified and extravagant 
adulation, especially the oration upon Athanasius. Thus 
he says : " In praising Athanasius I praise virtue itself. 
He is the whole of virtue incarnate, for he combined in 
himself all possible virtues." While he often shone as a 
midday sun in the brilliancy of his eloquence, his preach- 
ing was never without spots and faults. His language 
often degenerated into the emptiest declamation.^ 



' Neander's " Eccl. Hist.," v. ii. p. 415. 
"^ Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 493. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING, 89 

Gregory of Nyssa, the younger brother of Basil of 

C?esarea, was born between 330 and 340, and died about 

369. He was made Bishop of Nyssa by his 

brother Basil. In his youth he showed fire regoryo 

Nyssa. 
as a theological athlete, as a champion of 

the orthodox faith, but his disposition was naturally 
mild. Under the Arian Valens he was driven from his 
bishopric, but returned under Jovian. He was greatly 
honored as a ready preacher, drawing often large multi- 
tudes to hear him. He was also highly cultivated in 
the learning of the time, and, like Gregory 

Nazianzen, was built too much upon Greek ^ °"^^ 

^ culture, 

ideas of rhetoric and philosophy. He car- 
ried his Greek training into his homiletical studies. He 
was in fact a teacher of rhetoric for a time, as were many 
of the most distinguished Christian fathers. Although 
inclined to speculative thinking, he spoke with direct- 
ness and power on the theme of Christian 
morals and Christian life. Here he was V^^' 

calm, simple, orderly, and clear. He had preacher 
great influence in the ecclesiastical councils 
of the time of Theodosius. As an interpreter of the 
Scriptures, he considered with Origen the allegorical in- 
terpretation to be not only right but essential, and car- 
ried it to a fine-spun extreme ; yet he held firmly to the 
principle that " one must go to the Scriptures for every- 
thing that is really profitable." His sermons upon 
" Solomon's Song," " The Book of Ecclesiastes," " The 
Psalms," "The Lord's Prayer," "The Sermon on the 
Mount," " The Paschal Feast," " The Woman taken in 
Adultery," and the funeral orations upon the Princess 
Paulina, Ephraem the Syrian, and his own brother Basil, 
are among his most renov/ned discourses.* 

' Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 520. 



90 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Not to dwell upon many illustrious preachers whom it 

would be profitable to notice, such as Amphilochius, 

Amphilo- Bishop of Iconium; Epiphanius, Bishop of 

chius— Epi- Salamis ; Theodorus, Bishop of Mopsuestia, 

phanius— we will finish this account of the preachers 

Theodorus. ^^ ^^ early patristic period by a notice of 

two of the greatest of them — Chrysostom and Augustine. 

John, surnamed Chrysostom the Golden-mouthed — a 

name applied to him some time after his death, and, as 

it is supposed, by the sixth QEcumenical 
Chrysostom. ., . ^ , a • t 

Council m 680 — was born at Antioch, as most 

authorities state, in 354, although Neander and Milman 
say in 347, and was baptized by Bishop Meletius. He 
grew up a serious, lovable youth, under the care of his 
widowed mother Anthusa, and, as Neander remarks, 
passing through none of those wild, dark struggles with 
temptation which left an ineffaceable impression on the 
soul of Augustine and gave a gloomy coloring to his the- 
ology. He lived during his early manhood near Antioch, 
and led an ascetic life, in which period he is said to have 
learned the Bible by heart — probably an exaggeration, 
but founded on his intense study of the Scriptures. He 
was appointed deacon, and commenced preaching. He 
was ordained priest by Flavian, Meletius's successor. In 
the outbreak at Antioch in which the imperial statues 
were thrown down, Chrysostom preached with great 
boldness and effect. His pulpit eloquence caused him to 
be transferred to the archiepiscopal see of Constantinople 
in 397. He restricted the episcopal expenditure in 
which his predecessors had indulged, and by his bene- 
factions acquired the name of " John the Almoner." 
He deposed thirteen bishops of Lydia and Syria for 
abuse of office, and went to Antioch to reform the 
church there. During his absence the faction opposed 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 9 1 



to him gained ground. He refused to submit to the 
" Council of the Oak" at Chalcedon, and was exiled to 
Nicaea in 403. An insurrection forced his recall two days 
afterward. He continued to preach with increasing plain- 
ness till, through the influence of the Empress Eudoxia, 
he was banished to Cucusus in Mount Taurus, and after- 
ward, for greater security, to Pityus on the Euxine. On 
the road to that place, about nine miles from Comana, 
in Pontus, he died, through weariness and ill-treatment, 
September 14th, 407. In his wanderings and residence 
among the savage mountaineers of the Taurus he dis- 
covered the zeal of the true missionary, endeavoring to 
convert the Persians and the Goths with whom he came 
in contact. In his celebrated letters to Olympias from 
his place of banishment occurs the sentence, " None can 
hurt the man who will not hurt himself." He died ex- 
claiming, " Glory be to God in all things ! Amen !" He 
is said to have been, like the apostle Paul, small of 
stature, with a large, bald head, hollow cheeks, and deep- 
sunken eyes. The best life of him is that by Neander, 
one volume only of which has been translated into English. 
Though one of the greatest of commentators and theo- 
logians, he was eminently and distinctively a preacher. 
That was his enthusiasm and his life. He Number 
was as much like the apostle Paul in this and range 
respect as one man of a different age and o^ his 
culture could resemble another. His homi- honii^ies. 
lies that have been preserved are numerous (said to be 
over 600), though many extant are of doubtful authen- 
ticity. They are in many respects more valuable than 
the sermons of any of the fathers, Augustine not except- 
ed. All patristical literature, as we have before re- 
marked, with the exception of the works of Chrysostom 
and Augustine, might be destroyed, and, we might 



92 HOMTLETICS PROPER, 

almost say, all would be saved. It is quite difficult to 
determine the exact date of Chrysostom's sermons. The 
number, variety, and range of these discourses may be 
seen by mentioning the topics of some of them. Twelve 
homilies are upon the Incomprehensible Nature of God ; 
eight against the Jews and heathen, to prove that " Christ 
is God ;" seven upon Lazarus ; twenty-one upon Idol 
Statues, addressed to the people of Antioch ; nine upon 
Repentance ; seven in eulogy of the apostle Paul ; and 
twenty-five upon the saints and martyrs ; thirty-four 
principally upon certain passages in the New Testament 
(most of these homilies on the New Testament have 
been translated and published in the " Library of the 
Fathers") ; sixty-seven upon Genesis ; sixty upon the 
Psalms ; six upon Isaiah ; ninety-one upon Matthew, of 
which Thomas Aquinas said " that he would not give 
them in exchange for the whole city of Paris ;" eighty- 
seven upon John ; twenty-five upon the Acts ; thirty- 
two upon Romans ; forty-four upon the First Epistle to 
the Corinthians ; thirty upon the Second ; twenty-four 
upon the Epistle to the Ephesians ; fifteen upon Philip- 
pians ; twelve upon Colossians ; eleven upon the First 
and five upon the Second Book of Thessalonians ; 
eighteen upon the First, and ten upon the Second Epistle 
to Timothy ; six upon the Epistle to Titus, and three 
upon that to Philemon ; thirty-four upon the Epistle to 
the Hebrews ; ^ a great number upon special texts and 
occasions, the most interesting of which, historically, are 
those that belong to the time of the first and second 
exiles."^ His most eloquent sermons, or those esteemed 



' A beautiful edition of the Homilies of the Pauline Epistles in Greek 
(but without the Latin version), has been published in connection with 
the Oxford Library of the Fathers. 

2 Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 609. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 93 

SO, are upon Lazarus, upon Images, or " The Statues," 
upon Repentance, upon the History of Saul and David, 
upon the Gospel of Matthew, upon the Parable of the 
Debtor, upon the Forgiveness of Enemies, upon Almsgiv- 
ing, and upon Future Blessedness. It may be seen that 
most of these discourses were exegetical and Mostly 
expository, being running commentaries up- exegetical 
on the Scriptures ; and, in fact, Chrysostom ^"^ 

aimed to explain the entire word of God to ^^P°^^ °^y- 
the people, following it book by book, text by text. It is 
said that he actually did this in the course of his ministry, 
although the greater part of his exegetical homilies are 
now lost. We would call attention to this fact, that he 
was, above all, a biblical preacher, and in him we would 
find one of the noblest illustrations of this method of 
preaching. Neander says : " The tendency of the An- 
tiochan school is seen in its more moderate form, and 
deeply pervaded by the Christianity of the heart, in the 
case of two individuals, both of whom present models of 
biblical interpretation for the period in which they lived, 
while one of them furnished the best pattern of a fruitful 
homiletical application of the Sacred Scriptures ; these 
were Theodoret and Chrysostom. The example of the 
latter shows particularly the great advantage of this 
exegetical tendency, when accompanied by a deep and 
hearty feeling, and a life enriched by inward Christian 
experience, to any one who would cultivate a talent for 
homiletical exposition, and indeed for the whole office of 
the preacher." ' 

Chrysostom early adopted the intelligent Christian 
mode of interpretation pursued in the school of Antioch ; 
being, in opposition to the allegorical method of Origen 



' Neander's " Ch. Hist.," v. ii. p. 353. 



94 HOMILETICS PROPER. . 

and the Alexandrian school and its bold rationalizing 
spirit, an investigation of the simple exegesis of words as 
they stand in the Scriptures, an examination of the his- 
toric circumstances of the original writers and speakers, 
and a more careful distinguishing of the divine element 
from the human. Whatever of philosophy was intro- 
duced was Aristotelean/ 

Neander says again : ' * Through a rich inward experience 
he lived into the understanding of the Holy Scriptures ; 
and a prudent method of interpretation, on logical and 
grammatical principles, kept him in the right track in 
deriving the spirit from the letter of the sacred volume. 
His profound and simple, yet fruitful, homiletical method 
of treating the Scriptures shows to what extent he was 
indebted to both, and how, in his case, both co-operated 
together." * 

Chrysostom, as has been said, was eminently an exe- 
getical preacher, making, as did Origen and all the great 
preachers of his time, the interpretation of the word — 
the severe and yet prayerful exposition of the Scriptures 
— the basis of all his argument and exhortation, thus ele- 
vating the gospel above philosophy, above theology, and 
having the evangelic spirit running through his preaching 
—the spirit that comes from Christ through his word. 
At the same time, though so markedly a biblical preacher, 
Chrysostom was not a bibliolater. He recognized the 
human element in errors and contradictions, and did not 
attempt to explain these in a forced way. He did not 
make salvation depend on the letter of Scripture, and he 
thought that it would be better to have no Bible at all if 
the grace of God were written upon the heart in all the 
fulness of an inward spiritual revelation. 



^ See Plase's " Ch. Hist.," p. 177. 

^ Neander's " Ch. Hist.," v. ii. p. 693. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 95 

One might spend years and even a lifetime in studying 
these expository discourses, which contain every quality 
of style and eloquence. 

As to his native qualities as an orator, Chrysostom was 

gifted with splendid talents, and with an ardent vitality, 

a bold, incisive intellect, a pungent wit, a jjjg 

graphic power of the imagination, a fiery native 

temper, which, though controlled, is, after oratorical 

all, a source of power with the people, and ^^ ^" 

a profound original genius. He had, too, the training of 

the most distinguished rhetorician of his day, Libanius 

of Antioch, who was also the teacher of Basil 

. « < T^ 1 ^is culture, 

and Gregory Nazianzen, By the study 

of the ancients he secured to himself the advantages of a 
harmonious mental and rhetorical culture, which in his case 
was ennobled by the divine principle of life drawn from the 
gospel. A heart full of the love which flows from faith 
gave to his native eloquence, cultivated by the study of 
the ancients, its animating charm." ' As far as he could 
imitate any one, he built himself as a preacher upon the 
apostle Paul ; and he had the same ministerial zeal, the 
same love of souls, burning in him. He said : " It is the 
firm resolve of my soul, as long as I breathe, and as long 
as it pleaseth God to continue me in this present life, to 
perform this service, whether I am listened to or not, to 
do that which the Lord hath commanded me." " He 
complemented the sober clearness of the Antiochan exe- 
gesis and the rhetorical arts of Libanius with the depth 
of his warm Christian heart, and he carried out in 
his own life, as far as mortal man can do it, the ideal of 
the priesthood which, in youthful enthusiasm, he once 
described." "" The moral element of Christianity entered 

' Neander, v. ii. p. 693. 

^ Hase's " Ch. Hist.," p. 121. 



96 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

also largely into his preaching, and he sought, above all, 

to impress the practical truths of religion, and to gain 

influence over men for their spiritual wel- 

The fare. He preached a vital Christianity, 

'"^ not a formal orthodoxy. His whole life 

element -...,, 

in his ^ mmistry mdeed were a protest agamst 

preaching, unbelief. He contended, with a boldness 
and vigor unsurpassed, against the gigantic 
corruptions of the waning Roman empire. He preached 
on works as well as on faith, dwelling constantly upon 
the Christian life, pouring out the treasures of his heart 
upon the loveliness of the image of Christ in the be- 
liever's character, and striving to build up this inward 
Christlike life in the hearts of his hearers. '* In him we 
find a most complete mutual interpenetration of theo- 
retical and practical theology, as well as of the dogmatical 
and ethical elements, exhibited mainly in the fusion of 
the exegetical and homiletical. Hence his exegesis was 
guarded against barren philology and dogma, and his 
pulpit discourse was free from doctrinal abstraction and 
empty rhetoric. The introduction of the knowledge of 
Christianity from the sources into the practical life of the 
people left him little time for the development of special 
dogmas,'" Yet he was not wanting in the 

dogmatic element. He discoursed much on 
dogmatic 
element ^^ nature and being of God, on special 

providence, on sin, on the Church as God's 
spiritual temple, on the resurrection, and on future pun- 
ishments ; and, as a general rule, with remarkable liber- 
ality of sentiment for his age. On the subject of ever- 
lasting punishments, his lofty moral code, and the exces- 



' Niedner's " Lehrbuch der Christlichen Kirchen Geschichte," p. 303. 
Berlin, 1S61. 



HISTORY OF PREACHIXG. 97 

sively corrupt state of the times and of the Church, led 
him to a more marked sternness and positiveness of view 
than even that of Augustine, and certainly of Origen. He 
was, on this side of his preaching, overpowering in his ear- 
nestness. ' * It was the conscience of man, not his opinions, 
that he addressed ;" but the technicalities of theology 
he eschewed, and gave only the rich fruit of noble doc- 
trine. He had deep insight into the human heart, and 
understood men of all classes and characters. He was a 
fearless and terrible rebuker of sin in high places, and 
when it was a perilous thing to attack vice clothed with 
imperial arbitrary power, he shunned not to declare the 
whole counsel of God, speaking often with great severity 
of personal and popular sins, and of God's righteous judg- 
ments upon them. There was no mealy-mouthed popu- 
larity in his preaching. With cheerful courage he held 
up the light of a pure faith in the midst of the darkness 
of an impure age. Although more ornate in style than 
would suit occidental taste, yet from contemporary testi- 
mony, and from the testimony of the sermons 

1 1 • t • 1-1 ■^is style, 

that we have, his preachmg, which made the 

dome of St. Sophia ring with its rhythmical periods, 
was characterized by an eloquence as vigorous, direct, 
and vehement as, but far more copious than, that of 
Demosthenes, so rich was it in the play of the imagina- 
tion, and at times so tender, moving, and pathetic. He 
had the feeling of the true Christian preacher of the Paul- 
ine stamp, without which feeling no one can be a great and 
apostolic preacher. His discourses, like those of Augus- 
tine, rise sometimes into high devotional flights, into "that 
ampler ether and diviner air " where the incomprehensi- 
ble nature of God occupies all his thoughts, and the 
human audience is for a time lost sight of ; but, as a 
general rule, the practical, the pastoral, the missionary 



98 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

element prevails in them — that of the shepherd of souls,- 
of the leader and guardian of the Church of God. His 
preaching, as might be said of Luther's, was his life — 
it was an epitome of his character, of his soul-struggles, 
of his spiritual history. He glories in the work of 
preaching the gospel to the poor. He seems to revel in 
the richness of its divine scope and range. He varied his 
style of preaching — now using homely and familiar lan- 
guage ; at another time stirring, splendid, and energetic 
language ; and at another time metaphysical and ab- 
struse ; for, he said, the table of the gospel feast should 
be covered with various dishes, and the banquet should 
be like the divine generosity of the Giver. One might 
say of him and his style of preaching that, while he em- 
ployed all the varied sources of power to be derived from 
human training, he was, above all, trained in the school 
of the Holy Ghost, and was made a wonderfully skillful 
instrument in the hands of the divine Master. 

While he elevated the gospel above philosophy, hav- 
ing the true evangelic spirit running like a clear stream 

,,. ... through his preaching, still there is philoso- 

phy, and phy '" his preaching ; he appeals to general 
recognition of principles, and wields the whole truth with 

doctrine of power in its particular applications. While, 
perhaps, to be classed with the school of An- 
tioch in his careful and conscientious interpretation, he 
yet had much of the free spirit of the Alexandrian school 
of theologians, whose works he deeply studied. He be- 
longed to the polemic and apologetic age of the Church, 
and was thus led, in his life of mental and spiritual strife, in 
opposition to the false philosophies of the age, to medi- 
tate upon and to bring out the profounder harmonies of 
truth ; but he was such a loyal, practical, pointed scrip- 
tural preacher, of the true apostolic stamp, that he awokq 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 99 

a deadly opposition in the corrupt circle of the demoral- 
ized Greek Church, which finally destroyed him. The 
style of his sermonizing, undoubtedly, was oratorical or 
rhetorical, but his preaching was rhetoric in its best 
sense, being the persuasive communication of truth. As 
has been more than once remarked, he followed out with 
bold earnestness the problem of the freedom of the will 
and its moral self-determination, which is the foundation 
or condition of virtue. " He was so zealous for moralit)^ 
that he must have considered it a point of special impor- 
tance to deprive men of every ground of excuse for the 
neglect of moral efforts. His practical sphere of labor in 
the cities of Antioch and Constantinople gave a still 
greater impulse to this tendency. For in these large 
capitals he met with many who sought to attribute their 
want of Christian activity to the defects of human nature, 
and the power of Satan or of fate."' But it must be 
said that he urged quite as strongly on the other side the 
existence and power of depravity in opposition to a false 
moral and intellectual pride. But there is wrought into 
his sermons a vast amount of practical teaching upon 
virtue and moral subjects, some of which was derived 
from his study of the Stoical philosophy, of which he 
was fond, but chiefly from the word, example, and spirit 
of Christ. 

His sermons at Antioch were more elaborate than 
those preached at Constantinople. He composed his 
sermons with care, preparing himself by 

thorouf^h study, as well as by meditation °"^P°s^ *°^ 
A 1,-1 and form of 

and prayer. As an exegete he did not sermons 

possess a good knowledge of Hebrew, and 

he drew from the faulty Greek translations. From his 



Neander's " Ch. Hist.," v. ii. p. 658. 



lOO HOMILETICS PROPER. 

habit of expository preaching, all his discourses do not 
have an elaborate method or plan, and they are often 
desultory and diffuse ; but they are pervaded by an 
earnest aim, by the desire to build up the Church of 
Christ, to reform its corruptions, to vindicate the gospel 
against heathen philosophy, and to pluck souls from the 
depths of sin and unbelief in which they were sunk. 
Sometimes he preaches on a definite subject or proposi- 
tion, as we shall notice in a moment, dwelling upon it 
pertinaciously, and with something of the strict order of 
a classical discourse ; but as a general rule he is more 
free, and speaks the thought to which the Scriptures or 
the occasion gives rise. He was an extemporaneous 
preacher in the best sense of the term, having his facul- 
ties in command, and being able to speak solidly and 
thoroughly upon the subject presented at the moment. 
His sermons, like most of those previously to his time, 
were rather simply \6yoi (addresses, spoken words, upon 
the scriptural lesson) than ojAikiai^ or set discourses. 
Some sixty-two of his sermons are, however, regularly 
constructed discourses upon isolated texts of Scripture. 

He was probably a preacher of short sermons, for he 
says of himself, that the art of limiting himself to a 
small compass in his sermons, and of exhausting a sub- 
ject, was one of his principal endowments. His plan 
seems to have been, although he introduced a great deal 
of extraneous matter with frequent divergences into differ- 
ent themes, to preach briefly, pointedly, and frequently 
on the same subject till he had made an impression, and 
driven that particular lesson firmly into the minds of his 
hearers. He says : ** For this seems tome the best mode 
of instruction, to insist on a particular subject till we see 
our counsel taking effect. For he who discourses to-day 
on almsgiving, to-morrow on prayer, the next day on 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. loi 

kindness, and the following day on humility, will really 
be able to set his hearers right in no one of these things, 
passing so rapidly from this subject to that, and from 
that to another ; but he who would really reform his 
hearers in any particular should not cease his admonitions 
and exhortations respecting it, nor pass to another sub- 
ject till he discover his former admonitions well rooted 
in them.^ 

He was, in the best sense of the term, a popular 
preacher, gaining this distinction by his plainness, 
clearness, directness, and, more than all, by 
his abundant, lively, often homely, method P°P" *^ 
of illustration. His illustrations may be 
studied at this day for their freshness, vivacity, and 
illuminating quality. He knew how to come down to 
the level of the popular mind. The people were often 
completely carried away by his eloquence, and acted 
like drunken persons ; they pressed up to the pulpit 
where he spoke, so as not to lose a single word ; they 
said, when he was about to be banished, " Better that 
the sun should cease to shine than that our Chrysos- 
tom's mouth should be stopped ;" even the cold Gibbon 
praises his golden eloquence, and another has said, 
" his tongue flowed like the stream of the Nile." 

On the whole, to conclude this sketch, we would 
characterize this great preacher as one in all respects the 
best model for our imitation — one to be the most care- 
fully studied, and as far as practicable followed — since 
the days of the inspired preachers ; for he was built 
morally and spiritually, by nature, culture, and grace, 
upon an apostolic and divine plan. While a man of vast 
mind, he was, according to Pascal's classification of 



Bib. Sacra," v. iv. p. 625. 



I02 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

preachers, a preacher who belonged to the order of love 
rather than to the order of intellect. Eloquent beyond 
his age, and almost every age, the apostolic earnest- 
ness of his character as a preacher makes even the genius 
of the man seem secondary ; and compared with Gregory 
Nazianzen and most of the great preachers of his period, 
in whom the philosophic and rhetorical elements pre- 
dominated, he was Pauline in his bare, towering, sub- 
lime spirituality. He, like Paul, could boast of his gifts, 
but he counted all as nothing, less than nothing, that 
he might win Christ, and win the world to Christ. 

In addition to his homiletical and exegetical works, 
Chrysostom wrote a most valuable treatise on the priest- 
hood, TIfpz lepoavvrji, which contains valuable hints on 
the preaching and pastoral office. " He requires of the 
priest, or minister, to be better than the monk and 
better than other men, as he has greater difficulties to 
contend with, and a greater fight to wage. He sets up 
as the highest object of the preacher the great principle 
stated by Paul, that in all his discourses he should seek 
to please' God alone, not men. He must not, indeed, 
despise the approving demonstrations of men ; but as 
little must he count them, nor trouble himself when his 
hearers withhold them. Imperturbable comfort in his 
labors he finds only in the consciousness of having his 
discourse framed and wrought out to the approval of 
God."^ 

Without spending time upon the great preachers of 
the fourth and fifth centuries of the Western Church, such 
as Hilarius, Bishop of Pictavium, ** the Athanasius of the 



^ Schaff, V. ii. p. 253 : see also Neander's " Life of Chrysostom ;" 
Paniel's " Gesch.," p. 590 j^^. ; and Moule's "Oratory," pp. 140, 141, 
145, 146, 152, 156. 157. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 103 

West ;" Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, who was <^reat in 

character, but who as an orator was " more 

successful by simpHfying imitations of ^ ^""s» "^"' 

brose, 

Greek models than by orimnal eloquence ;" ^ t^^^ « 

Jo ^ ' Jerome. 

and Jerome, who, though more of a writer 
and theologian than preacher, yet exerted a vast influ- 
ence on the preaching and interpretation of his day, in- 
troducing Greek learning and Greek methods into the 
Western Church, we will conclude our account of this 
period by saying a few words upon Augustine as a 
preacher. 

Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, was born at 
Tagaste, in Numidia, November 13th, 354. Like Chry- 
sostom, he possessed the inestimable ad- 
vantage of having a thoroughly Christian 
mother. Of Monica Neander says : " Whatever treas- 
ures of virtue and worth a life of faith, even of a soul 
not trained by scientific culture, can bestow, was set 
before him in the example of his pious mother." Of a 
passionate nature, and full of the consciousness of power, 
he plunged not only into the brilliant though false intel- 
lectual life, but also the vicious excesses of the luxurious 
city of Carthage. The reading of Cicero's Hortensius, 
reveahng the dignity of philosophical pursuits, is said 
to have been the first good influence upon his mind, 
turning him from an openly immoral career. To quote 
Neander, " The conflict now began in his soul which 
lasted through eleven years of his life. As the sim- 
plicity of the Holy Scriptures possessed no attraction to 
his taste — a taste formed by rhetorical studies and the 
artificial discipline of the declamatory schools — especial- 
ly as his mind was now in the same tone and direction 



' Hase, " Hist, of Chr. Ch.," p. 118. 



104 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

with that of the Emperor Julian, when the latter was 
conducted to the Platonic theosophy ; as, moreover, he 
found so many things in the doctrines of the Church 
which, from, want of inward experience, could not be 
otherwise than unintelligible to him, while he attempted 
to grasp, by the understanding from without, what could 
be understood only by the inner life, from the feeling of 
inward want, and one's own inward experience ; so, 
under these circumstances, the delusive pretensions of 
the Manichaean sect, which, instead of a blind belief 
on authority, held out the promise of clear knowledge 
and a satisfactory solution of all questions relating 
to things human and divine, presented the stronger 
attractions to his inexperienced youth." While then 
an instructor in rhetoric at Carthage, he threw him- 
self with his accustomed impetuosity into the Manichaean 
heresy. He wrote about that time a book on aesthetics 
{De Apto et Pidchrd), which has been lost. After wast- 
ing some ten years in the barren Manichasan philoso- 
phy he went to Rome, and then to Milan. Through 
the preaching of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, and, 
above all, the prayers and tears of his mother, he be- 
came a Christian in 386. He returned to Africa, 
was ordained presbyter, then bishop-coadjutor, then 
Bishop of Hippo {Hippo-Regius), on the Numidian coast 
of North Africa, in 396. He carried on his great contest 
with Pelagius, with which the world rang ; but his suc- 
ceeding history, as a church father and theologian, is a 
familiar one, and we merely add the date of his death — 
August 28th, 430, at the age of jd. 

We will not speak of him as a theologian, though com- 
ing, as Milman says, just at the right time, and repre- 
senting the thought of the age, as going through 
Manichaeism and Platonism into pure Christianity ; but 



HISTORY OF rREACHhXG. 1 05, 

it is only as a preacher that we now have to do with 
him. Great as he was as a theologian, whose theology- 
Luther moulded into Protestantism, and Jansenius into 
Roman Catholicism, yet next after Origen and Chrysos- 
tom he had the deepest influence upon homiletical 
studies and preaching of almost any man. 

He himself produced a great number of homiletical 
works, both as a writer and sermonizer. A large number 
of his homilies, probably by means of short- 
hand reporters, have come down to us 

^ on 

fresh, sharp-cut, full of life and vigor, as if preaching. 

preached yesterday. 

As the moral element was prominent in Chrysostom's 
preaching, so in Augustine's the doctrinal or dogmatic 
element predominated, and from his exam- 
ple it has entered and ruled in the Christian ogma ic 

element 
pulpit to this day. His mind was of a predominant. 

speculative and organizing, rather than prac- 
tical order ; but notwithstanding this tendency to phi- 
losophy, he did, like Chrysostom, preach to the popular 
heart, and was above oratorical vanity, or the ambition 
to be considered eloquent, though his sermons still show 
the effect of his rhetorical and philosophical training. 
His own experience gave him a profound knowledge of 
sin and of the corrupt heart, and even his doctrinal dis- 
cussions were followed by a close application to his 
hearers' consciences. His main aim in preaching seemed 
to be to do good, and to draw men, by the agency of 
the preached word, to God. 

Augustine was not, however, a faultless preacher. 
Many of his sermons, especially his doc- 
trinal discourses, are jejune and barren ; , ,,, 

•' ■' faultless, 

and one may sometimes search in them 

in vain for the barest scriptural or even moral truth. 



lo6 . HOMILETICS PROPER. 

There is much also that is fanciful and excessively 
puerile : plays upon words, startling antitheses, odd con- 
ceits. There is often not the least systematic arrange- 
ment, and one wonders that a man of such extraordinary 
genius could have spoken such useless things. But these 
faults belonged to the age ; and he was too earnest a 
preacher, too strongly bent on winning men to Christ and 
doing God's work, to err greatly in this direction or any 
other. 

Augustine spent most of his life in studying and teach- 
ing the art of orator}/, and when he became a Christian 
he made- a special application of his rhetor- 
a writer j^^j studies to preaching. He wrote a treatise 
" Homiletics. °^ sacred rhetoric, which is contained in the 
fourth book of his great work entitled '* De 
Doctrina Christiana." 

In briefly and freely analyzing this treatise, its chief 
principles might be set forth under some twelve distinct 
heads : 

(i.) The knowledge of rhetoric is a genuine science, 

highly useful to be pursued by the Christian preacher, 

and its principles should be acquired by him 

^^" when young, or at the beginnings of his 
homiletical . . . , ^' , , • ^ , i , 

oreceots ministerial life ; and chiefly through the 

study and hearing of good models. 

(2.) As the preacher is a champion of the true faith 
and an opponent of error, he should use his first efforts to 
teach good and to unteach evil ; he may for this purpose 
employ every legitimate method of influencing men, and 
use different means and styles of persuasion — viz., con- 
versation, historical illustration, argument, motives, open 
rebuke, animated exhortation. 

(3.) It is better for the preacher to speak with true 
knowledge isapienter) than with mere art {eloqiienter) ; 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 107 

and a man speaks with more or less of true knowledge as 
he makes greater or less advancement in the study of the 
Scriptures. This Scriptural knowledge may go a great 
way as a substitute for artistic eloquence ; but a union 
of biblical knowledge and artistic eloquence he considered 
highly desirable. 

(4.) Plainness or perspicuity is the first great merit of 
the preacher ; and he thought that the obscure parts of 
even inspired Scripture were not to be imitated by the 
human teacher. Clearness rather than elaborateness 
should be aimed after ; and he says, in so many words, 
that the best preacher is he who provides that his hearer 
hear the truth, and that what he hears he understands. 
He held that the thought is to be preferred above the 
word, and that the true is better than the artistic. 

(5.) Everything in preaching should be held subservient 
to bending the hearer to action. Didactic preaching should 
not waste itself in vain learning and argumentation, but 
should-aim to bring to light what is hidden, and set it 
vividly before the minds and hearts of the hearers, how- 
ever this be done ; for what is the use of a golden key, if 
it will not open, and what advantage has it to the wooden 
key that will open ? 

(6.) Attractiveness or persuasiveness in preaching must, 
however, always be tempered, 

{a) By sound doctrine ; 
{b) By gravity. 
He gives examples of the violation of the first rule in the 
false prophets, whose seductive, persuasive eloquence in 
falsehood brought dreadful ruin upon Israel ; and of the 
second rule in Cyprian, where even so great a father erred 
in speaking foolishly, and lost more than he gained by 
his mistimed liveliness. 

(7.) It is by the Christian feeling of his sermons, more 



lo8 IIOMILETICS PROPER. 

than by any endowments of intellect, that the preacher 
must hope to inform the understandings, and catch the 
affections and bend the Avill of his hearers. If thus 
earnest, the Holy Spirit will come to his assistance. The 
Spirit is promised (Matt. lO : 19) to those who for Christ 
were delivered over to persecution, and he will not with- 
hold his aid from those who are heartily engaged in de- 
livering Christ into the hands of learners. But nothing, 
he thought, was more unwise in itself, or more alien from 
the spirit and letter of the divine economy, than to sup- 
pose that the gifts of the Spirit justify us in relaxing our 
own efforts of preparation, whether intellectual or 
spiritual. 

(8.) As to style in preaching, while the thought should 
be preferred above the word, precisely as the mind is 
preferred above the body, and while thus bearing in 
mind the prime importance of his subject-matter itself, 
he laid down the following distinctions of style to be 
observed by the preacher according to the several exigen- 
cies of application. Is he conveying instruction ? he 
should use the simple and low style {submissa dictid). 
Is he bestowing praise or blame ? the even and regulated 
style {temperata dictid). Is he rousing the sluggish or 
diseased will to a performance of duty .^ the lofty and 
impressive {grande dicendi geims). 

Examples of all these styles are extracted from the 
writings of St. Paul. The low and quiet {submissa 
dictid) is illustrated from Gal. 4:21 ff., and 3 : 15 ff., in 
the first of which the Judaizing Galatians are met by an 
allegory ; and in the second the redemption of the 
world through Christ is vindicated against the exclusive 
claims of the special covenant. 

Several passages are brought forward in explanation of 
the even and regulated mode of speech {temperata dictid), 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 109 

the chief of them being Rom. 12 : i ; 12 : 6 ; 13 : 6 ; 
13 : 12. 

The lofty and impressive style {gi-ande diccndi genus) 
is nobly represented by 2 Cor. 6:2; Rom. 8 : 28 ff., and 
the chapter is brought to a close by an extract from Gal. 
4 : 10 ff., which is characterized by Augustine as the one 
" lofty" passage in a production the general tone of 
which is " low and quiet," dismissed by the " even and 
regular" style at the beginning and end. 

(9.) "A variety in style should be employed," or, he 
says, one style being made to relieve another. But, 
above all, care must be taken not to prolong the " lofty 
and impressive" style beyond judicious limits. The very 
strain upon the mind which eloquence involves, and upon 
which its effect depends, cannot be kept up. 

The legitimate effect of the impressive style is not to 
draw down men's approbation, but to move their feel- 
ings. It is the tear and rtot the shout that forms its 
proper result. Augustine brings forward an instance of 
the effect of his own words in quelling a tumult in 
Mauritanian Caesarea. The " low" is best in all cases of 
instruction, as of proof distinguished from active influ- 
ence. But, at best, these styles are only imperfect means 
to an end ; and the end, or right persuasion, is all in all. 

(10.) All styles of address are mutually interdependent. 
We should not separate them, nor think that one should 
be regarded as the sole instrument of mastering the un- 
derstanding, another the affections, another the v/ill. 

(11.) More important than anything is the life of the 
preacher ; and no rules of art will ever have the least 
chance of supplying the void which must result from an 
unsoundness in that. He adds in another place that 
" ministers should avoid faults of conduct more than 
faults of oratory." 



no HOMILETICS PROPER. 

(i2.) In conclusion, let not prayer be forgotten. Did 
Esther pray for an evpvd}AOv Xoyov, when pleading for 
the temporal safety of her people ? And shall we neglect 
to do the same when the eternal welfare of mankind is at 
stake ? 

Though profound as a theologian, and brilliant as a 
rhetorician and dialectician, Augustine as a preacher was 
uncommonly simple and direct. Niebuhr 
calls him eloquent, but it was the eloquence 
of simple, unaffected truth. Although so highly rhetor- 
ical in his other works, most of his sermons are so plain in 
their style and biblical and spiritual in their themes, that 
they could be preached with effect at this day ; they have 
that freshness which springs from the central light and 
spirit of Christian truth. They are, however, full of the 
expression of devotional feeling ; and the intense passion 
of his nature, turned after his conversion into devotional 
channels, bursts out and overflows in his discourses, which 
sometimes rise to the highest pitch of eloquence. There 
is in his discourses no rigidly logical plan — for he followed 
the rhetorical rather than logical order — his reasoning in 
this respect resembling that of Paul rather than that of 
Aristotle ; but there is evident unity of aim, even if not 
strictly logical unity. While always drawn from some 
portion of the word of God, his sermons are not often 
built upon particular texts, and yet one text is usually 
prominently brought forward near the beginning of the 
homily, and this appears to be the main text around 
which other passages of Scripture are grouped, and about 
which the sermon itself revolves. 

His favorite precept, that the general style of the 
preacher should be a low and plain one {subniissa dictio)^ 
was strikingly exemplified in his own preaching. 

Although his serm^ons, as has been said, rise to eloquent 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. m 

flights, gaining for him the name of " the Christian 
Cicero," yet he was really too earnest to indulge in much 
rhetorical freedom. He had at times a kind of direct im- 
passioned energy that was full of poAver/ 

Augustine preached mostly in an extemporaneous 
manner, and with but slight immediate preparation ; 
for his sermons appear to have been al- Extempo- 
ways freely delivered, and he was occasion- raneous 
ally directed to the choice of a subject by preacher, 
thoughts that sprang up during the course of sacred wor- 
ship. He followed the ancient method of commenting 
upon the lesson of Scripture which had been read by the 
praelector in the public service. His manner of preach- 
ing is chiefly expository, going upon the principle of ex- 
plaining from the pulpit as much of the Bible as possible. 
He deeply pondered the word of God, and drew his in- 
spiration, his thought, his style, from this divine fountain. 
As an exegete, however, his discourses do not ahvays 
show profound learning ; for though well versed in the 
Latin language and literature, he has always had the 
reputation of being a poor Greek scholar, and he knew 
little or nothing of Hebrew. " Apparently he was in 
the habit of using translations of Plato (Confess. 8, 2) ; 
but, on the other hand, Greek words frequently occur in 
his writings, correctly rendered and discriminated ; and 
he speaks, in one of his epistles to Marcellinus, of refer- 
ring to the Greek psalter, and finding, in reference to cer- 
tain difficulties, that it agreed with the Vulgate. Clausen, 
who has particularly investigated this point, sums up the 
evidence to this effect, that Augustine was " fairly in- 
structed in Greek grammar, and a subtle distinguisher of 
words ;" but that beyond this his knowledge was insuffi- 



See Merivale's " Conversion of the Roman Empire," p. 78. 



112 HO MILE TICS PROPER. 

cient for a thorough comprehension of Greek books, and 
especially for those in the Hellenistic dialect/ " 

The introduction of his sermon is commonly simple and 
artlessly attractive. He often goes on without developing 
any specific proposition or theme, and then as suddenly 
comes to an end, closing generally with the doxology, or 
with a short prayer. Indeed, as to that, the early preach- 
ers were in the habit of introducing short prayers in all 
stages of their sermons, as the Spirit moved them. 

Augustine was an inexhaustibly fruitful preacher. "He 
often preached five times a day In succession, sometimes 
Number twice a day, and set it as the object of his 
of preaching that all might live with him, and 

sermons. he with all, In Christ. Whenever he went 
into Africa he was begged to preach the word of salva- 
tion."^ His sermons and ecclesiastical orations that still 
remain to us number some five hundred and ninety ; of 
these, one hundred and eighty-three are upon passages in 
the Old and New Testaments, eighty upon church fes- 
tivals, sixty-nine upon saints and martyrs. They are, 
indeed, upon all subjects fitted for pulpit Instruction, and 
exhibit Immense range and variety of topics. 

As a general thing, Augustine's sermons are short, 

some of them probably not more than a quarter of an 

hour in length. In comparison with the endlessly 

long and ornate discourses of the Greek preachers, 

his brevity and simplicity are worthy of imitation. 

Although he frequently enhvened his discourses with 

historical Illustrations, yet In metaphors 

... ^ . and fip;ures of speech he does not abound, 
illustrations. ^ ^ 

or, when they do occur, they are not, while 
sometimes elegant and powerful, as a general rule, par- 

' " Encyclopaedia Britannica." 

^ Schaff's " Ecc. Hist.," v. iii. p, 194. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 1 13 

ticularly felicitous. It seems as if his earnestness caused 
him to rise above rhetorical style, of which he was never- 
theless a trained master. He trusted to the Spirit of 
God, and to the inbreathing- of his heart-melting- elo- 
quence.' He preached to the many, not to the few. He 
preached in an animated and pungent manner, with an 
affectionate ardor, abounding in pointed interrogation 
and appeal. He emphasized the side of truth in which 
his deepest personal experience lay — viz., the extreme 
corruption of the human heart, and the absoluteness of 
divine grace. No one could be unmoved under his lively 
and incisive harangues. He stood face to face with the 
soul, and had a tone of intense reality. The African fire 
of his native temperament pervaded his discourses, only 
purified and attempered by the Spirit of God. 

We would close this sketch of the preaching of the 
fourth and fifth centuries, and in fact of the first five cen- 
turies, by saying that although the preaching 
of the patristic period has been by some Patristic 

enthusiastic students overpraised, and its P^"° 

of homiletical 
eloquence falsciy compared to the best study 

periods of Greek and Roman eloquence, yet, 
with all its faults, it is a rich field of study. It affords a 
still fresh region of homiletical research and suggestion. 
Luther called Augustine " the best and purest of the 
fathers," and from the reading of his sermons and writ- 
ings he caught the true spirit, the deep meaning, and the 
renewing life of the word of God. In the earlier patristic 
preachers there was much that still lingered of the sim- 
ple, artless evangelic spirit, which was mixed with and 
corrupted by the coming in of Greek philosophy, while 
at the same time it was deepened and^ adapted to the 
intellectual wants of men. 



' See Moule's "Oratory," pp. 177, 17S : Aug. " Confess.," Ox. cd. p. 389. 



114 HO MILE TICS P 1^0 PER. 

We have thus traced the historic beginnings of the 
preaching office from the time of the apostles, and fol- 
lowed down the varied and changing current of preach- 
ing through the first five centuries, from the simple col- 
loquial style of address to the dawning inception of art 
and the influence of Greek philosophy ; through the 
theological period, strictly so called, to the broader de- 
velopment of the pulpit discourse, in what might be prop- 
erly called " the oratorical period," uniting the expo- 
sitory with the didactic, analysis with synthesis, exe- 
getical interpretation of the Bible with the rhetorical, 
methodized, and philosophic habit of thought, as exem- 
plified especially in such great preachers as Chrysostom 
and Augustine. But during all this period, with all its 
faults and corruptions, we have discovered the grand 
truth that the Scriptures themselves continued to be re- 
garded as the true and only basis of preaching, and that 
interpretation lay at the bottom of all address which 
aimed at bringing the kingdom of God in its spiritual 
power and supernatural claims to bear upon the minds 
of men. 

If we derived but this one lesson from the study of the 
history of early and patristic preaching, it would be an 
ample reward. 

Sec. 8. Preaching from the Sixth Century to the Ref- 
ormation. 

A longer time has been spent on the preceding five 
centuries of Christian preaching, from the fact that in 
them we were treating of the beginnings of things, of the 
influence of the apostolic institutions, and were tracing 
the origin and early development of the office of preach- 
ing in the Christian Church ; but we must now move on 
more rapidly. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 115 

During the sixth century, while there were thoroughly 

educated and skilful orators as well as earnest preachers, 

who united culture with Christian faith and zeal, yet 

more and more the preaching tended to 

rhetorical skill and self-display. The re- tendency 

to rhetorical 
buke of Athanasms to the preachers of his display and 

day would apply still more to those who luxurious liv- 

came after them. He said : " If the church ing in the 

were an audience for the hearing of orators, clergy— 
, , , 111-1 1 rebuke of 

then eloquent words would be m place ; but . , 

since it was a place of contention for the 
highest achievements of piety, words were not so 
much needed there as good conduct." The clergy of 
the Roman empire, east and west, grew luxurious in 
their habits, loved fine clothing and rich living ; and the 
bishops especially, who had by this time monopolized 
the preaching office, or at all events had monopolized 
the entire control of it, lost their zeal for preaching ; 
and yet, in spite of this, and notwithstanding the gross 
corruptions and superstitions that began to make their 
appearance in the Church, there still continued to be 
in the Church an earnest desire to interpret the word 
of God to men ; and this was undoubtedly the main pur- 
pose of all the great preachers of the age. 

But when we come down as late as the seventh cen- 
tury, we find that preaching was beginning to sink to 
those depths of degradation, which con- 
tinued to grow more and more profound. Downward 
even to the time preceding the Reforma- ^^"^^"^y 
tion. The idea of bringing the word of century 
God to bear directly on the mind and 
heart of the people, as in previous ages, was more and, 
more lost sight of, though it was not as yet entirely lost. 
In the middle of the eighth century, at the Council of 



Ii6 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Cloveshire, for example, constituted for the refor- 
Attemots to "^^^^^^ ^^ abuses in the EngHsh Church, 
revive the preaching was declared by the bishops to be 
custom of a duty Avhenever they visited the different 
preaching, churches ; this implied that in the interval 
of these pastoral visitations the people had no public re- 
ligious instruction. Afterward Charlemagne, in his 
time, exhorted his clergy to preach on cer- 
Charlemagne's^^.j^ occasions; and Alcuin, his adviser, 
efforts. , . , , . , 

especially strove to renew this duty, which 

had almost fallen into complete disuse in the German 

and Gallic churches ; but where preaching was renewed, 

those who preached — the bishops themselves — were rude, 

unlearned men, and public worship had become a round 

of senseless forms and ceremonials. True preaching had 

lost its important place in worship ; its light was put out 

in the temple. Certain " postils" {postillcE), originally 

signifying: brief comments upon a text of 
Postils. ^^ . ^ 1 1 . 1 1 

bcripture, and which were snort discourses 

or commonplaces that were manufactured by the 

bishops, to be recited by the preacher, were read. A 

collection of these homilies was first made by Alcuin, 

and a fuller one by two of his pupils, Rabanus Maurus 

and Haimo. They had for their principal 

Themes of tj^gj^^s the authority of the Roman Church, 

preaching. -^ 

the glory of the Virgin, the flames of pur- 
gatory, and similar topics. An ancient English preacher 
of the better sort, Dan Jon Gaytrigg by name, mentions 
the "six things" which formed the theology and the 
subject-matter of preaching of his day. " The fourteen 
points of the creed, the ten commandments, the seven 
sacraments, the seven works of mercy, the seven virtues, 
the seven deadly sins." There can be no doubt that 
Christian truth was conveyed in such preaching ; but the 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 117 

monastic system corrupted the Christianity of the Middle 
Ages (or those ages lying between the period of the 
destruction of the Roman empire and the Reformation), 
by promulgating the idea that there could be no true 
religious life outside of the monastery walls — in fact, 
as Dean Milman said, " Manichaeism poisoned the life- 
blood of mediaeval Christianity." Some of the names of 
the great preachers of the Middle Ages, com- 
mencing from the time of Venerable Bede, Names of great 

preachers of 
in the last half of the seventh century and , j^^ Middle 

first half of the eighth, are Bede himself, Ages, 
who worthily modelled his preaching on the 
admirable homiletical precepts of Pope Gregory the 
Great ; St. Boniface in the eighth century ; Rabanus 
Maurus in the ninth century ; St. Peter Damiani (re- 
former of the papacy in his day) ; Anselm and Peter 
Abelard in the eleventh century ; St. Bernard of Clair- 
vaux, Guaric, Abbot of Igniac, Peter, Bishop of Chartres, 
and Hugo St. Victor in the twelfth century ; St. Anthony 
of Padua, St. Francis of Assisi, Albertus Magnus and 
Thomas Aquinas of the thirteenth century ; Berthold, 
the Franciscan, in the fourteenth century^ and Thomas a 
Kempis in the fifteenth. Most of these were monks of 
the Franciscan and Dominican preaching 
orders. At first there was very little of The preach- 
regular preaching in the vernacular ; but in ^"^ orders— 
the ninth century, at the councils of May- t^he vernacuUr. 
ence and Langres, some earnest effort seems 
to have been made to renew the office of regular preach- 
ing in the Church ; and it was also decreed that the 
Christian faith should be taught to the people, and the 
Scriptures expounded to them in their vernacular. These, 
however, were but transient efforts, gleams athwart 
the darkness, that did not influence the deep prevailing 



ii8 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

want of religious instruction from the pulpit ; and all 
that related to public worship grew more and more sensu- 
ous and puerile. From the twelfth to the fourteenth cen- 
turies there was much preaching in the common tongue 
by itinerant friars, of a highly fanatical 
Preaching of j^j^^^^ They dealt with the fears and super- 
itinerant . . . , , , .,,,.- 
r • stitions of the people, who were mdeed chil- 
dren in their hands. One of the chief aims 
of this preaching was to induce the people to enter upon 
the Church's pilgrimages and crusades. Still there were 
noble exceptions, throughout the so-called 
Exceptions of ^^^-^ ^^^^^ ^f preachers, powerful both in 
earnest and . , , ..,.,., 
. . . human eloquence and true spirituality, like 

preachers. Berthold in the thirteenth century, John 

Wyclif, and that remarkable company of 

preachers of the fourteenth century who were called the 

*' Friends of God," such as Erckhardt, Nicholas of Basle, 

Tauler, and Henry Suso. 

Master Erckhardt, as he was termed, the Dominican, was 

a bold thinker, and with a pantheistic tendency, anticipat- 

T-« , . j^ iner, it is said, the German transcendental phi- 
Erckhardt. t^' ' r 

losophy ; but he was still a true believer, keep- 
ing in company with Augustine, and holding the great 
facts of the divine personality and human responsibility. 
^ . Tauler was a profound preacher, of the mys- 

tical type, contending against externalism 
in religion, and the meritoriousness of good works, and 
he was one of the originators of the old German theology, 
so fascinating to Luther and to all spiritually-minded men. 
Luther frequently referred to him and his sermons. He 
said (Epistol. xxiii. ad Spalatin) : ''Si te delectat puram 
solidiam antiques similliuiani TJicologiam legere i7t Ger- 
inanica lingua effusam sermones jfoh. Tauleri Prcsdicatiorice 
profcssioncs comparare tibi potes. Ncqne enim ego vel in 



HISTORY OF rREACIIIXG. II9 

LattJia vel in nostra lingua TJicologiam vidi salnbriorem, ct 
cum Evajigclio consonantiorevi.'' Tauler's preaching was 
without art, and his sermons were simple developments, 
through meditation, of the word of God, like pure flow- 
ers springing up, under the sun and rain of heaven, from 
their hidden roots. They dwell chiefly upon Christ and 
divine love. They were brief " postils" in plain, com- 
prehensible speech, showing the w^ay to blessedness and 
the soul's perfection through Christ. They are, however, 
often profound in their spiritual meaning. The main 
principle of these old preachers was that " No work or 
service is good and perfect unless it is the simple, unselfish 
outflow of a divine principle of love and life in the heart ; 
but if a man works for himself, for a reward, for a where- 
fore, he is a hireling, and not a true friend or servant of 
God." * These mystics as preachers are not to be de- 
spised, since they represent, like the apostle John him- 
self, a faith deeper than that of their antagonists. They 
have seized upon a living principle, true in all ages, 
and the renewing principle of the Church, that pre- 
serves it from sinking into dead forms on the one hand, 
and dead philosophy on the other. Still, their doctrine 
of longing for union with God and of annihilation of 
self, was, to say the least, liable to run into errors. 

We would say a word concerning another light of 
the Dark Ages, the greatest of the English early 
reformers and preachers, John Wyclif. John Wyclif 
was born in 1324 and died 1384. About 

1363 he took his degree at Oxford and ,„ " 
^ Wyclif. 

began his lectures on divinity, in which 

his first anti-papal opinions were put forth. These 



' Dr. Pfeifier's " Deutsche Mystiker der Vierzehnten Yahrhundert. " 
1845. 



120 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

lectures made Oxford the centre of theological il- 
lumination, eclipsing the great fame of the University 
of Paris and the French schools. Wyclif owed some- 
thing of his progressive tendency to the English Doctor 
Ockham, but far surpassed him in acuteness and bold- 
ness of views. Concerning this period, a recent English 
historian says : " The spare, emaciated frame of Wyclif, 
weakened by study and by asceticism, hardly promised a 
reformer who would carry on the stormy work of Ock- 
ham ; but within this frail form lay a temper quick and 
restless, an immense energy, an immovable conviction, 
an unconquerable pride. The personal charm which ever 
accompanies real greatness had only deepened the influ- 
ence he derived from the spotless purity of his life. As 
yet, indeed, even Wyclif himself can hardly have sus- 
pected the immense range of his intellectual power. It 
was only the struggle that lay before him which revealed 
in the dry and subtle school-man the founder of our later 
English prose, a master of popular invective, of irony, 
of persuasion, a dexterous politician, an audacious par- 
tisan, the organizer of a religious order, the unsparing 
assailant of abuses, the boldest and most indefatigable of 
controversialists, the first reformer who dared, when de- 
serted and alone, to question and deny the creed of the 
Christendom around him, to break through the tradition 
of the past, and with his last breath to assert the freedom 
of religious thought against the dogmas of the papacy." ' 
As a lecturer on divinity, Wyclif showed the greatest 
daring in theological speculation, with, however, a strong 
leaning to Augustine's doctrine of predestination. In 
1374 he was presented to the parish of Lutterworth, re- 



^ J. R. Green's " A Short History of the English People," Harper's 
ed. p. 251. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 121 

maining through all his stormy career its priest and 
preacher ; laboring with great zeal, and preaching not 
only on Sundays but on the festival days ; showing him- 
self, in another's language, " a most exemplary and 
unwearied pastor." Here he began his indomitable 
efforts at church reform, and his attacks upon the papacy : 
styling the pope " antichrist," " the proud, worldly priest 
of Rome," "the most cursed of clippers and purse- 
kervers" (cut-purses). He was the upholder of the rights 
of the Church of England against papal aggressions, and 
grew bolder in his assaults upon the doctrine of transub- 
stantiation. He was soon summoned to appear before 
the Convocation, but was saved from condemnation 
through the influence of his powerful friend, John of 
Gaunt. His fundamental idea of the kingdom of God 
having reference immediately to the individual conscience 
swept away the whole tissue of the papal system of a 
mediating priesthood. Pope Gregory VI. issued several 
bulls having direct reference to him and his opinions ; 
on which he was summoned before the bishops' council 
at Lambeth, but again, through a happy turn of circum- 
stances, escaped. He now commenced his great work of 
translating the Scriptures, and giving them to the people 
in their vernacular, and also of defending the Scriptures 
by constant preaching and writing, sagaciously addressed 
to the common mind of the English people. Here we 
see him as the founder of biblical preaching in England, 
which was addressed in plain, popular language to the 
minds and hearts of the common people. The historian 
before quoted thus remarks of this popular work of 
Wyclif — and with this quotation, which graphically char- 
acterizes the great English preacher of reform, we would 
end the sketch : " But Wyclif no longer looked for sup- 
port to the learned or wealthier classes on whom he had 



122 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

hitherto relied. He appealed, and the appeal Is memora- 
ble as the first of such a kind in our history, to England 
at large. With an amazing industry he issued tract after 
tract in the tongue of the people itself. The dry, syllo- 
gistic Latin, the abstruse and involved argument which 
the great doctor had addressed to his academic hearers, 
were suddenly flung aside, and by a transition which 
marks the wonderful genius of the man, the school-man 
was transformed into the pamphleteer. If Chaucer is 
the father of our later English poetry, Wyclif is the 
father of our later English prose. The 
rough, clear, homely English of his tracts, 
orose ^^ speech of the plowman and the trades 
of the day, though colored with the pictu- 
resque phraseology of the Bible, is in its literary use as dis- 
tinctly a creation of his own as the style in which he em- 
bodied it — the terse, vehement sentences, the stinging 
sarcasms, the hard antitheses which roused the dullest 
mind like a whip. Once fairly freed from the trammels 
of unquestioning belief, Wyclif's mind worked fast in its 
career of scepticism. Pardons, indulgences, absolutions, 
pilgrimages to the shrines of the saints, worship of their 
images, worship of the saints themselves, were succes- 
sively denied. A formal appeal to the Bible as the one 
ground of faith, coupled with an assertion of the right of 
every instructed man to examine the Bible for himself, 
threatened the very groundwork of the old dogmatism 
Avith ruin. Nor were these daring denials confined to 
the small circle of the scholars who still clung to him : 
with the practical ability which is so marked a feature of 
his character, Wyclif had organized, some few years be- 
fore, an order of poor preachers, ' The Simple Priests,' 
whose coarse sermons and long russet dress moved the 
laughter of the clergy, but who now formed a priceless 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 1 23 

organization for the diffusion of their master's doctrines. 
How rapid their progress must have been we may see 
from the panic-struck exaggerations of their opponents. 
A few years later every second man 3-ou met, they com- 
plain, was a Lollard ; the followers of Wyclif abounded 
everywhere, and in all classes, among the baronage in 
the cities, among the peasantry of the country-side, even 
in the monastic cell itself." ^ 

Mention was made of the exceptionally noble preach- 
ers of the Middle Ages, and especially those of the four- 
teenth century, of whom Wyclif was the greatest. Of this 
same class, in the fifteenth century, John Huss, Gerson 
{Doctor CJiristianissimus), who was the founder of Galli- 

canism, and Savonarola, mi^ht be particular- ^ 

^ ^ Savonarola. 

ly noticed. We will dwell only upon the last 
of these, because as a preacher, he was the greatest. 
Jerome Savonarola was more truly a preacher than even 
Wyclif. His prophet's throne was the pulpit. His 
preaching not only moved the city of Florence, but all 
Italy and the papal church ; and its profound effects 
were seen in the Reformation of the next century. He 
v/as the Wesley and Whitefield of his age, combined with 
a higher order of genius than either. He took complete 
possession of his hearers — of their imagination, feeling, 
and will. He played upon every string, now appealing 
to the heart, and now assailing with tremendous force 
the conscience. He understood the power of this great 
instrumentality of preaching, ceaselessly laboring in his 
pulpit till he was cut off by a violent death. He was 
born at Ferrara in 1452, and was burned at the stake in 
Florence in 1498, his life thus nearly covering the last half 
of the fifteenth century. The history of his life, like that 



Green's " Histor}- of the English People," p. 206. 



124 I/O AIILE TICS PROPER. 

of Luther's, in its great events and steps, is so familiar a 
one that we need not give it circumstantially, since it is 
especially as a preacher that our attention is now directed 
to him. The year after his birth, in 1453, Constantinople 
was taken by the Turks', so that he felt during his whole 
life, and especially as a citizen of Florence, the influence 
of the dispersion of the Greeks, and the rise of the 
** New Learning" during the early part of that marvel- 
lous period of the Renaissance. His intellectual and 
spiritual life was greatly influenced by this. The com- 
ing of large numbers of the most learned Greek scholars 
to Italy, and their reception and patronage by the Medici 
family, opened the treasures of ancient literature, and gave 
birth not only to new ideas in art and philosophy, but 
also in political science and religious civilization. The 
effete political and religious systems of the Middle Ages 
began to be assailed by bold thinkers, and among these 
none thundered so terribly against the towers of bigotry 
and tyranny as did the Dominican monk-preacher of San 
Marco at Florence, Jerome Savonarola. 

No complete collated edition of his sermons has yet 
been printed. There are said to be two large MS. 
volumes of his sermons, written in very small hand, 
that have never been published ; but there has been re- 
newed interest of late in the history and works of this 
wonderful man, both in Germany and Italy. Perhaps 
the best and fairest life of him is from a Roman Catholic 
souKce, that of Pasquale Villari, which has been recently 
translated into English. 

Savonarola is another eminent instance of an expository 

or biblical preacher, and of the superior ad- 
Expository ^ r 1 . T 1 • 
oreach'ne- vantages ot such a style 01 preacnmg. In his 

period of training for the pulpit he devoted 

himself almost exclusively to the study of the Scriptures. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 1 25 

His Bible, which was until recently exhibited at St. 
Mark's Convent in Florence, bears every mark of being 
well thumbed, and is filled with marginal notes written 
in an exceedingly minute hand. One author says of 
him : " He was early led to begin a series of expository 
sermons, and it was in such expositions that he exhibited 
that wonderful power in the pulpit which marked his 
after years. At Breccia, in i486, he gave a series of ex- 
pository sermons on the book of Revelation. Such was 
the effect of these that his reputation soon began to 
spread far and wide. Among his extant works are to be 
found sermons on the books of Exodus, Ruth, Esther, 
Job, the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, Ezekiel, Micah, 
Zechariah, and the First Epistle of John." 

There was another cause of his great power in the pul- 
pit- -his voice and attractive delivery. When he made 

his first attempt to preach in Florence it ,, . 

Voice and 
was a decided failure — a great audience delivery 

dwindling down to twenty-five. His voice 
was harsh, his gestures uncouth ; his whole manner 
showed total want of tact and adaptation to the preach- 
ing office. 

A recent writer says of him : 

" It was not until the year 1485 that he rose superior to 
the physical disadvantages which had marred his earlier 
efforts in the pulpit. We have no record of the various 
means to which he had recourse, in order to overcome 
the natural defects of which his first auditors complained. 
But he was one who would be unlikely to rest contented 
until he had discovered the cause of his failure ; and he 
had so learned the lesson of self-control and self-abnega- 
tion as to be able to receive with meekness, if not with 
thankfulness, the suggestions of those who could point 
out his defects and show him how to remedy them. 



126 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

Humbert de Romanis, the general of the Order of Do- 
minicans, many years before, had urged those in whom 
there was a talent for preaching — that most excellent 
gift — to cultivate it assiduously. No doubt his work was 
familiar to Savonarola, and its precepts were obeyed. 
There must have been long and patient training of his 
vocal powers ; for we find him no longer speaking with 
weak, harsh tones, but filling the vast, crowded area of 
the Duomo at Florence with his clear, loud, ringing 
voice. Nothing but well-directed, honest, and long- 
continued culture in all that pertained to the art of 
oratory could have wrought the change which soon 
became manifest to all." 

He attacked the immorality of the times and of the 
papal church with such boldness and even fierceness that 
his career as preacher was soon cut short by martyrdom. 
He, as well as Chrysostom and Luther, are to be espe- 
cially remembered as illustrating the aggressive power of 
those who as preachers take their stand on the word of 
God, and trust more to it than to philosophy or theology. 
Savonarola was in the habit of commending those preach- 
ers of olden time who, in his own words, " using the 
Holy Scriptures with a simple and familiar language, 
marvellously spread light and love among the people ; 
and he had learned by his own experience as a preacher, 
that by putting aside tiresome questions, and explaining 
in their stead the holy Scriptures, the faithful have at all 
times been enlightened and charmed." Let us remem- 
ber these words of men who shook the world from their 
pulpit thrones, in days when the pulpit is, comparatively 
speaking, so weak. 

** Savonarola Avas certainly born with that kind of elo- 
quence which may be called combative. Fully persuaded 
that he had a divine mission, no sooner did he come into 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 127 

the presence of the people than he felt himself in a 
state of exaltation, and he gave free course to his 
thoughts ; then his fancy was lighted up, his power re- 
vived, his energy was redoubled. If, in obedience to 
duty, he felt that he ought to restrain himself, the bright 
color of his imagination would most assuredly have all 
vanished, the whole vigor of his eloquence would have 
been subdued." ' 

The first series of his sermons on the First Epistle of 
John belongs to the year 1491. " He always begins with a 
quotation from the Bible, around which he gathers all his 
theological ideas in conformity with his system of inter- 
pretation, bringing in their support some new passage 
taken from the Bible. We have thus a heterogeneous 
mass of ill-assorted materials, amid which the hearer be- 
comes lost. Suddenl}^, however, Savonarola sets him- 
self entirely free ; his discourse has turned upon some 
subject of the time, deeply interesting to himself and his 
audience ; his fancy is kindled, gigantic images rise up 
before him, his voice becomes more sonorous, his ges- 
tures more animated, his eyes seem to flash fire, and 
from that moment he becomes original, a great and pow- 
erful orator. But soon he falls back again into that 
artificial world of ideas, ill-connected and ill-digested, to 
rise again from them and again to fall back ; never being 
able to succeed in freeing himself entirely from them, 
nor ever allowing them to be entirely dominant over him. 
In this way whoever reads and diligently examines those 
sermons will be obliged to confess that Savonarola was 
born an orator, but that he was wholly wanting in the art 
of oratory. Hence, when the subject was so deeply in- 
teresting to him as to have complete mastery over him, 



Hist, of Savonarola and his Times," Pas. Villari, v. i. p. 124. 



^2^ HOMILETICS PROPER. 

nature took the place of art, and then only was he 
eloquent." ^ 

The same author goes on to remark (and what he 
says is the more worthy of notice since, as has been said, 
he writes from a Roman Catholic standpoint) : " The 
somewhat too simple and ingenuous eloquence that 
we find in the sermons of the thirteenth century had 
disappeared, such as those of Bernardo of Siena and 
his followers. The preachers, if not of the grammarian 
class (who were pedantic), were more like vulgar play- 
ers, and spoke, in a kind of scholastic jargon, which 
was no longer understood. Hence the secret of Sa- 
vonarola's great success is to be traced to the affec- 
tionate warmth he himself felt, and with which he in- 
spired the people. His voice alone had a familiar and 
domestic tone. His eloquence had a natural and master- 
ful character. He spoke in a language that touched the 
hearts of the multitude ; he discoursed on the matters 
that nearly concerned them ; he alone fought sincerely 
for truth, and had a fervent love for all virtue, and felt 
deeply the misfortunes of those he was addressing ; and 
therefore in that century he alone was eloquent. Since 
the cessation of the holy eloquence of the Christian 
fathers, no other voice but his has been found worthy to 
be transmitted to posterity. To him it is due that ser- 
mons were again held in honor, and received a new life, 
and hence he may be termed the first of modern orators. ' ' '' 

The following is an extract from his sermon on love or 
charity, preached at Advent, 1493 : " The gospel, my 
Christian brethren, must be your constant companion. I 
speak not of the book, but of its spirit. If you have not 
the spirit of grace, although you carry the whole volume 



Villari ; see v. i. pp. 129, 130-135. - Id., pp. 135, 136. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 129 

about with you, it will be of no avail. And how much 
more foolish are those who go about loaded with briefs 
and tracts, and look as if they kept a stall at a fair. 
Charity does not consist of sheets of paper. The true 
books of Christ are the apostles and saints ; the true 
reading of them is to imitate their lives. But now men 
have become the books of the devil." 

The sermon on the " City of the Foolish" is an instance 
of his boldness in attacking the sins of the age, and the 
city where he lived. " He dealt with the evil habits of 
the day, with religion and with the Church, condemning 
princes and priests ; and he came to the conclusion that 
punishment was near at hand, and that the good ought 
to wish for it. Having expounded his whole doctrine, 
Savonarola throws down a gauntlet of defiance to all 
potentates on earth ; to all princes, whether temporal 
or ecclesiastical ; to the wealthy, to the dignitaries among 
the clergy and the governments — all became the objects" 
of his charges. I am, he said, like hail, which bruises 
every one who has no shelter." 

In regard to his so-called prophetic gift, Villari says : 
'* It was one of those moments of which he used to say, 
' An inward fire consumes my bones and forces me to 
speak out.* He was then carried away by a kind of 
ecstasy, in which the future seemed to open up before 
him. When this followed him into the solitude of his 
cell, he remained a long time the victim of visions, and 
was kept awake whole nights, until sleep, getting the bet- 
ter of him, brought refreshment to his wearied body. 
But, on the other hand, when this state of ecstasy took 
possession of him in the pulpit, in the presence of the 
whole people, there Vv^ere no bounds to his exaltation ; it 
exceeded all that words can describe ; he became as 
it were the master of all his hearers, and carried them 



130 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

along with him in the same degree of excitement. Men 
and women of all ages and conditions — artisans, poets, 
philosophers — sobbed aloud, so that the walls of the 
church echoed their wailings. 'The individual who was 
taking down the words of the preacher, having had to 
stop, wrote, * At this place I was so overcome by weeping 
that I could not go on.' Savonarola himself had to sit 
down from exhaustion; sometimes he was so much affected 
as to cause an illness that confined him to his bed for 
several days. His written sermons cannot convey any 
adequate idea of the eloquence of those moments ; many 
of the words must have been missed in a report, and 
what remained can have none of the ardor with which 
they were uttered. We can the more readily believe in 
the high state of exaltation of the orator, in his extraor- 
dinary vehemence, and in what may be called the elo- 
quence of his person and gestures, because the little that 
remains of the words which fell from his lips in those 
solemn moments hardly accounts for the great effect his 
discourses produced on the Florentine public, at that time 
the most cultivated in Europe." ^ He foretold his own 
violent death in words of eloquent pathos.^ Savonarola's 
testimony in regard to his prophetic gift is thus quoted : 
" I am not," he said, '* either a prophet or the son of a 
prophet. I do not dare to assume that awful name ; but 
I am certain that the things I announce will come to 
pass, because they spring from Christian doctrine, from 
the spirit of evangelical charity. In truth the sins of 
Italy are your sins, by force of which I am a prophet, 
and which ought to make every one of you a prophet. 
Heaven and earth prophesy against you, but ye neither 
see nor hear them. You are struck by mental blind- 



' Villari, v. i. pp. 300, 301. '^ Id., p. 298- 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 13 1 

ness ; you shut your ears to the voice of the Lord, who 
calls you. If you had the spirit of charity you would all 
see it as I see it, that the scourge is approaching." ' 

To sum up this sketch : his main style of preaching 
was expository, dwelling chiefly on the prophetic books of 
the Old Testament, such as Habakkuk, Ezekiel, and the 
Psalms. He was reared in the Platonic philosophy, and 
much influenced by the scholastic philosophical writings. 
He was a political preacher, and may be considered as 
the founder of the Florentine republic. In his own life- 
time he ruled Florence from his pulpit. He was a poet 
and man of literature and the arts, a friend of Fra 
Bartolommeo and other painters. He was a many-sided 
and truly great man. His chief sources of power were 
his consecrated, holy character, his intense study of the 
Scriptures, and his great nature, that w^as alive to all the 
wants and sympathies of man's heart. He may be said, 
in some sense, to have failed as a reformer, perhaps from 
the fact that he was not only a political preacher in the 
true sense, but he dealt with the actual Vv^eapons and fire- 
brands of political strife, and of course fell an early victim 
to them. 

To retrace our steps, and to speak of the Middle Ages 
as a whole, the greatest Catholic or purely ecclesiastic 
mediaeval preacher, in point of eloquence and wide influ- 
ence, was Bernard of Clairvaux. He was born 

, ,. 1 . TT • Bernard of 

m 1091, and died m 1153. He is sometimes p, . 

called " the last of the fathers," and his 
contemporaries gave him the title of " the thirteenth 
apostle." Dean Milman says of him that " when he ap- 
peared, the pope ceased to be the centre around whom 
gather the great events of Christian history, and St. Ber- 



Villari, v. i. ch. vi. 



133 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

nard is the leading and governing head of Christendom." 
As an orator, judging by the immediate effects of his 
eloquence, he would have been remarkable in any age. 
His impelling power of speech roused all Europe until 
" The cross ! the cross !" became the universal cry. 
With mingled motives of faithfulness to God and zeal 
for the triumph of the Church, he confronted and bore 
down the greatest opposition. As an interpreter of the 
Scriptures he was fanciful and discursive, but always 
glowing with earnestness. Though inclined to mysticism, 
yet there was much of the true doctrine of Christ in his 
writing, which contrasts favorably with the jejune scho- 
lasticism of the times ; and here it may be remarked that, 
whether in the Greek or the Latin, in the Roman Catho- 
lic or the Protestant preacher, where there is genuine 
spiritual power, it springs not so much from the genius of 
the man, or the system under which he is reared, as 
from the hold his mind has upon the word of God. 
It is the divine unction, or anointing of the Spirit, which 
breathes something of the divine into the utterances of 
a human soul, and makes him the mouthpiece of God ; 
and instead of utterly condemning Roman Catholicism 
or any other form of the Christian Church, however cor- 
rupt, it were more in accordance with the spirit of Christ 
to trf to look for the evidences of true doctrine and of 
Christian life and power in these forms ; seeing that the 
Spirit is not bound, and can make use of imperfect men 
in every age and every mode of the Christian faith. Ber- 
nard's writings were numerous, and of his sermons there 
are said to be some 340 extant. Though naturally impe- 
rious, and though he could be terrible and fierce, gain- 
ing for himself the title of the " Dog of the Church," 
yet a vein of pathetic tenderness runs through his 
preaching, especially in the exegetical discourses de- 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 1 53 

llvered after the death of a dearly loved younger 
brother. He not only professed with his monastic vows 
a lofty and world-abnegating holiness, but he seems 
to have lived up to it. Luther said of him : " If there 
ever lived on this earth a God-fearing and holy monk, it 
was St. Bernard of Clairvaux." Bernard says, in one of 
his homilies, ''What is ours but an insect life? Well 
may we ask, with the wise man, ' What profit hath a man, 
for all his labor under the sun ? ' Let us then rise 
higher than the sun ; let us mount up to heaven, and 
have our thoughts and affections there before our bodies 
are transported thither. Earth is nothing but a battle- 
field. W^e must fight here for Him who liveth in the 
heaven of heavens ; there v/ith Him shall we rest from 
our labors, and receive our crown." 

Before the time of St. Bernard, St. Peter DamianI was 

one of the most prominent mediaeval preach- 

11- r • T St. Peter 

ers, though his sermons were oi a strictly namiani 

conventual order ; but in his stern monastic 
asceticism there runs also a vein of remarkable mildness. 
Anselm, too, was a great preacher as well as theologian 
and statesman, though we have but sixteen of his ser- 
mons upon which to found our judgment. 
These are formed upon one model, taking 
the gospel of the day, and expounding it verse by verse. 
The discourses are somewhat long and abstract, and 
were probably preached to monks. Thomas 

Aquinas, the scholastic theoloc^ian, was a 

Aquinas — 
priest of the Dominican preaching order, Guaric. 

and his sermons in the Latin and also Italian 
language, though highly polemical, like his writings, 
have the same character of acuteness, clearness, and 
metaphysical vigor. Guaric, Abbot of Igniac, who mod- 
elled himself upon St. Bernard, was in his day a remark- 



134 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

able preacher, of a mystical but highly devotional style. 
Peter, Bishop of Chartres, was a more in- 

^ ^^ ° structive preacher, perhaps, than any of 

Chartres- , ,^, ^ V V ^ ^ , 

Peter of these, though not so eloquent. Peter of 

Biois— Blois was called, in reference to his sermons, 

Anthony of *' divmissimus.'" St. Anthony of Padua (not 

Padua— Anthony the founder of monasticism) is re- 

_ nowned for his pithy, odd, and story-telling 

Thomas a preaching. Albertus Magnus had much that 

Kempis. is ingenious and not much that is practical 

and weighty in his preaching. Thomas a 

Kempis, though he possibly may not have written the 

**De Imitatione," yet was a preacher entirely in the 

vein of that incomparable work. 

We have mentioned the names of these preachers, as 
well as the names of the mystical preachers of the four- 
teenth century, and of a few of the more distinctive re- 
formers through these ages, with some particularity, to 
show that we cannot condemn mediseval 

Oenerai preaching in a wholesale way, nor despise 
summingr up ^ -, . , -.tt- > 

r ,. , altogether its study. With its monstrous 

preaching, faults, that seemed at times to extin- 
guish the pure light of the gospel ; with 
its system of belief that regarded certain requirements 
connected with the Church in the light of an optis 
operatum ; with its total failure of preaching through 
long periods ; with its Latin homilies, and, in the 
later scholastic ages, its endless hair-splitting specu- 
lations ; with its ascetic piety ; with its childish and 
often totally irreverent mode of illustration — with all 
these faults it still had some marked merits, which 
Protestant preachers at this day would do well to note. 

(i.) Its popular quality. Many of these mediaeval 
preachers had a highly popular talent, and were wonder- 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 1 35 

fully successful in adapting themselves to a rustic audi- 
tory, as was said to be the case with the 
Venerable Bede. They spoke coarsely but Popular 

stronf^ly to rude minds. They introduced a en o 

mediscvd,! 
anecdotes and stories, which, if not always preachers 

in good taste, were fitted to interest the 
people, and were sometimes very beautiful and touch- 
ing, like the story of Elizabeth of Thuringia, and also 
the one of St. Christopher. German and English preach- 
ers were more accustomed to this kind of free and lively 
illustration than the French and Italian. They some- 
times introduced the most ludicrous and burlesque stories, 
and even vulgar and blasphemous ones. Robert of 
Abrissel was especially famous for this buffoonery, at- 
tracting crowds as to a low comedy. Oliver Maillard, 
preacher of Louis XL, and Michael Menot, of a later 
age, were also examples of humoristic preachers. Doubt- 
less many things were said by them in simplicity and 
from pure ignorance ; thus Abraham and Isaac are rep- 
resented by one of these preachers as going up Mount 
Moriah reciting '' avcs'' and '' paternosters,'" not in 
French or Latin, but in Hebrew. One preacher calls 
Christ VAbbe Jesus, Nicholas de Lyra says that Jesus 
was of the order of Friars Minorites. Cornelius Musso, 
a bishop who affected classical learning, speaks of our 
Lord as '' dying like Hercules, rising like Apollo or Escu- 
lapius, ascending to heaven as a true Bellerophon, a 
second Perseus who had slain the Medusa that changed 
men into stones." 

(2.) Its dramatic element. This quality of the preach- 
ing of the Middle Ages, which takes truth 

, r ^L 1 .L . 1 • <« 1 . .. Dramatic 

out ot the abstract, and is ever domg , 

or "acting" as in life, is not to be over- 
looked and contemned, as it grew to be afterward in the 



136 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

rationalizing view of Christian truth that prevailed after 
the Reformation ; for thereby power is lost. The preach- 
ei; shrewdty appealed to examples and to facts. There 
was a freshness and homely force in the manner of put- 
ting things which was admirable. We see this in the 
best of preachers, like Wyclif and Hugh Latimer. 

(3.) Its symboHcal or spiritual use of Scripture. Another 

characteristic of mediaeval preaching which is not to be too 

hastily spoken against, is its finding of spirit- 

Symbohcal ^^^ instruction in all kinds and portions of 
and allegori- , , . .... ^ , „ 

. . holy writ, usmg it m the way of type and alle- 

Scripture. ^^^^Y' The past was made to teach the pres- 
ent. Present wars were found in the old wars 
of the Jews. The troubles and tribulations of the heart 
were hidden under some Old Testament story, or some 
prophetic figure. This at first sight is a fault, and happily 
is one which will not be reintroduced, to a great extent, 
into preaching ; but there is something to be said in its 
favor in this respect, that it served to give a sacred 
flavor, a mellow biblical tone to the sermons of some of 
these preachers. It led them to regard the whole Bible, 
the Old Testament as well as the New, as a spiritual 
granary, in every nook and corner of which food might 
be obtained for the nourishment of piety. But what is 
called technically ** allegorical preaching" is certainly not 
to be recommended. 

(4.) Its abundant use of Scripture citation. Their very 
use of Scripture for the purposes just named compelled 
Abundant preachers to this. It would indeed be surpris- 
use of ing to most of us, who are in the habit of 
Scripture thinking that Luther and the reformers re- 
citation, stored the Bible to the pulpit, to find how sat- 
urated are those sermons of the Middle Ages with the 
sacred writings — turned often wholly out of their right 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 137 

meanings, and absurdly applied — but nevertheless giving 

an indescribably devotional tone to sernnons. These 

quotations do not seem to be made for the purpose 

of propping up dogmas, but they appear to be the 

natural expressions of religious sentiments — the only 

forms in which the minds of these rather childish and 

untaught preachers ran in expressing their feelings on 

divine themes.' 

(5.) Its fruits of meditative piety. One might also 

say something favorable of the rare fruits of meditation 

and of contemplative wisdom to be found in 

the Middle Ages— of even a profound self- ^'"^^^ °^ 
, . , 1 r • 1 ,..,., meditative 

abnegatmg love and faith — shmmglike gems • . 

in dark caverns. In addition to this list of 
what may be said in favor of mediaeval preaching, it 
might also be said that in the earlier part of this period 
some of the preaching was of a noble aggressive charac- 
ter. This was the age of the great missionary preachers 
of the Romish Church, to Avhose heroic efforts we our- 
selves owe the Bible and Christianity. 

We will not enter into the m*ore familiar and prolific 
theme of the crudities and absolute falsities of monk- 
ish and mediaeval preaching — its obscur- ^ ... 
ing of the vital truths of the word. and 

Some of these have already been suggest- falsities of 
ed ; and, with such noble exceptions as mediaeval 
have been mentioned, preaching was, it ^"^^^ 
must be confessed, generally but as the blind lead- 
ing the blind. Brawling and ignorant priests used their 
spiritual authority, and their office as leaders of the 
people, to foment discords in the state, to fasten the 
chains of ecclesiastical tyranny more firmly, and to carry 



* See Neale's " Mediaeval Preaching." 



138 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

out their own crafty and evil purposes. The period 
even immediately preceding the Reformation witnessed 
a most profound depth of degradation in the manner 
and matter of preaching. The harangues of the pul- 
pit were addressed to the lowest passions, and, above all, 
to the sentiment of the marvellous ; and they sometimes 
consisted wholly in the detailing of absurd legends 
hatched in the brains of half-cunning, half-fanatical 
monks, in the cells of monasteries. Mummeries were 
enacted in the pulpit. Anything like a 
ummenes pjous sentiment, at one period, in the pulpits 
absurdities ^^ prominent cathedral churches was con- 
sidered almost insupportable ; and at the 
Easter season especially, preachers taxed their ingenuity 
to invent all kinds of folly and vulgar witticisms, to 
amuse the audience and to excite roars of laughter ; 
and, generally speaking, though there were ever excep- 
tions to this, preaching had come to such a pass that, 
when Luther arose, in the beginning of the sixteenth 
century, he saw the necessity of reforming not only the 
Church, but the pulpit itself, and the Church through the 
pulpit. Reuchlin and Erasmus, it must be said, had 
somewhat prepared the way for and preceded him in 
this idea. Erasmus's book, written in 1535, a year 
before his death, entitled " Ecclesiastes, sive concionator 
evangelicus," sets forth in a clear and impressive manner 
the needs and qualities of true evangelical preaching : I. 
Qualifications ; II. Examples and illustrations of elo- 
quence ; III. The use or handling of Holy Scripture. 
Before, however, leaving this theme of mxcdiseval 
preaching, we would gather up a few small 
Mediaeval -^^^^ ^^ ^ ^^y^y^^^ j^j^^^^ chiefly from Nean- 

der's Church History, in order that we may 
see that the Spirit of God had not forsaken the Church 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 139 

or its ministers in these ages. For example, St. Ber- 
nard preached, with a liberality beyond his age, that 
" infidels should not be put to death or suffer loss, but 
only prevented from oppressing Christians. " St. Francis 
of Assisi said that " a heart fixed in God is all that 
gives actions their real importance." Otto, Bishop of 
Pomerania, when presented by some of his people with 
a rare and delicate dish for his table, said, " Give this 
costly dish to Christ" — that is, to the poor. As a 
fruit of similar teaching, it is related in the twelfth cen- 
tury of the wealthy father of a family who, whenever 
he went to the church, was accustomed to take provisions 
with him to feed one poor family, proving his faith by 
his works. Ambrose of Siena set forth very distinctly 
the social duties and influence of the Christian man. 
Richard a Sancte Victore calls the changing light and 
darkness in the life of the soul '' a needful darkness, a 
necessary vicissitude of this present earthly life, where it 
cannot always be clear day as it is in heaven ; but there 
must be, as in the sphere of the natural world, day and 
night," Abbot Bernard of Tiron says : " xS\\ virtues be- 
sides love are perishable ; but this consists of the essence 
of all God's commandments ; by this alone the disciples 
of Christ are distinguished from the children of anti- 
christ." ^gidius of Assisi declared that " only through 
humility can man attain to the knowledge of God ; 
the path upward begins downward." Guibert of Novi- 
gentum, in the twelfth century, who wrote on homi- 
letics, insisted upon the preacher's preaching Christian 
morality, and treating of the motives of actions. He 
said: ' ' No sermon was more useful than that which showed 
men to themselves, and led back those who, by the dis- 
traction of outward things, had become estranged from 
themselves in the secret recesses of their hearts ; present- 



I40 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

ing them as if reflected from a mirror to their own eyes." 
He also advised brevity in preaching, because otherwise 
hearers could not retain it in their memories. Another 
father, Alanus ab Insulis, of the thirteenth century, who 
was a writer on homiletics, or " Suinma de arte prce die a- 
toria,'' defines preaching to be, Predieatio est manifest a et 
publica instrjietio inoruni et fidei, i?iforinatio7ie homimim 
deserviens et rationuin seinita et aiictoritatein fonte pro- 
veniens.'' He held to the theory (not so defensible) that 
preaching must be addressed to believers, as other men 
held it in contempt, and therefore they could not be bene- 
fited. * ' Indignis et obstinatis stibtrahenda est prcedicatio. 

Humbert de Romanis sets the preaching of Christ 
even above prayer. Thomas Aquinas, learned theologian 
as he was, took the greatest pains to preach plainly to the 
common people. Abelard said that '■ The fear of the 
Lord is the beginning of wisdom. But the perfection of 
it is pure love to God for his own sake." Said Anselm, 
" The highest truth is that which manifests itself to the 
spirit." And Alexander of Hales declared that "The- 
ology itself is more a matter of wisdom and temper than 
of systematic knowledge. It is rather divine wisdom than 
human science." 

Sec. 9. Preaching of the Reformation Period. 

The iron unity of the Church of the Middle Ages, both 

autward and inward, pressing all minds into one mould 

.. .. and repressing thought on religious sub- 

of Brescia— j^cts, could only be broken up by a strong 

Savonarola— instrument. Arnold of Brescia, Savonarola 

Wyclif-Huss \^ Italy, Wyclif in England (called the true 

~~ ^ ■ founder of the English pulpit), Huss and 

Jerome in Bohemia, Waldo in France, had done their 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 141 

preparatory work ; but there needed to be a man sent 
from God to do the work for all the groaning nations. 
Luther was that man. 

There is no need of relating the thrice-familiar story of 
Martin Luther's life. By nature he was endowed with 
great human sympathies and passions, with , , 
lively imagination, with manly earnestness 
and singleness of aim, and with a heroic love of truth. 
It was this last quality, by the grace of God, which led him 
from being, as he called himself, " the most insane of 
papists, " to be a reformer of the Church of God. An Eng- 
lish historian says of him : " Men of Luther's stature are 
like the violent forces of nature herself — terrible when 
roused, and in repose majestic and beautiful. Of vanity 
he had not a trace. ' Do not call yourselves Lutherans,' 
he said ; * call yourselves Christians. Who and what is 
Luther ? Has Luther been crucified for the world ? ' I 
mentioned his love of music. His songs and hymns were 
the expression of the very inmost heart of the German 
peoples. Music he called ' the grandest and sweetest 
gift of God to man.' * Satan hates music,* he said ; 
* he knows how it drives the evil spirit out of us.' He 
was extremely interested in all natural things. Be- 
fore the science of botany was dreamed of, Luther had 
divined the principle of vegetable life. ' The principle 
of marriage runs through all creation,' he said ; * and 
flowers as well as animals are male and female.' A 
garden called out bursts of eloquence from him, beautiful 
sometimes as a finished piece of poetry. . . . Eras- 
mus considered that sometimes a lie might be as good as 
truth ; but a lie, ascertained to be a lie, to Luther was 
poison — poison to him, and poison to all who meddled 
with it. In his own genuine greatness he was too hum- 
ble to draw insolent distinctions in his own favor, or to 



142 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

believe that any one class on earth is of more importance 
than another in the eyes of the Great Maker of them 
all/'V 

Upon the vivid and dramatic power of eloquence like 
Luther's, Dr. Bushnell remarks : " It is a fact to be 
carefully noted that all the best saints and most impress- 
ive teachers of Christ are those who have found how to 
present him best in the dramatic forms of his personal 
history. Such were Chrysostom, Augustine, Luther, 
Tauler, Wesley. Those great souls could not be shut up 
under the opinional way of doctrine, or even under their 
own opinions. Their gospel was not dry, and thin, and 
small in quantity as being in man's quantity, and there- 
fore soon exhausted ; it was no part of their idea to be 
always hammering in or hammering on some formulated 
article, but they had a wonderful outspreading of life and 
volume, because they breathed so freely the supernatural 
inspirations of Christ, and let their inspirations forth in 
such grand liberties of utterance. They were men 
thoroughly Christed by their inspirations and deep be- 
holdings in the gospel facts. They had gotten such 
insight into the ways and times and occasions of their 
Master's life that subjects enough and truths always 
fresh were springing into form in all points of the story. 
And they v/ere not mere surface subjects ; but they were 
cogent, massive, piercing, pricking in conviction, melting 
ice-bound states away, battering down every citadel of 
prejudice, and flowing out in senses of God that make a 
wonderfully divine atmosphere about the circles they live 
in, and the audiences before which they appear." "^ 

We will speak more definitely of Luther's oratorical 

' Froude's " Short Studies on Great Subjects." 
"^ " Sermons oh Living Subjects," p. S6. 



neglect. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 143 

training ; but would now only say that by art and study 

he was the possessor of great erudition for 

his time ; at the same time metaphysician earning 

and poet, musician and linguist, the master acquirements. 

of a forcible, popular eloquence ; and to all 

these advantages were added a deep religious nature, a 

power of intuition in spiritual things, an invincible faith 

in the word of God and in the divine instrumentality of 

preaching. Luther plucked up preaching 

from the mire in which it had fallen, and Rescued 

reinstated it as the central light in the house P*"^^^ ^^^ 

from its 
of God. From its fanciful and allegorical 

character, its scholastic and dry and dead 
forms of Aristotelian logic, he restored the true idea of 
preaching — viz., the scriptural homily, or the bringing of 
pure biblical truth to bear directly on the reason, con- 
science, and sympathy of men. He was eminently practical 
in his view of truth, holding that truth was of no value 
unless it bore upon the reality of things, upon the king- 
doms of good and evil in the world ; and thus in his use 
of truth he was eminently the preacher instead of the 
philosopher, employing preaching as an instrumentality 
in the vernacular tongue. Michelet says : " He treated 
religion in his mother tongue ; by that he moved the 
world." The great work which he did, though aided 
and confirmed by his writings, was chiefly 
carried forward by his preaching ; he said ormation 

,. ir .. T . 1 t 1- 1 1 carried forward 

nimseli, It is the word which has consumed , . « bv his 

the papacy, and no emperor or prince could preaching, 
have done this." There was wonderful 
spiritual vitality in his preaching, which affected the 
lives of men before he broke with the papacy, or even 
supposed himself to be a reformer of the Church. His 
preaching thus led others on, and he was himself led on 



144 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

by his preaching. Truly, his words were ** half battles." 

Luther said of his work and his preach- 
Character • .. j ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^j^^ ^^.^j^ ^^yW'^ 

and quality of . ^, . . . . 

reachine- ^ factions. i his is the reason that my 

writings are so boisterous and stormy. It is 
my business to remove obstructions, to cut down thorns, 
to fill up quagmires, and to open and make straight the 
paths ; but if I must necessarily have some failing, let 
me rather speak the truth with too great severity than 
once to act the hypocrite, and conceal the truth." He 
was dogmatic, overbearing, and coarse, as in his contro- 
versies Avith Erasmus and Zwingli ; he was bitter, sarcas- 
tic, and brought every kind of force in him to bear upon 
his adversaries, even his poetic and musical talent. 

As to Luther's oratorical education, he devoted him- 
self at Erfurth with the greatest diligence to humanistic 
studies. Melanchthon says : ** As his mind, 

, ^. full of zeal for learning, aspired to s^reater 

education. fc>> r & 

and better attainments, he read most of the 
works of the old Latin authors — Cicero, Virgil, Livy, and 
others. These he also read, not in the manner of boys, 
who seize only upon the words, but as true lessons and 
portraitures of human life. Therefore he clearly per- 
ceived the intent and meaning of these authors, and as 
he possessed a true and tenacious memory, that which 
was best in what he had read and heard was ever present 
before his eyes." Luther in his writings spoke strongly 
of the value of such studies, and he often expressed his 
wonder at the wisdom of pagan writings. He saw in them 
sometimes the teachings of God's good Spirit. He culti- 
vated, above all, those authors of antiquity who could aid 
him in speaking, and he agreed with Erasmus in thinking 
that Quintilian was the greatest teacher of the oratorical 
art. He also pursued studies in philosophy, in natural 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 14S 

science, in history, having a broad conception of the cul- 
ture which a preacher and teacher of the people required. 
But above all he gave himself to the study of the Scrip- 
tures, thinking that there was the preacher's whole treas- 
ury of truth. And in the first place he strove to make 
himself a master of the original languages of the Scrip- 
tures. He said it was a shame that Christians did not 
understand their own book, the word which God had 
given them, and the very words in which God had given 
it to them ; and there is no doubt but that his study of the 
Scriptures, to translate them so as to give them to the 
people in their own tongue, gave him his wondrous 
power as a preacher to reach the religious nature. He 
spoke freely and directly out of the word. He was filled 
with it. He recognized its unity as the testimony and 
the testament of Christ. He rose above its letter into its 
spirit. He thus became mighty in the Scriptures, and used 
the word of God as an irresistible sw^ord to conquer all op- 
position, error, and unbelief. He was another, and per- 
haps still greater instance of the preacher who draws 
his strength immediately from the word — who is its true 
interpreter and w^itness. And it is to be remembered, 
as Michelet says, that while other preachers of the Mid- 
dle Ages and of his times spoke mostly in Latin, he 
preached in German to Germans as a German, and with 
what vigor and what freshness ! Next to his fidelity to 
biblical truth, or the evangelic spirit in his preaching, he 
mastered audiences by his emotional power, his passion, 
his immense vitality. His nature, full of great affections 
and great feelings, w^as itself a mighty power. 

Melancthon said that " Luther's words were born, 
not on his lips but in his soul." They thus moved 
men profoundly, in spite of their occasional violence and 
immodcratcness. 



146 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

** We take the precise man for a religious man. We 
are content to see him stiff in his black coat, choked in 
a white cravat, with a prayer-book in his hand. We 
confound piety with decency, propriety, permanent and 
perfect regularity. We proscribe to a man of faith all 
candid speech, all bold gesture, all fire and dash in word 
and act ; we are shocked by Luther's rude words, the 
bursts of laughter which shook his mighty frame, his 
work-a-day rages, his plain and free speaking, the auda- 
cious familiarity with which he treats Christ and the 
Deity. We do not remember that these freedoms and 
this recklessness are simply signs of entire belief ; that 
warm and immoderate conviction is too sure of itself to 
be tied down to an irreproachable style ; that primitive 
religion consists not of formalities but of emotions."* 

As an illustration of Luther's naivete and realness there 
is the following passage from his table-talk : " When 
Jesus Christ," he said, "was born, he doubtless cried 
and wept like other children, and his mother tended him 
as other mothers tend their children. As he grew up he 
was submissive to his parents, and waited on them, and 
carried his supposed father's dinner to him ; but when 
he came back, Mary no doubt often said, * My dear little 
Jesus, where hast thou been ? ' " 

Luther's best sermons are adjudged to be his church- 
postils {kirchenpostille) on from 1522, which 

Form of his -were prepared to be read in the churches, 
sermons— ^w^ house-postils Uiaus-postille), while town 
church-postils , -.tt- , 1 1 

and house- P^^^^'^^^^ ^^ Wittenburg, were perhaps al- 

postils. most as good, and were extemporaneously 

delivered. There are many other famous 

sermons which have been collected and published. 



' Taine's " English Literature," v. i. p, 384. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 147 

His sermons remind one, in some respects, of those 
of Augustine, upon whom he modelled himself. They 
are plain and practical, oftentimes exhibiting an easy- 
elegance of style, and they usually spring from the 
running exposition of passages of Scripture {Perikopen), 
sometimes without any special text ; but still, as a gen- 
eral rule, all the principal parts of the sermon — the text, 
the theme, the exposition, the argument, and the appli- 
cation-— are found in his discourses. A large portion of 
them are upon doctrinal subjects — upon the 

beine of God, and the creation ; upon sin, 

, , , sermons, 

justification by faith, and the nature, char- 
acter, and work of Christ ; upon the Church and its 
sacraments— but all with a strong controversial drift, 
contending against the pope and the Roman hierarchy ; 
mingling the contests that were then going on with the 
older conflict of light and darkness, of God and his 
enemy. 

To sum up this description, it might be said, in a word, 
that Luther's preaching, as well as his writing, sprang 
from his profound conception of the gospel ; Summarv 
of the length and breadth, the height and of qualities 
depth of the work and the law of Jesus Christ. as a 

He came more and more to see the spiritual Preacher, 
aspects and inner substance of Christian faith. Christ 
was his unceasing theme. He said: "All the wisdom 
of the world is childish foolishness compared with the 
acknowledgment of Christ." He said again: "Jesus 
Christ is the only beginning and end of all my divine 
cogitations, day and night ; yet I find and freely confess 
that I have attained but only to a small and weak begin- 
ning of this deep and precious profundity." Merely 
rhetorically speaking, Luther, as was said, despised no 
learning, or art, or any other lawful weapon, such as 



148 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

figurative illustration, allegory, story, irony, and wit ; 
yet he did not trust to any such weapon. He reproves 
preachers " who," he said, '' aim at sublimity, difficulty, 
eloquence, who, neglecting the souls of the poor, sought 
their own praise and honor, and to please one or two 
persons of consequence." 

Speaking of his own preaching, Luther said : " When 
a man comes into the pulpit for the first time, he is much 
perplexed by the number of heads before him. When I 
ascend the pulpit I see no heads, but imagine those that 
are before me to be all blocks. When I preach I sink 
myself deeply down ; I regard neither doctors nor mas- 
ters, of which there are in the church above forty. But 
I have an eye to the multitude of young people, chil- 
dren, and servants, of which there are more than two 
thousand. I preach to them. I direct my discourse to 
those that have need of it. A preacher should be a 
logician and a rhetorician — that is, he must be able to 
teach and admonish. When he preaches on any article, 
he must first distinguish it, then define, describe, and 
show what it is ; thirdly, he must produce sentences from 
the Scripture to prove and to strengthen it ; fourthly, 
he must explain it by examples ; fifthly, he must adorn 
it with similitudes ; and, lastly, he must admonish and 
arouse the indolent, correct the disobedient, and reprove 
the authors of false doctrine." 

Luther introduced freshness and nature into the pulpit, 
as well as knowledge, earnestness, and faith. He was 
more progressive and bolder in his preaching than even in 
his writing, for in the pulpit he was himself. There was a 
free speaking out from himself, as if he had broken from 
precedents and rules. We see the man ever in his words. 
There was strong personality, a fearless expression of indi- 
vidual experience, thought, and feeling of the truth. This 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 1 49 

boldness, freshness, and naturalness, united with knowl- 
edge, and knowledge above all of God's word, made him 
a preacher whom the common people heard gladly. He 
was their prophet. He spoke to them directly, as from 
" the living oracles. "He spoke political as well as religious 
truth. He preached from the abundance of a heart filled 
with the divine message, and, as by a kind of prophetic 
inspiration, making him the creator of a new time, illus- 
trating the words of Neander : "A certain faculty of 
prophecy seems implanted in humanity ; the longing 
heart goes forth to meet beforehand great and new crea- 
tions ; undefined presentiments hasten to anticipate the 
mighty future." ^ 

Calvin, in some respects, was the exact opposite of 
Luther, both as a theologian and a preacher. More of a 

dialectician than orator, his work seemed to 

- , . . , .... Calvin. 

be the systemizmg and co-ordmatmg of 

doctrine, rather than the preaching of living truth freshly 
to men. He had some of the best characteristics of the 
French mind— clearness, precision, logical ability. He 
was a great reasoner. He did not address the senti- 
ments and passions, as did Luther, and draw men by their 
hearts ; but he bound them fast in the serried links of 
his iron logic. Even in his early academic days, such 
was the trenchant positiveness of his character that his 
companions surnamed him the "Accusative." His style 
was neat, polished, and concise. Bossuet said of Calvin, 
" Son style est triste ;'' but Calvin, stern theologian as he 
was, had some of the qualities of a great preacher. He 
ruled the turbulent city of Geneva from his pulpit. He 
had a style, it is true, totally bare of ornament, and with 
no ray of imagination, or of anything that gave evidence 



' " Ch. Hist.," V. iv. p. 216. 



150 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

of the influence of Nature, though he lived in the 
shadow of Mont Blanc ; but his preaching was weighty 
with biblical truth, clear in its reasoning, and burning 
with an intense purpose. There is no doubt, however, 
that, in all the qualities of genuine pulpit eloquence, 
Luther was much the greater preacher. 

Calvin was passionless in his life ; he did not go through 
those mighty struggles with doubt and evil that Luther 
went through, and therefore he was not so truly a repre- 
sentative man as Luther was ; men and whole peoples 
did not see in him a type of themselves ; they did not go 
to him for aid and sympathy ; he was not, in fact, so 
genuinely a people's preacher. But he was the intel- 
lectual complement of Luther. He made up Luther's 
marked defects. He supplied the calm will, the regula- 
tive and reflective principle to the Reformation, which it 
needed ; and he is therefore to be looked upon as the 
legislator rather than the mouthpiece or prophet, or 
preacher, of that great movement. The Calvinistic sys- 
tem of theology, in many respects a reproduction of the 
Augustinian, has indirectly exerted an immense influence 
upon preaching, in some respects good, in others bad. 
So positively defined, so iron-bound in its logic, it power- 
fully moulds everything that comes into the grasp of its 
influence ; and it has in this way shaped the preaching 
of the Puritan churches in England and 

^ , „ ,' Scotland, and also in America, and served 
Farel, Haller, 

Bucer ^^ %^^^ it its rigidly theological type. 
Barnes, Knox, Zwingli, with his simple, manly, and heart- 
Cranmer, felt style of preaching ; Farel, Haller, Bucer, 
and the other g^j-^es, and Bullinger ; Knox, Cranmer, 
Latimer, Jewel, Hooper, and the other Ger- 
man and English reformers — these aided to restore the 
dignity, earnestness, and biblical authority of the pulpit. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING, 151 

The preaching of the Reformation period had in it the 
missionary element ; it was again the true K7]pvKeia, the 
voice of the herald to awaken the slumbering nations ; nor 
did it entirely lack what is to be seen also in Luther's 
preaching, the power of edification, the power to build 
up the spiritual life of the Church of Christ. The preach- 
ing of the Reformation, wherever its seeds were carried, 
was characterized by its scriptural directness, its freedom 
from ecclesiastical forms, and robust energy. 

Latimer's preaching is particularly noteworthy for its 
strength, boldness, and quaint humor. He who could 

quote against Henry VHL the passage, 
.« 1 1 t 1 /-..,, Latimer. 

whoremongers and adulterers God will 

judge," and who comforted Ridley at the stake with such 
powerful and sublime words, could preach to the com- 
mon people also with great familiarity. He too was a 
story-telling preacher, and his stories had all the vivid- 
ness and point of Luther's. As one instance of his odd 
and plain speaking, I will quote what he said upon 
feminine apparel. ** I think Mary had not much fine 
gear. She was not trimmed up as our women are now- 
adays. I think, indeed, Mary had never a fardingale ; 
for she used no such superfluities as our fine damsels 
do, for in the old time women were content with honest 
and single garments. Now they have found out these 
roundaboutes ; the devil was not so cunning to make 
such gear — he found it out afterward." Latimer called 
the priests and bishops who failed to instruct their peo- 
ple in divine truth "bells without clappers"; and he 
speaks of "strawberry-preachers whose season was but 
once a year." He says of himself, " I have a manner of 
teaching which is very tedious to them that be learned. 
I am wont even to repeat those things which I have said 
before, which repetitions are nothing pleasant to the 



152 . HOMILETICS PROPER. 

learned ; but it is no matter — I care not for them : I 
seek more the profit of those which be ignorant than to 
please learned men. Therefore I often repeat such 
things which be needful for them to know, for I would 
so speak that they might be edified withal/* His 
famous illustration of the Goodwin sands and Tenterden 
steeple is an instance of his method of illustrating truth. 
He is often like Luther, coarse as well as strong, and had 
something of the monkish trait of saying ludicrous things 
and teUing droll stories. It was Latimer who preached 
the sermon on " The Devil Driving and Drowning his 
Hogs." (i.) The devil will play at small game rather 
than none at all. (2.) They run fast whom the devil 
drives. (3.) The devil brings his hogs to a fine market. 
But this should not give a false impression. He was a 
great, eloquent, earnest, faithful preacher of God's word, 
and a holy confessor and martyr. 

The later preaching of the Reformation, both in Ger- 
many and England, did not deal so much in subjective 
views of truth as in its plain objective 

^ ^^ aspects ; but the mind, freed from its fet- 
Reformed . . 

oreachine ^^^^' stood erect agam, and transmitted 

the message of God with apostolic power 

and boldness. This, also, was the period, or the later 

portion of the period, of the revival of letters ; and 

though feebly at first, yet with increasing strength, the 

influence of the renewed study of the classic 

The age of , , , , ^, . . , 

French and ^^^^^^ "^^^ ^^^^ upon Christian eloquence, 

German and entered more and more into the struc- 

illuminism, ture and style of preaching. The sermon 

in the soon began to lose somewhat of its biblical 

' ^" / life and evan^^elic element, until, much later, 
centuries. ° t- 1 n 

in the age of German and French illuminism, 

in the scvaiteentJi and eigJitcenth centuries, it had become 



HISTORY OF PREACHING 153 

nothing better than polished puerility, when preachers 
preached upon agriculture, the raising of tobacco, and 
the Copernican system. The French in particular fos- 
tered this classic barrenness and varnished impiety. The 
English pulpit was saved from this curse, in a great 
measure, by the early infusion into it of the Puritan 
element, when such profound and earnest preachers as 
Howe, Baxter, Flavel, and Owen arose. 

Sec. 10. Preaching in different lands since the Reforma- 
tion. 

Owing to the liberalizing influence of the Reformation, 

there came to be a more spontaneous view of divine 

truth among the people ; and there was Character 

also a development of the original genius of preaching 

of each nation in religious things and ^" different 

thouq-ht ; so that each reformed nation , ^. 

^ ' of the 

became, at length, intellectually and spir- Reformation 
itually represented by its own peculiar style how 
of preaching. In Germany, France, Eng- influenced, 
land, Scotland, and afterward in America, the bent of 
the national mind or genius acted powerfully on the form 
of preaching in these several countries, and this also re- 
acted on the political, intellectual, and social character 
of the type of civilization of these several countries. 

We close this sketch of the history of preaching with 
a notice of the preaching of some of the leading Chris- 
tian nations since the Reformation ; and preaching of 
without speaking of the pulpits of Holland, Holland, 
Italy, Spain, and Russia, of which much Italy, Spain, 
might be profitably said — when we have such Russia, 
names as Carlo Borromeo of Italy, Constant de la Fuerte 
of Spain, Simeon Polotrki of the Greek Church, Van der 



154 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Palm of Holland, and many others — we will say a few 
words of the more distinctively reformed countries, Ger- 
many, England, and America ; and also of France, which 
was but partially reformed at last, and sank back into 
the power of the Roman Church. 

The German pulpit has always retained something of 
the freedom, fire, and naturalness of the Reformation 
period, and it might be said of the style of 
The German Lather, who stamped his influence upon 
German preaching, being characterized 
by its lively exposition of the Scriptures and ethical 
quality, accompanied with hortatory earnestness and 
emotional glow. More attention, indeed, has been 
paid in Germany than in any other country to pure- 
ly homiletical studies. There are more 

German ^orks in this language on " Homiletics" 
works on , , r ^ . i x- 

Homiletics ^^^^ there are found m any other, rrom 

all of Luther's works Conrad Porta, in 1586, 
gathered together what the great reformer had more 
especially said upon the subject of preaching and of 
ministerial duties, in a work entitled ** Pastorale Lu- 
theri. " Melanchthon also wrote a work which had great 
reputation among the reformed churches, styled " De 
Officiis Concionatoris," of which one part is especially 
devoted to the Formula de arte concionandiy in which 
he sets forth the principles of classic eloquence in the 
form and composition of the sacred oration, with, how- 
ever, some particular reference to the more practical 
needs of ecclesiastical and religious instruction. There 
are many other German works upon homiletics, dating 
back to the sixteenth century ; among which, perhaps, 
Erasmus* '* Ecclesiastes" (of which mention has been 
already made) might be reckoned. After the falling 
away from the faith in the first half of the seventeenth 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 155 

century and the dying out of the evangelic spirit of the 
pulpit, Spener (1635-1705) and the pietistic preachers, 
so-called, although they were somewhat narrow in their 
views respecting sound learning in the pul- 
pit, revived its life and power for a while. nimen 

preachers. 
Spener labored to abolish the formal Peri- 

kopen system of sermonizing and to introduce ** free 
texts." He was distinguished for his plain, strong, 
and clear exposition of the Scriptures, and his warm 
devotional spirit. Following Spener in the simplicity 
of the gospel and in spirituality were Francke, an ani- 
mated and almost vehement preacher ; Anastasius Frey- 
linghauser, more thoughtful and logical ; Joachim Lange, 
and others, in the beginning of the eighteenth century. 
After the period of these pietistic divines came the chill- 
ing reign of the philosophical school, influenced greatly 
by the Wolffian rationalistic exegesis. In fact the Bible 
was little explained or referred to, though there were ex- 
ceptionally scriptural preachers, even at this period. 
But a dry morality, professing to free the mind from its 
bondage by philosophy, prevailed. In the middle of the 
eighteenth centuiy Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1694- 
1755) furnished the most eminent example of classic, able, 
well-methodized preaching that was still inspired by the 
truth and spirit of the gospel. He also wrote the " His- 
tory of Christian Homiletics. " Then appeared such dis- 
tinguished pulpit orators as Cramer, Herder, Zollikoffer, 
Bretschneider, and Reinhard, the court preacher at Dres- 
den, who wrote much and ably upon the art of preach- 
ing ; until we draw nearer the present day, and we have 
the illustrious names of Krummacher, Draseke (whom 
Hagenbach reckoned among the first pulpit orators of 
Germany), Claus Harms (warm and pathetic, and some- 
what humoristic), Schleiermacher, Nitzsch, Heubner, 



156 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Hagenbach, Julius Miiller, Hofacker, Rudolph Stier, 
Beck, Theremin, Schweitzer, and Tholuck. 

The German mind, from the earlier times until now, 

with all its intellectual ponderousnessand thoroughness, is 

distinguished by its power of sympathy, by 

Character- ^ j.j^j^ pj^^ ^f ^^ sensibilities ; and this is 

^ shown in a marked manner in German preach- 

German ^ 

preaching. ii^g> i^^ which the morally genial and thor- 
oughly humanistic element is prominent. 
Herder, for example, though the peer of the great liter- 
ary men of his times, and the theological father of such 
men as Hase, Bunsen, Rothe, manifested this. If he had 
had more of the strictly evangelic element he would have 
been still more effective. The German pulpit is not so 
polished, oratorically, as the French pulpit, but its style 
is more homely and hearty, and has more of fresh, robust 
thought. The German sermon, as a general rule, is freely 
expository rather than severely didactic, although there 
are exceptions, as in the case of Reinhard ; indeed, some 
writers have accused it of wanting body or theological 
substance. It gives free play to aesthetic and poetic sen- 
timent, sometimes causing the stern old Protectant ca- 
thedral fairly to blossom as with spring flowers. In its 
plan it is simpler than the Puritan discourse, making, in 
fact, but two grand elements to the sermon — the text 
and the disposition. But in the pulpit discourses of a 
preacher like Julius Miiller there is a predominance of 
the theological and dialectic element ; and in Schleier- 
macher there is more of the German subjectivity than is 
usual ; but even in his most philosophical preaching 
Schleiermacher sought by his own spiritual sympathy to 
develop the Christian consciousness in his hearers, and 
to bring them into inner accord with Christ. He sought 
for the spirit of things, and cared not so much, perhaps 



HISTORY OF PREACHING, 157 

not enough, for dogmatic expression. As the greatest 

modern preacher of Germany we would endeavor rapidly 

to delineate him, and also, as a complement of him and 

existing because of him — though intellectually inferior — 

the late Dr. Tholuck. In regard to the outward facts 

and circumstances of these lives we draw them directly 

from German sources. 

Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher, born at Bres- 

lau in 1768, was the son of a clergyman of the Reformed 

Church, a man of stern piety, who reared him in the 

precepts of the straitest orthodox sect. 

He was early sent to the Moravian instftu- ^ f^^*"' 

macher. 
tion at Niesky„ Here by the narrowness of 

the religious tenets inculcated he was driven into doubt, 
and into a most harrowing controversy with his father 
upon the subject of his Christian faith, although the 
affectionate and earnest type of religion exhibited by the 
Moravian brotherhood made a healthful and lasting im- 
pression upon his mind. In 1787 he went as a student 
to Halle, and at the end of his academic course acted for 
a while as lecturer in that university. Having recovered 
in a measure his faith, he became assistant preacher at 
Langsberg-on-the-Warthe, and after two years removed 
to Berlin. Here he formed the friendship of Friedrich 
Schlegel, Scharnhorst, Alexander Dohna, Wilhelm von 
Humboldt, and other leading minds. He now preached 
constantly, and his discourses upon religion {Rcden iiber 
die Rcligioii), and Monologues (Monologen), by their ex- 
traordinary philosophic and spiritual depth brought him 
into notice. Appointed regular preacher in Berlin he 
published other discourses of a profound character, and 
also his translation of Plato's works with a commentary, 
so that from his Platonic studies and the idealistic cast 
of his philosophy, he has been called " the Plato of Ger- 



158 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

many." In 1804 ^^ was named University Preacher and 
Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Halle. During 
the period of the " War of the Liberation," being broken 
up at Halle, he returned to Berlin and became the centre 
of patriotic influence in those troubled times when all 
seemed failing and falling ; so that a German writer says 
of him, "That small, insignificant-looking man became 
the soul of the warlike activity of Berlin." His eloquent 
** Christmas Festival discourse" {Die Weihiachtsfeier), 
breathing the soul of a thorough German patriotism 
which sprang from a deep-grounded Protestant faith, 
roused Germany like Luther^s discourses to the German 
people of old. It was the speech of a man who, suffering 
intensely with all the woes of his fatherland, could be- 
come her counsellor and mouthpiece. In 1809 he was 
appointed pastor of Trinity Church, Berlin ; and, soon 
after, in harmony with his own efforts and views, the 
University of Berlin was re-instituted, of which he be- 
came the most renowned light. His last great work was 
" The Christian Faith systematically presented according 
to the Fundamental Propositions of the Evangelical 
Church" {Der Christliche Glaube nach den GriLudsaetzen 
der Evan. Kirche in Zusammenhange dargestelli). 

Six series of his sermons (Predigte^t) have been pub- 
lished, the first in 1801, and the last in 1833. He died 
at Berlin, February, 1834. 

Schleiermacher's style as a preacher was without much 
ornament, but, at the same time, it had a classic finish. 
Style and ^^ onward movement, and an original and 
characteris- vigorous thought that held his hearers spell- 
tics as a bound. He was a man who brought into 
preacher, j^j^ preaching the results of great erudition 
and profound thinking, and yet he strove to distinguish 
the true elements of Christian faith from the dogmatic 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 159 

forms which had grown up around it and obscured its life. 
He sought for the springs of Christian faith in the real 
union of the soul with God. In this God-conscious- 
ness {Gott-Bewusstseiri) he placed the source of religion. 
Christ revealed the true God-consciousness. He kncAV 
of no Christianity that was without Christ ; and even as 
his own pure life welled forth from that fountain of in- 
nermost personal union with the personal Christ, so he 
thought that the life of all believers, and of the Chris- 
tian Church, should and could only spring from the same 
source. 

Schleiermacher has wrought a profoundly shaping in- 
fluence upon the new and more truly evangelical views 
which have sprung up in Germany regarding the imme- 
diate relation of Christian faith to Christian life. Such 
wTiters and preachers as, first of all, Neander, after him, 
Twesten, Nitzsch, Jul. Muller, Dorner, Martensen, Liicke, 
Tholuck ; and those of other lands, like Vinet, Archdeacon 
Hare, Maurice, F. W. Robertson, and Horace Bushnell, 
have drunk deeply, if sometimes unconsciously, into the 
thinking and theology of Schleiermacher. His was a 
large and hospitable theology that brought into it all 
there was revealed of God in the human mind, in nature, 
in science, in art, in literature, in the State and the 
household. Schleiermacher fairly turned the tide of 
rationalism in Germany. He discovered in his own con- 
sciousness of humanity the need of the soul to be perfect, 
and that this want could not possibly be met in the 
human soul itself by reason of its moral imperfection, 
and this was the death-blow of rationalism. He also 
discovered the truth that in Jesus there was a perfect and 
holy humanity upon which to rest this mediatorship be- 
tween the sinful soul and a holy God, He was firm amid 
the confusing voices of his doubting age in his faith of 



i6o HOMILETICS PROPER. 

the unassailable holiness of the human nature of Christ. 
If temptation had but one slightest point of contact 
whereby to assail the character of the Saviour, he would 
have been no longer the Saviour of humanity. Yet it 
must be admitted that Schleiermacher built his theology 
too exclusively upon consciousness, upon this purely sub- 
jective basis, and that there was not enough in it of the 
positive element of revealed truth to make it a firmly 
reliable system for other men ; yet he probably did more 
than any other man to reconcile philosophy and faith, 
and to show that the objective truth of Christianity har- 
monized with the absolute needs of the soul. His the- 
ology went far to meet the deepest questions of man's 
own nature. 

It is here, as a preacher, that he is worthy of profound 
study. Preaching is not only a means whereby to illu- 
mine the mind by divine truth, but to vitalize the soul 
by the touch of the divine spirit. It must penetrate 
deeper than the reasoning faculty to the springs of motive 
and life. It may be great as a didactic performance, and 
may leave the mind thrilling like a harp over which a 
master-hand has swept, but the vibrations die away in 
silence and apathy. The soul still sleeps the sleep of 
death. The preacher must come nearer than by the hand 
of power, and must open the fountains of long sealed-up 
affections. This constitutes pulpit genius. There are 
hundreds of intellectual discourses to one that is truly 
spiritual. One hears sermons that reverberate like thun- 
der-peals through the vestibule of the mind, but do not 
speak to the inner man of the heart with the renewing 
voice of Christ. They do not speak with the sweet pene- 
trative power of the Gospels. It is not given to all 
preachers to touch the heart. Not all are successors of 
the apostles in spiritual gifts. Hence they are almost 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. l6i 

powerless for good. Though they have other gifts of 
power, the vital thing is wanting. It would be hard to 
say of such men (what often might be said of the best of 
us) that they do not feel what they say, or that they 
have no feeling, but somehow that gift has been denied 
them, and the golden key to hearts is not theirs. They 
are rhetoricians and logicians. The subtle instinct of 
love which the most hardened soul instantly perceives, 
and which inspires what is said with the pathos of sym- 
pathy, and enters the secret parts of the soul with a com- 
pelling force like a message of heaven, and raises the 
dead to life, is a precious gift in a preacher ; and theo- 
logical seminaries have a responsibility in this, that while 
they train men as exegetes, theologians, and writers, they 
do not destroy in the preachers they send forth the 
power of feeling the truth they utter, the power of lov- 
ing men, the power of simple unconscious sympathy, and 
" freeze the genial currents of the soul." Churches, too, 
have a responsibility not to select men to fill their pul- 
pits solely for their disciplined powers of intellect (none 
could rate the importance of these higher than we do), 
but also and perhaps mainly for their power with human 
hearts, their genius of sympathy, of Christlike persua- 
siveness, of true spirituality. If an individual preacher 
do not possess these qualities, it should be with him a 
matter of the most earnest striving — a matter of life and 
death — by prayer, by charitable activity among men, by 
humiliation and imitation of Christ, by pressing into 
closer and closer union with the spirit of the loving and 
crucified Lord, to win this divine sympathy, this love, 
or charity, which the apostle declares is the great end as 
well as means of Christian working, struggling, preach- 
ing, and living. Christianity, as Coleridge says, consists 
not only of ideas but of facts ; and as ideas arc the cor- 



l62 nOMILETICS PROPER. 

relatives of doctrines, so facts are the correspondents of 
feelings. If God first loved me I should love him first 
of all. If Christ, from love, died for me, this should 
awaken in me a lively sympathy for every sinful human 
heart upon which the gracious power of Christ can work. 
The unity of man, not only from nature, but from Christ's 
human nature, was a prime principle in Schleiermacher's 
creed. All the nature, too — the intellect, will, and affec- 
tions — were comprehended in his conception of theology 
and preaching. The whole man was to be regenerated, 
but the spiritual man — the man of the heart — was the 
man whom, above all, he addressed ; for therein consisted 
the reality of the gospel as addressing itself to that part 
of the nature in which was contained its essential unity. 
The gospel which he preached was a spiritual gospel 
which penetrated to the secret faith, or real love, of the 
heart, and purified the inner sources of action and char- 
acter. He laid special stress upon the spirit of the Chris- 
tian believer, the new regenerate affection which goes 
underneath acts, and is the product of a genuine union 
with Christ, and which is seen in the warm, pure, inner 
life of the soul that makes it one with Christ's life, and 
with that of all other believers. While a great intellect, 
while purely rationalistic in some of his views, he placed 
the hidden source of religion in the spiritual affection 
more than in the scientific apprehension. 

Another striking feature of Schleiermacher's preaching 
was the spirit of union, of true brotherhood in Christ 
which he cherished. He sought ever to find and develop 
in the congregation this sense of brotherhood, of union in 
Christ through faith in him as the Head. The Church 
was the sphere where the Holy Ghost, or the Spirit of 
Christ, enabled this consciousness of God, and life in 
him, to be manifested freely. He had a most earnest 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 163 

longing toward union and common love among believers ; 

that there might be even no marked distinction made, as 

in the past, between preacher and people, but that they 

all might be brought into the communion of the same 

spirit and life. He called the true preacher " the mouth 

of the congregation." He would have the teaching and 

authoritative idea of the preacher to be lost sight of in 

the higher idea of his being the instrument to express 

the will, the thought, the spirit, and the love of the whole 

body of the people and Church of Christ. 

Schleiermacher was a philosopher ; and the influence of 

his philosophical studies, as well as of his comprehensive 

philological and classical culture, was seen in 

his sermons ; but he warned his pupils and Difference 

between 
hearers of the difference between knowledge r .,, , 

and faith, and that the mathematical could dogma, 
not be mixed with the religious reason. 
His faith did not dwell in the dry region of human sci- 
ence {yvoDffii)^ but it sought something more vital and 
profound in the inward teachings of the Word and Spirit 
of Christ {TtiffTis). He opened his heart freely to these. 
He abode in the love of Christ as well as in the love of 
human Christian friends. All the impulses of his being 
sought for sympathy, and his religious life would soon 
have perished in the exclusive pursuit of the technical 
science of speculative theology ; it strove after a more 
permanent nourishment in the moral and spiritual affec- 
tions brought in union with Christ, the Lord of life. He 
was indeed almost the first Christian theologian who de- 
veloped the ethical side of Christianity in its harmonious 
breadth and freeness ; and, after all, amid the scientific, 
materialistic, and pessimistic doubts through which the 
struggling Christianity of the present day is called to 
pass, and in which the faith of many grows faint and is 



1 64 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

almost ready to vanish away, is there not an immovable 
standing-ground in the ethical and spiritual position upon 
which Schleiermacher's theology based itself? 

His sermons thus, though intensely subjective in their 
currents, were not mere expressions of thought, and as- 
suredly not mere bookish and literary dis- 
courses, but were full of the warm life of 
sermons— 
^extempore *^^ ^^^\' They were poured forth from the 
preacher, depths of a great, loving, religious nature. 
They were rarely written out beforehand, 
but though carefully thought through and methodized, 
being synthetic and thematic in form, they were extem- 
poraneously delivered. Schleiermacher was an extem- 
poraneoiis preacher. His thoughts did not freeze into 
ice-cakes as if to be weighed and delivered from a vehicle, 
like those of many preachers who adopt the written 
method, but they had the direct and spontaneous flow of 
fresh currents of thought and feeling. We would not 
lose the opportunity to enforce by the example of a great 
preacher, this needed reform in our modern pulpit, 
whereby it may be made equal in popular power to the 
bar and the platform. Never will it attain its highest 
influence with the great masses of the people until it is 
emancipated from the tyranny of the written method, 
and men who have a living message from God can deliver 
it like God's prophets freshly and freely to the hearts of 
living men. But Schleiermacher did not trust to the 
moment for his real thinking, or even his ordering of the 
discourse, but he said in his counsels on this point : 
** Before going into the pulpit, the sermon as a whole — 
that is, the separate thoughts in their relations to all the 
members and the whole — should be clearly in the mind." ' 



* Hagenbach's " Horn, and Lit.," p. 137. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 165 

Hence his discourses united in a wonderful degree the 
clearest thinking with the freest and most vital form of 
expression. Having seized the idea in its fullest concep- 
tion, nothing of its luminous beauty and completeness 
was lost in giving it outward shape and language. He 
illustrated in a striking manner Quintilian's conception of 
extemporaneous oratory : " Extcmporalis oratio nee alio 
tnihi videtitr mentis vigor e constare. 

While Schleiermacher lived in the pure ideas of beauty 
and truth, and possessed to an exquisite degree the feel- 
ing of whatever was true, good, and beauti- 
ful, he had a most comprehensive and virile theoloeian 
intellect that sought for the moral elevation 
of his hearers, for the greatest good of men and the 
State, and for the eternal interests of the human race. It 
cannot be denied that he leaned strongly to the philoso- 
phy of Spinoza, or, more correctly, of Schelling — the 
philosophy of the absolute ; though to call Schleier- 
macher a pantheist is as false as to say that such expres- 
sions as " For me to live is Christ," "Yet not I but 
Christ who liveth in me," would prove that the apostle 
Paul was a pantheist ; but it is patent that on the doc- 
trines of the Trinity and the Atonement, he has given 
speculative explanations which differ widely from current 
orthodoxy. One writer states his position in a few dis- 
criminating words : '* Schleiermacher knew the experi- 
ences of the religious life of the Christian, and he felt a 
powerful reality in them. In many of his speculations he 
coincided with Fichte, but feeling with him was a stronger 
reality than speculation. He believed that philosophy 
is yet far from attaining its true end ; and he drew him- 
self back from it, and retired into the province of Chris- 
tian experience. This experience he vindicated in his 
systematic theology with the aid of a fine-drawn and 



i66 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

eloquent system of dialectics. On the other hand, the 
rationalistic tendencies of the day in which Schleier- 
macher commenced his labors, the style of criticism 
that then prevailed, his own philosophical studies also, 
particularly his study of Spinoza, undermined his faith in 
many points of the orthodoxy that has ever been preva- 
lent in the Church. Hence it is that he defended the 
great doctrines of Christianity, and at the same time 
abandoned many portions of truth, many parts especially 
of the historical revelation." For these reasons doubt- 
less he is to be studied with caution. He was a great 
freethinker in the best sense of the term. But he is not 
to be judged rashly. In some respects he was more 
evangelical than many in his time, and many now, who 
claim to be orthodox ; for he preserved the essential 
thing — the life and spirit of Christianity. The centre of 
his system is Christ ; is the gospel ; is the redemption 
wrought by the life, death, and Spirit of the Son of God ; 
and he, probably more than any other one mind, has 
brought back modern theology from the rationalistic to 
the Christian standpoint, and held it there firmly, and 
more and more will continue to hold it there. He, like 
our own Bushnell — though they could not otherwise be 
compared — had great penetrating thoughts of God, which 
still are influencing men and all Christian thought and 
life. He cannot, any more than Bushnell, be put into a 
theological school-closet. He not only regarded himself 
as being in God, but as God being in him, working in 
him, loving him, being joined to him in Christ, and 
moulding him spiritually into the perfection of Christ, 
who was human as well as divine. The amazing and all- 
comprehending truth of the Incarnation — of divine life 
brought into humanity, and, above all, into the purified 
soul of the believer through the Son of man — was the 
main truth with him. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 167 

We are just beginning to feel the strong tides of his 
influence in this country, and our Puritan theology is 
destined to be modified by him much more than it has 
yet been. He was, in his day, as he said in noble con- 
sciousness of himself, " the organ, the mouthpiece of 
many loving and profound Christian natures, the turning- 
point of the thoughts and feelings, the joys and sorrows, 
the doubts and hopes of many noble and pure souls ;" 
and this office he still in some sense fulfils, and in an 
ever-widening power. Thus he moved men, his country, 
and his age. It has been said of him, that as the Ger- 
man poet Arndt sought tp awaken the German sentiment 
of nationality in a depressed and downtrodden land, and 
as Fichte sought to erect ag^ain the German reason, so 
Schleiermacher spoke to the German religious life — to 
the deepest soul of the German people — to their concep- 
tion of and hold upon God and divine things. As he was 
a prophet to the people in the time of their greatest sor- 
row, need, and fear, so should every true preacher of 
Christ be, and may be, because the love wherewith Christ 
loves him is in him, because he has that divine sympathy 
which is ever ready to console and to suffer with men. 

We have dwelt so long upon Schleiermacher that we 
have but few words for Tholuck, Avho was, nevertheless, 
as a preacher, in some respects, a better or more prac- 
ticable model than Schleiermacher. 

Friedrich August Gottreu Tholuck was born March 

30th, 1799, in Breslau, the birthplace of Schleiermacher. 

He was the son of a goldsmith, and was 

^ . Tholuck. 

destined to be himself a goldsmith, but his 

brightness and love of knowledge caused him to be sent 

from the gymnasium of his native place to Berlin to study 

the Oriental languages, and through his enthusiasm for 

these studies he is said at that time to have been as much 



1 68 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

a Mohammedan as a Christian. He made great profi- 
ciency in h'nguistic pursuits, and became also at this time 
an ardent believer ; so that from his promise as a scholar 
and his earnestness as a Christian he began to be regard- 
ed by the leaders of the evangelical party at Berlin, such 
as Neander and Hengstenberg, as an important ally to 
their cause ; and he was appointed Extraordinary Pro- 
fessor of Theology at Berlin University, He wrote a 
reply to DeWette on a subject connected with the 
dominant scepticism then in Germany, and was trans- 
ferred to Halle, where, in 1826, he was named Ordinary 
Professor of Theology, for the avowed purpose of com- 
bating the Leibnitz-Wolffian form of rationalism then 
and there prevailing, whose leaders were Wegscheider 
and Gesenius. For fifty years he sustained an active 
conflict in support of evangelical views, and lived to see 
a great change wrought in the religious opinion both of 
his own university and of all Germany. He was a fer- 
tile writer on theological subjects, though not taking the 
first rank as a scholar. One critic says of him : " His 
biblical, historical, and practical writings found a consid- 
erable circle of readers, for they are distinguished for 
richness of thought, learning, and sensibility. In spite of 
the numerous quotations from Christian and heathen 
authors, both old and new, they indeed lack true thor- 
oughness ; in spite of their orthodox coloring they lack 
consistency ; in spite of their keenness they lack clear- 
ness. One seldom loses the feeling that the author fails 
to comprehend clearly what he means to express. And 
could this be well otherwise ? Theologian of compromise 
through and through, at the same time belonging to the 
Romantic and sceptical schools, Tholuck had in fact won- 
derful receptivity for everything, but no clear, consistent 
standpoint. As a preacher in the philosophical mantle 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 169 

of Schleiermacher he still could be claimed by the vari- 
ous schools of theology, while he belonged in substance 
to none of them wholly." Tholuck died at Halle in the 
summer of 1877. 

As a preacher, Tholuck perhaps wrought his greatest 
influence. There was a free and almost torrent-flow of 
emotional thought in his sermons — of thought inspired 
by an evangelic spirit. He often exhibited an impas- 
sioned eloquence which bore the minds and hearts of his 
hearers along with it. ** While," says Professor Park, 
" he would be called a memoriter preacher, yet he bor- 
rowed so much aid from the extemporaneous method 
that it is not always easy to classify him. He would dic- 
tate to his amanuensis a sermon on one Sabbath morn- 
ing between five and seven o'clock ; review the sermon at 
the same hours on the next Sabbath morning, and deliver 
it at nine o'clock on that very morning. His tenacious 
memory grasped and held a large part of what he had 
written, but his sentences as they were uttered received 
a new wealth of beauty from his rich imagination." ' 

Although a man of varied learning, Tholuck's sermons, 
like other German sermons, are simple without show of 
erudition, and though not without interesting thought, 
are mainly addressed to the heart rather than the head. 
As most of his sermons were preached to university stu- 
dents, they are stamped with that free, fresh style adapt- 
ed to impress young men. There is nothing drily 
scholastic in their method or substance. They are living 
forms of thought. They are shot through with feeling 
as if caught from the light of that cross which he loved 
to hold up before the eyes of men, and especially of 
those who were accounted wise. 



' " Bib. Sac," vol. xxix. p. 377. 



170 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

He also exhibited a sagaciousness, a hard, shrewd 
knowledge of human nature, which is wonderful in a man 
devoted so exclusively to scholarly pursuits. The main 
traits of his preaching, we should say, were individuality, 
boldness mixed with kindness, dramatic power of the 
imagination, a pointed and homely style of thought, and 
a truly evangelic feeling that interfused all, and entered 
into the core and inmost meaning of the gospel. There 
are now and then sentences in his sermons which take us 
into the heart of spiritual truth, and we find ourselves 
making a stand upon them, revolving them and incor- 
porating them into our own thinking, and almost uncon- 
sciously adopting them as principles to regulate our modes 
of belief. Were it not indeed well for us to infuse some- 
thing of the spiritual life, and of the heart-glow of Schleier- 
macher, Tholuck, and the best German preachers from 
Tauler and Luther down to Palmer of Tubingen, Dorner 
of Berlin, Kahnis and Luthardt of Leipsic, and a hundred 
others, where, at the same time, there is no want of 
vigorous thinking-— into our more cold, formal, and 
rationalistic methods of preaching ? Yet we are of the 
opinion that we should not wholly adopt the German 
style of sermonizing, and lose sight of the best distinctive 
traits of the New England pulpit — its nobly thoughtful 
method and its profound grasp of principles. 

The French pulpit is classic and brilliant. Its most 
eloquent Protestant representative was Jacques Saurin. 

Saurin v/as born 1677, and died 1730. His 
e renc professional life was mostly spent in Holland, 
Saurin ^^ ^^ Hague. Although he adorned the 

Protestant pulpit with more of grace than it 
had before, he sincerely aimed at the great end of preach- 
ing — the spiritual welfare of men. He therefore stands 
higher as an evangelical preacher, though not as an ora- 



HISTORY OF PREACinyG. 171 

tor, than most of the great Cathoh'c French preachers. 
He was one of the first Protestant preachers who intro- 
duced into the plain didactic method of the Reformed 
pulpit the ornaments of eloquence. His chief produc- 
tions are his sermons. These sermons have an elaborate 
method, and are built on the plan of a classic oration ; 
indeed, he rarely puts off his oratorical robes. His *' in- 
troductions" are often highly wrought, and he follows the 
strictly logical or forensic method in the development. 
He concentrates all the elements of the text in a common 
subject or proposition, and preaches topically. His style 
is clear, shining, energetic, at times almost harsh, and 
deficient in pathos and unction. He introduces his ideas 
in a formal way by the law of progression rather than of 
natural development. Sometimes his whole plan con- 
sists merely of a number of remarks arranged numeri- 
cally, without much regard to the logical evolution of 
thought. His sermons are full of eloquent thoughts. 
There are animated dialogues introduced — dialogues be- 
tween the preacher and God, and between the preacher 
and his flock, so that his pulpit address attracted crowds 
by its liveliness ; and his reputation was at one time so 
great that a number of irnitators arose, who carried his 
impassioned style to an extreme. He addressed the pas- 
sions rather than the will and the affections. He delivered 
almost an entire system of theology, or body of divinity, 
in the course of his preaching ; and, while undoubtedly 
orthodox, was still more liberal than his contemporaries 
in his theological views. Though he employed meta- 
physics, he did not do so profoundly, and he did not 
always get at the root of things divine. Although he 
felt strongly what he said, he was essentially a " book- 
man" in his style, and he painted, by a sort of intellectual 
insight, man rather than men. He did not so well know 



173 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

men. There is, however, considerable variety in his 
preaching, and he entered the field of Christian ethics 
more boldly than his predecessor ; but he was, more than 
all, and in spite of all, a true preacher of the gospel. 
Abbadie, another French preacher of celebrity, on one 
occasion said of him : " It is an angel and not a man who 
speaks." Nevertheless Saurin is perhaps a little too 
much of an eloquent declaimer built on the plan of a 
classic orator, with too abstract and polished a style to 
be the highest model of a Christian preacher, who speaks 
the language of common life, the language of the Bible, 
and of that spiritual truth that reaches both the under- 
standing and the hearts of plain men. He dealt too 
much in the general, and not enough in the concrete. 
He could speak of the avarice of Judas till he thrilled the 
souls of his hearers, but it was the effect of the orator 
rather than the preacher. Still, as a faithful preacher of 
evangelical truth, he was, as has been said, superior to 
the French Roman Catholic orators. 

We usually think of the French pulpit in connection 
with the brilliant and world-famous names of the great 
Roman Catholic preachers ; but there was also a class of 
noble French contemporaneous Protestant preachers who 
are too often overlooked. 

As this is rather a neglected period of French homi- 

Reformed l^^^^al history, we will speak more fully 

preachers o^ these Reformed French preachers of 

of the* the seventeenth century, selecting one of 

Seventeenth ^j^^ greatest of them (not the most elo- 

Cen ury. q^gj^^^ since Saurin was probably that) as 

an illustration.* 



' What follows upon this particular period is in the main derived from 
Vinet's " Histoire de la Predication de I'Eglise Reformee de France." 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 173 

The greatness of Protestantism is one of the principal 
features of the greatness of the seventeenth century. 
This is true even in France, where Protestantism was 
proscribed. 

At a later day this could be forgotten ; but the con- 
temporary Roman Catholic orators, like Bossuet and 
Bourdaloue, did not speak but with respect, even if hos- 
tilely, of the French Protestant Church and its ministers. 

There was at this time in the Protestant Church a num- 
ber of great theologians, great controversialists, and above 
all great Christians. A part of the strength 

of Catholicism itself in this age must be ^°"^^ ^"^ 
, -, . ^ 1 1- . 1 1 historical 

imputed to Protestantism. Catholicism had characteristics 

arrived at that point when all Europe was of this period, 
falling into the abyss of impiety ; and the 
Romish priesthood, so far from restraining was pre- 
cipitating it. The Romish Church, by holding to its 
traditions instead of preserving anything, only hastened 
its own destruction ; the progress of light and learning 
widened the breach ; and had there been no Luther and 
Calvin, the papacy would have succumbed under the 
thrusts of such merciless foes as Rabelais and Montaigne. 
The Reformation was the saving of Christianity, whether 
Protestant or Catholic. 

The most conspicuous preaching talents, it is true, 
were found among the Catholics ; but in the main the 
Protestant Church was weightier than its rival. The 
superiority of one age is not in the marked pre-eminence 
of isolated individuals, any more than the prosperity of a 
country consists in the wealth of certain men. Catholi- 
cism, notwithstanding its great names, had really fewer 
able preachers than Protestantism. On the whole, the 
reformed preaching of the seventeenth century in France 
is remarkable. 



174 HO MILE TICS PROPER. 

But the literary inferiority of the Protestant ministers 

is very evident. Even before they went into exile they 

had the style of exiles ; and the reformed 
Literary i , • t- 

inferioritv pi'eachers who wrote and spoke m r ranee 

were wanting in a fine appreciation of their 
own language. One reason of this is that they were 
not in such propitious circumstances as their rivals to 
form their taste ; they were not, as it were, in the focus 
of good language, in the light of the court. The Protest- 
ant Church was a republic by itself, with its own habits, 
tradition, and even language — a language grave and sim- 
ple, as was befitting a persecuted church. Its preachers 
followed the counsel of D'Aubigne : '* Let us make our 
style of writing respected." This is better than beauty ; 
but it must be confessed that beauty was wanting. Bos- 
suet said of Calvin, as has already been quoted, " Son 
style est triste/' He could have said the same of most 
of the reformed preachers of France. But Calvin is some- 
times eloquent, and they are not so always. Their 
gravity is bare, stripped of all the flowers of the imagina- 
tion ; nothing in their situation, nothing in their past or 
their future was calculated to enliven their style. 

Another cause of their inferiority is that they were un- 
able to avoid controversy and the consequent abuse of 
the dogmatic clement. Men of combat, they carried into 
the pulpit the dust of the arena. Theology, in their ser- 
monizing, bore hard on religion, and the practical applica- 
tion of their discourses is often slurred over. Doubtless 
dogma is the foundation of moral truth ; but for all that, 
too much of the dogmatic can hardly be reconciled with 
much spirituality. It must be also added that the 
abounding of the moral element in the whole substance 
of preaching is an essential condition of eloquence. In 
this respect the Catholics were, perhaps, in a more favor^ 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 175 

able position : they did not have to establish the dogma 
anew for their own Church, and as It was for their Inter- 
est to cause Protestants and their doctrines to be for- 
gotten, they avoided theological controversy as much as 
possible ; having to dogmatize less, they moralized more, 
and their whole preaching gained by It. 

That which redeems the fault which we have noticed 
In Protestant preaching is the purity and solidity of the 

doctrinal teaching; ; It is identical In the 

^ ' , , Doctrinal 

mam with that which we call Puritan the- teaching; 

ology, though differing from it In some re- 
spects. The French reformed preachers of the seven- 
teenth century laid their foundations solidly ; the Eng- 
lish Puritans aimed vigorously for immediate results ; 
the first had more regard to the life and foundations of 
the Church ; the last aimed more at the salvation of 
the individual. One feature which characterized the re- 
formed preachers of the seventeenth century, not only 
those who remained in the Roman Catholic Church, but 
their successors in the Reformation, Is their biblical char- 
acter. Their sermons are often nothing more than an 
extended exegesis of the text ; they spell It out, syllable 
by syllable, word by word ; they press it ; they almost 
Avring It ; this Is ordinarily all their plan. There is little 
invention, but there Is a judicious and exact analysis, 
though carried to an extreme. 

Their preaching is, however, superior to that of their 
successors in regard to its texture, Its solidity. Its cor- 
rectness, and Its knowledge. It addressed auditories 
difficult to satisfy — auditories of theologians, sometimes 
of martyrs. It was " the church in the desert," as it 
was aptly called. What force there was needed In the 
flocks themselves to support such a style of preaching ! 
But they doubtless more than supported It ; they loved ijt. 



176 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

For to this height a whole church was elevated. Those 

merchants, those artisans, studied their religion with the 

greatest care. 

In these reformed preachers, notwithstanding their 

literary inferiority, a genuine respect for learning is also 

„ ^ apparent, which has been sometimes errone- 

Respect for ^^ 
learning. ^usly thought to be incompatible with high 

pastoral fidelity. They recognized in learning 
a means, a power, and also a fitness. One of them was 
deposed solely on account of his culpable ignorance of 
good letters. Some of them even carried their cultiva- 
tion in this respect farther than would be imagined ; thus 
Le Faucheur, the most vehement of all, composed " A 
Treatise on the Action of the Orator," which is evidently 
the fruit of thorough classical studies. These ministers 
were, in other respects, among the most intelligent men 
of their day ; they wished at least to be equal to the best 
educated of their congregations. 

Through all the differences which separate them from 
the Roman Catholics and distinguish them among them- 
selves, a common character is everywhere seen — it is the 
French genius, the French style ; the direct march, the 
method, the clearness. It is not that which makes them 
great, but without that they could not be so great. 
They all have, also, more or less of what the French call 

/ esprit. 

The study of these old preachers not only affords us 
an historical interest, but they furnish us also good 
models. One may read many of them even now for 
edification, and, excepting their archaic language, he will 
find them little touched by age. In the purity and 
solidity of their doctrine they have something fresh, 
while the preachers who come an age later present in 
their sermons a faded foliage and a worn-out doctrine. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 177 

The first really appear to us to be younger, and in reality 
they were so ; they are less antiquated even than the 
great models of the Roman Catholic pulpit. If they 
have not, like them, the advantages of form, they have 
not the disadvantages ; for the form is something tem- 
porary, while the substance of truth is eternal. The re- 
formed preachers were not fashionable in their day, and 
that is partly the reason why they are not superannuated 
now. The oldest of them all, Du Moulin, is he who 
appears the youngest. 

What has thus far been said applies essentially to the 
preachers of the first half of the seventeenth century. 
The literary' influence and culture of the succeeding last 
half of the century made itself more felt upon their suc- 
cessors. The preachers of the first period, which extends 
from Du Moulin to Claude, exclusively, is distinguished, 
according to Vinet, by three characteristics : i. The 
analytical system of their sermons; 2. The brief place 
occupied by the moral element ; 3. The almost total 
absence of the literary and even oratorical element. 

When we come to the second period of the reformed 

preaching of the seventeenth century the transition is so 

gradual that we could quite as well say 

The second 
that its greatest preachers, like Claude, for neriod 

example, terminate the first period. Yet 
one perceives in Claude's sermons the first symptoms of 
the homiletical revolution that then took place. Analy- 
sis becomes synthesis. It was very much like the history 
of preaching in the early centuries. Until that time the 
expository method had prevailed — an exposition easy, 
and followed ordinarily by a simple expansion of the text. 
There was an effort, doubtless, to unite different parts, 
and to give them a final direction, but this effort was 
not \itry strenuous. From this to the sermon, ordinarily 



I 7^ HOMILETICS PItOPER. 

SO called, which grasps an idea in the text, there is a 
great distance filled by intermediate examples. Claude 
does not separate himself from the ancient method, he 
only modifies it. In this conciliation which was then at- 
tempted there was a desire above all to give a faithful, 
solid, and detailed explication of the text, but at the 
same time to develop an idea which should become the 
subject of the discourse. The attem.pt was difficult, and 
was hardly to be accomplished without doing some injury 
to that simplicity of attraction which should belong to 
the Christian pulpit. The Protestant preachers have not 
always avoided the danger of the method that they have 
chosen ; and they have often been led to wrest either 
their mind or their text. This, however, is better than 
the method of the Cathohc orators, who scorn the text 
and do not make use of it. 

Another character of the sermons of this second period 
is, that controversy occupies a less and less prominent 
place. We will now speak more particularly of one great 
man as being, perhaps, the best exponent of this period. 

Jean Claude was the most eminent French- 
Claude "^^^^ ^^^ ^^^ Reformed Church of his time ; 

the Roman Catholics called him ** the famous 
minister Claude." He was born in 1619 at Sauvetat, in 
the Rouergue, where his father was minister. It was 
under his father's direction, who w^as a man of great 
knowledge, that he carried on his studies, even those of 
theology, although he desired to go to Saumur, where 
he was attracted by the polish of manners and language 
prevailing there. After his consecration he became pas- 
tor of the little church of " Saintc Afriqitc,'' in the 
South, where he could devote a great part of his time to 
study. Called to be pastor at Nismes in 1654, he also 
taught theology there with success. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 1 79 

He presided at the provincial synod of Nismes in 1661, 
and there opposed the projects of reunion with the State 
Church, which concealed views of direct oppression of 
religious freedom. It was desired by the originators of 
this plan of union, on the one hand to divide and on the 
other to diminish the moral power of a body whose only 
power was moral. Claude declared that the reformers 
could not consent to unite light with darkness, Christ 
with Belial ; and, in spite of the opposition of the royal 
committee, he caused this declaration to be inserted in 
the protocol. In consequence of this bold opposition, 
his ministry in Languedoc vv^as interdicted. He betook 
himself to Paris to protest, but could not succeed in re- 
moving the interdiction. 

Then opened to Claude the career of controversy, In 
which he rendered such great service to his Church. 
Madame de Turenne besought him to refute a manu- 
script treatise which had been written for the view of 
converting the Marechal. His reply was widely circulated 
before it was printed. His fame dates from that time. 

He then refuted the book upon " La Perpetuite de la 
foi sur TEucharlstie, " in which Arnauldand Nicolo main- 
tained that the dogma of the " real presence" had always 
been admitted by Christendom. The Jesuits themselves 
labored to spread the reply of Claude, as a weapon 
against the Jansenists. 

Claude was named minister at Paris in 1666. From 
that time his influence was great in the councils of the 
reformers. He was the leader and soul of his party. He 
was placed in the front rank on all important occasions. 
The most celebrated is the conference or controversy that 
he held with Bossuet, at the invitation of a relative of 
Turenne, Mademoiselle de Duras. It is not easy to dis- 
cover who really prevailed ; but Bossuet himself said, in 



l8o HOMILETICS PROPER. 

speaking of Claude, in the preface of his own relation of 
the dispute, " He made me tremble for those who heard 
him." 

At the revocation of the edict of Nantes (1685) he was 
distinguished in the general proscription. While it al- 
lowed to other ministers a delay of fifteen days to leave 
the kingdom, Claude was compelled to leave in twenty- 
four hours. He was everywhere on his journey over- 
whelmed with marks of respect, even on the part of 
Catholics. He retired to La Haye, where he continued 
to preach, though wholly occupied with other labors. 
He died at the end of eighteen months of exile. 

Claude, in his style, belonged to that literary epoch 

which is called the age of Louis XIV. He has the pure 

taste of the great writers of that age, a classic 

y e and language, and a horror of false brilliancy. 
character as . , ^ .. 

a preacher ^ passage from his first discourse on the 

" Parable of the Marriage Feast," he ex- 
presses his strong aversion to elaborate minuteness in 
sermonizing. 

** I will not stop here," he says, " to draw an imperti- 
nent parallelism composed of all the points of correspond- 
ence that might be discovered between a marriage feast 
and the gospel of the Saviour of the world, and much less 
will I weary myself to push to excess this figure of the 
' marriage feast. ' These allegorical and parallelistic 
methods, if I dared say so, are generally only bad efforts 
or evil, which do not please an)^ one, and more than this, 
do not edify any one's conscience." 

Claude, while attached as a matter of principle to the 
analytic or expository method, still inclines to the syn- 
thetic treatment ; while he is faithful to the text, and 
spells it out, word by word, as did his predecessors, yet 
he is not satisfied with following it thus closely ; he 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. i8i 

seeks to bind it up in one or two ideas, and to recast it in 
the form of a subject ; in a word, he has a plan. This 
he announces ordinarily at the beginning of his sermon. 
Thus, in the second sermon of a series upon the parable 
of the wedding (Matt. 22 : 1-7), he begins in this wise : 
" You have come here, Christians, to learn two important 
truths : one, the corruption of man deprived of the aid of 
grace, and the other, what divine justice does when man 
abandons his duty. These are the two points to be 
treated. We have to see, first, what the guests did when 
the king sent his servants to call them ; secondly, we 
have to consider what happened to these guests." 

Nothing like this is to be observed in any of his prede- 
cessors. And in the fifth sermon, more particularly upon 
the words, " Many are called, but few are chosen," he 
says : " This is, in truth, the conclusion our Lord draws 
from the whole of the parable, and this is the reason he 
gives why the Jews rejected his gospel, and why among 
the Gentiles who received it outwardly, there are found 
some who did not bring to his divine banquet the right 
dispositions of heart. To treat more distinctly so great 
a matter, we divide it into two parts. The first will be 
upon the calling and election considered in themselves 
what they are ; the second will have regard to their ex- 
tent according to the limits given them by our text." 

In other respects we do not find anything remarkable in 
Claude in his analysis of texts and subjects. He has not 
much invention, but is judicious and penetrating. What 
strikes us in him is his invariable good sense and eleva- 
tion and firmness of spirit. 

His style is terse, neat, and rapid ; each phrase, each 
Avord goes straight to the point, ad cvcntuvi fcstinat. 
He is distinguished also generally by an irreproachable 
correctness. 



102 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

" He did not view the public," says the author of his 
posthumous works, " with that proud security that we see 
in some authors, and he did not think himself so infallible 
as to be contented with his first thoughts. His principle 
was that he could not reflect enough on what he wrote, 
and when it was a question to come before all eyes, he 
could not present himself with too much honesty or wis- 
dom. This obliged him to revise his works often, and to 
retouch them with severity." 

As to the quality of imagination, whether it be that 
which invents ideas or creates images, he has little of it ; 
but he has vigor and authority. He was naturally stern ; 
Benoit rightly calls him *' the inflexible Claude," and he 
found too many occasions to show his stern inflexibility. 
At the epoch of the edict of Nantes the condition of the 
Reformed Church was desperate ; the Protestant char- 
acter was weakened ; the whole Church was gradually 
sinking into a lethargy ; there were many apostasies of 
distinguished persons and of the rich. 

Such a condition of things inspired Claude to utter 
words of terrible severity. These are not commonplaces 
either : his character, moderate and rather cold than pas- 
sionate, as a guaranty that they were not also exaggera- 
tions, but a faithful portraiture of the moral condition of 
his auditors. In his reproofs he shows an apostolic bold- 
ness, without personal asperity, and sometimes rising to 
eloquence. 

Thus, having spoken of the ruin of the people of Israel 
after the death of Jesus Christ, Claude addresses his audi- 
ence in these terms : " Let us learn, my brethren, from 
this great and terrible example, to know and fear divine 
justice ; and you, ye profane, be astonished. There is 
now no more any question of shifting and cavilling about 
the Christian religion ; the time has come to tremble at 



HISTORY OF PREACH I KG. 1 83 

the sight of the most fearful object that ever presented 
itself to human eye. When a disbeliever is alone in the 
quiet of his chamber, he can philosophize at his ease, 
and search out arguments to call in question the plainest 
things ; but when he is in the open field and sees the tem- 
pest burst around him, and the lightning strike tall trees 
and burn houses ; when he sees the earthquake-fire de- 
scend from heaven and leap up from the abyss beneath, 
and whole cities swallowed or consumed, then he has 
something else to do than to weave subtleties ; he is ter- 
rified, and feels, in spite of what he has said, the effect 
of what he does not wish to believe. And so it is with 
us now. If it were only a question of dogmas and mys- 
teries, our courageous spirits could raise troubles and 
difficulties ; but if it is a question of a thunderbolt hurled 
from the mightiest hand in the universe ; if it is a ques- 
tion of an incurable wound, which bleeds and has bled 
for seventeen centuries ; if it is a question of a fii-e which 
smokes before our eyes and will smoke to the end of the 
world, who would not be afraid ? I avow that God has 
never displayed his judgments in so impressive a manner ; 
that he has never presented such occasions ; that the Son 
of God descends once more on earth to be personally 
crucified. The ruin of the Jews was a strange event, and 
hence Scripture presents it to us as an image of the last 
judgment and of the end of the world. But, while 
guarding the proportion of things, I say that God does 
not leave men's crimes unpunished, and, above all, those 
which outrage or bring into contempt his gospel ; and if 
we would open our eyes to see the ways of his providence, 
all the ages and even our own age will furnish us with 
remarkable examples. Learn then to fear, and knowing 
what is the terror of the Lord, suffer it at least to lead 
you to faith. While God keeps himself hid in the cloud 



184 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

of his pity and of his long-suffering, and has, so to speak, 
his arms tied, you have no conception of his power, his 
anger, or his justice ; but know if you overcome his 
patience by your obduracy, the victory will cost you 
dear. Remember what God said to the wicked in the 
fiftieth Psalm, for after having set forth his sins, he adds : 
* These things hast thou done, and I kept silence ; thou 
thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself ; 
but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine 
eyes.' It is true that God has placed our evil and our 
good, our punishment and our reward, as ideas of the 
future ; but what St. Paul has said for the consolation of 
the just, *' Yet a little while, and he that shall come will 
come, and will not tarry,' we can say with stronger rea- 
son in order to impress the wicked with terror ; if divine 
justice lingers, it will come, and will not tarry. In my 
opinion, one can say this with more emphasis in regard to 
the effects of his justice than of his goodness ; for there 
is nothing in the wicked but what hastens his justice, 
while God's goodness finds in the most just persons a 
thousand reasons for delay. 

" But, one will say, why do you speak thus ? We, by 
the grace of God, are not wicked, nor profane, nor unbe- 
lieving persons ; we believe in Jesus Christ, and we have 
made profession of his gospel ! My brethren, 1 know 
that you profess to be Christians, and if the question 
were on condemning the act of the Jews, not one of you 
would undertake its defence. I am even persuaded that 
if there may be among us many profane and worldly men 
who make no account of religion, there are still many 
good souls who desire to win salvation ; and if this were 
not so God would not preserve to us as he has the min- 
istry of his word. But do we not make ourselves every 
day unworthy of his grace by the great number of sins 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 185 

that we commit, and by the small account that we make 
of his gospel ? We are selfish and avaricious, hard and 
obstinate, unjust and violent, proud and arrogant, sensual 
and given to pleasure, envious, slanderous, malicious, 
implacable like all the rest of men ; and how can we 
boast of our Christianity? It is for this reason that God 
has made us for a longtime to hear his voice ; he exhorts 
us, he admonishes us, he presses us, he solicits us, he 
chastises us, he bears with us, and still how few are the 
fruits that he has yet gathered from so great care ? We 
have, then, just cause to fear that he will at length be 
angry at our negligence and ingratitude, and we have the 
more cause to fear in that, notwithstanding some threat- 
enings which he has made against us, and which have 
already begun to be accomplished, there has been no 
amendment seen in our people." It should be remem- 
bered that this was spoken in the period of the persecu- 
tion of the Huguenots, the revocation of the edict of 
Nantes, and the dragonnades of Louis XIV. It was a 
painful, perilous, and most solemn period for all who 
loved the truth in France. 

We have spent upon this preacher and this epoch more 
time than was justifiable, and the only excuse is that it 
is new and noble ground for study. But there were also^ 
other preachers of marked power in that age, who be- 
longed to the Protestant Church, such as Pierre du 
Moulin (already mentioned), Mos. Amyraud, other 
Jean Daille, Michel le Faucheur, Jean Mes- Protestant 
trezat, and Pierre du Bosc. Associated with French 
these in lineal descent were those great P*"^*^ ^^^• 
French preachers of the eighteenth century who were 
driven to Holland by the edict of Nantes, of whom 
Jacques Saurin, whom we have before noticed, was 
one of the most eminent, such as Jean Basnage, Henri 



l86 HO MILE TICS PROPER. 

Chatelain, Jacques Abbadie, Pierre Roques, called " Pas- 
teur Evangelique." The first mentioned preachers who 
remained in France were pastors of the French Protestant 
Church in times of its distress and persecution, when it 
was *' the church in the wilderness." They were, as has 
been said, apostolic men, true leaders and counsellors of 
the people. 

The more widely known and celebrated French Roman 
Catholic divines are headed by Bossuet, ** the eagle of 

- . , Meaux. " He was born in 1627 and died 
Eminent ' 

French 1704, being almost the exact contemporary 
Roman of Claude. He has not been unjustly com- 

Cathohc pared to Demosthenes, though it must be 

preachers — -j .u • • 1 • 1 r 

^ said the comparison is one exclusively of 

French writers. His sermons abound in 
passages of grandeur and force. He caught something of 
the sublime style of the Hebrew prophets, who were his 
favorite study in youth. Indeed, however falsely he 
may have interpreted it, the Bible was the grand source 
of his inspiration as a preacher. His six oraisons fune- 
bres are full of majesty of tone, and have a breadth and 
freedom of style beyond that of other French preach- 
ers. He despised the minute and fine-spun styles ; but 
his faults also were great, having a tendency to stage 
effect, or to the false sublime, and to an imperious harsh- 
ness and virulence of language. He was jealously at- 
tached to the orthodox doctrine, as held by the Catholic 
Church, attacking vindictively both the heresies of Lu- 
ther and of Fenelon, the latter in the disgraceful contro- 
versy on ** Quietism." He was devoted to his church 
rather than to the simplest and highest objects of preach- 
ing ; but he was not wanting in faithfulness in boldly 
attacking the vices of the corrupt court of Louis XIV., 
resembling Dr. South, who was placed in somewhat 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 187 

similar circumstances, In this particular, though the com- 
parison cannot be carried farther. He was a learned and 
brilliant orator of a brilliant age, but his fame in the 
future will never be so great as it was in the past. 
Although he was a defender of the rights of Gallicanism, 
he was, above all, the indomitable and untiring servant 
of the papacy, or, as he called himself, ** Bos siietits 
aratro.'' He was great from his own point of view. 
Whatever else he was or was not, he was the determined 
foe of Protestantism, and, with Massillon, Flechier, and 
other court chaplains, he hounded on Louis XIV. in his 
persecutions of the Huguenots and the reformed churches. 
Massillon, probably a greater pulpit orator than Bos- 
suet, though of a less brilliant style, was moderate and 

self-contained, even in his most fervid 

. .< • Massillon. 

utterances ; and this noticeable vis tcni- 

perata' of Massillon is one chief source of his elo- 
quence : it marks reserved force — a great quality in 
preaching. At times Massillon was vehemently im- 
petuous. No recorded uninspired sermon ever probably 
made a greater immediate impression upon an audience 
than his sermon on ** The small Number of the Elect." 
It reminds one of the scenes that occurred at the 
preaching of Jonathan Edwards. When he came to 
these words : " Withdraw now these four classes of sin- 
ners from this congregation, for they will be withdrawn 
from it at the great day. Stand forth now, ye righteous ! 
Where are ye? Remnant of Israel, pass to the right ! 
Wheat of Jesus Christ, separate yourselves from the chaff 
destined for the everlasting burning ! Oh, God, where 
are thine elect !" hundreds rose up with agitation and 
despair painted on their countenances, and the preacher 
himself was obliged to stop, overcome with emotion. 
Bourdaloue, by some considered the greatest of the 



1 88 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

French preachers, had a dignified and serious style, de- 
void of florid ornament, plain, masculine, 
Bourdaloue. 

and direct. He drew largely from the 

fathers of the Church. He was called " Le predicateur 
des rois et le roi des predicateur s.'' As one who set his 
face against the false taste of the Jesuit pulpit in his 
times, and was a reformer of pulpit style, bringing it back 
to something of its pristine soberness, reasonableness, 
and vigor, Bourdaloue is perhaps our best model among 
the great Roman Catholic preachers of his day. He has 
indeed been called the founder of modern pulpit elo- 
quence among the French. 

Fenelon, whose name cannot be mentioned but with 
admiration and affection by all who love Christ, united a 

polished but easy and natural style with 
Fenelon. ^ , , . . ,. , . ^, 

profound spirituality and unction. The 

best mystical theology, that of self-abnegation and 
quietism — the theology of Thomas-a-Kempis — was ex- 
emplified in the writings and life of Fenelon. 

The great modern French preachers, such as the broth- 
ers Monod, Coquerel father and son, I.acor- 

° ^^" daire, De Ravignan, Pere Hyacinthe, Grand- 
French x^ T^ f ^ 
oreachers pi^^'^e, Bersier, De Pressense, and, above all, 

Alexander Vinet, who may be reckoned a 
French preacher, though he lived at Lausanne in Switzer- 
land, are more familiar to us by name, though their sermons 
perhaps may be as unfamiliar to us as those of the older 
classic French preachers. The French are almost uni- 
versally memoriter preachers, taking great pains to com- 
mit their sermons, and to speak them with grace, fluency, 
and fervor. Though often characterized by great spiritual 
fervor and devoueineiit ^ they confessedly aim at pulpit 
eloquence. They are, in a word, more complete classic 
orators than the German or English preachers, but with- 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 1S9 

out the powerful individuality and depth of the preach- 
ers of the Teutonic race. 

The English or British pulpit is excelled by none in 
great names. It is robust, practical, sober, direct ; 

though not without its highly speculative 

t . , . , . , e British 

and mystical side, as seen m the group ot pulpit 

English Platonic divines of the Puritan pe- 
riod like Nathaniel Culverwell, Ralph Cudworth, Henry 
More, ending, or perhaps degenerating into English 
Bohmenism and Quakerism, but comprehending some of 
the most lofty and spiritual minds of the age. English 
preaching really began with Wyclif, who sowed the fire- 
seed of earnest evangelical preaching which sprang up 
two centuries after him, though its greatest representa- 
tives lived in the seventeenth century, which was the 

golden age of the English pulpit, when the 

. Its Golden 

Puritan strength and fervor, caught from ^ 

communion with the Holy Spirit, were still 
unadulterated. Even in the latter portion of the pre- 
vious century, during the fires of the Reformation in 
Elizabeth's reign, the emancipation of the English mind 
showed itself in the new vigor and spiritual freedom of 
the pulpit ; and many devoted preachers of the pure gos- 
pel, like John Rogers, Henry Smith, Bernard Gilpin, 
were precursors of the more learned and eloquent of the 
Puritan divines of the next reigns, whose preaching was 
massive in philosophic thought, with a hard rind of contro- 
versial theology, but informed and instinct in every part 
with spiritual light and living energy — the age of John 
Howe, Baxter, Flavel, Calamy, Owen, Bates, Charnock, 
and their powerful compeers of the Church party, Hook- 
er, Donne, Bishop Hall, South, Barrow, Jeremy Taylor, 
Leighton. Hooker and Donne, it is true, belong also to 
a somewhat earlier period, and they possess much of the 



190 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

richness and power of the wonderful Elizabethan age of 

intellectual development. Old Fuller says of Hooker : 

** Mr. Hooker, his voice was low, stature 
Hooker. hi. 

little, gesture none at all, standing stone 

still in the pulpit as if the posture of his body were the 
emblem of his mind, immovable in his opinions. Where 
his eye was left fixed at the beginning it was found 
fixed at the end of his sermon ; in a word, the doc- 
trine he delivered had nothing but itself to garnish it. 
His style was long and pithy, driving on a whole flock 
of several clauses before he came to the close of a 
sentence. So that, when the copiousness of his style 
met not with a proportionable capacity in his auditors, 
it was unjustly censured for perplext, tedious, and ob- 
scure. His sermons followed the inclination of his 
studies, and were for the most part on controversies and 
deep points of school divinity." 

In the other great preachers of this period there was a 
rich play of the imagination, and often true eloquence ; 
perhaps there are no passages of more rare and wonderful 
eloquence to be found in the sermons of any 
preacher than in those of Dr. Donne ; but 
they are "purple patches" interwoven with a vast deal 
that is rhapsodical and feeble. Charnock is especially 
vigorous and masculine ; he is also perspicuous and often 
profound. 

Of English sermonizers, whether of the older or the 

more modern school, Robert South is to be particularly 

noticed. He was born in 163^, and in 165 1 
> South. .^.T' 

became a student of Christchurch, Oxford, 
obtaining the honor of University orator. After the 
Restoration he was made Chaplain in Ordinary to Charles 
n., and continued to be a staunch loyalist and unflinch- 
ing and bigoted supporter of the English prelacy in 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 1 91 

Opposition to the Presbyterians and Puritans. He died 
in 1716. He belonged to the last half of the seventeenth 
century — to the stormy period of the English revolution, 
and of the conflict between the kingly and popular 
powers. It was the age of great men — of Cromwell, 
]\Tilton, Bacon, Locke, Fuller, Cudworth, Stillingfleet, 
Owen, Howe, Baxter, Bunyan, Barrow, Taylor. South 
did not at all like the stricter Puritan school of preachers, 
and there is little of real spirituality in his sermons ; but 
he is nevertheless a great ethical writer, not a dry dialec- 
tician, but ever keeping his feet on the facts of nature and 
experience. He lashes vice and the vice of his age with all 
the power of his unsparing wit and sarcasm. In the loose 
age of Charles II., Rochester, and Dryden, he stood 
boldly upon the rock of good morals. In thought he is 
powerful but irregular, being influenced in this respect 
by his passions, and resembling a volcano rather than a 
fruit-bearing mountain. He was a thoroughbred po- 
lemic, giving and taking blows without mercy. As a 
preacher few have excelled him in vigor of language, and 
as the master of a trenchant and forcible English style. 
Though rarely sublime, he is often eloquent. He is an 
excellent model of a sermonizer. His sermons always 
possess a distinct and indeed strongly marked logical 
plan, and his treatment of subjects is of the most thorough 
as well as copious kind. (See sermon on " Image of God 
in Man.") There is always a body of substantial and 
solid reasoning in his discourses. But he is greater as a 
sermon-maker than as a genuine preacher of the gospel. 
He had more grit than grace. He had a serviceable and 
business-like, strong and picturesque style. There is 
often a homely force about it which is better than all the 
graces of rhetoric. He speaks of the gospel's '' setting 
fallen man on his legs again." Discoursing of sceptics 



192 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

he says, " Or can they imagine that the law of God will 
be baffled with a lie clothed in a scoff?" He exclaims, 
** Creation bends and cracks under the wrath of God." 
One cannot open South without finding some strong 
meat. He is not one of those who is the servant of his 
language, but language is his servant. He understood 
the power of the English language as well, perhaps, as 
any prose writer of English. He was quick at resem- 
blances and objects of fresh illustration. His wit was pun- 
gent. He speaks of the peril of the modern infidel's be- 
coming like the ancient idolater, in these words :" That 
he should at length come to fawn upon his own dog ; 
bow himself before a cat ; adore leeks and garlic, and 
shed penitential tears at the smell of a deified onion." 

He preached out of his intense convictions, whether 
right or wrong, but he was strongly biassed by his preju- 
dices, and is a noticeable example of a partisan or political 
preacher in the bad sense of the term. Nothing was so 
black as his opposers, nothing so white as his own party. 
He is more than usually virulent in his assaults upon 
Puritan worship and extemporaneous prayer ; and he 
says of the Established Church of England that it is 
" the purest and most apostolically reformed church in 
the Christian world." He preached absolute subjec- 
tion to princes and the divine right of kings ; he calls 
Charles I. ** a blessed saint, the justness of whose govern- 
ment left his subjects at a loss for an occasion to rebel ; a 
father to his country, if but for this only that he was the 
father of such a son." He says there is but one prayer 
which is omitted in the English prayer-book, and that 
is that '* the Book of Common Prayer should be the 
book of worship used in the whole world from that time 
and forever !" 

But as the writer of an every-day nervous English style, 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 193 

without false sentiment and false ornament, virile, 
direct, clear, incisive, and practical, we know no better 
model for the orator, whether at the bar or in the pulpit. 
If his fervor at times is earthly, and his eloquence 
Demosthenean rather than Pauline, this is the fault of 
the man more than of the style, for that has genu- 
ine individuality. It is hard for us to regard him with 
entire approbation or patience because he is so bigoted a 
foe of free government and a free church ; but take him 
aside from his political prejudices, and we will find him 
to be a great moral reasoner and also a powerful apologist 
for the main doctrinal truths of Christianity in a highly 
infidelic and scoffing age. 

A writer in the Edinburgh Review ssys oi South : " His 
sermons are well worthy of frequent perusal by every 
young preacher. " He is not so wordy and epithetic as 
Barrow, is more pointed than Howe, and is more prac- 
tical and has better command of the imagination than 
Jeremy Taylor. He is also clearer in arrangement and 
freer from classicisms of style than are his eminent con- 
temporaries. While there is a great mass of valuable 
matter, ethical and theological, in his sermons, he is 
chiefly to be studied for his incomparable English. His 
chief fault of style, perhaps, is his too frequent use of 
antithesis, which comes from his keen and uncontrollable 
wit. He is ever more interested in state religion than in 
the religion of the New Testament, and his works form 
a treasury of prelatical arguments ; but, as has been 
said, when not pursued by this ecclesiastical demon he is 
an earnest preacher on moral and religious subjects. 

Isaac Barrow was also a distinguished master of the 

moral-descriptive style of preachincr, but 

u- 1 ^ . , o , . Barrow. 

his language does not compare with South s 

for condensed vigor, and it is overloaded with adjec- 



194 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

tives and qualificatives even to verboseness. Barrow 
is also lengthy in his treatn^ent of a subject. He has 
" the gift of continuousness." His sermons are in fact 
treatises on Christian themes and the Christian virtues, 
some of them being continuations of the same subject 
through five or six discourses, as his sermons on ** Obedi- 
ence to Spiritual Guides. ' ' They are better fitted in their 
present shape for reading in the study than for delivery 
from the pulpit, and they were felt to be so sometimes 
by the audiences of his day. Yet they have some marked 
qualities of power. 

Jeremy Taylor cannot be judged of superficially ; for 
he is like a mountain or a whole terrestrial region bearing 

all manner of fruits. He affords illustrations 
Jeremy Taylor, ^ni-i r i rii 11 

of all kmds of style, of the best and the 

worst. There is sometimes a lack of the pure gospel in 
them ; but his sermons and writings, as examples of what 
Taine calls " the period of the Christian Renaissance in 
literature," are vast treasures of religious thought and 
even theology, though his works are better adapted for 
private meditation than for imitation in the pulpit. As 
one writer has said of him, *' He is a preacher who comes 
in state to the soul" — not the best kind of preacher for all 
souls. To read him is like looking into a gorgeous sun- 
set ; there is often a vagueness in the ideas, but it is a 
glorious illumination of the earth and heavens, an in- 
describable magnificence of imagery, through which his 
imagination shines like the sun ere it sinks into the 
ocean. He might have been born in the Orient and 
reared in a ''garden of spices ;" nor would David and 
David's royal son have despised his companionship, nor 
failed to acknowledge the kinship of his genius. 

But let us speak of him more circumstantially. Jeremy 
Taylor, son of a Cambridge barber, was born in 161 3. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 195 

He entered Cambridge University when but a boy of 
thirteen, went through a brilHant seven years' course as 
a student, and at the age of twenty-one was admitted to 
holy orders. His precocious genius attracted the atten- 
tion of Archbishop Laud, and obtained for him early 
preferment in the Church. His first publication was a 
defence of the Church under the title " Episcopacy As- 
serted." During the reign of Parliament he retired from 
public life and taught school, and also wrote many of his 
greatest works, such as " The Liberty of Prophesying," 
the " Life of Christ," " The Rule and Exercises of Holy 
Living," " The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying," and 
his famous ** Doctor Dubitantium ; or, The Rule of Con- 
science in all her General Measures." He was made 
Bishop of Down and Connor in 1660, and died in 1667. 
His character is hard to analyze, and combines the rarest 
excellences with some marked defects. He uttered the 
profoundest as well as the most baseless things. He has 
risen to the sublimest heights of the imagination, and 
has given specimens also of decided bombast. As a rea- 
soner he is at times remarkably clear, close, and cogent ; 
but at other times his imagination swayed his reason, 
and his figurative language led him into ambiguities of 
expression which seemed almost to amount to moral 
ambiguities. He often admits weak arguments, and 
mixes sound and unsound arguments, and thus impairs 
the strength of his reasoning ; but take him for all in all 
he was the most learned and brilliant, if not the most 
evangelical divine of his times, and almost of any time. 
He had both compass and subtlety of mind ; his theology 
was practical ; and as a moral reasoner he was, as a gen- 
eral rule, sound and strong, because, without question, he 
heartily loved truth and was a thoroughly good man, with 
a Christian spirit. He painted virtue and vice in their 



19^ HOMILETICS PROPER. 

beauty and deformity. But his regal imagination is his 
great glory as a writer, and in this he stands unsur- 
passed. There is no subject, not even the driest point 
of casuistry, that he does not adorn with grace and 
luxuriant imagery. His learning that ransacked antiq- 
uity did not seem for a moment to dampen the fire and 
splendor of his imagination. He loves ornament abso- 
lutely for ornament's sake, or because he is a poet in love 
with beauty. He plays with his fancies as if they were 
his children. His tropes run into metaphors, his meta- 
phors into similes, his similes into apologues and allego- 
ries. His writing is like one broad " field of the cloth 
of gold." While thus his imagination is not oratorical 
but poetical, and to the utmost diffuse, his sermons, of 
which there are sixty-four, are notwithstanding the finest 
of his works — most full of thought and eloquence, of sound 
theology and beautiful Christian spirit. Yet he was too 
gentle, calm, and meditative for the greatest style of 
preacher, and lacked energy, earnestness, and directness. 
He is also somewhat vague in his devotional writings, and 
he does not bring forward with sufficient clearness the 
distinctive doctrines of the gospel. He is more practical, 
however, than metaphysical in his theology, and his 
views on religious toleration (which were not always car- 
ried out in his acts) were broad, and suited to any times. 
He was inclined to Pelagian and latitudinarian views ; 
and there is, perhaps, although his sermons are pervaded 
by a Christian spirit, too little of the element of Christ 
as Intercessor, as the atoning Redeemer of men. He 
rests much on natural theology, and on arguments such 
as Cicero or Plato might have used. Indeed he is some- 
times ranked with the school of the Cambridge Platonists, 
or mystics, of the seventeenth century. 

In his use of language he is inclined to employ words 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 1 97 

derived from the Greek and Latin, and also in their 
original senses, as " contortion" for bruise, " excellent" 
for exceeding, as " excellent pain." His style, beyond 
even the custom of his day, is studded with classical allu- 
sions and quotations. In the structure of his sentences, 
though they are long and complex, they are generally 
clear, the clauses being joined together by a simple con- 
junctive. He makes use of language with a masterly 
power, owning no rule but the exigency of his own fertile 
thought and brilliant imagination. He should be studied 
mainly as one of the great masters of English literature, 
and in this regard should be approached not in a flippant 
and critical but reverent spirit. His study is particularly 
useful to the preacher and student of theology on account 
of the unstinted richness of his thought and copiousness 
of his language upon religious themes ; and also for his 
liturgical or devotional thought, in which, as on an eagle's 
wings, he soars past common bounds into the highest 
empyrean of praise and adoration. 

Let no common preacher attem.pt to imitate Jeremy 
Taylor in his imagination, for too much ornament, de- 
spite its richness, makes a cold style. But a preacher's 
imagination, if he have any, may be touched and set on 
fire by the exceeding brilliancy of this poet-preacher of 
old England's greatest period of great divines. 

Of the Presbyterian and Puritan divines of this same 

epoch the most celebrated are John Bunyan, Richard 

Baxter, John Owen, and John Howe. We 

will say a few words of Howe, Baxter, and 

-' ' ' vines. 

Bunyan, the three decidedly the superior in 
original genius ; for Owen, though learned and weighty 
as a writer, was, as a preacher, prolix and ponderous. 
He lacked the ethereal fire. 

John Howe was born in 1630, and died in 1706. He 



198 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

Studied both at Cambridge and Oxford, and in 1656 he 

, , ,, was appointed domestic chaplain to Crom- 

John Howe. ^^ ^^ ^ 

well. Under the ** Act of Uniformity" he 

was ejected from his parish at Torrington, and wandered 
about preaching here and there until he found a home in 
Ireland, where he wrote his greatest work, " The Good 
Man the Living Temple of God." He afterward became 
the pastor of a dissenting church in London. He trav- 
elled on the continent, and resided for a time at Utrecht 
in Holland. At the ** Declaration of the Liberty of Con- 
science" in England, he headed the deputation of dis- 
senting ministers in their address to the throne. 

He was perhaps greater as a theologian than as a 
preacher ; but as his theology was originally, for the 
most part, presented in the form of sermons, and those 
gathered up into treatises, he takes his rank as one of 
the great theological preachers of his age. English the- 
ology at this day, it might be said with little qualifica- 
tion, owes more to John Howe than to any other Eng- 
lishman. When very young he drew up a book of divinity 
for his own use. His writings as well as his sermons are 
characterized by a lofty eminence of thought, broad views 
of the divine nature, and great spirituality. He disliked 
exclusiveness in religion, and could not be, even in the 
controversial times in which he lived, a sectarian. He 
strove for union among Protestants of all names. His ser- 
mons are long, scholastic in form, dwelling with prolixity 
on the explanation of terms before coming to the subject, 
and abounding in learned and Latin phrases ; but still 
for his times they were full of life, freedom, and power ; 
and as has been said, " The better times of the Church 
will be marked by an increasing appreciation of John 
Howe's writings." 

His sermons are sometimes more like contemplations of 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 1 99 

divine truth than homilies ; in which there are thoughts 

marked by intellectual force and majesty, and a certain 

ravishing sublimity. He delighted in dwelling on the 

being, nature, and attributes of God, and the image of 

God in man, so that from his profound ideality and 

spirituality of conception he has sometimes been termed 

the "■ Platonic Puritan." His sermons form in themselves 

a " body of divinity ;" and the preacher, especially if he 

be one who desires to be grounded in the deepest ideas 

of a theological science which is at the same time imbued 

with the purest influence of the word and spirit of God, 

cannot afford to be unacquainted with the writings of 

John Howe. Howe must not, however, be thought 

of wholly as a theologian or theological preacher ; he 

was also plain in the rebuke of sin, and practical in 

his views of Christian morality. He says, in one of 

his discourses, "A miracle may strike a little wonder 

at first, but good morality {i.e. a holy conversation) it 

sinks, it soaks to the heart." One of his finest and most 

moving discourses is that entitled " The Redeemer's 

Tears. 

Richard Baxter was born in 161 5 and died in 1692, his 

life embracing a controversial period of history. He was 

ordained at the age of twenty-three, and be- 

. r 1 . 1 , r T.., Richard 

came m 1040 the parish clergyman of Kid- Baxter 

derminster, where he not only won a high 
position as a preacher, but was the instrument of relig- 
ious reformation. On the breaking out of the civil war, 
though a strong monarchist he was also a strong Puritan, 
and he exerted a conservative influence during all that 
troublous time on both parties. He was, however, out- 
spoken in his opinions, and at length, by the " Act of 
Uniformity," was driven from the English Church, so 
that the latter part of his life was chiefly spent in the 



200 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

writing of those works which have made his name famous. 
He was a voluminous author, the total number of his 
publications exceeding one hundred and sixty ; and of 
them Isaac Barrow said that ** his practical writings were 
never mended, and his controversial seldom refuted." 
Of all these works none are more profitable in a homi- 
letical point of view than his " Reformed Pastor ;" and 
in a spiritual point of view than his " Saint's Ever- 
lasting Rest." His published sermons are now mostly 

- , in the form of tractates or treatises, as 

As a preacher. ' 

those of John Howe. Of preaching Bax- 
ter himself said : "It must be serious preaching which 
will make men serious in hearing and obeying it ;" and 
the spirit of this remark characterized his preaching 
throughout. He was a solemn and searching preacher, 
addressing the conscience in a way that might be justly 
termed " blood-earnestness." Sentences like the follow- 
ing frequently occur in his sermons : *' O thou carcass, 
when thou hast lain, rotted, and mouldered to dust till the 
resurrection, God will then call thee to account for thy 
sin, and cast thee into everlasting fire before you can be 
made to feel." But it is said of him that while in his 
youth he preached of repentance, of sin, and of everlasting 
wrath, in his old age he preached of the love of God and 
of Christian charity, and his sermons became almost like 
hymns of the praise of God. 

But he is especially powerful in appeal, using the great- 
est plainness of speech, and calling men sottish, senseless, 
stupid, carnal ; yet as he was animated by the love 
of men, and as his accents breathed of the pure influ- 
ence of the Holy Spirit, and often were touched by a 
celestial fire, he was able to be plain even to severity. 
He labored for the meanest and poorest as well as the 
greatest of his flock. He studied the temper of men*s 



HISTORY OF PREACIHNG. 20I 

minds, and as a pastor and preacher he tried men's 
spirits with rare penetration and faithfulness. 

He had a certain noble negligence of style, and much 
copiousness of expression, though with no affected elo- 
quence or rhetoric. 

His preaching was, indeed, without ornament, though 
Baxter had a vein of poetry in his nature. In his younger 
days his sermons Avere of a highly argumentative and 
theological cast ; afterward he relied more on simple fact, 
Scripture, and experience. In truth his sermons form a 
rare union of reasons and motives. His style was plain, 
natural, and clear ; and, as he said, " My intellect 
abhorreth confusion." He also abhorred all affectations 
of style, and sought to preach simply, by manifestation 
of the truth commending himself to men's consciences. 
He labored to save souls. All his powers he threw into 
that object, and his language often reached the extreme 
of earnestness and passion. He cried out, " O that 
heaven and hell should work no more on men ! O that 
everlastingness should work no more !" Baxter showed 
the martyr-spirit, even where he may have erred some- 
times in his opinions. He steadfastly upheld his princi- 
ples, both in the presence of Charles II. and of Cromwell, 
suffering persecution for conscience' sake ; and he was in 
advance of his times in principles of Christian toleration 
and communion. Baxter spoke once of his own style of 
preaching and writing in this wise : " Though I have 
had my part of all these means (that is, of books and 
learning), yet being parted five years from my books and 
three years from my preaching, the effects may be seen. 
You must expect neither quotations or oratorical testi- 
mony, or ornaments of style ; but not yet having wholly 
ceased from writing, I may own so much of the exactness 
(of good style) as will allow me to entreat the readers not 



202 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

to use me as many have done, who by overlooking some 
one word have made the sense another thing, and have 
made it a crime to be exact in writing, because they can- 
not or will not be exact in reading, or charitable or 
humane in interpreting." His sermons, like those of his 
times, are long, and elaborately planned, with many divi- 
sions and subdivisions. 

It would not do to leave this mention of the great Puri- 
tan divines without a passing allusion at least to perhaps 
a greater than them all — viewed as a man of genius — 
simple John Bunyan, who once upon a time had a 

dream that opened deeper into thing^s 
John Bunyan. ,. . . "^ u .' • • ^ Z 

divme than many a prophet s vision. John 

Bunyan is commonly looked upon as the author of ** Pil- 
grim's Progress," and that is all that is known of him. 
It were indeed enough to have been the author of a 
book which Longfellow calls *' the English Divina Cont- 
inedia,'' and of which it has been said, ** It is supposed 
that no other book, except the Bible, has gone through 
so many editions and attained to so wide a popularity in 
all languages, as the * Pilgrim's Progress. ' " But Bunyan 
was also a preacher endowed with special gifts and power. 
He was born in 1628, the son of a tinker, and was 
brought up to that humble occupation. The opinion 
which has commonly prevailed, that he was a profligate 
youth, and which rests mainly upon some of his passion- 
ate self-accusations, is not now believed to be true in the 
sense of an outwardly licentious life. He had temptations 
and profane thoughts, and fightings with Satan as did Lu- 
ther ; but that his conversion awaked his whole higher na- 
ture, intellectual as well as spiritual, to a remarkable de- 
gree of activity, and made a new man of him, there is little 
doubt. He served in the Parliamentary army for a while, 
and then became a preacher in a Baptist church at Bed- 



HISTORY OF PREACIIIXG. 203 

ford. He was silenced, and then imprisoned in Bedford 
Jail under the act passed against conventicles. During 
the twelve years of his imprisonment he wrote " Pilgrim's 
Progress." On his release he again became a preacher, 
itinerating until settled again in Bedford, and continuing 
in that calling until his death in 1688. 

In his preparation for preaching his only teacher 
seemed to have been the Holy Ghost through the instru- 
mentality of the Scriptures, so that his preaching was 
both scriptural and spiritual. His very imagination, 
Avhich was that of a man of the highest creative genius, 
worked through the imagery and the language of the 
sacred writings. His preaching was what might be 
termed, almost more than that of any other modern 
preacher, inspirational preaching, or prophesying, in the 
New Testament sense of the word. He did not care 
to meddle much with things controverted, or w^ith specu- 
lative theology, but spoke directly to the spiritual na- 
ture. His preaching seems to have been characterized 
by four things in especial : i. Faithfulness to the con- 
science. His sermons had an awakening power to 
the sinfully dead conscience, like that of the prophets, 
as is especially seen in his famous '* Jerusalem ser- 
mon." His "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sin- 
ners" is much in the style of his ordinary preaching. 
He said of his own preaching : ** I did labor to preach the 
word so that thereby, if it were possible, the sin and the 
guilty person might be particularized by it." He roused 
the impenitent man to a lively sense of personal respon- 
sibility. 2. Intense solicitude to win souls. " I thank 
God," he said, " that my heart hath often, all the time of 
this exercise, cried to God with great earnestness, that he 
would make the word effectual to the salvation of souls." 
Bunyan, like Baxter, is one of those not common in 



204 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

the long bead-roll of great preachers, whose whole aim 
seemed to be to save the souls of men from the grasp and 
eurse of sin by the power of the gospel. He had no other 
object set before him than this. 3. Strong faith in the 
power of the gospel. " I have been in my preaching," 
he writes, " especially v/hen I have been engaged in the 
doctrine and life of Christ, in that work, as if an angel of 
God had stood at my back to encourage me ; oh, it hath 
been with such power and heavenly evidence upon mjy 
own soul, while I have been laboring to unfold it, to 
demonstrate it, to fasten it upon the consciences of others 
— that I could not be contented with saying * I believe 
and am sure ' — methought I was more than sure that 
these things which I then asserted were true." 4. His 
preaching was accompanied with earnest heart strivings 
and prayer. He says : " I have observed that when I had a 
work to do for good, I have had first, as it were, a going 
to God upon my spirit, to desire I might preach there. I 
have also observed that such and such souls, in particu- 
lar, have been strongly set upon my heart, so I was stirred 
up to work for their salvation ; and that these very souls 
have, after this, been given as the fruits of my ministry. " 
Again : "I have observed that a word cast in by the bye 
hath done more execution in a sermon than all that was 
spoken besides." 

Bunyan's view of preaching had a charm for the poor. 
There was often something of the same limpid quality of 
style that is to be seen in his " Pilgrim's Progress ;" but 
it was no longer a vision, a dream, but it had the power, 
and sometimes the terrible power, of a living word, cast 
like a thunderbolt upon the sleeping conscience. 

In the following, or eighteenth century, although 
preaching in England was characterized by less of 
richness, originality, and spontaneity than in the for- 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 20$ 

mer century of great divines, there were, notwithstand- 
ing- their deficiencies in scholarly breadth 
of view, some effective and faithful preach- English 

ers, who preserved the spiritual tone of ^^^^ 

* ^ ^ the eighteenth 

the English pulpit ; such men as John New- century 

ton, Thomas Scott, Drs. Watts and Dod- 
dridge, Cecil, Charles Simeon, John Wesley, and George 
Wliitefield. These last two (of whom we shall speak 
more particularly soon) stirred the stagnant atmosphere 
far beyond any power of mere human eloquence, and 
their influence is felt to this day in England, America, 
and the world. Whitefield was an accomplished rhetori- 
cian and finished pulpit orator, but it was his intense 
earnestness, his desire to save men, his power of emotion 
and sympathy, his plain, pointed, rousing appeals to the 
heart and conscience, rather than his intellectual force or 
weight of thought, which constituted his real power. 

There was also, in this age, a school of sound, intel- 
lectual, and philosophic though somewhat cold preachers, 
represented by such men as Cudworth (be- 
longing to a little earlier period). Til- , 
lotson, Stillingfleet, Lloyd, Seeker, Bishop 
Butler (the last the prince of reasoners) ; and these were 
followed by another school (their lineal successors) of 
still more polished but less earnest preachers, represented 
by Clarke, Sherlock, Atterbury, Blair, Paley, and men 

of that class, who might be characterized 

1 «. 1 >» -1 r T- 1- 1 Moral-essay 

as the moral-essay period of English preachers 

preaching— correct, elegant, and (spiritually 

speaking) shallows These eighteenth-century divines 

represented, on the whole, a period of dulncss, or rather 

superficiality in the pulpit. 

Dr. Samuel Clarke was the exponent of a theology 

that, while it embodied some of the better thinking and 



2o6 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

even higher philosophy of the time, and was serviceable 

as an antidote to infidelity, was nevertheless 
Dr. Clarke. ^ . . , ^ ^[ 

a frigid system of reasoning, pretty much 

on a plane with the Cartesian philosophy that then pre- 
vailed, and seemed to have little conception of the pro- 
founder spiritual character of Christian faith. Dean 

Sherlock was the best of this class of preach- 
Dean , . i . i-, 

She lo k ^^^' ^ sometimes rose to something like 

eloquence. Sherlock's sermons are worthy 
of study for their clear method and their finished style, but 
they lack the Pauline elements of preaching. Atterbury, 
too. Bishop of Rochester, attracted the at- 
tention of Pope and Swift by the controver- 
sial liveliness of his pulpit style, yet there is not much in 
his sermons that shows that he really understood what 

_. . the sfospel is. It was a time of the winter of 

Blair. . ^ 

faith, and Blair, barren and utterly common- 
place as his sermons were, attracted more attention than 
he deserved, from the fact that there seemed to be the 
faintest reflection of evangelical truth playing about the 
surface of his smooth and graceful pulpit-essays. Indeed, 
at the time of the rise of the Methodist Reformation 
there were but few earnest and evangelical preachers in 
all England. It was a time not only when " dulness was 
sacred in a sound divine," but when sound divines were 
rare. It is related of the celebrated Blackstone, in the 
early part of the reign of George III., that he went dili- 
gently through the churches of London, and declared 
that " he did not hear a single discourse which had more 
Christianity in it than the writings of Cicero, and that it 
would have been impossible for him to discover, from 
what he heard, whether the preacher was a follower of 
Confucius, of Mohammed, or of Christ." 

We spoke of the rise of the great Methodist move- 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 207 

ment ; and this remark should not go by without our 
dweUing, more particularly than has been done, upon the 
two prime leaders, under God, of that wonderful move- 
ment, who were themselves remarkable preachers, and 
who illustrate some Important, perhaps the most im- 
portant, qualities of preaching — Wesley and White- 
field. 

John Wesley was born in 1703 and died in 1791, hav- 
ing reached the age of eighty-eight years. This magnifi- 
cent patriarchal life was rounded out and 
filled with great activities and great im- john Wesley, 
pulses, that made him a kind of " father of 
the faithful" of a multitudinous family of disciples, who 
have spread over English-speaking lands, and, in fact, 
over the world. The Oxford student life of Wesley 
formed the beginning of his religious career, which is said 
to have received its first impulse, instrumentally, from 
his intercourse with John Law, the author of the 
** Serious Call." He also early felt the influence of the 
principles of the Moravian brotherhood, especially in 
their evangelizing or missionar>^ zeal. But he was him- 
self a spiritual reformer who sprang out of the depths of 
religious declension in England and the English Church. 
He did not, certainly at first, perhaps never, intend to 
be the founder of a sect which should separate itself from 
the English EstabHshed Church ; but as he was not re- 
ceived and recognized by that church he of necessity came 
outof it— that is, essentially if not formally, as did the Pu- 
ritans in the previous century. In 1740 the breach be- 
tween Wesley and Whiteficld occurred which divided the 
Methodist Church into two parties, the Arminian and 
Calvinistic ; but Wesley continued to be the head and 
soul of the body, above all in England, so that one writer 
has said of him : " Probably no man ever exerted so great 



2o8 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

an influence on the general religious condition of the 
people of England as John Wesley." 

Wesley was absolute monarch in his own realm, and 
out of his organizing mind he moulded almost every feat- 
ure, form, and principle of the great militant body that 
recognizes him as its earthly spiritual chief. He had an 
energy that was both indefatigable and systematic. He 
had the governing element joined at the same time with 
an unceasing diligence and attention to detail — the organ- 
izing principle which went to the minutest particulars. 
It is Wesley's " discipline" which has stamped the 
peculiar name and spirit upon what is termed Method- 
ism, or the Methodist Church. With his genius for 
order he built up a system of religious rules, and a sys- 
tem or society of religious discipleship that equals, and 
surpasses in its merely outward features and organization, 
Loyola's famous " Society of Jesus," v/hile it has in- 
finitely more of the spirit of the gospel of Jesus. But his 
great secret of success was his desire to save the souls of 
men, and the doctrine of individual accountability which 
he revived in its primitive force in the minds of men 
deadened by form and worldliness. It was, in the words 
of Isaac Taylor, the awakening " sense of an immortal 
and guilty spirit coming into the presence of eternal jus- 
tice. " He spoke in plain, pungent, rousing language to 
the sleeping conscience. He addressed it without cir- 
cumlocution or apology — as he said on one occasion : 
" We are poor and suffering because you impiously refuse 
to help. Ye are the men, some of the chief men, who 
continually grieve the Holy Spirit, and in a great measure 
stop his gracious influences from descending upon our 
assemblies. ' ' 

Wesley had not, strictly speaking, a philosophical 
mind, or a mind of the most profoundly comprehensive 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 209 

grasp ; but he had a powerful instinct of divine truth, an 
energy of intuitive reason in religious things, and a wonder- 
fully practical style of didactic address. He was intended, 
in every fibre of his being, for a reformer, more perhaps 
than for the founder of a broad apostolic church ; indeed, 
no man is equal to this, and in this we have no Master 
and Teacher other than Christ. But while Wesley had 
his acknowledged faults of over-regulating, of over-organ- 
izing, of dogmatism, yet he led the Church of Christ out of 
the captivity and the barren desert into a new region of 
spiritual life and action. He too was a spiritual preacher 
who sought for the conversion of men to Christ, and 
his kingdom of faith. He preached, with the earnest- 
ness of intense conviction, the full, free, and sovereign 
grace of God in the salvation of every soul that would 
trust itself to it for eternal life. He blew again the gos- 
pel trumpet and rallied the hosts of God to hope and 
faith and a new life. His style of preaching was clear and 
flowing, and more calm and orderly than that of White- 
field. He was a man of logical and literary culture, and 
did not despise learning. His agreeable manners, unas- 
suming dignity and authority, and his saintly simplicity 
of life aided his power as a preacher. He had also apos- 
tolic courage which defied the shouts, threats, and blows 
of infuriated mobs ; and before he called men to lead a 
life of sacrifice he had himself given his own life to 
Jesus Christ by an entire self-surrender. 

Wesley's sermons are short, pithy, clearly-arranged, 
pointed, and very plain in style. Among his best ser- 
mons, though by no means the best, are " The Great 
Assize," Rom. 14 : 10 : " We shall all stand before the 
judgment-seat of Christ" ; "The Marks of the New 
Birth," John 3:8: " So is every one that is born of the 
Spirit"; " Free Grace," Rom. 8 : 32 : "He that spared 



210 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

not his own son," etc. ; "A Call to Backsliders," Ps. 
77 : 7, 8 : " Will the Lord cast off forever? and will he 
be favorable no more ? Is his mercy clean gone forever ? 
Doth his promise fail forevermore ?" The character of his 
sermons could not be better given than in his own words 
in the introduction to his published discourses. You there 
read the man and his philosophy of preaching the gospel. 
George Whitefield was eleven years younger than Wes- 
ley, and was born in 1 7 14, and died in Newbury port, 
Mass., in 1770, twenty years before the 

eorge death of Wesley. He was attracted, while 
Whitefield. , i , /. 

a student at Oxford, by the peculiar re- 
ligious system which afterward developed itself into 
Methodism, and that had been originated by the Wes- 
leys a few years before. He became a preacher and was 
admitted to holy orders at the age of twenty-one, led to 
it both by his elocutionary gifts and his earnest religious 
convictions, delivering his first sermon with great effect 
in Gloucester cathedral. It is even said that "persons 
were driven mad with fear under liis impassioned 
oratory." He soon commenced that career of revival 
preaching which swept over England and America like 
the sword of a destroying angel — destroying to heal. 

"A homeless pilgrim, with dubious name 
Blown about on the wings of fame ; 
Now as an angel of blessing classed, 
And now as a mad enthusiast. 
Called in his youth to sound and gauge 
The moral lapse of his race and age. 
And, sharp as truth, the contrast draw 
Of human frailty and perfect law ; 
Possessed by the one dread thought that lent 
Its goad to his fiery temperament, 
Up and down the world he went, 
A John the Baptist crying — Repent I" ' 



Whittier's Poems. Fields & Osgood's ed., 1S69, v, ii. p. 390. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 211 

All kinds of men were moved by him ; the distinc- 
tions of class were forgotten ; and though intellectual 
men like Bolingbroke and Franklin saw his inferiority 
in some of the rarer qualities of the intellect, yet 
they all acknowledged him to be a true ambassador 
of God. Whitefield is generally held to have been 
a preacher who spoke to the feelings almost exclu- 
sively, and whose great power consisted in his emo- 
tional style of address. This is partly true, but it does 
not go deep enough, and may do injustice to White- 
field as a preacher. His power consisted of something 
more than ephemeral feeling — it was the earnestness of 
a heart-conviction that sinners were perishing, and that 
the gospel alone could help them. It was a burning 
passion for souls that consumed him, and gave him as 
a preacher that spirituality, that solemnity, vehemence, 
and pathos, that awakening and convicting force, that 
made him even greater than Wesley or most other preach- 
ers in his immediate influence over the souls of men. If 
he now and then gave way to his emotions and wept in 
the pulpit, this was a true emotion, and it was as true to 
the laws of mind as was Wesley's logic. He himself felt 
with overwhelming consciousness the truth of what he 
spoke, which is a familiar canon of eloquence. This con- 
ceptual faculty as related to the objects of spiritual life, 
— this power of bodying forth in vivid form the eternal 
world, this spiritual and creative attribute of the imagi- 
nation — gave Whitefield a freshness and vigor of style 
which never lost its hold upon men's minds. He was 
an indefatigable laborer. He crossed the Atlantic Ocean 
seven times, the last in his fifty-fifth year, and he always 
found great audiences, whole cities and towns thronging 
to hear him with unabated enthusiasm and interest. 
Crowds wept under his orator>% each man for himself. 



212 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

and for his own sins. He laid his hand boldly upon the 
moral consciousness. He applied the gospel to the 
hearts and wants of men. He wrought upon the moral 
nature with the higher forces of the gospel, and awakened 
new belief in the Christian faith by the simplicity and 
amplitude of his perceptions of divine truth — of the 
abounding grace of God in Christ. 

Whitefield did not possess the ratiocinative faculty, 
nor perhaps even the imaginative faculty in the highest 
sense. His sermons were not distinguished for logical or 
profound thought. They were inartificial, conversational, 
and dramatic, somewhat diffuse and stereotyped in their 
language, with a spirit of vivacious exaggeration ; but 
nevertheless they were powerful. He was a master of 
elocution, and was both graceful and solemn in delivery. 
He was meek and patient under rebuke and persecution, 
endured revilings, bringing the world's bitter hatred 
upon him, but forgiving injuries with the spirit of a 
Christian. He had the hero in him, and wherever he 
was wanted or felt that he and truth would be most op- 
posed, there he went, manifesting a Pauline grandeur of 
moral courage with a Pauline modesty and absence of 
self-display. The gospel, in a word, had renewed and 
potentialized a simple-hearted man, who gave all he had 
of mxind, feeling, and energy, whether of greater or less 
compass, to the Saviour whom he served. There was 
therefore in him a power extraneous to natural gifts, a 
power from God. His popularity never waned, for it was 
fed from a higher spring. 

Nearer to our own day, toward the beginning of the 
Modern present century, arose in England a class of 
English preachers of more true depth, both philo- 

preachers. sophical and religious, than had preceded 
them, such as Robert Hall, Andrew Fuller, John Foster, 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 213 

and their great Scotch contemporaries, Edward Irving 
and Thomas Chahners. We will say. a few words concern- 
ing Robert Hall and Thomas Chalmers. 

Robert Hall was born in 1764. In his childhood and 
youth he was feeble in body, but exhibited, like Pascal, 

remarkable intellectual precociousness. He 

Robert Hall, 
was a classmate and friend of Mackintosh, 

the historian in Aberdeen College. When these two 
walked together the collegians would say: ''There go 
Plato and Herodotus." He commenced preaching in 
a Baptist church at Bristol, exhibiting decided ora- 
torical power ; but his fame as a preacher culminated 
when he went, in 1790, to Cambridge. He finished, 
also, his ministerial life in Bristol, where the little 
old chapel at Broadmead, in which he preached, and 
his pulpit bound together with iron clamps to pre- 
serve it, are still to be seen, quite unchanged. His 
occasional writings, such as " The Apology for the Free- 
dom of the Press;" his controversial tracts on political 
and moral questions ; his sermon on " The Death of 
the Princess Charlotte," and his discourse on " Modern 
Infidelity," gave him a more than local fame, and made 
him known as one of the eloquent men of his times. 
After enduring;- intense sufferinn-s all his life from an 
acute disease, which was heightened by the exercise of 
preaching, and compelled him often at the conclusion of 
the service to retire to his room in the church and fairly 
writhe in agony, he died in 1831. Notwithstanding his 
physical weakness and suffering, he was full of wit, sar- 
casm, and playful good-humor. He was brilliant in con- 
versation. He had genuine nobleness and magnanimity 
of character, meeting sectarian attacks with equanimity, 
and showing much humility of spirit whenever his natu- 
rally fiery nature got the better of him. He had immense 



2 14 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

power of moral indignation against untruth, meanness, 
and mean expediency. He lived in contact with public 
questions, and was fully awake to the influence of public 
opinion upon morality and religion. His sermons and 
writings, like Robert South 's, are worthy of our study as 
a treasury of theological and moral reasoning, and also 
for their eloquent rhetoric. His " Christianity Consis- 
tent with a Love of Freedom" is, in some respects, a very 
fine piece of writing. His discourse on ** Modern Infi- 
delity Considered with Reference to its Influence on 
Society" was for its day a most effective treatise, abound- 
ing with thought and splendor of imagery, though it 
would not meet the sceptical wants of this day, as an 
apology for Christianity. But his more ordinary sermons, 
such as ** God in Concealing," "The Lamb of God," 
"Spirituality of the Divine Nature," "The Joy of 
Angels over a Repenting Sinner," " Of Evil Communi- 
cations," are noble sermons for study. 
As a preacher his characteristics were 

1. The force and weight of his mind. His very appear- 
ance in the pulpit was formidable, from "his personal and 
mental traits. He looked the great man. He was really 
one of the great minds of his age — a mind at once of capa- 
cious philosophic grasp and of penetrative analytic force. 
He has indeed been compared to his contemporary, 
Edmund Burke, in the volume of his intellectual power. 

2. The splendor as well as precision of his language. 
His brilliance of imagination was a marked quality, and 
shone through the forms into which his thought was cast. 
Some of his illustrations are as magnificent as anything 
in Burke's writings, though his imagination was more 
chastened than Burke's. There was a tendency to the 
oratorical climax, his thought expanding as it grew, yet 
never becoming vague or confused. 



HISTORY OF PREACIIiNG. 215 

3. Power of abstract thought and reasoning. He had 
" much of the essence and effect of reasoning without its 
technical logical forms." He became absorbed in the 
subject, in the idea, and was borne along by it rather 
than by mere methods of discussion and division. In 
fact his sermons, while clear, are inartificial in respect of 
division. He was a great extemporaneous preacher, his 
discourses that are left to us having been either taken 
down short-hand or written out afterward with im- 
mense trouble, for writing was to him a physical martyr- 
dom. In preaching, so great was the absorption in the 
theme that the preacher was not only forgotten, but 
sometimes the audience ; and this leads me to speak of 
one or two faults of Robert Hall's preaching : 

1. His undue tendency to abstraction and generaliza- 
tion. He sometimes worked, as the expression is, ** in 
fire as well as frost," but as a general rule in frost. He 
dwelt in this cold, abstract atmosphere, and did not 
treat the truth so much as a message to men as a subject 
of reasoning ; he did not bring down his thought to the 
minds and wants of his hearers. It was like watching 
the soarings and circlings of an eagle. He did not indi- 
vidualize and particularize. He was interested in the 
theme apparently more than in the audience. 

2. With some magnificent exceptions, his style was 
lacking in vividness, point, and personal interest. He 
was inclined to the use of Latin and Johnsonian rather 
than short Saxon words ; but his style was harmonious, 
while at the same time strong. It has been said of his 
more labored discourses : "His language in (ordinary) 
preaching, as in conversation, was better than in his well- 
known and elaborately composed sermons, in being more 
natural and flexible. When he set in reluctantly upon 
that employment ^writing), his style was apt to assume 



2i6 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

a certain processional stateliness of march, a rhetorical 
rounding- of periods, a too frequent inversion of the 
natural order of the sentence, with a morbid dread of 
degrading it to end in a particle or other small-looking 
word ; a structure in which it is to be doubted whether 
the augmented appearance of strength and dignity be a 
compensation for the sacrifice of a natural, living, and 
variable freedom of composition." 

3. His preaching was too purely intellectual. He 
was almost too exclusively the metaphysician and the 
rhetorician, and not the simple preacher trusting in 
Christ and the Scriptures of divine truth for the conver- 
sion of sinful souls. He generalized rather than indi- 
vidualized truth. His prayers, though devotional, were 
exceedingly vague, abstract, and pointless. His the- 
ology might be called that of moderate Calvinism, with 
some tendency to a stricter Calvinism. He addressed 
men as rational beings, appealing freely to every motive 
which might influence their minds, though with utter 
avoidance of the doctrine of free-will in the Arminian 
sense, which was opposed to his theology. 

Thomas Chalmers was born in 1780, in Anstruther, 

Fifeshire, Scotland ; was educated at the University of 

St. Andrews, and after having been licensed 

omas ^^ preach at the aee of nineteen, his first 
Chalmers. \ ^^^., / . . 

settlement was at Kilmany, where, it is 

said, his attention was mostly directed to scientific pur- 
suits and mathematics ; and here, it is related, occurred 
that change in his religious character which had such a 
powerful effect upon his whole life and preaching. Be- 
fore this, to use his own language, " he walked among 
the elements of inconstancy and distrust. " His sermons, 
before this period, were written hastily, and as a perfunc- 
tory duty, but after that they became " the spontaneous 



IIISrORY OF PREACHING. 217 

productions of the new spirit of love and zeal." His 
study of the Bible became intense. A friend remarked 
to him about that time : " I never came in before but I 
found you busy, yet never at your studies for the Sab- 
bath. You said, ' Oh, an hour or two Saturday evening 
is quite enough for that ; ' but now I never come in but 
you are at your Bible." In 181 5, at the age of thirty- 
five, he was transferred to Tron Church, Glasgow, where 
his fame as a pulpit orator was soon established, and the 
immense influence he gained over the people was em- 
ployed by him in the furtherance of works of beneficence 
truly grand and original in their conception. He united 
the preacher and the pastor in a wonderful combination. 
His labors produced a reformation in the care and edu- 
cation of the poor in that great city worthy of the study 
of every pastor, reformer, and political economist. His 
own parish consisted of 11,000 souls, who were divided 
into twenty-five parochial districts, and over the whole of 
this complex system of religious, benevolent, and educa- 
tional training of the people he watched and presided 
with the utmost vigilance, visiting, it is said, all the two 
thousand families of his parish. 

In 1823 he was made Professor of Moral Philosophy at 
St. Andrews, and the following year, of Theology, at 
Edinburgh. He is generally reckoned to have made some 
original contributions to ethical science. The leading 
part that he took in the great Free Church movement, 
when four hundred and seventy ministers withdrew from 
the Established Church of Scotland, is a familiar history. 
He died in 1847. 

We can only notice him, and that in a brief way, as a 
preacher. After the profound change in his religious 
character his preaching became of a most practical na- 
ture. He aimed at the immediate spiritual renewal of his 



2i8 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

hearers. Nothing else satisfied him. He labored for 
this object with such earnestness and such a concentra- 
tion of his powers ** as to idle spectators looked like 
insanity." This, however, made him a power with the 
people ; not only his Sunday services, but his Thursday 
evening lectures at Glasgow were thronged with eager 
listeners. In his preaching there were the broad intel- 
ligible qualities of thought, reason, and what the Scotch 
call " wicht" — perhaps in the end preferable to mere 
magnetism. He had great energy as well as scope of 
illustration, the fruit of a powerful imagination and wide 
scientific knowledge. His exuberant fancy ranged 
through nature and space for its objects of comparison. 
His features, like his native hills, were rugged, his ges- 
tures were ungraceful, and his tone and accentuation 
broadly Scotch ; but the individuality, richness, and 
sweep of his thought, together with his simple earnest- 
ness, made up for all, and led the polished Canning to 
say, after hearing him in London, " The tartan beats us 
all." 

His plan of sermon was almost without plan. He had 
few divisions, and the peculiarity of this mode of thought 
was this, that a sermon contained, as a general rule, but 
one theme or thought, and the development consisted of 
the amplification of this thought as from one common 
centre, of an unfolding from a point in a circle to the 
circumference, rather than a progression in one straight 
line, so that Robert Hall said that Chalmers' mind 
moved round like a wheel, turning upon a fixed point 
instead of like a wheel that rolled on. There was, in 
fact, a development, an expansion, instead of a mechani- 
cal progression. He piled up sentences and illustrations 
about a central thought or proposition till it stood in 
pyramidal proportions. His style had violent faults as 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 219 

well as vivid beauties. This very tendency to amplifica- 
tion led to turgidity of style, to verboseness in the em- 
ployment of words, and to enormously long sentences. 
One of his sentences, covering two or three pages, has 
four hundred words ; and frequently he has sentences 
containing two hundred and three hundred words, mak- 
ing what one has called the unique and ponderous 
" Chalmerian period." 

He also uses hugely pedantic and uncouth words — a 
cumbrous theological and scientific phraseology — like 
" vesicular properties," " afferent and efferent vessels," 
"unbridled appetency," "the alone Saviour of man- 
kind," " to effectuate an object of desire," etc. ; and he 
might almost be thought to describe himself in a sentence 
like this : " He just put forth the evolutions of his own 
nature as one of the component individuals in a vast and 
independent system." But all this was nothing : it even 
added, like his peculiar gesture and voice, to his indi- 
viduality. His disciplined and abounding thought, his 
large and quick sympathy, his spontaneity that allowed 
no unreal or artificial utterance, his genuine manhood, 
his simple piety pleading, as he said, for " the crown 
rights of King Immanuel," his glowing eloquence, like 
Ezekiel's vision of wheels within wheels of living crea- 
tures, mastered audiences and swept before him all obsta- 
cles. With this eloquence that belonged to the man 
there was added the sanctified power of the true preacher 
of the gospel — ever setting forth Christ as the one 
object of faith, as "the propitiation, the sanctifier, the 
hope of glory, the all in all" of believing souls. Thus 
his ministry, having in it the evangelic element, was suc- 
cessful in the conversion of souls. Here he was superior 
to Robert Hall. He loved to pile up a great argument, 
as in his "astronomical discourses," but even to these 



2 20 . HO MILE TICS PROPER. 

argumentative discourses he managed to give a practical 
and conscience-searching turn ; and in his ethical ser- 
mons, in which his preaching abounded, and in which he 
brought to bear his tremendous power of invective and 
plain-speaking upon the covetousness of the business 
world in the large cities, he never lost sight of the prin- 
ciple that " to preach Christ is the only effective way of 
preaching morality in all its branches ; and not until 
Christ had been pressed upon the acceptance of his hear- 
ers did he urge subordinate reformation of conduct and 
character." The crowds at his commercial lectures in 
Glasgow, it is said, would sometimes go away uttering 
curses both loud and deep against the preacher, but 
would be sure to be again present at the succeeding 
lecture. 

Dr. Chalmers made a brave effort to become an extem- 
poraneous preacher, seeing with his usual sagacity the 
superiority of that method, but he never succeeded in 
this attempt. His biographer,. Dr. Hanna, says: "He 
could not on the instant light on words and phrases which 
would give adequate conveyance to convictions so intense. 
His thoughts ran in too great a volume for words." 

Dr. Chalmers put genuine labor into his sermons, and 
thought that the more labor a sermon had the more 
effect it would have. 

But after we have said all this there is one quality of 
Dr. 'Chalmers of which we have neglected to speak, and 
without which there would be indeed a fatal omission and 
blank in any true characterization of his genius as a 
speaker — and that is his great heart, his power of feeling 
and of sanctified affection. One writer who knew him 
thoroughly has said of Dr. Chalmers that " he owed his 
power to the activity and quantity of his affections." 
He had indeed, like Luther, a great nature, ample in all 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 221 

its proportions of reason, passion, sensibility, and will ; 
there was a vast vital force in him ; and when this was 
fully aroused by the truths which he had preached, he 
carried all before him as a river that inundates and sweeps 
its banks. 

The British pulpit of our own day has exhibited many 
men of very decided power, some of them still in the 
field, such as, in the Established Church, 
Dr. Arnold, Dr. Pusey, Archdeacon Hare, ^"*?^^ 
Whately, Trench, Samuel Wilberforce, ^ 

Heniy Melville, John Henry Newman, 
Maurice, Kingsley, Mozley, Dean Stanley, H. P. Lid- 
don, and that matchless sermonizer F. W. Robertson ; 
among dissenters, John Angell James, Dr. Raffles, 
Baptist Noel, Edward Irving, McCheyne, Caird, Guthrie, 
Candlish, and Norman McLeod ; Thomas Binney, Alex- 
ander Raleigh, and Charles Spurgeon. 

Before leaving the British pulpit we would speak a 

few words concerning F. W. Robertson. Hugh Miller, 

the Scotch geologist, had exceedingly high ideas of 

the Christian ministry, commonly saying that " true 

ministers cannot be made out of ordinary 

, , F. W. Rob- 

men — men ordmary m talent and charac- ertson 

ten" F. W. Robertson suits this concep- 
tion of the eloquent stone-mason ; and there was some- 
thing too of Miller's stalwart manhood in the preach- 
er, the primitive granite underneath his culture. They 
were both leaders of men. 

As wonderful as Robertson's sermons are, his character 
is chiefly to be studied, since his sermons are but the 
outgrowth of his interesting personality. His sermons 
could not have been different from what they were — in- 
tellectual, thorough, philosophic, expressive of the har- 
monious strength and beauty of his soul. Let us then 



222 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

look, in the briefest possible manner, at the character of 
the man, and that will be the analysis of the character of 
his sermons. 

1. Love of nature. The aesthetic principle that ran 
through the mind of Robertson like a vein of gold, ran 
also through his discourses. His delight in natural 
beauty imparted fresh nature to whatever he wrote and 
spoke. It was this that took his words out of the plane 
of ordinary discourse and made them full of fresh beauty 
and power. His illustrations are those of a keen-sighted 
traveller who lets no beautiful object pass unnoted, and 
he sees, too, the object with his own eyes, and not with 
the eyes of another man. This is ever a characteristic 
of genius. 

2. Culture. His rich and varied culture, both clas- 
sical and philosophical, as well in language as in logic, 
gave him the mastery of a finished style, condensed yet 
delicate, combining elegance and force. The thought 
moulds the style, and he speaks like a man who has 
ideas forcing themselves into expression — not mere words, 
whether ideas be behind them or not ; for while he 
has the rarest and most finished power of expression, 
his language resembling the sharply cut bas-reliefs 
around a Greek vase or entablature, it is the thought of a 
deeply musing soul which is prominent. An affectation 
of style, therefore, rarely if ever occurs. We do not 
make beautiful extracts from Robertson's writings, but 
we quote him for his strong thoughts put into their most 
condensed forms — and this is the highest type of artistic 
as well as moral beauty. 

3. Intense love and realization of truth. He was no 
flippant utterer of truth or truisms. What he said about 
Christ was a real thing with him, and it had come out of 
the white heat of his mental conflicts. This made com- 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 223 

mon truth, passing through the fiery alembic of his own 
mind, new truth, gleaming with new lustre. A part of 
his personality was in it. It addressed itself to other 
earnest and struggling minds with an unwonted power. 

4. Love of humanity. While, as has been often said 
of him, he kept himself sternly from saying anything that 
was popular, he was the idol of the common people, be- 
cause they saw the true man and the true lover of men in 
him — a helper, guide, and champion. 

His high culture did not hurt him with the laboring 
classes, because even more than with Charles Kingsley 
or Norman McLeod, they discerned the real manhood 
under the scholar's silken robes — the manhood that 
yearned to die on some high moral battle-field for the 
people. His spirit of self-abnegation was like that of the 
soldiers and martyrs of the primitive Church. 

5. Indignant opposition against wrong. He had not 
only the moral sentiment to feel wrong, but the courage 
to attack wrong. He said " to love intensely good is to 
hate intensely evil." The sword of his spirit was a two- 
edged sword, cutting both ways. As no man ever laid 
open his own soul more bare to the gaze of the world, 
the throbbings of his heart against meanness and tyranny, 
whether without or within the Church, were painfully 
exposed. He could not hide his feelings, and while this 
candor caused him to be idolatrously loved and gave him 
power with poor, suffering men, it also brought upon him 
the hatred of the powerful classes in society whose actions 
and characters he assailed with such open fearlessness. 

6. Method. This rhetorical quality of his sermons 
flowed from his trained intellect, which could not but be 
orderly in all its products. There is usually the thought- 
ful skill of extreme simplicity in the plan of his sermons. 
He rarely has more than three main divisions, and gen- 



2 24 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

erally but two. He extracts a definition of the text, then 
draws from it a definite theme — a deep theme going to 
its roots and not lying upon its surface. He seems to 
come at the vital source of the passage through patient 
thought and fresh original exegesis. 

7. Biblicalness. While Robertson is doubtless liberal 
in his theology, and belongs to what is called the 
" Broad Church," still he finds his theology in the Bible. 
It is in the best sense of the word biblical theology, which 
is the only true theology. He may err — doubtless he does 
in many things — but his Christianity is not a Christianity 
of the schools, but a Christianity which comes from the 
study of the New Testament, and which has Christ in it. 
He makes Christ our hope, our life, our model, our sal- 
vation. It is no Hamlet with Hamlet left out. When 
he takes a text he sticks to it. He does not philosophize 
out of sight of the text. The text forms the material, 
the impulse, the inspiration of his sermon. His power 
of homiletical impression is biblical rather than theo- 
logical. He is even superior to Dr. Bushnell in that re- 
spect, though they resemble each other in this as in many 
other features. 

8. Practicalness. What Robertson has to say has 
point to it. It does not expend itself in glittering gen- 
eralities. His sermons abound in sentences of con- 
densed wisdom and of practical personal application. 

9. Reasonableness. Robertson is an eminently rational 
preacher ; but he is not a rationalist. His preaching is 
based on reason, and is a reaction from an age of rigid 
submission to creeds. It is reason baptized with a Chris- 
tian spirit. Puseyism was his first intellectual idolatry, 
but he shattered his idol at the bidding of reason, and 
above all, of the Word of God. 

10. Extempore ability. He was an extempore preach- 



HISTORY OF PREACniNG. 225 

er, basing his sermons in the thought rather than in the 
words. He rarely used more written notes than could 
be pencilled upon a visiting card, or scrap of paper. 

Robertson was not without faults which should deter 
us from making him our absolute model as a preacher. 
Among these may be mentioned three in especial : 

1. Unsettled theology. Perhaps this very trait en- 
deared him to thoughtful doubters, and gave him claims 
to their sympathy, seeing he was a sincere striver after 
the truth. Though an independent thinker and sincere 
learner, his theological opinions shift about with much 
uncertainty, yet, it must also be said, they ever grew 
nearer to a noble consistency of Christian faith. But his 
theology is suggestive rather than systematic. It is right 
as to the spirit, yet perhaps not always so as to the 
letter. 

2. Fragmentary style. From his extemporaneous 
method, or from poor reporting, many of his sermons 
come to us in an unfinished state as regards composition. 
Perhaps this is only an error of transmission, for his style 
in most respects is about perfect. 

3. Morbidness of spirit. This arose partly from an 
ascetic tendency which he took early from Tractarianism 
and partly from ill-health, or an extremely sensitive and 
overcharged nervous organization. This, however, he 
was overcoming grandly, and growing healthier in spirit 
even to the end, when death gave him the perfect life. 
Yet Robertson's biography is a sad book to read, though 
highly ennobling, as tracing the history of a soul beating 
its way upward into the clearer light with slow and 
wounded wing. Notwithstanding these imperfections, if 
they be such, Robertson is worthy of our thorough study. 
As a mere sermonizer, in the arrangement and presenta- 
tion of his matter he shows the rarest rhetorical skill, and 



2 26 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

while his style is simple his thought is profound. His 
poetic sense and his spiritual earnestness led him to ad- 
dress the heart as well as the head, both in illustrations and 
appeals. As an interpreter he goes beneath the letter and 
values the spirit more than the form. His sermons are 
thrown into life-forms and are not mere dry intellectual 
processes. He is a manly thinker. He is an earnest re- 
ligious teacher. His religious system might be condensed 
into this : that the life of God in us, as manifested in 
Christ, leads to the sacrifice of self for God and man. 

English preaching, it must be said, has, generally speak- 
ing, fallen into a somewhat narrower range of ideas, and 
does not appear to have the ample freedom, profound 
depth, solid thought, or literary splendor of its earlier 
days, being too often intensely devoted to an ecclesias- 
tical idea ; and if it has aught remaining of the Puritan 
energy and assertion of the free principle, it does not 
always possess the corresponding spirituality of tone. 
There are, however, in all the various bodies of the Eng- 
lish religious world, many preachers of great learning and 
originality, as well as of high earnestness of aim, who rep- 
resent the advanced state of religious thought in England. 
Coming to America and New England, we find that, 
while the first ministers were educated and 
The American able men, the true leaders {i)y ov p.Bv oi) of the 
and New people and men of heroic martyr-spirit, their 
., style of preaching was exceedingly scholas- 

tic, owing, perhaps, to the fact that all the 
learning in the community was confined to the minis- 
terial class ; but, notwithstanding this, such men as the 
Christ-like Eliot, called " the apostle to the 

^^f^^ Indians," John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, 
preachers. 

Nathaniel Ward, Thomas Shepard, John 

Davenport, Roger Williams, Francis Higginson, the 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 227 

Mayhews, and the Mathers, were preachers of great 
ability and influence, in most instances of eminent piety, 
and highly accomplished for their day, when the people 
considered a learned ministry to be a first necessity of 
life — as necessary as " fire to a smith." To Roger Wil- 
liams belongs the high praise of having founded a State 
upon freedom of conscience, thus applying the great prin- 
ciple of Christian liberty to civil things. 

Immediately before the period of the American Revo- 
lution there were some strong political preachers in New 
England, dealing with the fundamentals of 

government and Christian civilization, one of ° ^ ^^^ 

preachers, 
whom, Jonathan Mayhew, born 1720, died 

1766, in his famous election sermon preached in Boston 
in 1750, laid down the ground-principles of human gov- 
ernment and constitutional liberty, which, bearing fruit in 
the Adamses and Otises of the day, led to the Revolution- 
ary War and the freedom of the United States. Other 
names of political preachers and leaders of opinion w^ere 
those of Charles Chauncey, Samuel Langdon, Samuel 
W^est, Samuel Phillips Payson, and Ezra Stiles, Presi- 
dent of Yale College. 

About the beginning of the second century after the 
settlement of New England, there sprang up a style of 
preaching far superior to that of the earliest ministers ; 
which, for metaphysical depth as well as spiritual earnest- 
ness, has rarely ever been surpassed. Its unequalled 
master and originator was Jonathan Edwards, who was 
followed by a race of lesser giants, Hopkins, Bellamy, 
Edwards the younger, Dwight, Emmons, and many 
other noted preachers and theologians, who showed the 
controlling influence of Edwards's mind, which has, in 
fact, moulded the American pulpit in its essential quali- 
ties and characteristics down to the present. 



2 28 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

While Edwards will always be looked upon as a master 
in metaphysics and dogmatics, as one of the main pil- 
lars of Calvinistic theology, yet the power 
jona an ^^ Jonathan Edwards also as a preacher is 
Edwards. , , , i -t-i 

represented to have been tremendous. 1 he 

great revival of 1740, of which he has written a narrative, 
in all probability sprang, under God, instrumentally from 
his preaching. In his sermon on *' The Last Judgment," 
one of his hearers said that *' he expected, when Mr. 
Edwards stopped, that the heavens would open and the 
Judge descend, and the separation of the righteous and 
the wicked immediately take place." His style, regard- 
ed in a literary point of view, was not a finished one, 
and was often, on the contrary, hard and rugged ; but 
his clear mind shone through it, and by the force of his 
mental vision he made spiritual truths plain. This 
graphic power of exhibiting truth showed not only his 
force of thought, but the idealizing faculty of his imagi- 
nation. He felt the want of early culture in the art of 
writing, and set himself in middle life to the work of im- 
proving his style ; but thought was the important ele- 
ment of his preaching ; he addressed chiefly the under- 
standing and conscience. His sermons were carefully 
written upon the scholastic model, and with an elabo- 
rately methodical plan. He dwelt on the explanation of 
Scripture, which he presented as a fact the most moment- 
ous to the soul ; and his idea seemed to be that the truth 
— the doctrinal truth — made clear to the mind and there 
left, was sufficient to do its own work. He preached 
down as from a divine point of view, wielding the attri- 
butes of God, especially those of justice and holiness, 
with mighty power and with a kind of celestial inexorable 
logic ; but he di'd not bring out so clearly the love of 
God and the grace of the gospel as they meet man's wants. 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 229 

His own meekness and holy purity of character added 
weight to what he said, and in the immediate results of 
his preaching few apparently have excelled him. He 
was not a great orator, in the common acceptance of the 
word, for his delivery was monotonous ; but his pro- 
phetic earnestness made him powerful. He seemed to 
dwell in the counsels of Almighty wisdom. His sermons 
were adapted to awaken the dead conscience of the New 
England Church, then fallen, through the influence of 
the "half-way Covenant" and other causes, into an 
apathetic and immoral state. They startled the auditors 
like the judgment-trump of God. 

The sermonizing of Edwards and his immediate suc- 
cessors was characterized, as we have said, by a faith- 
ful exposition of the Scriptures, and by 
a careful drawing out of the doctrine which Characteris- 

they fortified with all manner of illus- ties of the 

, , , , Edwardean 

trative reasonmg, both moral and meta- c ^ 1 r 

physical ; and after that came the ap- preachers, 
plication, which included often more than 
half the sermon, and was very solemn and pungent. 
It was dealing with eternal interests, and was intended 
to be God's argument with men to convince them of 
sin and reconcile them to God. The present life and 
its interests were nothing — the life to come every- 
thing. This application saved the preaching from being 
altogether too abstract. This method of preaching, while 
it was solemn and powerful, had doubtless faults, which 
have since been more or less corrected, and which will 
be still more successfully guarded against as a clearer 
knowledge of the true life and universal power of the gos- 
pel prevails ; but the American style of preaching, ac- 
cording to the principle we started with, is also the direct 
product of the intellectual character and history of 



230 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

the American people. For instance, the element of 

faith, which so peculiarly characterized the 

Product of history of our fathers, leading them, like 

Abraham, to leave their ancient homes 
and history 

of the people. ^^^ ^° ^^^^ ^ country that God should 
give them — this element of the Refor- 
mation — predominates in American preaching, hiding 
even the essential doctrine of good works ; thinking too 
little of it, or not giving it the actual place assigned 
to it and to the great Christian virtues of hope and 
charity in the New Testament. The principle also of 
liberty of conscience, which was so marked in the char- 
acter of the founders, impelling them to separate them- 
selves from popery, ritualism, and church authority, is 
seen in American sermonizing in its simple and 
earnest appeal to the Scriptures, resting proof upon the 
Word of God and not upon human authority, urging to 
personal search, and setting forth individual responsi- 
bility. Indeed, this element of conscience — this bringing 
of truth to bear upon the "man of the heart"^ — is 
strongly, one might say, terribly, distinctive in American 
preaching, leaving often no tender thing living in its fiery 
blaze. The one thought of sin against God seemed 
sometimes to consume all other thoughts and to destroy 
all the gentler feeling and the more passive affections of the 
mind ; but this preaching to the conscience was a purify- 
ing fire that searched the recesses of the soul as with 
"the candle of the Lord." Early American preaching 
had also the element of sound learning. While litera- 
ture, for its own sake, was not cultivated by them, and 
amid the stern realities of American life there was little 
of the aesthetic sense (though poetry did show a wan 
flower now and then), yet learning flourished, John Cot- 
ton had been the Dean of Emmanuel College, in Cam- 



HISTORY OF PREACIIIXG. 231 

bridge. Increase IMather could converse fluently in 
Latin, and could compose in Hebrew and Greek. His 
son, Cotton Mather, prodigious pedant as he was, was 
more learned still. " The proportion of learned men 
among the early Puritans was extraordinary. It is proba- 
ble that between the years 1630 and 1690 there were in 
New England as many graduates of Cambridge and Ox- 
ford as could be found in any population of similar size 
in the mother country. At one time, the first part of 
that period, there was in Massachusetts and Connec- 
ticut a Cambridge graduate for every two hundred and 
fifty inhabitants, besides sons of Oxford not a few." ' 
While the preaching that came forth from this learning 
was abstruse, technical, and highly theological, it had all 
the substantial characteristics of intellectual preaching. 
It spoke to the thoughtful nature of man. Jonathan 
Edwards would have been profound in any field of human 
knowledge which he had entered. The prominent quali- 
ties of rational knowledge, or knowledge through which 
the reason had powerfully cleared its way, as through the 
tanfjled forests of the oris^inal wilderness, were in the 
preaching. The audiences themselves were composed 
of strong-minded, thinking men, and the pulpit was 
their one fountain of instruction. But in its intellectual 
aspects American preaching unites the argument-loving 
or logical element with the more practical quality of the 
American mind. It is highly doctrinal, as suiting an in- 
tellectual race, and one inclined to subtle speculation ; 
but it is both doctrinal and experimental ; it aims to 
reach the conscience through the understanding, and to 
bring men to an immediate decision in the matters of 
the soul. It deals with these doctrines as if they were 



A History of American Literature, by Moses Coit Tyler, v. i. p. 93. 



232 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

indeed the greatest truths, the substance of things, the 
only things worthy of a rational being's attention. It is 
therefore characterized by an intense earnestness. The 
early preachers, like Hooker and Edwards, seemed to 
preach with a spiritual intensity, with the lightening of 
divine truth as out from the very bosom of the cloudy 
presence of God's power and wisdom. There was an 
utter loss of self-consciousness in these utterances. The 
question of authority in the preacher was in the early 
days unheard of. It is said of Thomas Hooker that 
"when he was doing his Master's work, he would put 
a king in his pocket." These ambassadors of God spoke 
with the majesty of their Sovereign's message to men's 
consciences, whether they would hear or forbear. And 
why has not the Holy Spirit, the actual guide of the 
Church in all ages, guided also in the preaching of 
American preachers of the Word, adapting it to the 
character, circumstances, mind, and wants of the Ameri- 
can people, as being the voice of God to us in our passage 
through the wilderness ; as truly as in the preaching of 
Moses and Isaiah, or of those apostolic ambassadors who 
delivered the message of God to the Jews, Greeks and 
Romans ? 

The American sermon, as we have already described 

it, is usually built upon a logical plan cast into the form 

of an argument, with direct practical lessons 

Characteris- ^^^^^^ {^^^ ^j^^ demonstrated truth ; it is 

tics of the ... - ,111 11 

American synthetic m form, and although generally 

sermon. biblical in tone and aim, yet it is not simply 
biblical as confining itself to the interpreta- 
tion of Scripture and the setting forth of the word of 
God ; it is not satisfied with this, but it aims at a philo- 
sophical systemization of divine truth. Indeed, as was 
said, there has been a want of the truly evangelic ele- 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 233 

ment — a want, one might say, of Christ in his fuhiess, in 
his pre-eminently human nature and relation, in his per- 
fect sympathy, in his love to man, and in the multifarious 
and intimate applications of his incarnation, and of the 
new reanimating life of God that has come into the 
human soul through Christ's entering into humanity. 
One feels this want in reading the otherwise admirable 
sermons of such a preacher as Dr. Emmons. There is a 
lack of Christ-like sympathy, of the soul-melting element, 
of something that wins, subdues, and converts the most 
obdurate heart through the imperceptible and resistless 
ways of divine love. They address the head rather than 
the heart. They are not too intellectual, but too exclu- 
sively so ; and such preaching has thus a rigidity of form 
which has not suffered it to come down freely enough 
to the actual feelings, needs, and comprehension of all 
men, so that it might be indeed and in every sense to 
them " the glad tidings." 

There is recently more of this free human element 
coming into our preaching ; and the great 

fear is, that it will come in such an impet- ^^^ element 

coming in. 
uous and untempered way as to endanger 

the substantial and divine groundwork of American 
doctrinal preaching. This new style of sermon applies 
the truth to the life in an exceedingly interesting man- 
ner, interpreting truth into natural language, language 
that is spoken by men every day. Such preaching seeks 
to introduce the Christian element into every part and 
faculty of the nature, and freely expresses the broader 
sympathies of the gospel for all men, and for all condi- 
tions of humanity. Its faults of secularity and irrever- 
ence, and of a certain carrying of the human element to 
an extent that oftentimes seems to overlie and obstruct 
the divine — these exaggerations, we think, will become 



234 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

hereafter toned down, and will leave the soil enriched, like 
a great and apparently destructive overflow of the Nile. 
The moral element markedly predominates over the doc- 
trinal in this style of preaching ; and there can be no pul- 
pit eloquence, says Vinet, without the moral element ; 
but it should be remembered that the moral, the ethical, 
is formed upon the dogmatic ; and although exclusive 
dogma without the moral element extinguishes both elo- 
quence and spirituality, yet the moral without the dog- 
matic also loses its deepest spring and power ; a whole- 
some mingling and interfusing of the two will make the 
future true eloquence and power of the American pulpit. 

We would notice with some particularity, though briefly, 
but two of our American preachers. Dr. Emmons and Dr. 
Lyman Beecher. Of Dr. Bushnell, what is said of him 
in this book in various ways, must be taken as an in- 
adequate offering to his powerful, original, and most 
inspiring genius. His sermons on the "New Life" 
formed an epoch in homiletical literature, and in our 
higher religious thought and conception of divine things. 

Nathaniel Emmons, another great American thinker 
and preacher, but as different from Bush- 

nell as a glass prism from the sunlight it sep- 
Hmmons. 

arates into its constituent rays, was a recog- 
nized preacher of the gospel seventy-one years, and a 
settled pastor over one parish in one town fifty-four 
years. Preaching, or, one might say, writing sermons, 
was the business of his life. By long practice he became 
an uncommonly skillful artificer in this line — a kind of 
cabinet-maker of sermons. Writing "generally rather 
than specifically," and upon a uniform plan, his discourses 
are finished productions, almost perfect of their kind. 
They are doctrinal and argumentative sermons ; and 
while following out his train of reasoning with an inflexi- 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 235 

ble logic, he sometimes landed in false doctrine, or false 
statements of doctrinal truth ; for he shunned no result 
where his analysis pressed him or his reasoning fairly 
led him on, though the character of God might seem 
to suffer. Dr. Emmons arranged his ideas in lumi- 
nous order, easy to follow and remember. He digested 
his subject thoroughly before he formed his plan. He 
sought the substance of truth, filling his mind with 
great principles of theology, and from the revolving in 
his mind of this system of metaphysical truth, his ser- 
mons were evolved. He thought and conversed continu- 
ally on theological themes, and stimulated his thinking 
not only by the study of metaphysics but of the best 
writers in other departments, and of Shakespeare's trage- 
dies. He did, however, his own thinking, living, as it were, 
in an abstract realm. He was one of the eminent theolo- 
gians of New England, in the lineal line of succession 
from Edwards and Hopkins ; and perhaps the clear- 
ness of his style has made him the best or best read 
exponent of that remarkable theology. His style of 
writing is a model for neatness, precision, and plain un- 
modified assertion of principles. It has a calm and 
evenly sustained power, rarely rising to eloquence, never 
sinking to feebleness. It is excellent for its didactic 
quality. He was a sagacious student of the human 
heart, but rather by thinking than by intuition. He 
taught displeasing truth by way of inference, and 
was the incarnation of ministerial prudence. He had, 
however, his faults. He was too exclusively topical, 
and did not rest enough upon exegesis, so that his 
sermons proceed, or seem to proceed, from a human 
standpoint, and are run in the same mould of thought. 
He was also too exclusively intellectual, and thus 
his sermons become sometimes hard, and more inge- 



236 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

nious and subtle than persuasive and edifying. The 
constant argumentation must have tended to produce a 
questioning turn of mind on the part of his hearers. There 
is not enough, also, of the divine gospel in his preach- 
ing, or not enough of simple dependence upon the higher 
supernatural element. His style, though exceedingly 
lucid, lies too much in the broad light ; it has not enough 
of light and shade. It is more like Euclid than Paul. 
Yet he has left us both admirable sermons — a vast 
treasury of them — and admirable homiletical suggestions 
scattered throughout his writings and his table-talk, which 
have been gathered up into a valuable volume by the 
labors of his favorite pupil. Professor Park. They are 
such as these : 

" The preacher must be established in great principles 
of truth." 

" Leave the subject of your discourse in the minds of 
your hearers rather than a few sentiments and expres- 
sions. " 

** Preach better sermons every Sabbath." 

** The thing — the thing — is what you are after." 

** When you write a sermon say, i. What do I know 
about this that my people do not know? 2. How can I 
make my people know what I know ?" 

He made a great deal of the plan, and he had a 
supreme respect for the application. He spoke both to 
saints and sinners in the same sermon. 

He was to a large extent an extemporaneous preacher ; 
but his sermons were ever thoroughly composed, men- 
tally, before speaking. 

We would now speak of Dr. Lyman 

yman Beecher, both as a man and as a preacher. 
Beecher. . ^^. ,. . 

I,. As a man. His religious character was, 

above all, distinguished by a positive and hopeful 



HJSrORY OF PREACHING. 237 

faith. He believed almost without a doubt, and with 
great energy and earnestness. Religious things were 
to him the most real things. All was referred to God ; 
and tliis supreme reference of everything to God's 
government was seen especially in the great turns and 
changes of his life ; when he went from. East Hampton 
to Litchfield, and from Litchfield to Boston, and in 
going to Lane Seminary. The depth and earnestness 
of his religious principles are also shown in his anxiety 
and his unceasing efforts for the conversion of his chil- 
dren. He was their father twice over. His letters to 
his children give proof that his mind travailed for their 
eternal welfare. He is plain almost to severity with 
them. He was, however, an affectionate man toward his 
family. Very touching are his allusions to the death of 
his wife. He said to his son, " These are the sermons I 
wrote the year after your mother died, and there is not 
one of them good for anything." Yet this affection did 
not prevent him from training his children's minds by 
merciless encounters with them in argument. He taught 
them to think and reason, as a mastiff teaches its young 
to fight. There was immense intellectual activity in that 
household, springing from Dr. Beecher's own interest 
in mind. His mind was eminently practical, and sym- 
pathized with everything that had in it the promise of 
good. Nothing was good to him that could not be 
reduced to immediate practical use. This trait rendered 
him nobly effective ; but at the same time it may have 
had an influence to give him a somewhat one-sided view 
of things. As a man and a pastor he achieved a vast 
amount of good work by setting other people to work, 
evincing in this great tact and magnanimity. He em- 
ployed and interested young men to carry out his plans 
of benevolence or of revival work. " The Hanover 



238 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

Association of Young Men," which was so efficient, was 
a creation of his. His knowledge of men was consider- 
able, though he may have sometimes made mistakes, as 
he probably did in regard to Dr. Finney. The moral- 
reform movements of the present time owe much to his 
original genius and boldness in grappling, as he did 
almost single-handed, with intemperance, duelling, poli- 
tical atheism, and the spirit of absolutism in Church and 
State. He had a ready and pungent wit, not the quality 
of humor which quietly touches and plays about a sub- 
ject, but which showed itself in unexpected striking il- 
lustrations and pithy, homely sentences, that stuck fast 
in people's memories. It was often the solidest wisdom 
packed in the oddest forms. He had a considerable 
amount of innocent vanity which sprang from his entire 
self-reliance. He seems to have had a healthy though not 
particularly fine or sesthetical love of nature. He loved 
fishing, as much perhaps for its opportunity for open air 
and exercise, and knack required for success, as for the 
beauties of nature that it led one into. 

2. As a preacher. He was, above all, an orator, a 
preacher. His powers were eminently adapted to apply 
truth to the human mind with force and effectiveness, 
rather than to discover, weigh, and analyze truth. His 
mind was not eminently philosophical. We doubt 
whether he did or could make a thoroughly philosophical 
system of theology. But he was a great preacher. 
There was his place. He had both logic and passion, the 
material and the fire of oratory. He was one of nature's 
own orators. There were bursts of spontaneous eloquence 
in his preaching that, in his prime, are reported to have 
been of extraordinary power and even sublimity. The 
imagination of the true orator was marked in him, as some 
vivid passages in his Temperance Discourses still bear 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 239 

witness. His ideas of writing and speaking had nothing 
of clap-trap and the false sensational about them, but they 
were sound and classical. As a minister he thought the 
pastoral work was necessary to make the good preacher, 
and that the two must be united. His sermons ever swept 
on to some pastoral and practical result on heart or life. 
No one could have a higher idea of the preacher's work 
in which he continued till near the end of his life, and it 
was a touching scene when he gave up his sermon-making 
and preaching. He was then ready to depart. But Dr. 
Beecher was, more specifically, a revival preacher. Here 
was his life and life-work, his glory and crown. He lived 
in the atmosphere of revivals ; and to have a revival was 
his idea of supreme felicity. The last words he said 
were, " not theology, not controversy, but to save souls." 
He said of the period when he entered upon the minis- 
try, " Dwight was, however, a revival preacher, and a 
new era of revivals was commencing. There had been a 
general suspension of revivals after the Edwardean era 
during the revolution ; but a new day was dawning as 
I came on the stage, and I was baptized into the re- 
vival spirit." His ministry was blessed with many and 
powerful revivals at East Hampton, Litchfield, Boston, 
and also afterward when he preached as a revivalist 
at Terre Haute and other places at the West, and at 
Andover. To rally the Church for revivals was his inces- 
sant and absorbing work. His method of promoting re- 
vivals is as specially worthy of study by all those who are 
entering the ministerial field, as it would be for a young 
military officer to study the strategical principles and 
the campaigns of a Wellington or a Napoleon. He relied 
greatly upon the influence of a perfect concert of action, 
on church prayer-meetings, and on household visitation, 
bringing up the whole working capacity of the Church into 



240 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

united and vigorous co-operation. His means of ** deal- 
ing with sinners," as he termed it, were something quite 
original, as was the character of his preaching, at such 
times, to the impenitent and the inquiring. He watched 
with intense anxiety the condition of his own heart and 
the leadings of the Spirit of God. The end of a revival 
was the end with him. He did not run after it, as he 
said, any more than he would after a spent cannon-ball. 
His peculiar system of theology, or truth, as applied to 
preaching, was not probably so great a source of power 
as was the earnestness of soul and the faith and the faith- 
fulness which he put into the work. 

It would be interesting in this connection to speak 
here of Dr. Finney, who in some sense was a contemporary 
of Dr. Beecher, and whose method as a revival-preacher 
had strong and most interesting peculiarities of great 
practical utility for the young preacher to study ; but we 
must bring these remarks upon the history of preaching 
to a close. 

We will not stop to discuss the effect of what is some- 
times called Liberal Religion upon American preaching ; 
it has exerted a marked power in a literary 

n uence o ^^^ intellectual point of view, in bringing 

Relieion ^^ ^ purer style of writing and a more fin- 
ished culture ; and it has not been with- 
out its good in theological directions as a modification 
of extreme views, and as an influence to enlarge 
thought where it had become hide-bound by the force 
of a traditional dogmatism ; but it has had, on the 
whole (it is not uncharitable to say), a depressing 
influence in taking the fire out of pulpit eloquence 
and introducing an essay-like style of sermonizing. 
There can be no genuinely apostolic preaching without 
the earnestness of positive evangelic truth concerning sin 



HISTORY OF PREACHING. 241 

and redemption. The sermons of such men as Dr. 
Channing, President Walker, and that giant, Theodore 
Parker, are worthy of our study for many most noble 
and admirable qualities, as are also those of such Euro- 
pean Unitarians as James Martineau, Stopford Brooke, 
and the Coquerels, father and son. These preachers 
and writers, men of force and genius, have worked one 
golden vein which has been too little wrought by us — 
the ethical — and here we may learn much from them, 
and may go deeper than they, even in this their peculiar 
province. 

Besides those already mentioned, the names of other 
American preachers, of Samuel Davies, John H. Living- 
stone, John Leland, Griffin, Payson, the 
Alexanders, Nathaniel Taylor, Erskine Ma- ^^"^^^ °^ 
son, Gardiner Spring, OHn, Summerfield, pj-eachers. 
Bedell, Bishop White, Bethune, Barnes, 
McClintock, without mentioning eminent preachers now 
living — these are familiar names, and, taken together, 
there probably never has been such a body of preachers, 
comprising so much of intellectual power, sanctified 
earnestness, and living faith, since the days of the 
apostles. 

The main practical lessons to be drawn from this brief 
survey of the history of preaching are (i) that the preacher, 
especially the young preacher, should study p . . 
to comprehend and to combine the various lessons from 
excellences of the different kinds of preach- study of 
ing to be found in all times and ages, and history of 
to enrich, strengthen, and elevate his own P''®^*^^^"^- 
preaching by endeavoring to appropriate whatever is 
good in them all. He should be led to read the ser- 
mons of all ages in their original forms. It is true that 
sermon literature will not particularly help the preacher— 



342 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

his real Inspiration should be from the study of the Scrip- 
tures, and his own heart and life ; but he may have his en- 
thusiasm aroused by the study of the great models of his art 
■ — by placing before himself great ideals. He may strive to 
come at their sources of power. But let him remember that 
great men cannot be imitated, and he who is really great 
is built upon no other man's foundation ; his greatness is 
unconscious and inimitable ; still the deepest sources of 
power in preaching which are without the man, and which 
are divine, and can therefore be drawn upon by all men, 
these can be sought for with profit ; though, as a matter 
of fact, the divine and the human are invisibly wrought 
together in the interior parts of the mind, and both, ap- 
parently, belong peculiarly to the man himself. (2) 
That he should, above all, earnestly strive to catch the 
spirit and calling of his own age, feeling that the Spirit 
sweeps on like the wind and never recedes ; that it always 
hastens to a higher and fuller expression of the love of 
God ; and he should, therefore, adapt his preaching to 
the evident leadings and manifestations of the Spirit in 
his day, and to the living men about him, without at 
the same time yielding up the essential qualities and 
characteristics of the true preacher of the Gospel of Christ 
which belong to all time, and to eternal truth. 



SECOND DIVISION. 

OBJECT OF PREACHING. 

Sec. II. Object and Design of Preachmg. 

By reason of mistakes sometimes made upon the funda- 
mental topic of the object of preaching, and of the 
related subject, the true sphere of the preacher, and the 
great evils that result from these errors, it becomes nec- 
essary for the young preacher to have some well-defined 
understanding of this whole matter. It is vital. The 
work and sphere of the preacher is vast, almost requiring 
an angel's powers, yet at the same time it is something 
positive, and is not precisely the sphere and work of 
another man ; and it is good to know this, lest one waste 
his powers in vain efforts, and in fields of labor which 
are really not his own. In regard to the grand object of 
preaching it might be said, negatively, that Christian 
preachers are not set in the community to teach meta- 
physics and theology, to cultivate eloquence and litera- 
ture, to conduct a splendid ritual, to build up, financially, 
strong and paying churches ; but the preacher has a higher 
sphere and work which, whatever it is, is separable from 
every other. While it is a work mainly in the realm of 
conscience and spirit, while it takes hold of everlasting 
interests, it is still a definite work. It is not exactly the 
work of the scholar, or the philosopher, or the historian, 
or the scientist, or the advocate, or the soldier, or the 



244 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

business man, or the man of affairs in the State, though 
it partakes of all these, as might be witnessed, for exam- 
ple, in some of the preachers of the Reformed Church of 
France in the seventeenth century, who were genuine 
statesmen of the first order. But while it has no place 
properly among , the common occupations of men 
(though classified as one of the three learned professions), 
yet it is, and men still recognize it to be, the ** divine 
ofifice." The gospel, or God's message of peace and 
life, being a gift divinely suited to its object, which com- 
prehends the whole being, and is fitted to secure the com- 
plete restoration of humanity, is addressed to man in 
relations strikingly corresponding to the three great 
divisions of his rational, moral, and spiritual nature ; in 
other words, as a doctrine, as a motive, and as a life , 
and these relations in turn correspond to the three essen- 
tial properties of Christian preaching, which threefold 
design we proceed to unfold. All indeed might be ex- 
pressed in the familiar phrase "to save souls.'* The 
end of preaching is to secure men's salvation ; and there 
can be no truer and more comprehensive answer to the 
question "What is the object of preaching?" because 
salvation includes everything that is good in character 
and life. The object of Christ the Saviour is the object 
of his preachers. But such a phrase, " to save souls," is 
easily spoken, and may become stereotyped and meaning- 
less. 

The preacher's responsibility is great ; but let us 
endeavor to see just what it is. He is not to do things 
beyond his power. He is one in a series of agencies 
prepared by divine wisdom for the accomplishment of 
an infinite end, and he should know his work. He is 
not the head-spring of salvation, he is but a means to 
an end. Christ is the life ; he is to proclaim this 



OBJECT OF PREACHING. 245 

life. Christ is the light of men ; he is to diffuse this 

hght. 

We would answer, then, that the first great object of 

preaching, which goes also to determine its scope, is, 

I. Instruction. — This signifies instruction 

Instruction, 
in divine truth, and includes interpretation as 

a means to instruction. 

Preaching has primary reference to truth, which makes 
its first appeal to the intellect or the knowing faculty ; 
and, above all, it concerns that absolute truth which com- 
prises the knowledge of God, and which forms the basis 
of all other truth and being. This knowledge of God has 
relation to the manifestation of himself in revelation and 
in nature. It lies in its elemental relations in nature 
and the whole moral universe, but in its more perfect 
manifestation it is to be searched for in the Scriptures. 
The apostle Paul says (Eph. 5:13): ** For whatsoever 
doth make manifest is light ;" referring, as in the next 
verse, especially to Christ, as he who is the light ** which 
lighteth every man that cometh into the world," and 
this light penetrating the world of corrupt mind awakens 
everywhere new moral life. It is the duty of the Church 
on earth to diffuse this light of the knowledge of God 
and of Christ. The Church is endowed not only with 
the " charisma" of faith, to receive the truth, but with 
the " charisma" of preaching, to give the truth to others. 
It is to light up a blaze of truth in this dark world. Its 
messengers are to make known the truth to all living 
men, and all the successive generations of men, in its 
length, breadth, and fulness ; in the fulness of the love 
of God in Christ, of that last and most perfect manifesta- 
tion of God as a Saviour, sending his Son into the world 
to redeem the world — so that there can be no possible 
misapprehension about it. 



246 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

" Preach the gospel to every creature ;" let all men 
see, in clear light, what are the facts and contents of 
God's revealed truth, in order that they may understand 
and believe. This, historically, was the first object of 
the early preachers ; they were '* heralds" to announce 
the things belonging to the kingdom of God, whether 
men would hear or forbear. The apostles were sent 
everywhere to manifest *' the truth as it is in Jesus," to 
indoctrinate men in the knowledge of God as made 
known in his Son. In the apostolic logic, this preach- 
ing, or making known the truth to men, was essential to 
their faith and salvation (Rom. 10 : 17), " So then faith 
Cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God ;" 
(John 17 : 3), ** And this is Hfe eternal, that they might 
know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom 
thou hast sent ;" (2 Pet. i : 2, 3) '* Grace and peace be 
multiplied unto you, through the knowledge of God, and 
of Jesus our Lord, according as his divine power hath given 
unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, 
through the knowledge of him that hath called us to 
glory and virtue." 

Now this same element of knowledge, of instruc- 
tion, still remains in preaching. Christ said, " To this 
end was I born, and for this cause came I into the 
world, that I should bear witness unto the truth ;" and 
as Christ was " the light," as he was " a teacher sent 
from God," so that deserves not to be called preaching 
which does not shine within and without with the light 
of the knowledge of God, which does not contain the 
prime quality of instruction ; for the gospel is a " word" 
even before it is a " message." It is a word which is to 
be sent, or published. The "word" is addressed to 
men's reason. In classic literature, as well as in the 
original Scriptures, it is well known that the term Logos^ 



OBJECT OF PREACHING. 247 

"word, "was used in a twofold sense, one as signify- 
ing " reason" or the " immanent word" (Xoyo^ evdia- 
Oeros) ; the other as " expression," or the " enuncia- 
tive word" {\6yo= TrpoqjopiKos). In the Christian 
economy it might be said that the " immanent word" 
or " reason" was a preparation in the human soul for the 
announcement of Christ, or a divinely given capacity in 
the higher rational nature of man when appealed to by 
the divine reason to receive Christ ; while the " enuncia- 
tive word " was the actual gospel. Here we have the 
subjective and the objective views, if we wish to look at it 
philosophically ; though this is a secondary matter. 
The gospel is the true enunciation of God in Christ. It 
is the manifestation of the nature, will, and grace of God, 
as represented in the new revelation of the Son of God, 
the "Word" that was in the beginning, and that was 
with God, and that Avas God. 

That " Word of God" is ever to be announced to men. 
That is the principal thing. It is itself the supreme rea- 
son, and speaks to the highest reason in man. It is the 
voice of God speaking to man's higher nature and con- 
science, as it spoke to him in the garden of Eden. 

The preacher must be thus a voice to give utterance 
to this will and grace of God in his gospel. He is " the 
voice of one crying in the wilderness" of sinful and deso- 
late souls. He is especially a " servant of the Word." 

The preacher, therefore, is not responsible for originat- 
ing new truth ; but his business is to announce and in- 
terpret truth already originated, and that was from the 
beginning. He is to treat it mainly objectively — its 
great truths or doctrines as they stand revealed in the 
Word of God corresponding to the great wants of the 
human heart. He is also to rise above the mere eccle- 
siastical conception of the preacher ; as, for example, 



248 HO MILE TICS PROPER, 

the Roman Catholic orator, who speaks what is given him 
by the Church, so much so that in earUer times, as we 
have seen, set ''homilies," prepared beforehand by the 
bishops, were publicly read by the priests. In the Epis- 
copal Church the clergyman could hardly presume to go 
beyond, or aside from, the authoritative prescriptions of 
the Church creeds and " agenda ;'* the Baptist preacher 
must maintain the Baptist view, and the Presbyterian 
the Presbyterian ; the Congregational minister must 
preach so as to please the people, or some of the people 
— we refer nov/ to the extreme tendencies of the denomi- 
national idea in its practical influence upon the preacher 
— but he is, nevertheless, the interpreter of a higher gos- 
pel. His duty is plain. He is to speak the Word that 
God gives him. The truth is given him, and he is to 
make it clear to the minds of men. He is always to 
make advance in the knowledge of God. He publishes 
to men, not new truth, but new discoveries of truth, as 
the star-sown spaces of the sky were the same in the time 
of Adam as they were in the time of Kepler, and as they 
are now ; but the eye of the true interpreter sees ever 
deeper and clearer into their abysses. 

We have said that interpretation is necessarily in- 
cluded in this idea of instruction. Let us look for a 
moment at this subject of interpretation 

Instruction ^hj^h is really the chief form or instru- 

. . ^°"^. . mentality of the instruction which the 
interpretation. ■^ 

preacher is to give. In its ordinary mean- 
ing, as applied to uninspired writings, interpretation 
refers to the philological and historical, perhaps ra- 
tional sense, of any given passage or book ; but in the 
interpretation of the Bible there is a new factor that 
enters into the problem, viz.. Inspiration {dtonvEv- 
aria)^ which brings in a supernatural element ; and the 



OBJECT OF PREACHING. 249 

interpretation of this underlying spiritual sense of Scrip- 
ture makes the office of the preacher one of such great 
and high responsibility. Spiritual things are discerned 
through the teachings of the Spirit to faith, love, and 
obedience. " If any man will do (or is willing to do, loves 
to do) his will, he shall know of the doctrine ;" so that he 
who " loveth is born of God and knoweth God." While 
it is true that the inner door of interpretation is unlocked 
by this key, it is also true that the outer door opens to 
patient scholarship. We are to come at the precise 
meaning of the words of Scripture just as we come at the 
meaning of any other book, written in a foreign language, 
by the help of grammar, dictionary, and commentary, 
and of that cultured literary sense, of which Matthew 
Arnold, in his " Literature and Dogma," speaks so well, 
if he did not overstate it. 

Let the tendency of public opinion be what it may, the 
preacher should Jiold to soimd learnings that he may be 
able to form his own judgment, since no commentator is 
infallible. 

The jealousies and bickerings of scholars in the mat- 
ter of interpretation should be a lesson to us. A wrong 
theory to start with, a mental twist, a temporary fail- 
ure of critical acumen, or even of common sense, upon 
a given text, among hundreds and thousands of passages, 
sometimes invalidates the authority of the most acute 
scholar, be he English or German. The conflict of the 
age is now waging about the oldest portions of the Old 
Testament concerning the creation of matter and the 
origin of man, and a scholarly acquaintance with Hebrew 
would seem to be indispensable, if one would stand on 
the primitive rock of the original text. There should be 
a renewed enthusiasm in the study of this grand old lan- 
guage. A recent writer says : "A knowledge of Greek 



250 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

is considered absolutely necessary for the clergy ; but in 
the present state of theological controversy, a thorough 
knowledge of Hebrew is even more necessary. On almost 
every disputed point of biblical criticism, the man who is 
not a Hebrew scholar is entirely at the mercy of the man 
who is." 

But while he should be able to know the Scriptures in 
their original tongues, and for this purpose must and 
should freely call to his assistance all scholarly helps ; 
while as a scholar, an historian, and a poet, he should 
enter into the deepest soul of these old languages ; he 
must at the same time be himself in inner harmony with 
the truth, and be brought by the Spirit of God in sym- 
pathy with that Word which he interprets, as well as 
with those hearts to whom he interprets it. So he stands 
between the two. 

" How deep you were within the books of God ? 
To us, the speaker in his parliament ; 
To us, the imagined voice of God himself : 
The very opener and intelligencer 
Between the grace, the sanctities of heaven, 
And our dull workings. " ^ 

The preacher, if he desires to be a true interpreter, is not 
to use the Bible merely as a treasury of texts for ser- 
mons, but as the nourishment of his thought, the con- 
stant source of that divine knowledge which he imparts 
to his people ; for he is not a mere brazen trumpet for 
the breath of God to blow through, but his own mind is 
to work upon the revealed truth — to translate, to judge, 
to unify, to combine, to bring to bear upon it his best 
critical and philosophical powers. He is boldly to em- 
ploy the tests of his most searching analysis and his widest 
generalization, since a narrow and rigid theory of inter- 

' Shakespeare's " Henry IV.," iv. 2. 



OBJECT OF PREACHING. 25 1 

pretatlon is ofttimes more destructive than the broadest/ 
He is, above all, prayerfully to draw forth the riches of 
the Word as it speaks to him in a religious point of view, 
as a sinful man needing Christ, being willing to be him- 
self taught of God, and having the passive as well as the 
active, the receptive as well as the seeking mind. In 
this way the humble interpreter becomes the wise teacher 
{SidaanaXoi)^ and imbibes a portion of that divine wis- 
dom which he dispenses to others. He catches the pro- 
phetic spirit of inspiration, and is imperceptibly clothed 
with its authority, so that he speaks as from out the 
'* lively oracles." He is a genuine voice of God for in- 
struction, consolation, reproof, above the voice of the 
sky, or sea, or mountains, or thunder. He speaks to 
what is more profound and enduring than nature. 

Thus the young preacher may look forv.^ard to no 
feeble and superficial, but to a wide and deep ministry of 
the infinite Word. He should settle it in his mind that 
by severe as well as generous scholarship, by a life-long 
systematic study of the Bible, by the consecration of his 
powers to this holy work, by humble waiting on God for 
light, he is to make himself a true interpreter. This is 
his prime business — to understand the Scriptures — to give 
his days and nights, his strength and life, to this work. 
His prayer — ofttimes agonizing prayer like that of Ajax — 
is for light. He is the prophet of God, as the poet is the 
prophet of nature. He is not a preacher, if this is not 
his first work. He is a false prophet. He is a disloyal 
messenger. He speaks his own word, not God's. He 
does not seek to know and think over again the thoughts 
of the Eternal mind. His little ministry soon runs out. Do 
we not, indeed, discover here the secret of the ofttimes 



' See Dr. Arnold's Sermons on " Interpretation of Scripture.' 



2 52 HO MILE TICS PROPER. 

superficial character and results of the ministry — of the 
small fruit of preaching and pastoral labor, of the almost 
total absence of the primitive quickening element in 
preaching, of the ambitious, low, and secular view of the 
divine office — of short settlements in the ministry — of the 
work of lay preachers to fill out (as some genuine ** evan- 
gelists" of this day, though not theologically and artisti- 
cally models of preachers, nobly and wonderfully are 
doing), the glaring deficiencies of formal, unsympathetic, 
unpopular and unbiblical preaching. The primary sphere 
of the preacher is, therefore, we conclude, to instruct in 
divine truth, to interpret purely God's Word. He may in- 
deed find God's truth in nature, as well as in revelation, for 
there is, as Lord Bacon says, " a voice of God revealed 
in things. " But his principal work is to instruct in the 
things of the Gospel of God. • He is God's mouth-piece. 
He is to let God speak through him. That is his office, 
and to this work of instruction the best powers of mind, 
the finest culture, the most profound spiritual insight im- 
parted by the anointing of the Holy Ghost, may be em- 
ployed. But great as this office is, this does not set forth 
the whole object of preaching, nor, though in point of 
time it necessarily comes first, does it, perhaps, in point 
of fact, express the highest aim of preaching ; and for the 
discovery of this we will have to consider the true results 
of preaching especially in those to whom it is addressed. 

The second great object of preaching, without which 
it is of little use, we would say again is, 

2. Persuasion. — This is, through the powerful appeal 

to motives, to bring men themselves into harmony with 

the truth which is preached, so that it shall 
Persuasion. , , , . . ... ^ . . 

be to them the word of life. It is to make 

the truth true to men. It is more than instruction. It 

is beyond knowledge ; it is the producing of repentance, 



OBJECT OF PREACHING. 253 

faith, conversion. It actually leads the religious aspira- 
tions to their divine object, bringing souls into vital union 
with Him who is the soul's Lord, Judge, and Redeemer. 
It is " speaking the truth in love." It is the truth per- 
suasively and effectively uttered, (it is swaying the will, 
and turning the moral affections, so that men shall not 
only hear and understand, but yield and obey. ^ Augus- 
tine's great precept in the fourth chapter of his " De 
Doctrina Christiana" is that the preacher should seek 
" to bend men to action." He is to use the truth of 
God with the whole momentum of his strength, to move 
men off their bases of sinful repose and save them. He 
is to regard sin as an evil to be mortally feared and es- 
caped from as soon as possible, through repentance and 
the forgiveness of the gospel. Nothing short of this can 
satisfy the preacher of Christ ; therefore it has been said 
by Vinet, that the pastoral work is a finer test of the 
Christian ministry than preaching, because it is the un- 
ambitious and unselfish seeking for wandering souls and 
bearing them back to the fold of Christ. 

Here the preacher's own personality comes in. The 
Word of God forms the divine circle in which preaching, 
or the human element, freely moves and operates. Men 
themselves come to have power. " Filled with the Holy 
Ghost," they speak with the Spirit's potency. They be- 
come charged with a life-giving influence, though of an 
instrumental nature and degree. Through their preach- 
ing souls are begotten unto eternal life. The apostle 
says (i Tim. i : 12), " And I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, 
who hath enabled (energized, empowered) me, for that 
he counted me faithful, putting me in the ministry." 
The Scotch preacher McCheyne said, " I had rather 
beg my bread than preach without success ;" and he 
meant by success winning men to Christ. 



254 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Christ himself draws through the preacher, and truth 
thus becomes a persuasive power. Preaching is truly a 
personal application of divine truth to the personal needs, 
sorrows, and doubts of sinful souls, so that they shall be 
led to the source of all life — it is a real, Christ-like sym- 
pathy with men. 

** Some preachers have only sympathy with ideas, with 
organized thought, with religious system-making, and 
philosophy, so that men have felt the strength of their 
preaching, but have not been moved by it." 

What even is that which we call eloquence, if it does 
not move men with the movement of the orator's own 
mind ; if it does not persuade men by the force of the 
orator's own will ? 

Quidaliud est eloquentia nisi motiis animce continuus f " * 

The French Roman Catholic preacher of Notre Dame, 
De Ravignan, said to his theological students, " What is 
pulpit eloquence ? It is the power of spoken words to 
draw souls to their Creator. This is the highest of minis- 
tries, the most difficult and full of danger. We must then 
highly value it, and bring to it a pious union with God, 
joined with deep humility. He that would speak merely 
as a man, wastes his strength on human passion ; but to 
speak as an apostle we must go to those holy passions 
which I will call supernatural — love of God, determina- 
tion to save souls, the strong, all-pervading zeal which 
springs from love of poor sinners ; in one word God, God 
alone, sought and gained through courageous and endur- 
ing labor, through ardent and painful prayer. Here you 
see the whole secret of an apostolic man. There are many 
who will preach from what they carry in their heads ; 
few, very few, speak from their heart, from their bowels 



Cicero De Oratore.' 



OBJECT OF PREACHING. 255 

of charity. The truth soon becomes known ; even the 
people of the world are not mistaken about it. In sub- 
ordination to this interior principle, the source of sacred 
eloquence is always the Holy Scriptures. You know 
them well ; what you mean to preach is the word of 
God. To produce emotion is to feel it. This true 
emotion is gained first in prayer, then in the perusal of 
some favorite author, then in a strong will to attain 
a proposed end. Do not hesitate to give yourselves 
full scope ; speak directly to the passions in every tone by 
turn ; by unlooked for strokes move the depths of your 
hearers' hearts. True eloquence is a drama. Look at 
Bourdaloue himself, how his logic carries us away ; how 
earnest he is, while he seems so calm. Look above all 
at the matchless Paul ; he throws himself into the scene, 
he interrupts himself, he apostrophizes his audience, he 
prays, he weeps, he loves." * 

The radical difficulty with men Is not so much a per- 
version of the reason as of the will. Men are more wil- 
ful than they are irrational. Here the preacher is to 
direct his main assault ; to pour in his mightiest forces of 
persuasion and carry the citadel by the violence of a 
divine love. He is to aim too at immediate results. 
Life is not long enough to preach proprieties and 
semblances. He is to persuade men to be reconciled 
to God, not next year, nor to-morrow, but to-day. A 
living successful preacher says: "Preaching is the art 
of producing religious convictions and emotions in an 
audience. Its effect must be immediate, or it fails in 
preaching. It must be understood at once. Every 
thought must be clear before another is presented. 
Thus repetitions arc often necessary, the expression of 



' De Pontlevoy's " Life of De Ravignan/' p. 261. 



256 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

the same idea in various forms, and occasionally the 
repetition of the very same words. Whatever inter- 
feres with earnestness of manner should be disregarded. 
The whole mind should be bent on the special work to 
be done, and that work is immediate impression. Just 
so far as the preacher's mind is diverted from this object 
by his anxiety in respect to the grammatical accuracy of 
his words, and the perfect taste of every expression, just 
so far will the sermon fail in impressiveness." 

John Foster, it is said, grieved in spirit because he had 
never, to his knowledge, been the means of the conversion 
of one soul ; but who can doubt, who knew aught of his 
life, that John Foster had the spirit of a true preacher ; 
and any theory of preaching which leaves out of view this 
self-forgetting earnestness of the orator for God, this 
deathless resolve to pluck men from the destruction of 
sin, to break the chains of death and bring them at once 
into the liberty of Christ, is a false theory. Dr. Finney 
was as sure of his success in regard to hundreds of souls, 
as John Foster was doubtful about one ; but whichever 
was right, without this devoted aim, preaching is en- 
feebled. It becomes a weak thing, far below the man- 
lier purpose of the reformer, the earnest author and 
journalist, the poet even, if he be such a consecrated 
nature's priest as was William Wordsworth. The 
scholarly culture and attainments of such a brilliant 
)^oung man as John Coleridge Patteson, missionary bishop 
of the Melanesian Islands, were nothing compared with 
his Christian manhood, his single-eyed zeal, which taught 
him to be as simple as a child in his instruction of those 
brutified savages, afar off in the lonely isles of the 
Pacific, which led him to homely, self-denying labors for 
their salvation and at last to death from their hands. 
This " one thing" a minister of Christ must do. 



OBJECT OF PREACHING. 257 

The preaching, then, that does not actually convert men 
from the love of sin to the love of God, nor aims to do so, is 
a religious play-acting, and an ecclesiastical sham. Surely 
the most respectable preaching in our churches which has 
dropped out of it the element of persuasion, has lost that 
which gives edge to " the sword of the Spirit," making 
it powerful to search the thoughts and intents of the 
heart that sin shall be disclosed, that the love of Christ 
shall be borne in to its secret depths, that the way of 
eternal life shall be opened. But as the word of God is 
addressed to the whole of the man, and not to one 
aspect of his nature exclusively, so we have not attained 
to the most comprehensive and apostolic idea of preach- 
ing in that which ends simply in conversion ; since it 
must goon into something higher still, in the establishing 
and perfecting of a holy life in the soul ; and how broad 
is the scope of preaching in this regard ! The cross is the 
sun of righteousness, the central orb that fills time and 
space with its beams, that searches human nature through 
and through, and casts light on all the varied interests of 
human life and all the aspects of human character ; on 
everything, in fact, where there can be a right and a 
wrong, and where responsibility is incurred by the moral 
choices of rational beings. The final object of preaching, 
then, is 

3. Edification. — This is to build up the soul (a slower 

process) in righteousness and true holiness. It is the 

work of soul-culture. It is the formation 

Edification, 
and completion of Christian character. It is 

rooting out the spirit of selfishness, malice, and impurity, 

and the training up of just, upright, merciful, honorable, 

chaste, loving, self-denying, heroic and Christ-like men. 

The work of pastors and teachers of the gospel is laid 

down comprehensively in Ephesians 4:12, 13, " For the 



258 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for 
the edifying of the body of Christ : till we all come in the 
unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of 
God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature 
of the fulness of Christ." It is the work of educating 
men into the benevolent will of God until they shall 
come in the fulness of their faith unto the perfection of 
Christ. This is real salvation. What, indeed, is a sal- 
vation that does not save from the power of sin — of all 
sin — and that does not bring into the perfection of moral 
purity ? The immediate aim of preaching is soul-enHghten- 
ment and soul-conversion ; but the final object of all true 
preaching is soul-edification — the formation of a true 
manhood in Christ Jesus. It looks, therefore, to the 
transforming of the whole man — the reason, will, and 
affections — into the spirit of that divine charity which 
is the bond of perfectness. Thus the meaning and end of 
preaching is really Christ. Christ the ideal, as well as Christ 
the source of spiritual life. The perfect manifestation 
of Christ to men, to trust, love, and obey, is the fulness 
of the gospel. This Christ-like ideal of something spiritu- 
ally apprehended though yet practically unattained, is the 
inspiring object of all true Christian preaching, which, 
since Christianity is a life in contrast to a system of phi- 
losophy, does not end in the enunciation of doctrine, im- 
portant as sound doctrine is, but in the real implantation 
and nourishing of a higher life ; and it is to be remarked in 
this connection, that the influence of motives which spring 
from Christ's own life, is the chief means of the spiritual 
edification of which we speak. The secret of power and of 
hope lies in a faith inwrought by the Holy Spirit, not so 
much in a creed as in a person ; and the union of the divine 
with the human in the person of Christ has made all things 
possible for us in the realm of moral and spiritual life. 



OBJECT OF PREACHING. 259 

In this love incarnate, this love given to us, there is 
power to purify and redeem the human race. While we 
despair, at least in this life, of searching to the bottom of 
this mystery, of defining or explaining it by any theory, 
yet the mystery of love working out the salvation of 
men by its own utmost sacrifice is there, and in this 
divine love must not the preacher be baptized by the 
Holy Ghost, who is the "Spirit of Christ," before he 
can preach " Christ, and him crucified " ? How else, in- 
deed, can he have the hope of redeeming the world or 
a single soul ? But with it he can hope for the realiza- 
tion of a full salvation in preaching the gospel to men ; 
of a redemption of their whole nature from the power of 
sin, and can labor for that end so that these souls shall 
grow up into Christ, who is the head, and bring forth all 
the beautiful fruits of holy living ; and thus gathering 
together regenerated minds into the unity of Christ, he 
may labor successfully to build up also a Christian church, 
and a Christian state, and a Christian civilization, com- 
prehending all that is true, pure, great, and divine in the 
world, and which shall be a synonym for the kingdom of 
God on earth. In order to bring about the great con- 
summation which we have mentioned, of restoring the 
kingdom of God on earth through preaching, mere 
knowledge, skill, learning, philosophy, and eloquence 
are, we at once perceive, not sufficient. There must be 
on the part of the preacher the holy mind, consecrated 
to Christ, filled by his spirit, inspiring others with his 
life and love, in order thus to impart this new life, and to 
" beget men in Christ Jesus ;" and on the part of the 
hearer, faith, love, and obedience to fit him to receive the 
truth, and to be built up in it. The preacher is only a 
medium ; but he is a true medium between the soul and 
Christ. He must himself be in soul-fellowship with 



26o HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Christ, and in him the spiritual must predominate over the 
intellectual. If, indeed, we speak of intellect in the 
pulpit, there is not enough of it, and it is dull com- 
pared with what it should be when God calls for the best, 
and compared with the force, fertility, and genius often 
exhibited in the other sciences and professions. But the 
great defect is the want of fire. It is the want of 
apostolic earnestness. The Christian Church fails to lay 
its grasp on the passing generations and upon some of the 
most brilliant and powerful minds. It is sometimes 
affirmed that Christ need not be in every sermon ; but as 
Christ is the life and centre of divine truth, and thus 
must be the end of all preaching, how can he be really 
absent from any true sermon ? To exhibit the truth of 
Christ in its beauty and completeness requires the spirit 
of Christ in the preacher, his spirit of love ; otherwise the 
unction, the renewing and edifying element, is lacking. 
Thus all preaching should be " a word of the Lord," and 
should have this characteristic of the apostolic preaching, 
that it leads the entire being into the eternal life of 
Christ. Now to bring these scattered elements of preach- 
ing together into one comprehensive whole, we would 
say that the true object and design of Christian preach- 
ing, in the largest and most stimulating view of it, 
is : So to set forth divine truth, the gospel of the Lord 
Jesus Christ, with such clearness, simplicity, sympathy, 
power, fulness, love, and utter dependence upon and 
union with the " Spirit of Christ," as to persuade men 
to receive it truly to the conversion of their souls, 
and to the upbuilding of their whole life and character 
in the faith of Christ ; or, in other words, to enlighten, 
renew, and sanctify them unto eternal life in the king- 
dom of God's dear Son. 



THIRD DIVISION. 

PREPARATION FOR COMPOSING SERMON. 

Sec. 12. Considerations preparatory to the zvork of preach- 
ing. 

As a preliminary step it is well to gain some idea of the 
real difficulties in the way of the work of preaching, and 
of the best methods of going about to accomplish it. 
Let us then notice briefly some of the 

I. Difficulties of preaching. — The prevalent ideas in 
regard to the easiness of the preacher's work have been 
increased by the now common and com- 
mendable habit of lay-preaching, by which ^^^^"^^^^2 of 
1 1 r 1 1 • 1 preaching, 

those who feel prompted to mstruct others 

become religious teachers and exhorters of the people ; 
and by the universal custom of address in prayer-meet- 
ings and on Sunday-school and moral-reform platforms. 
We do not say that many admirable sermons are not 
preached in this way, and great good done ; but from 
this or other causes the regular work of the preacher has 
been depreciated in value, and a style of preaching which 
is easy rather than thoughtful, sensational rather than 
searching, pointed rather than penetrating or profound, 
has been the result ; and this also has served to diffuse 
the false impression that preaching is not very difficult, 
and can be done by any one. 

Now to make a good sermon requires many things 



262 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

which a merely literary composition does not demand. 
It requires especially four things : i. Scholarly knowledge 
of the Scriptures. 2. Insight and judgment as to choice 
of subject, so that it shall fit the wants of the congrega- 
tion. 3. Power to set forth moral truth appropriately, 
implying a certain just knowledge of human nature and 
the human mind. 4. Spiritual apprehension of the truth, 
or a heart-deep religious experience. 

One should thus possess some real, scholarly knowledge 
of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, so that he can 
elucidate a passage of the Bible clearly from the original. 
Otherwise he is at the mercy of every gainsayer. 
Then out of a vast mass of subjects, like an endless 
armory of weapons, he should know how to choose his 
theme so as to adapt it to men's hearts, consciences, 
and present wants ; this requires sagacity and trained 
perception, or some maturity of mind and character ; 
the truth must be reasonably and clearly treated, so 
that it shall not be perfunctorily, but edifyingly set forth, 
in a way fitted to teach and make a lasting impression ; 
and then spiritual truths, the most difficult of all to com- 
prehend and teach, should be so truly comprehended by 
the preacher as to be made plain to the spiritual natures 
of others. There must be that religious experience, that 
condition of heart, that love of Christ and of men which 
is essential for the production of effective preaching, 
which qualities are not always possessed by scholars and 
eloquent men. 

He who begins this work, therefore, should expect hard 
work ; it will draw upon all his energies. There was a 
proverb among those who presided at the Grecian mys- 
teries that '* the wand-bearers are many, but few are in- 
spired." To be inspired one must go to the sources of 
inspiration. He must give himself to God and his work. 



PREPARATION FOR COMPOSING SERMON. 263 

The young preacher should know that his profession, 
intellectually and morally, is a difficult profession ; its 
work is never interrupted, never finished, and requires 
the whole energies of his being, up to the last day of his 
ministerial life. One is not only to write sermons, but 
he is to write better sermons, to make continual improve- 
ment in preaching. He is never to think that he has 
done his best, or done what he could. He is never to sup- 
pose that he has exhausted revelation. He is always to be 
a student and a seeker. He is always to be learning new 
methods of communicating truth. He is never to give 
himself to an indolent repose. He has entered on a war- 
fare from which there is no dismissal. He has conse- 
crated himself, body and soul, to this work. If he does 
not study his mind loses its invention, and its resources 
are exhausted. Sermon-writing is an all-absorbing labor. 
One cannot preach and do anything else. If we wish to 
succeed as preachers we cannot fall back on old sermons. 
New exigencies, new applications of truth are continually 
arising, and he who does not make preaching his one life- 
work will fall behind others who give themselves wholly 
to it, and he cannot also hope to reap the reward of the 
faithful laborer. Although it is an ungracious thing to 
say it, there are ministers who are not, and who do not 
seek to be, successful. They do not study Hebrew and 
Greek. They do not think severely. They will not 
labor to preach well ; they will not learn even the ex- 
ternal and collateral means and accomplishments of their 
profession ; they will not learn how to write ; they will 
not trouble themselves about the simplest rhetorical 
culture ; they will not even mend awkward habits 
of deliver)^ ; they will not correct a false tone or a harsh 
pronunciation ; they will not take pains to acquire the 
art of public speaking, so that they can address an 



264 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

assembly upon any subject with effect ; but, above all, 
they will not grapple with the real difficulties of setting 
forth divine truth effectively to men, which requires 
thought, clear arrangement of ideas, spiritual meditation, 
and prayer. They are doing, perhaps, all other things 
except giving their undivided energies to preaching. 
They say, perhaps, that there is no need of taking so much 
trouble about these things, for they will be helped at the 
time of speaking ; but they who say this are those who, 
above all others, need a thorough training ; for in God's 
work, as well as in man's, those who do not work are not 
helped ; and do such preachers deserve to be successful ? 

Let us, then, come to the conclusion that it is a great 
thing to preach the gospel ; and yet we do not mean, by 
that, preaching great sermons. 

Indeed too much is said, it may be, in theological semi- 
naries about the need of taking so long a time to write a 
sermon — a fortnight, or a month, or two months. We 
sometimics hear such remarks from those who desire to say 
a strong thing in order to impress upon the minds of 
young men the necessity of steady thought and care 
in preaching. No one can think more of this than we 
do ; but even this may be exaggerated. While there is 
truth in this language, it also may greatly mislead. 
Sermonizing is a difficult thing ; but let us remember 
that the real difficulty, the hard labor in sermonizing, is 
in the preparation of the mind for the work. It is in the 
previous training. If the mind itself is philosophically 
trained, if it knows how to think, if it is thoroughly 
accomplished in hermeneutics, and in the art of com- 
position, then sermons, especially if they are short ser- 
mons, may be composed rapidly ; and, as a general 
thing, two good and useful sermons may be prepared 
weekly. Of course an elaborate occasional sermon may 



PREPARATION FOR COMPOSING SERMON. 265 

take weeks and even months to prepare. It is well to 
have such a studied discourse — the results of one's best 
thinking and most careful scholarship — always on the 
stocks. It is well, while a student is in the seminary, for 
him to write some such sermons, embodying the results 
of his theological and philological studies as well as life- 
long religious experience. They form a good capital. 
They lie like investments in the bank that may be drawn 
from now and then, and that always yield good interest. 

But a man should be so constant a student of the Bible, 
and, we might add, so thoroughly versed in theological 
studies, as to be able, on an emergency, to draw out quite 
rapidly a clear and instructive sermon on almost any prac- 
tical topic. The main difficulty is in making Jiimsclf intel- 
lectually and spiritually a preacher ; then the individual 
sermon comes readily and as a matter of course. But one 
should learn his trade. He should know how to compose 
sermons. He should be always thinking upon his sermon- 
work. Life is so short, and man's powers so limited, 
that he can do but one thing well, and the preacher should 
therefore not expect to do aught else but preach. This 
continual labor bestowed upon the composition of ser- 
mons is very taxing at first, but it will grow easier (though 
perhaps never easy) as one grows to have power in the 
pulpit, and the way opens to freedom, light, and success. 
As one gets nearer to souls, he is repaid for his anxious 
thought. Young preachers, in fact all preachers who 
have not learned the best methods, are apt to be dream- 
ers in their studies. They think that musing on a text, 
or a doctrine, as a subject of thought, is thinking upon 
it, is investigating it, is developing it into clear forms of 
instruction and edifying lessons of duty and salvation. 
Something more is needed than musing. 

We will only add, in regard to the difficulties of preach- 



266 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

ing, and the hard labor which it involves, that an enthu- 
siasm for our work will, with God's help, carry us through 
it ; and the work will be found to be sweet, the sweetest 
of all works, the fullest of reward and true satisfaction. 

In this connection it is well also to look at some of the 
prevalent faults of preaching, so that one may avoid them 
in his preparation for the pulpit. 

2. Faults of preaching. — Among the most prominent of 

these may be mentioned (i) preaching without a strong im- 

pelHng purpose. To preach merely to serve 

^" . ^ ° ^ professional necessity, or to provide a dis- 
preachmg. r ^r, c j • • i 

course for the Sunday service, is surely an 

unworthy object ; for there should be in every sermon 
some definite purpose to convert men and to build them 
up in the faith of the gospel. There should be a solemn 
feeling of responsibility to God, who has set us in the 
ministry to be fishers of men and not fishers for our selfish 
interests. In his preaching the true preacher grasps men's 
spirits and draws them unto Christ, that they may be 
warmed into new life ; and there should be this spiritual 
grasp in every sermon, this laying hold of the souls of men 
to bring them to Jesus Christ that they may truly live. 
" The Judge standeth at the door." 

(2.) Preaching abstruse and learnedly expressed ser- 
mons. A sermon should be intensive rather than exten- 
sive or pretensive ; there should be in it more pith and 
point than elaborate argumentation. While a sermon 
should always have that in it which appeals to the reason, 
for religious truth, as well as natural truth, is a matter of 
thought, and is cognizable in so far as it is rational and ap- 
peals to the laws of the mind, yet a sermon is not a mere 
argument. It is a thoughtful and earnest presentation of 
truth, drawn with care and faithfulness from the Scrip- 
tures, in forms of the most effective speech, and in- 



PREPARATION FOR COMPOSING SERMON. 267 

tended, in its language and illustrations, to reach the 
popular mind, and to persuade men — men of all classes 
and divers characters— to a certain course of action for 
their highest good ; since their understandings often 
may be convinced — are perhaps so already — while their 
wills are to be turned, and their affections attracted by 
and fastened on higher objects. The sermon is a relig- 
ious address designed for a definite end, and not a relig- 
ious treatise, saying all that can be said in the way of 
discussion upon a given theme. A common audience 
does not come together to follow out the painfully ex- 
tended and intricate processes of a subtle and analytic 
mind ; and so also a too discursive style, which sweeps 
over a vast deal of ground, which deals with truth philo- 
sophically and abstractly, merely as a theme of learned 
research or even of interesting thought, and not plainly 
and pointedly, wastes the precious time allotted in the 
on-rush of this world's life to the preacher of truth. 
There may be learning and the results of critical schol- 
arship in the discourse ; but the sermon should not 
have the tone of learning, for learning deals with the 
past, and " knowledge should be turned into life." The 
divinely practical element in a sermon should sweep 
everything along with it. One should not stop to ex- 
hibit his learning ; and of what great importance is it, 
after all, to one who has a higher end in view ; who has 
to gain his hearer and persuade him to serve the 
Lord ? \Vc would make a difference between learn- 
ing and scholarship, as they are manifested in ser- 
mon-writing. We need the last ; but we should not 
exhibit the first ; or, to quote from Mr. Ruskin upon 
a different theme, " The artist need not be a learned 
man ; in all probability it will be a disadvantage to 
him to become so ; but he ought, if possible, to be 



268 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

an educated man ; that is, one who has understand- 
ing of his own uses and duties in the world, and 
therefore of the general nature of the things done and 
existing in the world, and who has so trained himself or 
been trained, as to turn to the best account whatever 
faculties or knowledge he has. The mind of an educated 
man is greater than the knowledge it possesses ; it is like 
the vault of heaven, encompassing the earth which lives 
and flourishes beneath it ; but the mind of an uneducated 
and learned man is like an India-rubber band, with an 
everlasting spirit of contraction in it, fastening together 
papers which it cannot open and keeps from being 
opened." 

(3.) Preaching sermons addressed to the fancy and the 
nervous sensibilities. This is what Shakespeare would call 
" tafifeta-writing. " It is not dealing with plain thought, 
from which true ideas are evolved, and true principles 
brought out ; but it is striving to rival brilliant and 
popular lecturers, who, by continually working u^^on 
their lectures, have made them like poHshed gems, 
and have taken everything out of them which is not brill- 
iant and immediately effective. It is also what is com- 
monly called " sensational preaching ;" since it is deter- 
mining to produce a sensation on the nerves by words, 
rather than on the conscience and heart by thought and 
feeling. It is writing from the motive of exciting men 
for the moment, and of catching their attention by novel- 
ties, rather than of doing them good for eternity. And 
it is also appealing to a lower class of motives, leaving 
men's higher nature untouched. It is true that the mass 
of men will be attracted by this style, and perhaps en- 
courage it ; and yet, sooner or later, even they will tire 
of it ; for it is turning the sanctuary into a lecture-hall 
or theatre ; and the results of this kind of preaching are 



PREPARATION FOR COMPOSING SERMON. 269 

indeed as superficial as those of the popular lecturer and 
player ; for if there are conversions, they are of a doubt- 
ful sort, it being poor seed sown in bad soil. In the 
words of another writer, " This whole business of preach- 
ing and hearing for entertainment may be told in these 
two words, 'deceiving and being deceived.* " We do 
not say that a preacher should not attract his audience, 
nor, if he has anything original in thought, or powerful 
in imagination, or moving in truth, that he should repress 
it ; on the contrary, let him be himself ; let him use 
every power that he possesses ; let his thought be fresh, 
and let him make a sensation if he can ; but let him not 
preach for the special purpose of making a sensation, of 
captivating, entertaining, exciting, drawing. How waste- 
ful the efforts of such a preacher ! How terrible the 
responsibility he incurs ! If the objection be urged that 
the sermon of an opposite character fails to interest an 
audience, it springs probably from other reasons : the 
preacher has, perhaps, failed to inspire a true and manly 
taste in his congregation ; he does not put genuine 
thought, feeling, or spiritual earnestness into his preach- 
ing ; there is nothing to attract in it ; there is no unction ; 
he copies his ideas and feigns his emotions, and how can 
he create a legitimate interest in this way ? The 
preacher should therefore resist the temptation (which is 
one of the first to assail him) to make a fine, attractive 
sermon ; but let him rather strive to make dL plain one, 
and if there is aught of literary or awakening power in 
him, it will shine out in due time. In saying this we 
would not be understood as saying anything against pul- 
pit eloquence ; but it is sometimes difficult to draw the 
line between the true and the false — the true sensational 
and the false sensational. We find no fault with him 
who strives, for the sake of truth, to say a thing elo- 



270 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

quently ; but if he says anything in order to be eloquent, 
to make himself attractive, to build up his reputation, to 
produce an excitement for his or its own sake, to gain 
the name of an eloquent preacher, to make preaching a 
vehicle for personal and popular influence — here we de- 
tect the false style ; it is thoroughly and in the lowest 
sense human and not divine. 

In regard to preaching to the emotions — this is an im- 
portant question by itself. There is certainly a true and 

le2:itimate preachinsf addressed to the emo- 
Preaching to . , ^ , „ 

the emotions. ^^^^^^ nature, and all true preachmg aims 

more or less directly to reach the feelings, 
which in one sense lie at the root of religion, since relig- 
ion is a want, a desire, a yearning of the heart before it 
secures a thought or an intellectual conception. Preach- 
ing is not merely a calm, unimpassioned, intellectual pres- 
entation of truth, arousing no sensibility and producing 
no mental excitation. On the contrary, it ought to 
awaken feeling of the right kind. Feeling is not what we 
should fear, but feeling of a false kind, springing from 
superficial sensibilities and wrong motives, or from a 
wrong way of appealing to the religious sensibilities. 
The true principle in regard to preaching to the emotions 
seems to be this, that the mere aim to arouse feeling 
through preaching — making that the object — is not 
enough ; but the aim of the preacher should be to 
awaken that genuine and profound feeling which leads 
the mind to act — the feeling itself being of little value 
which does not end in a determination or action. We 
must make men feel to make them act. So sodden are 
they in sin, so hardened in worldliness, prejudice, and 
error, that they must be made to fear, yearn, desire, per- 
haps agonize with desire, before they will be moved to 
seek God and truly repent. The fires must be kindled in 



PREPARATION FOR COMPOSING SERMON. 27 1 

the depth of the soul before its silent machinery will 
begin to operate, and before it will make any true advance 
toward God and a better life. But feeling that does not 
tend to action, that ends only in itself, that has no real 
influence on the soul's choices, that does not lead to re- 
pentance, faith, and holiness, that is but a temporary 
thing, that is a fire blazing up and then going out — 
that is not a worthy end of preaching — it is sensational 
preaching of the false kind ; and it may be the occasion 
of incalculable mischief, even as a burned district in the 
woods lies barren and waste for years. 

In order to produce this true emotion, of which we 
speak, the preacher (as the familiar Horatian rule is) must 
himself feel. The French preacher De Ravignan, in a 
passage before quoted, says : " To produce emotion we 
must feel it. Do not hesitate to give yourselves full 
scope ; speak directly to the passions, to every tone by 
turn ; by unlooked-for strokes move the depths of your 
hearers' hearts." 

(4.) Preaching unstudied and loose-jointed sermons. 
Antiquity and the authority of the Scriptures have made 
preaching on the Lord's day a matter of great and 
eternal moment, a reasoning of God with man, " the 
savor of life unto life, or the savor of death unto death." 

True preaching must, therefore, still continue to be 
thoughtful, profound, authoritative ; it doubtless may 
and should have more of popular application, naturalness, 
and life than it sometimes has ; it may and should come 
down to the sympathies and comprehensions of all men ; 
but the preparation for the pulpit should be a severe exer- 
cise, and the sermon should deal seriously with great 
thoughts, principles, and themes ; it should not play 
with them. 

De Ravignan, again, says to young preachers in regard 



272 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

to writing sermons, ** Draw up a plan, lay down the course 
of the ideas, their advance from one to another, their 
final effect. This is what is most important, it is almost 
ail. The writing is nothing when the work is performed. 
We must not fear trouble. Be laborious, patient, endur- 
ing ; at this price you will gain that fulness of force which 
convinces and persuades. The labor of composition 
should be a martyrdom, and ought to be felt to be such, 
for without this an apostolic life is worth little or noth- 
ing. Trouble must be taken if we hope to do any good. 
What fatigue and dejection ! Often sluggishness and 
inability will fill the mind ; there will be no results. It 
is well ; it makes us humble and devout. In these times 
we have recourse to God. We must, of course, employ, 
spend all that we have. We could scarcely wish to have 
genius save for the purpose of glorifying God by saving 
souls, for without this, genius is nothing. Talent, at 
least, of whatever sort, we must employ, but trample it 
beneath our feet. We ought to wish to succeed, to do 
well, very well. Listen to the fertile maxim addressed 
to us by St. Ignatius : * We must do everything as if we 
were doing it alone, and look to God for all success, as if 
we had done nothing.* He says again : ' For the pulpit 
toil is everything ; while sloth, on the contrary, hinders 
all success.' " 

Let us, then, ever strive to avoid this fault of com- 
posing too easy and off-hand sermons, that cost us little 
or no hard thinking. Let us shun this fatal habit of 
facility. The age demands thought. Let us resolve to 
give the best labor of our minds to this work, even if we 
do not and cannot always make great sermons. 

But, is it objected, how can a minister, with all his 
other duties, prepare two such thoughtful and faithful 
sermons a week ? This is a chronic question, and we can 



PREPARATION FOR COMPOSING SERMON. 273 

answer it only by asking another, " How have the best 
preachers done this?" In some way or another they 
have contrived to preach solidly, attractively, effectively, 
twice on Sunday, and every time they preach. White- 
field preached, on an average, ten times a week, for the 
space of thirty-four years, and John Wesley nearly the 
same number for a much longer time ; and Wesley's 
sermons, if not Whitefield's, were carefully composed. 
A young minister doubtless has a dii^cult task at first ; 
but by the habitual and systematic study of the Scrip- 
tures, by severe labor, by occasional exchanges, by some- 
times repeating his sermons, and by not preaching more 
than twice on Sunday, he can accomplish this, as others 
have done. And, as a general rule, let him preach reason- 
ably short sermons, if at the same time they are good ser- 
mons. After all that has been said about putting honest 
work into our sermons, this will not be misunderstood. 
But there is a prevalent fallacy that the longer a sermon 
the more thought it has. On the contrary, it may be 
very long and very dull. It may be vox et prceterea nihil — 
nothing but words. Surely, if a dull sermon, the longer it 
is the worse it is. A short sermon, too, may be vapid — ■ 
may amount to nothing — but if full of force and thought, 
a short sermon is better than a long one. Where both are 
good, a short one is the better. Attention is not wearied 
and impression is not effaced. Macaulay says that at 
the famous trial of the seven bishops. Lord Somers, 
then a young man, arose and spoke a little over five 
minutes, and his reputation as one of the most eloquent 
orators of England was established. Put thirty for five 
and the preacher need not err greatly. One thought, 
one duty, fully handled, fully illustrated, fully brought 
home to the conscience and heart, is enough for one 
sermon ; and would that young ministers, as well as 



2 74 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

older ones, could have the sagacity, humility, and in- 
dependence to see and follow this rule ! 

As to the length of sermons, we would add a word. 

The history of this subject is somewhat suggestive 

as well as amusing. The sermons of the 

engt o |^j.g^ ^^^ centuries varied in leng-th accord- 
sermons. . . " 

mg to preacher, place, and circumstances, 

as they do now; but Moule remarks (p. 56) that "as 
a general rule the discourses of the Greek fathers are 
the longer, and of the Latin fathers very considerably 
the shorter of the two. The delivery of the latter could 
rarely have occupied more than half an hour, often not 
more than ten minutes." Anselm is said to have given 
this advice, *' semi horae tenipus coin7nuniter non excedat." 
In Blackzvood' s Magazine of February, 1869, there are 
some curious observations on the length of sermons. 
The Avriter says, " Sermons in early times seem to have 
been comparative^ short. Some of these extant by the 
Latin fathers would not occupy, as they stand, more than 
ten minutes, or quarter of an hour ; many of Bede's 
consist only of a very few lines. Therefore we are not 
safe in resting upon such data — as these are evidently 
short-hand notes. Long sermons were the product of 
the post-reformation, especially of Puritan times. Yet 
some of the earlier divines w^ere lengthy. Bishop Alcock 
preached at St. Mary's, Cambridge, " a good and pleasant 
sermon," which lasted from one o'clock to half past three. 
Sometimes the audiences in olden times, in England^ 
scraped their feet and thus compelled the preacher to de- 
sist. The time was measured by the hour-glass standing on 
the pulpit, and when the hour was finished, the preacher 
turning it over would * 'invite his hearers to another glass. 
Bishop Alderson, however, was strongly opposed to long 
sermons ; when once asked his opinion as to the proper 



PREPARATION FOR COMPOSING SERMON 275 

length of a discourse, he answered, " twenty minutes, 
with a leaning to the side of mercy." Isaac Barrow's 
Spital sermon was three hours and a half long. Edward 
Irving, in later days, also preached a sermon of three 
hours and a half in length for the London Missionary 
Society, in Tottenham Court Road Chapel. He 
paused thrice, and the devout and patient congregation 
sang hymns in the interval, but they never forgave him 
that sermon." Perhaps the principle of Christian for- 
giveness could not apply in such a case. Notwithstand- 
ing, however, such exceptional cases, the testimony of 
history in all ages of the Christian Church is decidedly in 
favor of reasonably short sermons. There is, in fact, no 
rigid rule to be laid down ; subjects make their own time 
in treating them ; some subjects imperatively demand 
lengthy treatment ; but whatever our theory of preaching 
may be, whether we view preaching as a constituent part 
of worship, or simply as a didactic exercise, religious feel- 
ing and good sense point generally to a forcible brevity 
in preaching, though some topics will not suffer them- 
selves to be handled in a short time. Mullois, in his 
" Pastor and People," says sensibly " Believe me, and 
I speak from experience, the more you say the less will 
the hearers retain ; the less you say the more they will 
profit. By dint of burdening their memory, you will 
overwhelm it ; just as a lamp is extinguished by feeding 
it with too much oil, and plants are choked by immoder- 
ate irrigation. ' ' When a sermon is too long, the end erases 
the middle from the memory, and the middle the begin- 
ning. Even mediocre preachers are acceptable, provided 
their discourses are short ; whereas even the best preach- 
ers are a burden when they speak too long. A Japanese 
proverb is to the effect that " few orators are sufficiently 
talented to speak a short discourse." Let us strive to be 



276 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

weighty if we preach short sermons. Let us strive to 
pack more thought and fewer words into them, not for- 
getting the motto, '* si gravis brevis.'* 

Luther's advice in homely German to a young preacher 
was, ** Tritt frisch auf — thus maul auf — hoor bald auf 
(Stand up cheerily — speak out manfully — leave off 
speedily). 

3. Process of composing a sermon. — We have no in- 
tention of attempting to lay down an invariable method 
of composing sermons. One man will have 

Process of ^^^ method and another another , the 
composing a . ,....,,. . , 

e^reatest variety and mdividuality m the 
sermon. -cy j . j 

treatment of divine truth is to be encour- 
aged ; it is a blessed thing that we now and then have 
a Bushnell or a Phillips Brooks in the pulpit, as well as 
a Kirk or a Spurgeon. Earnestness and brains will 
make their own methods ; but we would simply now offer 
a hint or two that may possibly be useful to beginners. 

We will, in the first place, quote two or three passages 
from Dr. Alexander's " Thoughts on Preaching :" 

'* I wish I could make sermons as if I had never heard 
or read how they are made by other people. The forma- 
tion of regular divisions and applications is deadly." 

" In writing or speaking, throw off all restraint. Wait- 
ing from a pre-composed skeleton is eminently restrain- 
ing. It forces one to parcel out his matter in a forced, 
Procrustean way. The current is often thus stopped at 
the very m.oment when it begins to gush. The ideal of a 
discourse is that of a flow from first to last." 

" The true way is to have an object, and to be full of 
it. I never could understand what is meant by mak- 
ing a sermon on a prescribed text. The right text is one 
which comes of itself during reading and meditation ; 
which accompanies you in walks, goes to bed with you, 



PREPARATION FOR COMPOSING SERMON. 277 

and rises with you. On such a text thoughts swarm and 
cluster like bees upon a branch. The sermon ferments 
for hours and days, and at length, after patient waiting 
and almost spontaneous working, the subject clarifies 
itself, and the true method of treatment presents itself in 
a shape which cannot be rejected." 

In these remarks there is much truth, and they are 
eminently suggestive ; but we might be allowed to differ 
from them in some particulars, especially in regard to the 
use of a plan. We agree entirely with the advice that the 
plan should not be made to restrain or confine the thought ; 
it should not be the rigid application of the rule and 
square to every sermon ; but it is nevertheless useful as a 
means of arranging thought, and of employing our mate- 
rial to the best advantage. 

The ability to methodize thought is a great power. If 
the preacher wishes to produce a permanent impression 
he must cultivate the methodizing and organizing power, 
the skill to group his ideas to the best advantage. He 
must train himself In planning for an end, and in care- 
fully following the right processes necessary to the attain- 
ing of that end. This, to be sure, belongs more especially 
to the art of preaching — to its artistic side ; but it is not 
without its moral benefits ; and when one has trained 
himself to think with method ; when he has cultivated 
liimself in his own art so that he is at home in it, so that 
he is skillful in laying out his materials for sermons, as an 
engineer is in making surveys, or a general in mapping 
out the plan of a battle, then he thinks less about the 
mere art ; and his spiritual emotions run freely in these 
prescribed channels. Professor Shedd justly commends 
the forming of what he calls " a homiletical habit ;" and 
his words are so valuable — we think none more so in his 
book — that we would quote them in full. 



278 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

" The preacher ought to acquire and cultivate a homi- 
letical habitude. Preaching is his business. For this 
he has educated himself, and to this he has consecrated 
his whole life. It should, therefore, obtain undisputed 
possession of his mind and his culture. He ought not 
(save in peculiar cases) to pursue any other intellect- 
ual calling than that of sermonizing. He may, there- 
fore, properly allow this species of authorship to monop- 
olize all his discipline and acquisitions. It is as fitting 
that the preacher should be characterized by a hom- 
iletical tendency, as that the poet should be charac- 
terized by a poetical tendency. If it is proper that the 
poet should transmute everything that he touches into 
poetry, it is not less proper that the preacher should 
transmute everything that he touches into sermon. 

" This homiletical habit will appear in a disposition to 
construct plans, to examine and criticise discourses with 
respect to their logical structure. The preacher's mind 
becomes habitually organific. It is inclined to build. 
Whenever leading thoughts are brought into the mind, 
they are straightway disposed and arranged into the unity 
of a plan, instead of being allowed to lie here and there, 
like scattered boulders on a field of drift. This homiletic 
habit will appear, again, in a disposition to render all the 
argumentative and illustrative materials which pour in 
upon the educated man, from the various fields of science, 
literature, and art, subservient to the purpose of preach- 
ing. The sermonizer is, or should be, a student, and an 
industrious one, a reader, and a thoughtful one. He 
will consequently, in the course of his studies, meet with 
a great variety of information that may be advantageously 
employed in sermonizing, either as proof or illustration, 
provided he possesses the proper power to elaborate it, 
and work it up. Now, if he has acquired this homiletical 



PREPARATIOX FOR COMPOSING SERMON. 279 

mental habit, this tendency to sermonize, all this material, 
which would pass through another mind without assimila- 
tion, will be instantaneously and constantly taken up and 
wTought into the substance and form of sermons ; and 
will make themselves manifest in plans, metaphors, illus- 
trations, etc., in the preacher's commonplace book." ' 

Before giving any suggestions as to the process of ser- 
mon-making (which wall be indeed but brief hints, for, in 
discussing the structure and composition of a sermon we 
shall soon enter more particularly into this whole subject), 
we would call attention to a note by Dr. Gregory, the 
biographer of Robert Hall, on Robert Hall's method of 
composing his sermons. "That course was, very briefly 
to sketch, commonly upon a sheet of letter-paper (in 
some cases rather more fully), the plan of the proposed 
discourse, marking the divisions, specifying a few texts 
and sometimes writing a few sentences ; especially on 
those points where an argument could not be adequately 
stated without great technical correctness of language. 
This he regarded as * digging a channel for his thoughts 
to flow in.' Then, calling into exercise the power of 
abstraction, which he possessed in a degree I never saw 
equalled, he would, whether alone or not, pursue his 
trains of thought, retrace and extend them until the 
whole were engraven on his mind ; and, when once so 
fixed in their entire connection, they were never after 
obliterated. The result was on all occasions the same : 
so that, without recurring to the ordinary expedients, or 
loading his memory with words and phrases, he uniformly 
brought his mind, with an unburdened vigor and elas- 
ticity, to bear upon its immediate purpose, recalling his 
selected train of thought, and communicating it to others. 



' Shedd's " Homiletics," p. loS. 



2 53 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

in diction the most felicitous, appropriate, and expressive. 
This was uniformly the case with" regard to the tenor and 
substance of his discourses ; but the most striking and 
impressive passages were often, strictly speaking, extem- 
poraneous. " * 

Let us suppose that in studying or reading the Scrip- 
tures, a text has suggested itself as an appropriate theme 
of discourse, although we know that there is 
in s as o ^^ ^^1^ .^ ^^ manner and mode of these 
method of 
composition suggestions ; for the subject of a sermon may 

come to one in travelling, or upon a walk, 
or in pastoral visitation, or upon his bed, or at the bed- 
side of the sick, almost as readily as in the study ; yet 
texts and subjects of preaching that are suggested to one 
in his regular daily study and meditation of the Word of 
God, are certainly the truest, richest, and most profitable 
subjects for preaching ; for they seem thus to come to us 
by the direct inspiration of the Word and Spirit of God, 
Having thus fixed upon a text, we would make every- 
thing — first, last, and middle — of the study of the text. 
We have spoken already of interpretation as a matter 
of primary importance. Interpretation is the main pillar 
in any true homiletical system. The inspiration of the 
preacher is to be derived from the word of God. It is 
not to be derived from other books. Not only a study of 
the text, but, as has been said, a systematic study of the 
Scriptures — daily, weekly, yearly, pursuing some plan of 
biblical study — is needed to make the best and most 
useful kind of sermons. The exact meaning of the 
original text, then, should first of all be obtained. 
The mind should be filled with its teaching, and after- 
ward there may be its application made to human hearts, 



" Life and Works of Robert Hall," Eng. ed., v. i. p. 9. 



PREPARATION FOR COMPOSING SERMON. 28 1 

with fresh illustrations drawn from the study and knowl- 
edge of men, addressing them in ways and forms that 
common men understand — making the old truth to burn 
anew in their minds, and to meet them in their every- 
day thoughts and avocations ; doing this with a supreme 
reliance on the Spirit of God — this, we think, is the right 
way to preach. 

But a positive portion of divine truth, a definite sub- 
ject, drawn from the patient study of the text, has thus, 
it is supposed, been presented to the mind, which must 
have something to work upon ; for thought depends 
upon knowledge, and reasoning is simply a deduction 
from previous facts of which the knowing faculties have 
taken cognizance. Now, although the subject is thus be- 
fore the mind, the simple theme is not itself sufficient to 
keep the mind working ; for to begin at once to write 
upon this subject is preposterous ; to catch up an idea, 
or half idea, and compose an edifying discourse upon it, 
without more study and reflection, is to heap up words 
without wisdom. 

After obtaining the theme, the first thing to do is to 
learn something about it ; to read, to investigate, to 
think upon it ; to draw out from the best sources, and 
all sources, the real knowledge of the subject ; to recall, 
revolve, and develop it by patient thought. The idea 
which is contained within the text may be taken out of its 
immediate connection with the text, and conceived of in 
its wider revelations with other truth ; and not only the 
reasons for, but the objections that may be brought against 
it, may be contemplated. The subject should be looked 
at in its whole length and depth ; all the possible side- 
light should be let in ; and thus the mind works in and 
through it till the whole is leavened, till the simple 
thought is fully developed. 



282 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

All this, perhaps, may be done (if one is preparing a 
written sermon) without putting pen to paper ; for the 
great thing is to get the mind thoroughly aroused, every 
faculty of it, and all directed to one particular object. 
This is the momentum which is required to carry one 
through. And this should not be a mere intellectual ex- 
citement ; it should be the stirring of the depths of the 
nature and of the soul. 

** A purely intellectual force may arrest and interest an 
audience, but taken by itself it cannot persuade their 
wills or melt their hearts. The best sermons of a preacher 
are generally those composed under the impulse of a lively 
state of religious feeling." 

We would also add that the thought of the audience 
should be always present — the great object for which the 
sermon is composed — the particular persons it may be 
that it is designed to reach, so that this human element 
should run like a warm, vitalizing current through all the 
processes of writing, and preparing to write, and the 
preacher in this way will not fall into scholastic methods. 
He will not be taken up with the development of the 
thought merely, but with its application to men, and to 
the great ends of preaching, 

When one is ready to compose his sermon, the books 
he has read, the commentaries he has consulted, the notes 
he has made, might be laid aside for a little while, in 
order to give the mind time to recover its independent 
tone and action, and to think for itself. At this stage we 
would suggest that one should rapidly write down his 
ideas, and the thoughts he has collected together or 
originated upon the subject, however diverse from each 
other, and without any particular regard to connection, 
or arrangement. Say to one's self ''what definite 
thoughts, after all this study and investigation, have I 



PREPARATION FOR COMPOSING SERMON. 2S3 

really gathered on this subject?" If there is anything 
so gained, no matter what it is, let him put it down ; and 
these more or less disconnected thoughts will form the 
nucleus of the sermon, out of which order will finally 
spring ; this is the first step out of confusion toward 
order ; and in this process the inner connections of ideas 
will begin to manifest themselves more clearly. 

By this time (and this may not be a long time) one is 
ready to form something like a plan, because now he has 

the materials to do it with. No true sermon 

i. r 1 u i. 1 • ^ Place of a 

spnngs out of a plan, but a plan sprmgs out 

of study and thought, and it is merely a help 
in the orderly development of a sermon. The difficulty 
concerning a plan has generally arisen from supposing 
that inspiration comes from the plan. Not at all ; a plan 
is but an aid to guide and regulate thought, and not an 
original som'ce of tJiougJit ; and we w^ould, therefore, not 
entirely dispense with a plan ; for both nature and reason 
teach us that it is indispensable. Is not creation — God's 
discourse — carried out on a plan ? So every true work 
should have a plan, an inner unity, some one idea to be 
developed, some one aim to be attained ; and that should 
guide and shape every subordinate detail to the furthest 
and minutest ramification of the theme. As to the ser- 
mon Bourdaloue said : "I can forgive a bad sermon 
sooner than I can forgive a bad outline." And how 
often a sermon that contains excellent thoughts, the 
fruit of laborious study, yet falls absolutely without 
effect upon the audience ; and the reason of this is 
that the thoughts are not well arranged, that they are 
mixed up, or are put in some unnatural and illogical 
order. A little labor spent in reconstructing the plan, 
would make all the difference between an effective and an 
ineffective discourse. 



284 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

A word still further as to plans. Are we to have one 
plan and no other, dividing a subject up into regular divi- 
sions, two or three, or four or thirty, as some old sermons 
were divided — with formal phrases to connect, and the 
gaunt ribs of the skeleton sticking out — with the introduc- 
tion just so long, and the proposition in just such a place, 
and every transition regularly parcelled out and numbered, 
and the application in a stereotyped form of words, first 
to sinners then to saints, or vice versa ? Heaven forbid ! 
We would go so far as to say that no two sermons should 
or could have precisely the same plan. This, I know, is 
contrary to the regular line of homiletical suggestion, but 
be it so. We would have every variety of plan — indeed 
the text or the theme makes the plan ; all we contend for 
is, that there should be some clear and thoughtful method 
of setting forth truth to the mind. A sermon cannot be 
written confusedly, without method or purpose. It must 
be a work of thorough, sometimes painful preparation. 
We would make here one main suggestion in regard to 
the plan of a sermon, and that is that the plan should 
never be one of entirely artificial construction, or one 
superimposed upon the subject ; but a natural plan, 
or one growing out of the subject itself. It cannot 
thus be the first thing made. The plan should be 
simply the natural and logical order of thought which 
every subject, when rightly treated, contains within 
itself. It is the true development of the thought. We 
would therefore abjure the whole race of skeletons. We 
would throw contempt upon plans made to order. If a 
preacher is forced to take some other man's plan, and 
cannot make one for himself, the best plan he can adopt 
is to give up preaching and find out another way of doing 
good. But to return from this digression. 

In the mean time, while the mind is busy in moulding 



PREPARATION FOR COMPOSING SERMON. 285 

and fusing what has been thus rudely thrown together 
into some degree of just quantity and proportion ; truly 
it were well if the ordering, guiding, and illumining 
Spirit were invoked to one's aid. The religious energies 
should have ample opportunity to warm and act upon 
the subject-matter of thought, and the mind should be 
kindled with the love of Christ, and filled with the truth; 
for no sermon should be written without prayer, since no 
true sermon, even if it is not divinely originated and in- 
spired, should fail to be guided by the Spirit of divine 
wisdom, truth, and grace. It is, moreover, a product of 
all the energies and affections of the mind, and not of 
the intellect only. 

Then, taking hold of it with interest and with absorbed 
attention, one should compose as rapidly as possible, 
with a glow of mind, without the least constraint or care 
for rhetorical rules, not stopping for a moment to correct 
or improve. Write a sermon sometimes at one sitting. 
Movement is a great element in preaching as well as in 
everything else that has life and purpose in it. This 
rapidity is important for the unity and life of a discourse ; 
for, let the gold simmer ever so long, at last it should run 
out in a continuous stream. 

The finishing of a sermon is a matter requiring more 
care, time, and deliberation. Lord Brougham wrote the 
peroration of his argument on the trial of Queen Caroline 
twenty times ; and even a genius like Goethe said that 
" nothing came to him in his sleep." 

Now, it is said, would you set this forth as the invaria- 
ble method of making a sermon, or of preparing tp 
preach ? By no means. This is but one method, and it 
has a more particular and distinct reference to the written 
and topical discourse. Different men have different ways 
of preparation for preaching ; let each one follow his own 



286 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

method. We throw this out only as a hint toward some 
practical way of proceeding to make a sermon, since the 
question is frequently asked by the theological student, 
" How shall I go to work to write a sermon?" But 
when the sermon is finished by the exercise of one's best 
powers, let it be finished, and let not the mind continually 
worry itself because it has not reached its ideal. 
Apelles, the ancient Greek painter, said, *' he knew 
when to leave off — an art that Protogenes did not know. 
One's aim may be high ; but when he has made an 
honest effort to reach it he should be satisfied ; for the 
mind may become absolutely morbid upon this point, 
and may maunder over its imperfect productions, wheji 
the manlier way is to say nothing and to write better 
sermons. 



FOURTH DIVISION. 
ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 

Sec. 13. The Text. 

The partitioning of the sermon proper into so many 
separate parts, such as text, introduction, argument, etc., 
has reference, not so much to the voluntary 

as to the involuntary plan of the discourse, " ^° ^^ °^ 

remarks, 
or to those constituent elements of a dis- 
course which absolutely demand attention in constructing 
a sermon. These, however, need not be distinctly and 
formally expressed in every sermon ; but they belong to 
the essential structure, the osseous framework as well as 
the complete development of every intelligible discourse, 
which must be made conformable to the laws of the 
human mind. In any formal address we cannot dispense 
with such grand divisions as the introduction, the argu- 
ment, and the conclusion ; for every true discourse must 
have at least a beginning, a middle, and an end ; and the 
beginning and end are naturally of less dimensions than 
the middle. In like manner every human frame has a head, 
body, and extremities ; every rock has a foot, middle, 
and summit ; every tree has a root, trunk, and crown. 

Vinet's analysis of a sermon, in his homiletics, is some- 
what technical, and comprises the following parts : i. The 
Subject or the Text ; 2. The Homily or Paraphrase ; 
3. The Matter ; 4. The Explication ; 5. The Proof. 

A less formal and technical, but more familiar and ex- 
tended analysis, would be the following, which we shall 



288 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

adopt: I. The Text ; 2. The Introduction ; 3. The Ex- 
planation ; 4. The Proposition ; 5. The Division ; 6. 
The Development ; 7. The Conclusion. 

This general method of partitioning a sermon varies, 
of course, in different sermons. It depends, in fact, 
upon the nature of the discourse itself, which develops its 
outward form according to its internal law, and has, or 
should have, an individual organic unity. 

It is our intention to exhibit, not the invariable form 
of every individual sermon, but rather the parts that 
legitimately enter into, and that generally should and do 
enter into, the composition of a well-constructed sermon. 
We shall try to present the ideal sermon in all its parts ; 
and although the logical method of partition is regarded, 
it is chiefly the rhetorical, or the practical, or, more truly 
still, the natural order that will guide us ; for, to use 
Vinet's words, " the dynamical is preferable to the 
mechanical style of sermon." 

We therefore now come first to speak of that funda- 
mental portion of the sermon from which it is originated, 
aYid on which it is based — the Text. Strictly speaking, 
the text is not the sermon, but rather forms the subject 
or material, out of which the sermon is drawn ; but, as 
it is connected with every portion of the sermon, and 
has so vital a part to play, we prefer, for convenience' 
sake at least, to look at it as one of the great component 
parts of the sermon. 

The Text, from texo^ *' to weave," or tcxtuSy a " web," 

is that which forms the " web" or " tissue," or ** main 

thread" of the discourse. The *' text" of a 

^ "* *°" sermon is, of course, some genuine word of 
of text. ^ 

Scripture ; although the Bible itself, as a 

whole, is eminently " the Text." 

As to the origin of and authority for the use of texts in 



AN-AL YSIS AXD COMPOSIT/OX OF SEKMO.Y. 289 

preaching, we certainly find some reason for the general 
principle of employing a portion of Scrip- 
ture as the ground-work of discourse, in the Origin of and 

Old Testament, as in Nehemiah 8 : 8, " So f^^^^^^y 

for use of 
they read in the book of the law of God dis- texts 

tinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them 
to understand the reading ;" and also in the New Testa- 
ment, in our Lord's example in Luke 4 : 16-27, ^^^ in 
the example of the apostles in Acts 13 : 15-44, and Acts 
15 : 30, and in other places. The basis of the apostles' 
preaching was usually some lesson read from the law or 
the prophets ; and as has been said, " even if Christ and 
his apostles did not strictly conform themselves to the use 
of texts, it may be answered that they, in their preach- 
ing, furnished the texts for us." 

While the general historical use of texts, or the found- 
ing of the sermon directly upon the word of God, is to 
be traced back to the earliest ages, the use of the single 
brief text in the more confined manner of our times, as 
standing for the particular theme of the discourse, is 
ascribed to the Presbyter Musaeus of Marseilles, in the 
fifth century. It was, however, by no means the uni- 
form custom of preachers in the first centuries, nor even 
down to the time of the Reformation, to employ specific 
texts in preaching, although about the time of Luther 
the custom was quite generally adopted. 

' ' In the Christian Church, the use of a passage of Scrip- 
ture as the ground of a discourse, an ' auctoritee,' as 
Chaucer tells us it was called in his time, is, probably 
coeval with the set discourse itself ; though, in the ser- 
mons of the great preachers, both of the Eastern and 
Western churches, we find sometimes two texts prefixed, 
and sometimes none at all." ' 



Moore's " Thoughts on Preaching," p, 78. 



290 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

The fact is, that the use of a text or of a definite por- 
tion or lesson of Scripture, as the theme of Christian 
preaching, has come down to us from the earliest times, 
and it has not been seriously opposed, because it seems so 
in harmony with the great design of preaching, which is 
the interpretation and the publication of the divine word 
to men. The text in ancient times consisted of a longer 
passage than is now used, since expository preaching 
was the prevailing style ; but, in the seventeenth century, 
in England, the practice of brief texts was common. 
Thus some preachers would write a dozen or twenty 
sermons on a very short passage of Scripture ; but now 
a reaction is going on toward the use of longer texts 
again ; which is a healthy reaction. 

As to the objections to the use of texts, Vinet himself 

says that " what gives a Christian character to a sermon 

is not the use of a text, but the spirit of the 

Objections her."' 

to the use 
of texts -^^ ^^^^ also, " the use of isolated texts, 

joined to the necessity of never preaching 
without a text, has certainly in its rigor and absoluteness 
something false, something servile, which narrows the 
field, confuses the thought, puts restraint upon the indi- 
viduality of the preacher." "" For a perfect defence of the 
use of texts, he thinks that every text should contain a 
complete subject, and every subject should find a com- 
plete text. As every sermon, he argues, rests upon a 
thesis, -which is an abstract truth complete in itself ; then 
a text, to'be what it should be, should contain a perfect 
theme ; and few texts do this. Vinet, however, on the 
whole, argues for the use of texts, as a custom sanctified 
by the practice of the Church, and as affording more 



Homiletics," p. 96. - Vinet, " Homiletics," p. 81. 



ANAL YSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 291 

advantages than disadvantages. But to bring these ob- 
jections into more specific statements : 

I. The use of a text prevents the unity of the dis- 
course. One must follow and explain his text, however 
he may violate the rules of rhetorical art. Here the 
objection rests upon the fact that the sermon is to be 
necessarily built upon the rules of classical eloquence, is 
to be a perfect discourse, preserving the unities of ancient 
art. But this idea of a sermon, even if admissible, was, 
as we have seen in the lectures upon the history of preach- 
ing, one of later introduction, and did not belong to it 
originally, and is not essential to it ; its essence being 
simply an address aiming to bring the message of God 
to bear effectively upon the minds and hearts of the 
people. 

But even if the sermon be a true oration, it may be said 
that the orators of antiquity had no infallible truth to 
speak from as a basis ; if they had possessed this, they 
would doubtless have reasoned from it. All writings to 
them were of no higher authority than their own 
thoughts ; they had no inspired word of wisdom to draw 
from. Yet, as a matter of fact, the practice of speaking 
from some text, or definite proposition, was frequently 
the custom of Greek and Roman orators. Demosthenes 
almost always spoke upon some special summons, or in- 
dictment, or carefully-worded motion, introduced into a 
deliberative assembly, which served him for a text. And 
this has continued to be the custom in forensic and parlia- 
mentary address formed upon classic models ; men speak 
to a point of law, a special motion or resolution, or else 
their speaking lacks definiteness and unity. 

But we argue further that the true use of the text posi- 
tively does promote the unity of a sermon. The main truth 
of the text, however complex the passage may be, should 



292 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

form the directive and unifying law of the sermon. It is 
not a true sermon which simply presents the exegesis of the 
text — which merely explains it ; but that is a true sermon 
which develops the text, and which is moulded in all its 
parts by one organic principle of life that springs from 
the inspired word. 

2. That the use of a text confines the discourse. The 
idea is, that a short text cannot afford enough matter 
for a long discourse ; and thus the mind of the speaker 
must be continually fettered by the narrow requirements 
of his text ; it cannot act with perfect freedom. 

One answer to this is, that it is a good thing to compel 
the speaker to concentrate his thoughts and to restrain 
himself from rambling discourse. This is not an en- 
feebling but an enriching process. One goes over less 
surface, but he sinks deeper. We answer again that 
there are few texts which do not contain the substance 
of more truth and of larger discourse than most men are 
capable of drawing from them. This objection is found- 
ed on the idea that the Scriptures are a book, like a 
human book, capable of exhaustion. Besides this, the 
literal and servile following out of a passage is not re- 
quired. This following out of a text, word by word, and 
step by step, without an inner grasp of its meaning, is, 
after all, but a superficial treatment of it ; it is what 
Hagenbach calls " mosaic-preaching," or making small 
bits of sermons on every member of the text — arranging 
these along together, sticking them side by side — and 
not one sermon, embracing the truth of the whole of it. 
The text need exert no tyranny over the free thought of 
him who has comprehended its spirit, and seized upon 
its true meaning and scope. His mind is inspired and 
freed, rather than hampered. 

Palmer, the German writer on homiletics, remarks on 



ANALYSIS AXD COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 293 

this point, that a true text cannot be compared to a ves- 
sel, or cask, which the preacher is to draw from until he 
exhausts it ; it is rather a spring of limitless resource, 
because it is a thought of God. If this were not so, then 
but one sermon, by an able preacher, could be preached 
upon it. It would thus be closed to another preacher's 
attempting to use it ; but, on the contrary, the same 
preacher at different times and in different moods may 
preach entirely different discourses from the same text. 
He looks at the truth from various sides and aspects. 
One can, in fact, always find something new in the same 
passage. 

3. Texts cannot be found which form perfect theses 
for all subjects important to be discussed in the pulpit. 
This is really the main stress of Vinet's objection. We 
answer that the Bible contains the seeds of all religious 
truth, or else it is not a sufficient revelation. It may 
be that the truth is sometimes contained in a concrete 
form in the Scriptures ; but this is better than an abstract 
form for the preacher, because it is vital and suggestive. 
It may stand thus as a generic truth that can be analyzed 
and applied ; or as a specific truth, presenting at least 
one aspect of the subject, which has a root in the gen- 
eral principle, and which thus legitimately opens to the 
discussion of the whole theme. 

All these and other objections will vanish when we re- 
gard the minister in his true light, as an interpreter of 
the word of God to men. Whether conformed to classical 
or unclassical rules, the minister's responsibility is to 
make known to men the will of God, and this will is con- 
tained most perfectly in the Scriptures ; and although 
he may preach the word of God sometimes without tak, 
ing a text from the Bible, yet so long as he is a minister 
of the word, he will not find a subject proper to be 



294 HO MILE TICS PROPER, 

preached upon for which he cannot find a legitimate text 
in the Scriptures. 

Let us, on the other hand, look at the true design and 

advantages of the use of texts. They are chiefly fourfold. 

I. The use of the text has the sanction of 

Design and an ancient and consecrated custom. It is 

advantages of ^j^^ ^ -^ ^j^j^j^ ^j^^ Christian Church has 

the use of 

texts been taught the word of God, and the way 

in which the truth has been preached to 
men from the earliest times, and it has therefore accu- 
mulated power and solemnity. What possible gain, then, 
would there be in cutting loose from this ancient custom 
of founding the instruction of the pulpit upon a definite 
portion of the word of God, and of delivering a religious 
essay or address from an independent and human point 
of view ? 

2. The use of the text serves to interpret and explain 
the Scriptures. This is nearly all the Bible truth that 
some hearers get in the course of their lives ; and this is 
the way that they learn what is contained in the Bible. 
A clearer understanding of the Scriptures is thus pro- 
moted ; and this we look upon as the great advantage 
of having a definite passage of the word of God to 
preach upon. The use of the text seems to remind the 
preacher of his chief responsibility as a minister of the 
w^ord. Every text he chooses says to him, ** Preach the 
preaching that I bid thee. Preach not yourself, but 
Christ Jesus the Lord." And one text often compre- 
hends a whole system of truth, the whole of Christianity 
— as the entire arch of heaven is said to be reflected in a 
drop of dew. 

3. The use of the text lends a divine sanction to the 
sermon. It recognizes the authority of the word of God 
as the basis of all true preaching, and the truth itself 



A XA LYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 295 

has a converting power. "The law of the Lord is 
perfect, converting the soul ; the testimony of the 
Lord is sure, making wise the simple." "Now ye are 
clean through the word I have spoken unto you." 
" Sanctify them through thy truth ; thy word is truth." 
** For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ ; for it 
is the power of God unto salvation to every one that be- 
lieveth ; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek." " So 
then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word 
of God." 

The use of the text as the foundation of the sermon 
leads us to see and feel that it is the authoritative message 
of God, not the doubtful word of man, which is set forth. 
This gives the preacher a more than personal authority, 
and it has also a reactive influence upon the hearer, 
awakening in him a renewed reverence for God and his 
word, which perhaps had become dulled. He is put in 
mind that there is a sure word of prophecy given from 
heaven to men, an infallible standard of faith and prac- 
tice by which at last he shall be judged. 

4. The use of the text serves to introduce and limit 
the subject of discourse. It obliges the preacher, or 
should do so, to have a definite subject of remark, and 
it affords, too, a better subject than the preacher, even 
if left to himself, would probably choose for the spir- 
itual instruction of his hearers. And with the whole 
Bible to select from, so rich and copious in every kind 
of theme for instruction and spiritual nourishment, the 
preacher need never be at a loss for subjects ; the 
great trouble is to choose among the multitude of sub- 
jects that the word of God presents. The proper use of 
texts is thus promotive of variety in preaching ; for 
where the mind naturally runs into one track of thinking, 
the very responsibility laid upon the preacher to give 



?96 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

something like a comprehensive view of the word of 
God, compels him to choose a great variety of themes. 

The use of a text gives a definite point of view from 
which to survey the vast riches of divine truth ; and not 
only a point of view, but, as one has said, of wonder and 
admiration. In fine, the advantages of the use of texts 
so greatly exceed the objections, that the custom doubt- 
less will and should continue, although without any rigidly 
prescribed rule in the case. Glaus Harms, who was theo- 
retically opposed to the use of texts, fairly tried the ex- 
periment of doing without them \ and his expressed con- 
fession is that he would preach without a text only as an 
exceptional thing ; because without a text the congrega- 
tion has no pledge that it is the word of God which is 
preached. He also said truly that a sermon could be very 
unbiblical which had a biblical text, and could be very 
biblical without a text ; but still, if one preaches from a 
biblical text unbiblically, then his text itself condemns 
him, and the unscripturalness of his sermon is made ap- 
parent by its unfaithfulness to the text. 

The congregation, too, though little edified, will be 
less injured, because they can readily compare the text 
with the sermon, and see how far the preacher has erred. 

Preaching, according to Palmer, represents the free 
personal element, while the text is the more limited or 
defined sphere, of divine truth in which this free person- 
ality exercises itself. This personality should never be so 
free or lawless as to go altogether outside of the truth, 
or to destroy the idea of a divine authority. 

** For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the 
Lord, and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake." 

When a Christian worshipper goes into a Christian 
church on Sunday he wishes to go with the assurance that 
he is not to hear a merely human word preached, but a 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 297 

word of the Lord authoritatively addressed to his soul, 
and powerful for its salvation and edification. This 
strengthens the Church's unity. 

Athanase Coquerel says that it is too prevalent a cus- 
tom, and also a very grave error, to attach so little impor- 
tance as some do to the text in a sermon. With many 
of our modern preachers the text is only an epigraph, to 
be mentioned now and then, to be brought into the intro- 
duction and the conclusion, to be cited, perhaps, but not 
studied. But it is quite useless to put a text scrupulously 
at the head of a sermon in order to prove our respect for 
the Scriptures, if we do not also regard it as a word of 
revelation upon which the faith of Christians and of the 
Christian Church is founded, if the text is not regarded 
as an authority in our instruction, and if it is not care- 
fully investigated and faithfully interpreted. 

We would now consider the main principles to guide in 
the choice of texts. The selection of appropriate texts 
is a matter of great responsibility for the -- . 
preacher ; and he cannot do this perfectly principles to 
well without some comprehensive knowl- guide in 
edge of the Scriptures, not merely an intel- choice of 
lectual but a spiritual knowledge of their 
truths ; nor without some wise, thoughtful, and con- 
scientious principle of adaptation to the audience and the 
occasion. 

I. The text should be the word or a word of God. 

*' If any man speak, let him speak according to the 

oracles of God." 

All preaching should have a biblical truth, "^^^ *^^^ 

<< 1 r 1 T i.j . . 1 1,1 should be a 

a word or the Lord m it ; it should be a tn a 

' word of God. 

a real nftoqereia, springing from a divine, 
not human root. To illustrate this principle more care- 
fully, 



298 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

(a.) It should not be drawn from any apocryphal writ- 
ing. 

(d.) It should not be of doubtful authenticity. 

How far texts should be chosen from books of whose 
canonical authorship, or even authenticity, there is more 
controversy than of others — as the books of Daniel, 
Ecclesiastes, Second of Peter, Hebrews, and Reve- 
lation — all we can say is, that English and American criti- 
cism has not yet reached the sublimations of German 
criticism ; for the critical faculty, rather than the faculty 
of faith — the faculty of believing as little as possible — has 
been developed in Germany during the last half century. 
The passion for scientific investigation should be subor- 
dinated in the preacher to the practical faculty. He 
should look for the word of God from every source, and 
in all its multiform modes of communication, rather than 
be continually striving to diminish and narrow down the 
field of inspired truth. Every book of the Bible, at least, 
stands upon its own evidences. The preacher should 
certainly examine those evidences with care ; but no 
book of Scripture has been left unassailed ; even the Gos- 
pel of John has been the theme of peculiar hostility. 
Shall we discontinue to take texts from John's Gospel, 
because, forsooth, this or that German critic has doubted 
its canonicity? And so of the book of Hebrews, and of 
Revelation. Christianity does not fall even with these 
great books. Paul may not, indeed, have written the 
Epistle to the Hebrews, nor John, the apostle, the 
Apocalypse ; but does this controversy as to their author- 
ship diminish their essential value ? and will the contro- 
versy be settled in our lives, and while the world stands ? 
Everything that has been assailed is not, for that reason, 
less true or divine. The proof of the inspiration of these 
books, both outward and inward, is overwhelmingly great, 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 299 

far greater, we believe, than the arguments for their non- 
inspiration ; and they remain in the canon, and continue 
to nourish the faith and piety of the Church, as they 
have done for ages. 

The truth is, the received text of Scripture, as far as 
its authenticity is concerned, and as compared with con- 
temporaneous classical writings, is singularly free from 
errors, doubtful passages, and lacunae. It has been won- 
derfully preserved. Twenty thousand various readings 
have been noticed in the brief six comedies of Terence 
alone. Let us, then, continue freely to use these precious 
portions of the word of God, though there may be 
peculiar difficulties that remain to be cleared up respect- 
ing their human authorship ; or, perhaps we should say, 
instead of "peculiar," more difficulties than attend the 
other books of the Bible. 

There are, of course, a few individual passages about 
which there is so much doubt, and one or two that are so 
evidently spurious, that it would not be right to preach 
upon them, certainly not without giving their true char- 
acter. 

{c.) It should not disregard the analogy of faith. We 
mean by this the right dividing of the word of God, in 
relation both to the essential and the relative impor- 
tance of every portion of Scripture. Thus one should 
not preach Judaism instead of Christianity, or dwell 
upon the Old Testament with such continuous inten- 
sity as to draw his inspiration from the spirit of the 
Old, rather than of the New, whose ministers we are. 
When we preach from the Old Testament, we should 
surely seek to find the New Testament in it— the testi- 
mony of Christ, the analogy of faith. Some one quaintly 
says that " He who understands the art of distinguishing 
between Moses and Christ may indeed be called a doc- 



300 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

tor." The Old Testament is the New Testament in its 
germ, and therefore cannot be neglected by the preachers 
of Christ ; but we should choose our texts, and treat 
them in such a way as that they may all bear upon the 
** truth as it is in Jesus ;" and we think, indeed, that a 
minister of the New Testament should preach most of 
the time from the New Testament, as being the fuller 
revelation, the perfect truth ; since the Old Testament is 
more especially the law, and therefore preparative, but 
the New is more truly the Gospel of the grace of God, of 
his perfect manifestation in his Son ; and even in the 
New Testament itself there are some portions more par- 
ticularly to be chosen and dwelt upon, as containing more 
of the truth and the riches of Christ. 

(</.) It should not be an incorrect translation. The text 
should be taken in its real, not its paraphrased and often 
perverted sense. 

The correct rendering of a text as well as the correct 
reading of a text should certainly always be given, even 
though our English translation of the passage be not 
entirely literal ; for a preacher should establish his people 
on the rock of the original text ^ and educate them to this 
idea. 

This counsel in regard to establishing a people on the 
original Greek or Hebrew text puts an end to the war of 
versions, aid and new. The preacher should employ all 
lights, aids, commentaries, translations, versions (and 
certainly the new revised version of 1881 is of signal 
assistance here), but above all his own most earnest in- 
vestigation and thought, in order to arrive at the correct 
meaning of the text. 

The exact rendering of a passage gives it often un- 
expected beauty and force ; even the right punctuation 
of a text adds vastly to its homiletical value. 



ANAL YSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 2>o\ 

How immeasurably different is the Roman Catholic 
reading, ** I say unto thee this day, Thou shalt be with 
me in Paradise," from the true rendering, " I say unto 
thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." 
In 2 Pet. 3:12, Gn^v6oyxa^ might very well be ren- 
dered in the active and more stimulating sense of " has- 
tening the day of God." In Gal. 3 : 24, -naidayooyo^ 
refers to the slave or tutor who leads the child to the 
house of the schoolmaster ; so the law leads us to our 
teacher, Christ, that we may be taught and justified by 
faith. I Cor. 4 : 4, Ovdtv ejxavTc^ (jvvoiSa, instead of 
meaning, " I know nothing by myself," is really, " I am 
not conscious to myself of any guilt," and yet I am not 
thereby justified ; showing that even the unconsciousness 
of his sins cannot justify the sinner — an important homi- 
letical and practical sense. It might indeed be said of 
this passage that the " by" may have had the old mean- 
ing of " against," and yet, as the translation stands, it 
leads to a wrong sense. In a passage which we have 
before referred to — viz., John 7 : 17 — the words of 
our Lord, ** If any man will do his will he shall know 
of the doctrine," might be more happily rendered, 
"If any man is willing to do his will," or "desires 
to do his will," thus emphasizing the desire, and 
bringing out more clearly the profound truth that our 
real knowledge of divine things depends upon the 
obedient and right disposition of the heart. It is, in 
fact, almost parallel with the beautiful passage, " He that 
loveth is born of God and knoweth God." Numerous 
other passages might be mentioned which are familiar ; 
yet how pertinaciously some absolutely faulty translations 
have been preached upon ! not, perhaps, to the inculca- 
tion of error, but certainly without a nice regard to exact 
truth. The text in Acts 26 : 28, " Almost thou persuad- 



302 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

est me to be a Christian/* has been used to serve as the 
basis of discourse on ** being almost a Christian ;" 
whereas it would seem to have been a scornful jest of 
Agrippa's, to the effect that Paul should be fooHsh enough 
to expect that in so short a time, so lightly, or by so lit- 
tle effort, Agrippa could be made a Christian. 

The beautiful passage in i Cor. 13 : 12, " For now we 
see through a glass darkly," would be stronger still if 
rendered literally, ** For now we see in a mirror obscurely 
(enigmatically). ' ' The idea is not that of looking through 
a glass ; but it is the imperfect reflection of an object in 
a steel mirror of the apostle's time, compared with the 
actual sight of the object itself. This is likened to the 
reflection of divine truth in these lower works of God, as 
compared with the future clear beholding of that truth in 
God himself. The translation of " my temptation," in 
Gal. 4 : 14, exposes the passage to the false and pernicious 
idea sometimes brought out in preaching upon it, that 
the apostle was in the power or continual temptation of 
some sinful habit — a totally incorrect meaning, for the 
" temptation" here is, in all probability, the trial occa- 
sioned by a physical disease or weakness. 

Biblical hermeneutics is the preacher's life-long study. 
He should have the principles of interpretation clearly 
established in his mind, so that they may be constantly 
applied in practice ; for his material for preaching lies in 
the Bible. The word of God is his field. Mere fragment- 
ar}^ studies of the Scriptures, therefore, for the purpose 
of selecting and elucidating individual texts for the 
material of preaching, are not enough ; his noble and 
difficult office is to be an interpreter of the whole 
word of God to men. He should explore it thor- 
oughly, its heights and depths, leaving no unknown 
land. He should make a systematic study of the Bible 



ANAL YSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 303 

following its books connectedly, according to the law 
of harmonious development, and not being content 
with the investigation of isolated texts upon particu- 
lar themes. Thus Whately says, " Beware of classing 
texts together in regard to their subjects alone, without 
any regard to the periods in which successive steps were 
made in the Christian revelation — jumbling confusedly 
Evangelists, Acts, Epistles. This, among other things, 
makes Socinians, who are right up to a certain point, but 
stop short in the middle of the gradual revelation ; they 
have the blossom without the fruit. Jesus Christ was 
first made known as a man sent from God, whom God 
anointed with the Holy Ghost and with power ; then as 
the promised Christ ; then as He in whom * dwelt all the 
fulness of the Godhead bodily,' in whom ' God was mani- 
fest in the flesh,' in whom ' God was manifesting himself 
unto the world.' " ^ 

If the preacher studies the Bible as a whole, then, 
when he comes to the interpretation of a single text, or 
passage of Scripture, he sees its proper relations, limita- 
tions, scope, and bearing ; and the philological exegesis 
of an individual text, though the first is therefore some- 
times the least part of the matter. Its real, spiritual in- 
terpretation as an harmonious portion of God's word is 
of higher import ; for the Spirit, who inspires the whole, 
who gives unity to the whole, must breathe new life into 
the word, and bring back its original power, its divine 
meaning. It was said of Edward Irving, who, with all 
his errors, had some grand traits as a preacher, that " the 
Bible was to him, not the foundation from which his 
theology was to be substantiated or proved, but a 
divine word, instinct with meaning and life, never to 



' E. Jane Whately 's " Life of Archbishop Whately ' v. i. p. 207. 



304 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

be exhausted, and from which h'ght and guidance — 
not vague, but particular — could be brought for every 
need." ^ These remarks lead us to add, as coming under 
this general head, another principle in the choice of a 
text : 

(^.) It should be suggested by the regular study of the 
Scriptures, rather than by chance or accident. This we 
have before remarked upon. The text should thus 
rather choose than be chosen ; it should spring out of 
the habitual meditation of the word of God. There 
should be a certain divine order in the selection oi 
texts, and the mind should, in some true sense, be 
guided by the Holy Spirit in the selection of proper 
texts. The text should be the text to be preached 
upon, because the Spirit has brought the mind of the 
preacher to it — has led his thoughts, studies, and desires 
up to the open door of the house of God, where food 
may be received for the nourishment of the souls of 
pastor and people. 

(/.) It should not be a merely human utterance, used 
as if it were the word of God. " All that lies between 
the covers of the Bible is not divine." It is not alia 
word or a speech of God himself, since a large portion 
of the Bible is the record of human sayings and do- 
ings. The record may indeed be divinely guided and 
preserved, while the text itself is but the expression 
of human imperfection and sin. The particular pas- 
sage may be used as a text in its true connections, 
as an important fact of human history, as something 
essentially related to God's government and the re- 
demption of men, but not as a direct expression of the 
mind of God. There are texts spoken by angels, men, and 



' Mrs. Olipiiant's " Life of Edward Irving. 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 305 

devils, by ignorant men, by wicked men and opposers, 
by the prince of evil himself. These may be usefully 
employed to illustrate the workings of the wicked 
heart, and also as forcible indirect arguments ; thus if 
even demoniacs, for example, acknowledge the truth 
and divine nature of Jesus, how much more should 
we ! 

We surely should never employ a text expressing a 
wrong sentiment, as if it were authoritative, simply be- 
cause it stands in the Bible. The book of Ecclesiastes 
is, on this account, peculiarly difficult to be handled ; 
and a right or wrong theory of this book makes all im- 
aginable difference in the authority of many of its pas- 
sages — whether they are considered to be truly inspired 
by the Spirit of God, or are the utterances of the disap- 
pointed and corrupt human heart of Solomon, or of some 
writer of the splendid but morally fallen Solomonic 
epoch. Many a false doctrinal argument, or perverse 
opinion, has been bolstered up by texts which, if studied 
in all their bearings, would lead to precisely opposite con- 
clusions. There are, it is true, texts which are the spon- 
taneous words of men, and which are, nevertheless, 
inspired by the Holy Spirit ; they flow from the teach- 
ings of God's law and Spirit. Such is the passage in Gen. 
32 : 10, where Jacob says, " I am not worthy of the least 
of all the mercies, and of all the truth, which thou hast 
showed unto thy servant." Most of the words of Job 
and of Daniel (though not all) are of the same character ; 
they are " the reflection of the word and will of God in 
the spirit of man." These, of course, constitute legiti- 
mate texts, as do also those words where the Spirit of 
God forces the truth, as it were, from irreligious or 
wicked men, as in the case of Balaam, and of Pilate, and 
of the Roman centurion at the sepulchre ; and the utter- 



3o6 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

ances of Job's friends, although condemned by God in 
the gross, are, in the detail, good. 

2. The text should be fitted for edification. 

It should be capable both of being built upon and also 
of building up in the truth. To do this it 

The text should have in it the elements of substance 

V £.^ -I r ^i^d increase — a text which contains a truth 
be fitted for 

edification, capable of application to the growing needs 
of practical life, a text, in a word, fitted for 
advancement in the knowledge of God and righteous- 
ness. 

In its adaptation to the wants of the audience, to the 
time, and to the occasion, it should be suited to the high 
purposes of sacred instruction. 

(<^.) It should be plain. If easily understood, and 
naturally suggestive of the subject, this helps the com 
mon mind to comprehend and remember it ; and it also 
removes the temptation from the preacher to be pe- 
dantic ; he is led by it to a solid and earnest style of 
discourse. But there are marked exceptions to this choice 
of plain texts. A more difficult text may sometimes be 
very advantageous. Its treatment assists in the inter- 
pretation of the Bible to the common mind ; and it 
leads to an expository style of discourse. The very an- 
nouncement of such a text in itself awakens attention ; 
for men like to see a hard knot untied. It is a great 
mental refreshment and excitement to the pious mind 
to obtain a new idea from God's word ; and all men 
love to have mysteries unfolded. But very dark and 
difficult passages, such, for example, as the Saviour's 
words in Mark 9 : 49, or Paul's meaning in Rom. 7 : 9-25 ; 
or Christ's preaching to the spirits in prison, i Pet. 
3 : 19, 20 ; or the passage in 2 Pet. i : 20, 21 ; or the 
allegory of the ** bond woman" and the ** free woman" 



ANAL YSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 307 

In Gal. 4 : 21-31 ; such recondite portions of Holy Writ 
should not be too frequently taken, nor as a general 
rule ; otherwise a curious, rather than trustful spirit will 
be nourished in the congregation. 

And as another caution, it is not best to take a diffi- 
cult passage unless we are sure we can go some way 
toward clearing up its difficulties, instead of increasing 
them ; thus we should not take such a text when pressed 
for time, or when we wish to talk in a direct, practical 
manner. In a word, he who is in earnest to convert the 
souls of his people will be most apt to take for texts 
those plain, important passages which contain saving 
truth expressed in the most simple and solid form ; com- 
prehending in clear propositions the great truths of the 
gospel — the incarnation, the atonement, faith, love, re- 
pentance, the Christian life, the judgment, and eternal 
life. 

{b.^ It should be dignified, as opposed to what is odd. 
In so vast and various a book as the Bible — a world in 
itself — there are passages treating simply and freely of 
human life, which are to be taken in their right histori- 
cal connections, and with proper mental preparation ; but 
which, suddenly announced from so solemn a place as 
the pulpit, would have a startling effect, tending to pro- 
duce irreverence. The dignity of the text may be vio- 
lated, (i) By a text which expresses no moral or relig- 
ious idea ; as if one should take the passage concerning 
the apostle Paul, " Having shorn his head in Cenchrea ;" 
or the words of the Saviour, " Loose the colt, and bring 
him here." (2) By a text which suggests ludicrous 
associations. These words have been actually preached 
upon, Cant. 5:3; "I have put off my coat ; how shall I 
put it on ?" " Ephraim is a cake unturned." (3) By a text 
not adapted to modern ideas of modesty. There may be 



30 8 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

too great a fear on the part of the preacher of offending 
a sickly fastidiousness, which by and by may grow so 
extravagant that it cannot even bear the truth that our 
Lord was conceived and born of a woman ; or that could 
not repeat many of his own words drawn from common 
things. To the pure all things are pure ; but, notwith- 
standing this, it is still true that the ideas of different 
ages differ, and a due regard should be had to that 
fact. The soberness of the text should be observed, in 
order, if nothing else, to maintain respect and reverence 
for the word of God. (4) By a merely ingenious and 
wittily-applied text. An old divine of the time of 
James I. of England and VI. of Scotland, preached be- 
fore that unstable monarch upon the words in James 
1:6 — *' Waver not. " This text was surely apt enough 
and bold enough to be admissible ; and so, perhaps, was 
the text which was used on the following occasion : 
William Pitt, when made Premier of England at the age 
of twenty-four, was very slim and youthful in appearance. 
He was publicly feted at Cambridge University, his own 
university, and was exceedingly pressed upon by the 
crowds of applicants for office. In the religious services 
which followed, the preacher took for his text John 
6:9, " There is a lad here which hath five barley 
loaves and two small fishes ; but what are they among so 
many ?'* 

But the following use of a passage in Gen. 48 : 13, 14' 
was much too ingenious. Jacob, in his blessing of 
Manasseh, laid his right hand upon him crossed over his 
left ; and the theme drawn from this was, ** We derive 
our blessings under the cross." Sometimes, however, 
there is a piquancy and pertinency in the text which is 
simply felicitous, and yet not undignified ; thus Edward 
Irving's first sermon in London was upon the text, 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 309 

" Therefore came I unto you without gainsaying, as soon 
as I was sent for. I ask you, therefore, for what intent 
you have sent for me." 

(r.) It should be fresh. That is to say, as a general 
rule, it is well not to take too familiar a text ; for 
a fresh text creates interest in the writer's own mind, 
and in the minds of his hearers ; it is turning over a 
fresh leaf in the Bible ; it promotes a broader knowl- 
edge of the Scriptures ; it is bringing out of the 
divine treasures " things new and old." Some preach- 
ers seem to think that they must in no case depart 
from the use of immemorial texts upon immemorial sub- 
jects ; whereas other texts, a little out of the common, 
would throw new light upon the subject. 

New circumstances and needs may require new texts 
in which we should study peculiar fitness of application, 
thus giving point to our instructions. We should study 
variety. 

This, however, should not deter one from employing 
those old and well-worn texts which have the merit of 
greater appropriateness, and which seem to be peculiarly 
consecrated to particular themes ; such, for example, as 
some of the words of Christ, which have a peculiar weight 
and sanction as coming directly from his mouth. " Ye 
must be born again" is and will ever be the great standard 
text upon the subject of regeneration ; and yet there are 
many other fruitful texts upon this fundamental theme. 
There are, indeed, a few standard texts which a min- 
ister should most certainly preach upon, and repeat- 
edly preach upon ; for, though so familiar, when treated 
with earnestness they never fail of having a powerful 
effect ; and, like the green earth, or the sun, or the stars, 
that we see every day, because they are so great, so good, 
so deep, so divine, they are ever fresh. 



3IO HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Searching out novel texts Is not what is meant by em- 
ploying fresh texts ; for fresh texts are those which, as 
soon as uttered, suggest original reading and study of 
the Bible, as if the preacher had gone further and deeper 
into the mysteries of the word, and found new and rare 
words of divine truth. 

Freshness in preaching consists not only in the text 
and subject, but in the way the preacher handles his 
text ; there should be freshness in his own thought or in 
his own appreciation of the eternal newness of the word. 

The stereotyped use of texts in preaching — setting 
aside those few familiar texts that stand out like moun- 
tains that cannot be hid — may be explained by the 
fact, that great preachers who have gone before have 
made certain texts familiar and popular by preaching 
great sermons upon them, by dwelling upon these pas- 
sages as their favorites, as their theological proof-texts ; 
and less original minds of their own denominations and 
theological opinions have concluded that there were no 
texts in the Bible other than these. How different was a 
mind like that of Leighton, that found food in every part 
of the word of God ! 

{d.) It should, as a general rule, be didactic. That is, 
it should have in it the quaHty of instruction ; it should 
be a text capable of analysis, of expansion, of thoughtful 
treatment, in opposition to a highly imaginative, poetical, 
or impassioned text. 

Such an impassioned text might be sometimes effec- 
tive ; but it demands a peculiar state of feeling in 
preacher and audience, and requires an equally fervid 
introduction and continuously impassioned treatment. 
It also excites undue expectation in the audience, and 
strings up a sermon to too high a pitch. A text, there- 
fore, which contains truth in a suggestive form, is better 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 3" 

than one which gives full expression to the feeling of the 
truth suggested ; for there is something undeveloped in 
the first, something that requires an act of reflection to 
awaken feeling, and it does not start from too high a 
point, thus aiding in the gradual development of the ser- 
mon. It is better to have feeling flow naturally from the 
actual treatment of a text, than to require it to flow at 
once on the mere pronouncing of the text. The preacher 
should not, therefore, acquire the habit of depending 
upon sensational, or what may be called ambitious texts. 
Yet, in a time when spiritual indifference broods like a 
death-pall over his congregation, it might be impressive 
for a minister to pour out his feelings in a vehement, 
ejaculatory text, which was uttered originally at a similar 
time of religious apathy and death: " Thine altars, O 
Lord of hosts, my King and my God I" 

Sometimes, also, a brilliant text gives power and glory 
to a sermon, when it is carried out, as are some of Mel- 
ville's sermons, in the same striking and exalted strain. 
Such a text at once raises the audience into a higher 
sphere, and bears their thoughts beyond this world ; 
but it requires deep feeling, powerful imagination, and 
bold thought inspired by bold faith, to treat such texts 
successfully. 

3. It should have true relations to the The text 
sermon. The text should be vitally one should have 

1 ,1 •^•1 ^1 1- ^1 ^ f 1 true relations 

and the same with the discourse that fol- , ,^ 

to the 

lows, and should have its legitimate influ- sermon, 
ence upon the sermon. 

{a.) It should have pertinency. This means that there 
should be an organic and not merely mechanical connec- 
tion between the text and the sermon. Pertinence im- 
plies, 

(i.) An appropriateness in the choice of the text to the 



312 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

outward object of the sermon. Texts should be chosen 
in reference to real and present wants, to events, circum- 
stances, and exigencies springing up in the circle of a 
preacher's own pastoral work, and for which he should 
seek divine guidance in order to instruct, aid, and comfort 
others. That particular man or that particular com- 
munity in affliction needs a special word of God which is 
addressed to actually existing needs and is fitted to reach 
and console them. Then there are texts which specially 
and exactly apply to the Lord's Supper, to Baptism, to 
Ordination, to Death, to the Seasons, to religious Re- 
vival, to War and Peace, to Thanksgiving and Fasting. 
These should be carefully sought out and employed. 
There is beauty in appropriateness, even if it be not the 
highest quality of art. 

(2.) The quality of pertinency implies an appropriater 
ness in the choice of the text to the inner subject of the 
sermon. This refers to its real meaning. 

There should be no painful divorce of the text from 
the subject. The rule of pertinency in this regard may 
be violated, first, when the text does not contain the true 
subject of the sermon. Thus the text in fact may refer 
to an entirely different truth or class of truths from that 
treated of in the sermon ; as if, for a broad case, one should 
take I Cor. 11 : 34 to preach upon "Home and home 
piety ;" or if one were preaching upon the ordination of 
a minister he should select Acts 20 : 36-38, referring to a 
pastor's leave-taking of his people ; or, to narrow it down 
still closer, if the preacher should take a text which, though 
it may refer to the general subject treated of, yet does 
not set forth the particular subject treated of ; as if one 
should take a text which treats definitely of the example 
of some Christian grace, and should use it as a theme for 
discussing the foundations of that virtue. 



AXALVSIS AXD COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 313 

It is the habit of some preachers to touch the text so 
lightly, to avoid it so scrupulously, to display one's inde- 
pendence in talking of everything but the text, and to 
look upon this fastidious avoidance of the text as a mat- 
ter of good taste (as, indeed, it is in essay-writing, where 
one strives to convey an idea indirectly, to insinuate as it 
were, and where philosophy, instead of the gospel, is 
often preached), that Cowper's words are brought to 
mind : 

" How oft, when Paul has served us with a text, 
Has Eplctetus, Plato, TuUy preached !" 

Yet, as a modification to what has been said in regard to 
the pertinency of the text in its relation to the subject, 
some modification must be made, owing to the great rich- 
ness of the divine word ; for it belongs to the breadth 
and depth of inspiration that we can often use a text in 
various applications. 

Thus texts which originally have a general application 
may be made to fit specific cases ; and texts which, on 
the other hand, have originally a definite historical or 
local reference, may be used for more general instruc- 
tion. 

Take such a text as the words of Christ contained in 
Matt. 22 : 21, " Render therefore unto Caesar the things 
that are Caesar's ; unto God the things that are God's ;" 
how multiform are the applications of such a passage, 
to baptism, to funeral occasions, to thanksgiving and 
political sermons, to charitable sermons, to young con- 
verts, and to many other subjects ! 

This rule may be violated, secondly, when the text has 
not the spirit of the sermon. Thus the sermon may be 
imaginative and poetical when the text is didactic ; or it 
may be logical and argumentative when the text is emo- 



314 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

tional and pathetic ; whereas the text should give the 
key-note to the sermon. 

{b,) It should have directness. By this is meant that 
the text should be one that can be directly and honestly 
used for the purposes of the sermon and not be ingeniously 
wrested to apply to something else which the preacher 
desires to discuss, or to present to his audience. A direct 
treatment and application of texts evidently secure more 
of divine authority, and tend more certainly to edifi- 
cation. 

The question arises here, May we employ an accom- 
modated text ? An accommodated text, being chosen, 
not on the principle of absolute identity, but 

■^" only of similarity, though allowable and 

accommodated . i i i i 

. , sometnnes even necessary, should be spar- 

ingly used, and never from mere fanciful 
resemblance, but from a substantial similarity of ideas 
or truths. " Speak unto the children of Israel that they 
go forward," may be justly applied to Christian sanctifi- 
cation amid difficulties, or to Christian activity in dis- 
couraging circumstances. 

I Chron. 21 124, "And King David said to Oman, 
Nay ; but I will verily buy it for the full price ; for I will 
not take that which is thine for the Lord, nor offer burnt 
offerings without cost." Here the great principle of 
self-sacrifice, of doing something for the Lord which 
really costs effort, self-denial, the giving up of property, 
or what is cherished, for his sake, is taught ; and it may 
have a genuine application in many other ways, and at 
the present day. 

Such an accommodated text, when it suggests a natural 
and sensible resemblance of ideas, without anything 
strained or frivolous, and is itself at the same time 
founded upon some deep principle of truth, applied 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 315 

only to different circumstances, is perfectly justifiable. 
*' Christ stilling the storm" is well applied to his peace- 
giving power in spiritual things, in stilling the tempest of 
the wicked and passionate heart ; for outer things may 
typify inward feelings. 

"Simon bearing the cross" is a proper type of the 
Christian bearing the cross after Christ ; in fact, the 
principle of humble obedience is the same in both ac- 
tions. 

The use of this principle of symbolical interpretation by 
the mediaeval preachers has already been noticed. They 
were sometimes quite felicitous in the employment of 
the accommodated text, although they were more often 
given to extravagant allegorizing. Thus Neale says, 
*' Consider the admirable wisdom with which the follow- 
ing texts are selected, under the head that we ought to 
be solicitous to help forward each other's salvation : 
Genesis 4:9,' Where is Abel thy brother ? ' ; Ex. 26 : 3, 
* The fine curtains shall be coupled together, one to 
another ;' Is. 2:3,' Come ye and let us go up to the 
house of the Lord ;' Jer. 16 : 16, ' Behold I will send 
for many fishers, saith the Lord, and they shall fish 
them ;' John i .-45, ' Philip findeth Nathaniel ;" John 
4 : 28, ' The woman then left her waterpot, and went her 
way into the city;' Rev. 22:17, 'And let him that 
heareth say, Come.' " ' 

There is a curious passage in Daille's " Traites de 
I'Eglise de I'Empire des saincts peres" (liv. ii., chap. 3), 
on the abuse of allegorical interpretation, which is worthy 
of study by those who are tempted to fall into this vein. 
The Welsh preachers have resuscitated this style of 



' Xeale's " Mediaeval Preachers," p. 38. 



3l6 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

preaching ; but it were better left with the preachers of 
the Middle Ages, and not be largely revived ; for this 
strained use of texts may easily be carried too far ; thus 
Hagenbach mentions that a German preacher drew from 
the Saviour's words on the cross, ** I thirst," the theme 
that " Christ thirsted for the salvation of men." 

It is one thing to take an outward type as obviously 
suggesting an inward truth, and another thing deliber- 
ately to turn the text to a sense entirely different from 
what it will plainly bear. 

The allegorical use of texts in the past, especially by 
the older Puritan divines, among them peerless John 
Bunyan himself, is an illustration of this. To what 
absurdities has it not sometimes led ? The four streams 
of Paradise have been metamorphosed into the four evan- 
gelists ; and the two pennies given by the Good Samari- 
tan have been turned into the two sacraments of baptism 
and the Lord's Supper. A preacher who deals in such 
a fanciful torturing of the plain meaning of texts, not 
only shows weakness, but is apt to lead himself and others 
into error, mysticism, and obscurity, as did Origen, with 
all his profound intellect and piety. 

This typical method of preaching has not entirely 
died out in these modern times or in sober, unimagi- 
native, straightforward New England. How often do 
we hear preachers of a poetical turn of mind (poetry 
is good in a sermon in its right place) make use of this 
method. Such preachers would really prefer to take the 
narrative of Christ in the storm and turn it all into a 
spiritual sense, thereby giving scope for picture- drawing, 
and for the display of the fancy, than to take a text 
plainly teaching the same truths of spiritual peril through 
sin, and redemption through Christ. But false doctrine is 
sometimes taught in this way, and all the doctrine in 



A.VALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 317 

such a sermon exists solely in the preacher's imagination, 
and not a word of it is contained in the narrative. 
Everything in the way of fact or plain history in the Bible 
may be typified by a preacher who cultivates a poetical 
style of sermonizing ; and this habit of mind should be 
strenuously guarded against. In a modern Protestant 
sermon noticed by Coquerel (perhaps its counterpart may 
have been heard by every one of us) the narrative of the 
healing of blind Bartimeus has thus been employed. 
Two kinds of blindness are designated in this history, 
that of the body and that of the soul. Christ has cured 
one, he can cure the other ; Bartimeus hears a great 
noise of the multitude, which signifies the advancing 
triumph of the Christian faith in the world ; his cry to 
Christ to heal him is the first cry of the sinner convicted 
of sin ; the multitude repressing this cry means the op- 
position of the world to spiritual things ; the answer of 
Christ, " What wouldst thou that I should do unto thee," 
is the voice of divine grace ; the recovery of sight is re- 
generation. This, though strained, is not so far out of 
the way as are many such ingenious discourses. But such 
sermons are not preaching, they are rather the parody of 
the gospel. There is only the shadow of the truth in 
them. Let us, then, resist this seductive temptation as 
much as possible, and not be carried away by the oppor- 
tunity which hundreds of like passages in sacred writ 
affords us of this kind of artificial and spiritualizing dis- 
course. 

Yet the use of the legitimate principle of accommoda- 
tion in texts cannot be given up ; for if we give it up we 
should lose much that is interesting to the mind in the 
inward and outward resemblances of truth, and in the 
matter of actual inspiration. Language, for example, 
which is addressed to the apostles, may, in most in- 



3l8 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

stances, be rightly accommodated to apply to all Chris- 
tians. But in using accommodated texts, let this be ever 
remembered, that the original significance of the text 
should not be lost sight of ; it should be fairly applied, 
and it should always be clearly stated in some way that 
it is an accommodated use of the text. 

But while freely yielding this principle, we are decidedly 
opposed to the employment of what are called " motto 

texts." Motto texts are those that are not 
Motto texts. - , , - , . . , 

made the real foundation of the sermon. 

They are used merely as a matter of form, in order 
that there may be a text to stand at the head of the 
sermon ; for they exert no further shaping influence 
on the subject, or on the mode of treating it. This is 
using the word of God unworthily, and the ** text" 
becomes a "pretext." Thus, to take a passage like 
Rom. 6:5-11, so full of rich and particular instruc- 
tions upon the central doctrine of the gospel, and, 
merely because it refers to the subject of the atonement, 
or has perhaps that word in it, to preach a sermon in the 
usual abstract way, drawn from theological class-notes, 
or systematic treatises on the doctrine of the atonement, 
without further reference to the text itself, would be an 
unwarranted abuse of the Scriptures. 

(<:.) It should have correctness. That is, the text 
should be employed in the sermon according to the truth, 
according to the true intention of the author, be he God 
or man ; audit should be applied to a subject which is 
the true one taught by it, and not to any other subject. 
This may seem to repeat what was said before, but we 
do not refer now altogether to the correctness of the 
verbal interpretation of the text, to which reference has 
been already made ; but more to the substance of the 
text itself, since truth is better than falsehood, and even 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 319 

truth cannot be helped by untrue arguments ; and if cer- 
tain texts have been used from time immemorial as proof- 
texts of any particular subject, which are not so in fact, 
it is, on a broader view of truth, right to disuse them for 
such a purpose, and to give them their true meaning ; 
for it is not the number of proof-texts that establishes a 
truth, but the clearness and authority of one text ; and 
if many texts may be used by way of illustration, they 
should not be employed as proof, and much less as con- 
taining the true substance of a particular doctrine or sub- 
ject. This opens an interesting field of discussion in 
regard to the external and internal sense of Scripture and 
the just limitations of biblical truth ; which questions, 
however, we cannot here discuss. 

The simple principle now before us is, that the text 
should be correctly employed in its relation to the sub- 
ject ; that the real contents of the subject should be 
found in it, though it may be in the simplest synthetical 
form ; it should not be wrested from its true meaning, 
force, and relations. 

Preachers will hereafter be called to a stricter account 
in their use of texts ; they will be required to be more 
candid and true, and their preaching will gain propor- 
tionally in point and power. 

(^.) It should have fruitfulness. Texts should be 
taken which are fitted to produce rich and fruitful ser- 
mons. 

The Bible is full of germinal texts capable of almost 
infinite development ; and yet every word and even 
sentence in the Bible which seems to convey such fruitful 
ideas, does not always do so. 

Preachers are sometimes apt to be caught by the ap- 
pearance of a passage rather than by the substance of truth 
which it contains ; for a text often appears very sugges- 



320 HO MILE TICS PROPER. 

live ; it seems to open a most fruitful subject of thought ; 
whereas it may be but an incidental or accidental ex- 
pression, and by no means the best and fullest manifesta- 
tion of the truth. Vinet (Homiletics, p. 137) thus de- 
scribes a fruitful text : " I call a text fruitful which, with- 
out foreign additions, without the aid of minute details, 
without discussion, furnishes, when reduced to its just 
meaning, matter for a development interesting in all its 
parts, and which leaves with us an important result." 

The subject of the text lies so directly at the founda- 
tion of Christian preaching, and so comprehends within 
itself the whole matter both of the sources 

of power and the inherent difficulties of ser- 
suggestions ^ 

on the monizing, that we cannot forbear, in closing 
. handling and this subject, even at the risk of some repe- 
interpretation tition, to give a few brief practical sug- 
° ^^ ^ gestions upon the matter of the proper hand- 
ling and interpretation of texts. 

1. Interpretation as the primary sphere of the preacher. 
This truth has been, perhaps, already sufficiently dwelt 

upon. Interpretation forms the primitive 
Interpretation .^^^ ^^ ^j^^ preacher's appointed work ; 

a primary , . r ^ 

sohere of the ^^' ^ purposes of mstruction, not to 

preacher, invent new truth, but to explain and to make 

clear truth already revealed ; he is not to 

preach primarily from a philosophy of divine truth, or 

even from the ''analogy of faith," or from previously 

conceived theological systems and theories, whether his 

own or others (and which are very good in their place), 

but from the basis of a sound interpretation of the word 

of God, and of that particular portion or text of Scripture 

with which he is dealing. 

2. Classification of texts for the purpose of preaching. 



A yA LYSIS A. YD COMPOSITION OF SERMOiV. 321 

There is no book so multiform in its aspects as the Bible, 

being made in different stages of religious 

, , , , 1 r -i- L • f Classification 

development, and much of it bem^r of pecu- 

^ . . of texts, 

liar and supernatural import, where inspira- 
tion struggles to express itself through an imperfect me- 
dium of human language. How large a part of the Bible is 
poetical, in which the deeper truth finds expression in type, 
figure, and symbol — in a word, in purely emotional lan- 
guage. How much of the Bible also is prophetical, wherein 
addition to the vagueness of poetic symbolism, the uncer- 
tain element of futurity comes in ! Another portion of 
the Bible is pure narrative, or the historic record of actual 
events ; and, after all, but a small part of the Scriptures, 
in form at least, is directly doctrinal and didactic. In 
handling the sacred text for the purposes of instruction, 
great discrimination and wisdom are required ; the spirit 
of the ancient Antiochean exegesis, applying sober and 
common-sense interpretation, and taking things as they 
are obviously meant, instead of the wilder speculative 
method of the Alexandrian school. 

As to the actual classification of texts, no scientific 
method can be laid down ; every one is at liberty to 
make his own classification ; but one can see at a glance 
that there are at least half a score of broad classes or 
types of texts, which it would be foolish to treat in a 
precisely similar way ; as, for example : 

(i.) Narrative and historical ; (2.) Poetical, symbolic, 
and parabolic ; (3.) Prophetic ; (4.) Meditative, aesthetic, 
and subjective ; (5.) Doctrinal ; (6.) Ethical and practi- 
cal ; (7.) Spiritual, or purely spiritual. The particular 
treatment of these different classes we will not here 
dwell upon, although in various ways, and especially 
under the head of the " development" of a sermon, 
more of a specific nature will be said. 



322 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

3. Consulting the text in the original. That one 

should, in every instance, consult the original Hebrew or 

Greek in selecting a text to preach upon, is 

Consulting ^^ obligation which both common sense and 

the original , ... x^ , r 

. . honest conscience dictate. But how often 

text. 

is this duty lost sight of by even the best 
men. The pressure of official work, the over-confidence 
in our own English version, the familiarity which breeds, 
if not contempt yet carelessness, combine to make 
preachers neglectful in this respect. But there are three 
very simple and very familiar suggestions, which might 
be termed axioms, which it were well for the preacher to 
fix in his mind. 

(i.) The precise translation of the original passage 
should first of all be obtained. There should be no in- 
definiteness here. Not what I would make the passage 
to mean, nor what Augustine, or Calvin, or Meyer, or 
Alford, or any other man, however influential as a teacher 
and commentator, would make it to mean ; but what the 
words themselves truly and obviously teach, this should 
be the rule. 

(2.) The meaning of Scripture is to be obtained in 
the same way that we get at the meaning of any 
other book v/ritten in a foreign tongue. We are to use 
our best intelligence, judgment, and scholarship for this 
end. Proper reverence for the word of God does not 
forbid this. The Bible does not take itself out of the 
category of books that are addressed to the understand- 
ing. It was meant for men, was meant for their compre 
hension, instruction, and highest welfare. Although the 
supernatural truth revealed in the Bible brings in a new 
element which requires the opening of the spiritual sense 
to comprehend it spiritually, yet as far as the meaning of 
the words themselves is concerned, the same appliances 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 3^3 

and methods- -the use of grammars, dictionaries, and 
commentaries which would be required in translating a 
classical Greek or Latin author, and the same philosophy 
of language, and the application of the same critical skill 
and judgment — these are equally needed in the study of 
the Scriptures. They are both lawful and essential. 
There is no illusion about this. One must understand 
Hebrew and Greek to interpret the Bible, or he must 
take a second-hand interpretation. 

(3.) There is but one true meaning to a passage, and 
not many meanings. The meaning may be profound and 
obscure, but is one. The Bible is not double-voiced. It 
has an honest meaning, a single voice, a clear teaching. 
We have only to discover this. Two widely-different 
meanings cannot both be right. We may be in doubt 
which of them is true, but one only is true. 

4. Scholarly familiarity with the peculiar usages and 
idioms of scriptural language. The preacher needs a 
special preparation beyond that of the classi- 
cal scholar for the study and interpretation Scholarly 
of the Scriptures. While he should be intel- familiarity 

HfTent in re^rard to those historical, geo- 

'^^ ^ ' ^ idioms of 

graphical, chronological, and archaeological scripture 

studies which fit him to understand so 
ancient a book, he should especially have that philo- 
logical knowledge which would enable him to have 
some genuine confidence in his own comprehension of 
the text. He should be able to enter into the very 
spirit of the original ; to comprehend the force of char- 
acteristic biblical forms of expression ; to feel the sig- 
nificance of the use of certain words instead of others, 
and even of particles, accents, and emphases. The lan- 
guage of Scripture, archaic and Oriental, cannot be 
judged by the principles that govern classic Greek or 



324 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Latin, or our modern English tongue ; therefore one is 
compelled to make a comprehensive study of the Bible in 
order to enter into these — we will not call them niceties, 
for they are vital expressions of truth — but rather nice 
and delicate forms of varied expression, belonging to the 
original languages of the Bible, upon which often great 
truths hang. Thus, for example, the language of Scrip- 
ture delights in strong contrasts — strong lights and shades 
— by which the truth expressed is exaggerated, as well 
as its opposite, in order to produce a vivid impression. 
Scriptural exaggeration is not erroneous statement, but 
statement addressed to the imagination or the feelings 
rather than to the calm didactic reason. 

When the apostle James says that the man who sins 
not in w^ord, the same is a perfect man ; when our Lord 
says that he who hateth not his father and mother cannot 
be his disciple, he who is penetrated with the spirit of 
scriptural language knows how to take the sense of such 
passages. He neither gives too much nor too little stress 
to them. The literal intellect cannot be applied to such 
texts, but there must be the higher critical and sympa- 
thetic appreciation. 

The Scriptures also often boldly set forth a specific case 
in such a way as to convey to the less thoughtful or the 
fanatically disposed mind, the impression that an invaria- 
ble principle or rule is created in regard to every such 
specific case ; whereas it has a wider and more general im- 
port. When, for instance, the young man was told that 
he must sell all that he had and give to the poor be- 
fore he could follow Christ, and the narrative is left 
in this abrupt manner, if it were argued from this that 
the holding of property in any shape by every person 
who was, or desired to become a Christian, was sinful, 
this would be erroneous ; but there was, nevertheless, a 



A JV A LYSIS AXD COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 325 

great principle of Christian self-denial taught here. To 
see just where a principle applies, in what it is gen- 
eral and what specific, in what it is absolute and in 
what relative, requires intelligent and cultivated dis- 
crimination, especially in the interpreter and teacher 
of truth. A preacher is thus called upon in the study 
of texts constantly to use his finest powers of under- 
standing, disciplined by a comprehensive philological 
skill. He could hardly make himself perfect. He could 
not, for instance, do better than to spend a definite 
period in studying the language of the apostle Paul, his 
style, his mode of argumentation, and his psychology. 
The interpreter should be able to note and understand 
the marked Hebraisms and Hellenisms of New Testa- 
ment Greek. " In especial it is to be noticed that the 
Hebrew of the Old Testament forms the basis of the lan- 
guage and idioms of the Revealed Word ; so that one 
cannot fully understand the language of the New Testa- 
ment without understanding that of the Old. Thus one 
of the first duties of the preacher is to ascertain the mean- 
ing of the words of the text in their common usage at 
the time, while noting their idiomatic and familiar appli- 
cations." 

This leads me to say a few words more particularly 
upon the interpretation of the Old Testament. 

5. The interpretation of the Old Testament. The Old 

Testament should be interpreted in accordance with the 

law of historic and essential truth. We 

mean by this the recognizing of a principle ° ^""P"^^ * ^°" 

r 1 • -11 1 r- • of the Old 

of historic development in the Scriptures — Testament 

that the germ and not the full fruitage of 

divine truth is to be found in the Old Testament. Thus 

Dr. Arnold notices the error continually made by Christian 

preachers in regarding the holiness of the Old Testament 



326 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

patriarchs as absolute instead of relative ; that men like 
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who had personal communi- 
cation with God, had such a knowledge of holy and divine 
things as the apostles John and Paul had, and giving to 
them all the excellences of perfectly holy characters ; and 
as if they had a nearer communion with God than even 
Christians had ; whereas they were in some things very 
imperfect. This arose out of the fact, he said, that 
Christians forget the privileges in their communion with 
the Holy Spirit. Knowledge and holiness are infinitely 
clearer under the reign of the Spirit than in the time of 
the patriarchs, when it was, as it were, a relative or re- 
flected light ; but now it is one direct from God and 
Christ through the Spirit. In the Old Testament men 
are not addressed as having faith in Christ, or as looking 
to eternal life with any large and settled hope such as 
Christian believers possess. Knowing the New, we find a 
great deal in the Old Testament to nourish our faith and 
Christian character ; but the light after all was not per- 
fect, and a man who now lives entirely in the Old Testa- 
ment is in fact a Jew, or a Judaic Christian. 

We hear the principle sometimes laid down in respect 
of sermonizing that it is right to take an Old Testament 
text and put into it all the meaning of the New Testa- 
ment. This is a wrong principle. It is making the 
Scriptures a sort of divination book, and it is destructive 
of intelligent interpretation. The Bible should be looked 
upon as containing the greatest and most sacred truths, 
and as setting forth especially God's manifestation of 
himself and his dealing with men ; but in its interpreta- 
tion, the best human qualities of reason, sagacity, tact, 
learning, and common sense should be called upon. 

This is seen in the power of discriminating between 
the divine and the human elements of Scripture, the 



A XA LYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SEKMON: 3-7 

infallibility of the divine and the fallibility of the 
human. 

This recognizes in the writings of Scripture the use of 
the human instrument, the reproducing of the milieu or 
immediate surroundings of the text, such as the age, the 
habit of thought, the character and philosophy of the 
language. 

Let us not start, as Arnold did not, with a precon- 
ceived theory of inspiration ; but let us reverently and 
humbly study the record as sent from God, and apply to 
it our best reason. Undoubtedly the nature of God's 
principles in his own word can be best vindicated by his 
own acts ; or those portions of the Old Testament, for 
example, which seem very obscure and difficult, such as 
the slaughter of the Canaanites, the sacrifice of Isaac, the 
language of the imprecatory psalms — these are best 
explained by him who can best unravel the thread of 
God's religious education of the race from its earliest in- 
fancy. 

In interpreting the Old Testament, one should have 
regard also to the principles of a true redaction or reduc- 
tion to order of the different parts and books of the Old 
Testament. The very beginnings of Genesis introduce 
us to two distinct accounts of the creation. The books 
of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, are sometimes parallel 
rather than continuous history*. The twenty-fourth and 
the twenty-sixth chapters of the first book of Samuel con- 
tain different accounts of the same event. How many 
more such illustrations might be given ! 

6. Consulting the context. In the context we may 

find circumstances, definitions, limitations, 

parallelisms, illustrations and various ideas, , °"^" ^"^ 
1-11 1- 1 *^® context, 

examples and facts, which throw great light 

upon the true meaning of the te.xt. To give the con- 



328 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

text due consideration is a well-settled rule of homi- 
letics ; and yet how often is it violated in the stereo- 
typed method of treating texts. The old motto of the 
mystics and the allegorists, " Verba Scriptura tantum 
ubiqiie significare, qtiayitum significare possunt,'' or the 
idea still asserted by some that we may take a detached 
text and make it to mean all that the words in themselves 
can possibly be pressed to mean, without regard to its 
probable and true meaning, is a dangerous rule of interpre- 
tation. The text may, for example, be originally used to 
apply to temporal things, and we should be careful in 
applying it to spiritual things. It may be employed, 
originally, simply as a figure of speech, and not literally. 
Now a figure means one thing in one place, and another 
thing in another. A phrase in the mouth of one person 
may teach a very different lesson from what it does in 
the mouth of another. The Bible is not a " lively 
oracle" in the sense of enunciating a truth without regard 
to order, time, or circumstance ; but it is addressed to 
the reason, and is amenable to historic conditions. A 
good Reference Bible is of assistance in enlarging the 
scriptural basis of a sermon, and in comparing the truth 
of the text with parallel passages teaching the same truth 
in different aspects. The context may be looked upon 
in its historical or logical connections, either in regard 
to its relations of thought, or its relations of time, place, 
and circumstance. The order of thought, for instance, 
in a Pauline epistle, though it may be often recondite, 
because connected with a controversial drift, is still of 
the greatest importance to comprehend, in arriving at the 
general tenor and significance of its instruction. We 
must, in fact, study the whole scope of the passage in all 
its relations in order to be honest, and in order to draw 
from the text its true teaching capacities. 



AXA LYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SEPMON. 329 

7. Employing a text containing a perfect idea, and that 
the complete idea of the author. 

This should be done as far as possible, especially 

when we preach topical sermons. Claude's 

rule is, " The text must contain the com- ^^^ 

plete idea of the writer from whom it is ^ ^ ,, 

^ perfect theme. 

borrowed ; for it is his language, they are 

his sentiments, which we are to explain to our hearers." 

In a word, we are not to mangle the Bible. We are to 
get at the full and rounded meaning of the Sacred Word, 
and to discuss the true subjects and truths which it enun- 
ciates. We should not be hasty to draw our subjects from 
texts. Vinet says : " We must not confound texts with 
phrases and periods, nor logical unity with grammatical 
unity, neither must we think that the text ends where the 
grammatical sense ends, or even where logical unity closes. 
Many logical unities may together form a greater unity ; 
and it is impossible to see beforehand, and in an absolute 
manner, what are the limits of a true text. The same 
text may furnish ten ; ten texts may make one. The 
art of cutting up a text, the art of grouping many texts 
into one, deserves examination." ' 

In order to retain this completeness of idea in the text 
it is not well, as a general rule, to employ two texts, or 
to employ two or more texts from different parts of the 
Bible ; it is better to have but one text, one passage of 
Scripture, and that, whether long or short, should con- 
tain one subject, and be complete in itself. 

The advice is commonly given that the text should be 
short, for a short text is better remembered. Brief, con- 
densed, penetrating texts stick in the memory like nails 
fastened by the masters of assemblies. And yet texts 



Vinet's " Homiletics," p. 141. 



330 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

may be too brief ; they may not contain a whole subject ; 
they may be mere fragments of a truth or of a sentence. 
The better rule is, that the text should contain one com- 
plete truth or idea, and then it may be long or brief. What 
a world of meaning is in that shortest text of the Bible, 
" Jesus wept !" 

It is wholly unjustifiable to take a mere portion or 
clause of a verse, even if it contains good sense in itself, 
but which, by thus dismembering it from the rest, does 
not give the real or full sense intended to be conveyed 
by the whole verse ; such a text, for instance, as Heb. 
4:2, "But the word preached did not profit them;" 
without adding the very important clause, " not being 
mixed with faith in them that heard it." The longer 
the passage, however, that we may conveniently employ 
for a text, which at the same time contains a perfect 
theme, and does not violate the law of unity, the more 
of the actual body of Scripture we bring before the peo- 
ple, and the nearer do we come, undoubtedly, to the 
primitive style of preaching. 

The following texts might be cited as having unity of 
theme, or as containing one main thought without excess 
or deficiency, though composed, it may be, of elaborate 
parts : I Pet. i : 24, 25, the imperishable character of 
the Word of God as contrasted with the changing char- 
acter of visible things ; John 3 : 16, the sending of 
Christ a convincing and triumphant proof of the love of 
God ; I John 4 : 19, the grand apology of Christians for 
loving God ; Galatians 3 : 15-22, the sureness of the 
promises in Christ. Even in so elaborate a passage as that 
last cited there is really but one idea running through 
it ; as also in James i : 22-27, the hearing and the doing 
of the word in their relations. 

8. Parabolic texts. In employing these we should 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. Zl"^ 

strive to come at the germinant idea of the figure, or the 

idea with which the picture is compared, 

or to which it is parallel. We should Fig^^a^^^^ 

and parabolic 
get at the foundation truth of a figure or a texts 

parable ; and such texts are good and rich 
texts if rightly treated. Indeed, everything to the spir 
itual mind becomes an image of the spiritual, and yet, as 
we have before said, care should be taken not to " spirit- 
ualize" texts unduly. 

In regard to the homiletical treatment of the parables 
of Scripture there are two theories ; one is, that there is 
but one main spiritual meaning or lesson taught, and that 
the circumstantials of the parable are wholly secondary, 
or only intended to make the story natural and coherent ; 
the other is, that all parts of the parable, that every cir- 
cumstance, and every turn of the allegory and every word 
is important and full of didactic significance. While the 
first of these is, in our opinion, the nearest to the truth, 
and comes under the principle that a metaphor should 
not be made to run upon four feet, yet for the preacher's 
purposes the parables of our Saviour are so wonderfully 
full of m.eaning that he cannot afford to neglect any part, 
or circumstance, or feature of them ; each serving to 
color, modify, and enrich the whole lesson. 

There is, at least, whatever theory of homiletical treat- 
ment we may adopt, one broad generalization which will 
comprehend the whole lesson and beauty of the parable. 
But for one to dwell too precisely upon the poetic and 
symbolical portions of the Bible, to go into the minutiae 
of the fringes on the priests' garments ; this leads to arti- 
ficiality and barrenness. 

We should avoid unfruitful figures or figures that do 
not contain real truths. We should shun strained paral- 
lelisms that the Scriptures themselves never intended. 



/ 



332 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

But such passages as John 4 : lO and I Cor. 12 : 25-27 
are of the number of inspired figures where one cannot 
easily make a mistake in the thing signified ; but which, 
when rightly understood, convey living truths, reasons, 
proofs, vividly expressed. Often the parable forms a 
true subject in itself, without the need of drawing out a 
propositional form, or a more distinct theme, as Matt. 
13 : 1-9. It is simply enough to comment upon this 
parable of the sower, especially as the Lord has been his 
own interpreter in it, textually, part by part. In treating 
such a parable, the sermon should not lose its simple ex- 
planatory form. Some parables are difficult to explain, 
to group the ideas boldly and successfully, to grasp the 
inner sense of the truth amid their contrariety and subtle 
changes. Such are the parables of the '* unjust stew- 
ard," and of the " laborers in the vineyard." 

9, The use of historical texts. In treating such texts 
one may either lay the stress upon the main event con- 
tained in the narrative, or upon some side 

IS one event, or side-issue, growing out of it. He 
may take the whole of a history, or only a 
part, a single salient circumstance, a single person, or a 
single act or remark of a single person ; but if he does 
this last he must do it regardful of the connections, and 
of the whole texture of the historic web out of which he 
draws this thread. We shall speak further of historic 
sermons, under the head of ** development." 

10. Time of choosing the text. The preacher, as a 
general rule, should select the text before he selects the 

subject. Sometimes this may not be feasi- 

ime 1^1^^ ^g j^ occasional sermons, but it is the 

choosing text. .,,,.. . ^ c 

right habit for an mterpreter or preacher of 

the Scriptures to form. This seems to honor the Word 
of God — that the subject should spring from it rather 



AiVAL VS/S AXn COMPOSITION- OF SERMON. ZZ3 

than that it should be fitted to the subject. This rule is 
continually violated by those who preach altogether topi- 
cally. 

Dr. Emmons recommended the choosing of a subject 
before a text ; and there may be exceptional cases where 
this is good or justifiable, as, for instance, when a subject 
which has possessed the mind has sprung up without con- 
nection with any particular text ; yet, when an appropri- 
ate text is found for such a subject, it will often receive 
new light and richness from the discussion of the text 
itself. Paul said to Timothy (2 Tim, 4:2), '* Preach the 
word." 

11. Announcing the text. As a practical hint in the 

mere matter of delivery, the text should be announced 

first of all. It is the European custom to 

preface the text with some remarks, some- nnouncing 
. . , ,. , , , the text, 

times with a little sermon, on the general 

subject of praise, or on the necessity of God's blessing 

the word ; our own custom of announcing the text first, 

with some simple introductory' phrase, is, however, we 

think, the best. 

12. Pronouncing the text. As a second hint in the de- 
livery, the text should be pronounced clearly, so that no 
one in the audience should fail to hear it. All 

thinsfs should be in readiness, so that there , 

^ ' , , . the text, 

may be no haste, or bustling, business-like air 

at the commencement of the discourse. Even as the pulpit 
itself should be entered with manly dignity and serious- 
ness, so the opening services should be simple, modest, 
serious, yet without dulness or gloomy gravity. There 
should be no act or gesture that draws the attention of the 
audience particularly to the speaker ; but the thought of 
God and the word of God should be the first impression. 
It is well to mention distinctly the chapter and verse before 



334 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

.mentioning the words of the text ; for the habit of con- 
sulting the Bible and following the preacher in the Bible 
upon the part of the congregation, is certainly to be en- 
couraged. If the text is a brief one it is well to read it 
twice ; if a longer one, it may be repeated in some way 
in the introduction ; at all events, the audience should 
hear and understand distinctly what the text is, or the 
effect of the discourse is greatly impaired, perhaps lost. 
The text should be read in a slow and clear voice, but 
not loud, and perhaps a little more emphatically the 
second time than the first. 

Sec. 14. TJic Introduction. 

Napoleon is reported to have said that " the first five 
minutes of a battle are the decisive ones ;" and this re- 
mark might sometimes also be applied to a sermon ; for 
although the preacher, like a military general, by good 
fortune and skill may be able to recover lost ground, he 
may also, like a general, not be able to restore the lost 
chances of a blundering and unfortunate initiative move- 
ment, and may be forced to a humiliating defeat. 

The introduction to a discourse is naturally compared 
to the door, or vestibule, of a house : it opens to what 
the house contains. The comparison might be carried 
still further ; for since the door of the house should ac- 
cord with the style and character of the house itself, 
and one would not put a Grecian portico on a Gothic 
house, so the introduction should harmonize with the 
subject of the discourse, and not strike the mind with 
incongruity ; and as the door ought not to be too big 
for the house, neither should the introduction be so for 
the sermon. Neither should the doorway be mean and 
narrow, nor the introduction fail of an air of freedom and 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 335 

simple elegance ; and as the door is generally placed in 
the centre of the building, in like manner the introduc- 
tion strikes the central thought and purpose of the ser- 
mon. 

In the matter of the introduction, it is well to study 
the best models, not only of the introductions of orations 
and serm.ons, but of all true literary works ; 

for every work addressed to the human u 7 o 

models, 
mind must have an intelligent and fit begin- 
ning, which suggests its object and denotes its leading 
idea. The brief but impressive introductions of the 
books of the Bible show that their authors, writing under 
the impulse of inspiration, did not disdain this rational 
method of making their objects known, of interesting 
those whom they addressed. The short introductions of 
the " Iliad," the "yEneid," the " Paradise Lost," the 
" Divina Commedia, " the " Faerie Queene," and the 
" Jerusalem Delivered," short as they are, may have cost 
their authors more labor than any other part of their 
poems, and may have been the last finished ; for they 
gathered up all the rays of light into one beam, they 
smote the human mind with a new thought and theme. 

Although it is well for a preacher to study good models 
of introductions in the works of great writers, and espe- 
cially in the orations and discourses of the best orators, it 
is better to take the best preachers for our models. 

Dr. South's introductions are characteristic, and may 
be described by the word connnanding ; for they imme- 
diately arrest attention, and strike the key-note of the 
sermon with a ringing blow, as much as to say, " Listen, 
ye people, to what I have to say on this subject, for I 
have that to say which is important." There is no frip- 
pery, or fancy, or fine writing, but a plain common sense, 
which appeals at once to the masculine understanding, 



33^ HOMILETICS PROPER. 

and leads the hearer to say, " At all events, here is a man 
who has begun to speak ; he is worth listening to, even if 
I cannot agree with him." South's introductions are not 
so long as to lead the mind away from the object set 
before him, or from the work laid out in the text itself — 
which he explains and develops with great care. 

Dr. Emmons's introductions are also, in some respects, 
models of excellence, and possess the same characteris- 
tics of common sense, and the union of strong thought 
with simple expression. They are judicious introduc- 
tions ; they seem perfectly pertinent to the subject, while 
at the same time they are sagacious, and they awaken 
curiosity. They are like a Doric porch — very plain and 
unornamented, but with a certain pleasing, attractive 
majesty. 

Saurin's introductions are particularly happy, and 
sometimes they are exceedingly bold and striking. They 
make it dif^cult to carry on and out the first impressions 
produced, and which it would not be well for any less 
brilliant and vigorous preacher to imitate. 

Of contemporaneous and younger preachers, the ser- 
mons of F. W. Robertson deserve to be studied for their 
artistic excellence. Some of his introductions consist of 
but six or seven lines ; others seem to lead on imper- 
ceptibly, without indicating where they leave off, into 
the heart of the sermon ; but in all of them, while there 
is no display, there is, at the outset, a fresh turn given 
to the subject, a new and awakening train of thought 
started. Robertson's introductions give the idea of a 
steel forceps seizing upon an object with tenacious 
grasp, and holding it up with perfect ease and power, 
turning it round, and then thrusting it into the glow- 
ing fire of thought, and welding it with the hammer 
of an earnest purpose : his introduction seems to say, 



A.VAL VS/S AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 337 

" I have thought tliis subject through ; I have gone 
to the heart of it ; I intend to treat it in my own 
way, and out of my own head ;" and then the preacher 
proceeds to lay the subject open, with the same free and 
confident power. There is no parading of theological or 
philological pedantry ; he is evidently not talking to 
scholars or philosophers, but he is talking to men — to 
thinking and feeling men. Perhaps the epithet which 
would best characterize his introductions is, manly ; just 
like the greeting of one genuine man to another, with no 
servility and no concealment, and yet with a certain 
thoughtfulness and art. The introduction to the sermon 
on " Caiaphas' View of a Vicarious Atonement" (First 
Series, p. 164) is a masterpiece of elaborate and subtile 
thought, as preparing the way for a remarkable and 
original view of the atonement ; but generally he begins 
with a simple, strong, and interesting train of thought, 
without a shadow of learned affectation, or even of mock 
rhetoric ; as, for instance, in the sermon on " Worldli- 
ness" (Second Series, p. 173), from the text i John 
2 : 15-17. This introduction, while it is simple and 
easy to comprehend, yet contains an extremely interest- 
ing and profound question, to the solution of which the 
mind of the hearer is excited and pushed on. The some- 
what extended introduction to the sermon on " Realizing 
the Second Advent" (First Series, p. 180) is a fine exam- 
ple of the plain, strong, unpedantic, and yet fresh and 
original way in which this preacher takes up a theme ; it 
is the highest art of a cultured and philosophic mind, 
determined to be simple, determined to be true and 
practical, and to be understood by all. 

Robertson's introductions are, in fact, unconscious ex- 
hibitions of the man himself, of his earnest, penetrating, 
and, as it were, military mind, that surveys the field at a 



33^ HOMILETICS PROPER, 

glance, and at once seizes upon the nnost advantageous 
positions to bring his forces into action. He stands be- 
fore us at the instant he begins to speak, an able and 
sincere teacher, who must be attended to ; he wins, in 
his very introduction, our respect for himself, if not our 
convictions of the truth of what he says ; and the hearer 
Avishes to hear such a man through, which is an important 
point gained. That is, perhaps, the great end of the in- 
troduction, which should excite a strong and healthy feel- 
ing of expectation for what is to follow. 

The introductions of J. H. Newman's sermons are 
generally very happy, easy, and at the same time cal- 
culated to interest and attract. They contain some 
fresh thought, but clothed in simple language, e.g., in a 
sermon upon " hypocrisy," he begins thus : " Hypocrisy 
is a serious word. We are accustomed to consider the 
hypocrite as a hateful, despicable character, and an un- 
common one. How is it, then, that our blessed Lord, 
when surrounded by an innumerable multitude, began, 
first of all, to warn his disciples against hypocrisy, as 
though they were in special danger of becoming like 
those base deceivers, the Pharisees ? Thus an instructive 
subject is open to our consideration, which we will now 
pursue." ^ 

What is an introduction ? (Lat. exordium, Gr. proem.) 
To speak in general terms, it is something which conducts 
to the real subject, but which is not itself the real subject. 
It is not, strictly speaking, the beginning of the discourse, 
but it leads to the beginning. It does not even include all 
that is preliminary to the proposition in the way of actual 
explanation or clearing up of difficulties ; but it has regard 
rather to the state of mind of the audience and of the 



Parochial and Plain Sermons," Ser. loth. 



ANAL YSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 339 

speaker, putting the speaker in correspondence with the 
audience. 

We would, therefore, more fully define a true intro- 
duction to be, all that precedes the real discussion of the 
subject, and which is fitted to secure the 

favorable attention of the hearer to the I^^fini^io" of 
,1 introduction, 

speaker and to his theme. 

Ouintilian says, "An exordium is designed to make 
the hearer think favorably of what the speaker is about 
to say." Schott's definition is, "All that part of a 
sermon which is intended to prepare the hearers for the 
body of the sermon, by bringing them into the same cir- 
cle of ideas and sympathy of feeling of the speaker." 
Vinet says, " The exordium should be drawn from an 
idea in immediate contact with the subject, without form- 
ing a part of it. It should be an idea between which 
and that of the discourse there is no place for another 
idea, so that the first step we take out of that idea, trans- 
ports us into our subject." ^ 

As to the necessity of an introduction, although there 
may be cases where an introduction is not necessary — 
where the subject, for instance, is a very 
familiar one, or where the audience is en- Necessity 

• 1 11-1- of an 

tirely prepared to hear it discussed — yet the ^^y-^a 4.- 

necessity of some introduction to an impor- 
tant discourse is founded in nature, and in the very laws 
of the mind. 

Nature has few sudden movements ; the ocean shelves 
off gradually, and one season imperceptibly introduces 
another ; a thunder-storm which rends -the heavens is 
preceded by a period of impressive silence and warning ; 
a battle is usually begun by skirmishing and tentative 



* " Homiletics," p. 300. 



340 HO MILE TICS PROPER. 

Operations ; a legislative assembly does not enter upon 
important business at the first moment of its session, but 
the way is gradually cleared for more serious questions. 
The human mind, which, in its healthy state, has a sense 
of dignity and self-respect, does not like to be hurried, 
or compelled to move by another's impulse rather than 
by its own voluntary act ; it will not be pushed, but may 
be drawn. Some preparation of the mind is needed on 
the part of the audience for the full influence of the ora- 
tor to be felt, or for the permanent influence and adoption 
of new ideas. 

An introduction is generally necessary when a pecu- 
liar theme is to be treated of, or to be drawn from the 
text. When the theme is an ordinary or very familiar 
one, there is no necessity of a special exordium. The 
reasons for an exordium in political and forensic address, 
and which are absolutely required to meet opposing opin- 
ions and party views, do not seem equally to apply to the 
preacher and his audience, who are, it is to be supposed, 
well disposed toward him and ready to hear what he has to 
say. Even the principle sometimes set forth that the in- 
troduction must be drawn from the circle of ideas in which 
the discourse is to move, is only partially true ; for the text 
itself has already introduced this circle of ideas, the intro- 
duction is made by naming the text — the path is opened. 
The text and the theme stand over against each other, the 
one being the comprehensive statement of the contents 
of the other ; now the aim of the introduc- 

Rhetorical j-jqj^^ rhetorically, or as it regards the treat- 

• i. J i.- ment of the subject, is to mediate between 
introduction. -• ' 

the text and the theme. It is the way of 
arriving at the one from the other. It is not precisely 
the way in which the preacher himself arrives at the 
theme from the text ; it may be a shorter or it may be a 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 341 

longer way. But the introduction is the genesis of the 
theme — the process of the text's crystallization into the 
theme. As the theme is the expression of the contents 
of the text, the introduction is the transporting of the 
hearer to where, so to speak, he will see and find for him- 
self the true meaning or contents of the text. It is 
gathering the different threads together where they may 
be seized and grasped. In occasional sermons, the intro- 
duction mediates between the text and the occasion, set- 
ting forth the relation of the subject to the time and cir- 
cumstances, and showing why it was chosen and its fit- 
ness.* 

But what, let us ask definitely, are some of the objects 
to be gained by a good introduction ? 

I. To remove actual prejudices against ^^J^*^*® *° ^^ 
the speaker. The preacher may have ere- • *. h t' 
ated an unfavorable impression by his course 
of action in some particular ; he may have aroused 
the jealousy or antagonism of a certain class in his au- 
dience — the fashionable class, or the conservative class, 
or the radical class, or w^hatever it may be. He may 
possibly have traits of character, which, he is conscious, 
place him in an unfavorable light with his hearers, 
especially in regard to his introduction of particular 
subjects ; he may have excited suspicions of his or- 
thodoxy, or, at least, of his sincere belief in some por- 
tions of the Christian faith ; and yet, although he is 
weak, imperfect, and inconsistent, the truth must be 
preached, the instruction must be given to the people : 
in the introduction, then, he is to feel his way through 
these popular prejudices, and dispel them, if they are 
unjust, without, perhaps, seeming to do so. It is 



See Palmer's " Homiletics,' p. 532. 



342 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

not often by direct allusions to himself that he can do 
this, but rather by indirect suggestions of the intrinsic 
importance of the theme, of the imperfection of preachers 
and of men, and of the perfection of truth. 

2. To create a favorable regard for the speaker. He 
may be a young man, a comparative stranger ; he may 
have an abstruse, or what may be called even an am- 
bitious, theme ; he should begin modestly ; the old Jew- 
ish rabbis used to say that '*the creation was made 
from night to morning, not from morning to night ;" he 
should avoid making too great promises of what he in- 
tends to do ; he should show an honest interest in the 
good of his hearers, without saying too much about it — 
above all things, avoiding flattery, which was the fault of 
some of the old French court preachers ; ^ he should en- 
deavor, in a simple, manly way, to bring himself into 
sympathy with his audience, and to gain their good will 
and willing hearing ; and to be modest and in earnest, is 
the best way to effect this. 

But while one should thus be modest it is not well to 
apologize in the introduction ; this weakens impressions 
and diminishes the sense of authority in the preacher. 

3. To create a favorable regard for the subject. The 
preacher is to turn the current of religious feeling, already 
set flowing, perhaps, by the previous devotional exercises, 
into the contemplation of some definite religious truth 
or duty, into some positive and special direction. In 
order to secure this end of a favorable regard toward his 
subject, (^,) he may state the intellectual advantages 
to be derived from discussing such a theme. The 
subject may be the doctrine of moral evil, or that of 
divine sovereignty ; it may be said at the beginning, 



* See Baring Gould's " Post-Mediseval Preachers," pp. 45, 46, 47. 



AXA LYSIS AXD COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 343 

that these are the greatest problems of the human 
mind, meeting the philosopher as well as the theo- 
logian ; that they have called forth the strength of the 
best intellects ; that no problems are more difficult, 
and therefore none more deserving of the attention of 
thoughtful minds. (^.) He may state the connec- 
tions of the subject with other more practical spiritual 
truths. He may remove the prejudice that the doctrine 
has no immediate practical bearing or utility, even as 
depravity, for instance, or the doctrine of sin, lies, in one 
sense, at the base of the whole Christian system of the 
atonement, regeneration, holiness, and the Christian life, 
(r.) He may make some historical allusions naturally 
connected with the theme, which always forms an attrac- 
tive introduction. (<^.) He may make it appear, at the 
ver}^ beginning, that the subject bears upon the welfare 
of all his hearers ; but one should be careful not to use 
hackneyed phrases about the greatness and importance 
of the subject in hand, and should shun stereotyped intro- 
ductions like the ''constat inter o vines'' of the old scho- 
lastic preachers. The classic orators, it is true, had intro- 
ductions prepared beforehand, which they could fit to any 
subject ; Cicero recommends this ; but times have 
changed, and the duty of the preacher, above all, re- 
quires simple earnestness and truth in all parts of the dis- 
course. He should so treat his subject from the start, 
that his hearers will be impressed with the importance 
of it, without any formal asseveration of its importance, 
(r.) He may make general and modifying suggestions 
in the introduction ; for this is just the place for 
these incidental remarks, which cannot have a proper 
place anywhere else. The preacher, looking forward, 
wishes to give a certain turn to the discourse, or to draw 
forth a new idea or lesson from the text. In the in- 



344 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

troduction he may skillfully prepare the way for this ; he 
may make the groove, which he will widen and deepen 
for the sermon to run in. In the introduction, also, he 
may set aside, in a few words, any false impressions 
which a certain text, or the foreshadowing of a certain 
subject, may awaken ; here, in a word, he is still free ; 
he has not yet bound himself to any particular line of 
thought, and he has the advantage of the fresh state of 
mind of his audience, and of the natural curiosity which 
is awaked at the first words of a discourse, to see what it 
may be, and what may be the metal of the speaker. 

The qualities of a good introduction may be resolved 
chiefly into four — simplicity, modesty, fit- 
Quali les of a j^^gg^ ^^^ suggestiveness. 

introTction. ^' Simplicity. The first moments of a 
discourse, as has been said, are often the 
critical moments, and success or failure is sometimes con- 
tained in them ; for, one may see, that to begin a sermon 
in a stilted or highly artificial manner, is to insure its 
condemnation ; but as an ocean steamer puts to sea, 
when she is fully ready, with a steady motion, so a ser- 
mon should begin without display, but with a full and 
firm consciousness of power to reach the end in view. 

This simplicity in the introduction may be violated, 
{a.') By too great abstruseness. There may be an in- 
teresting thought in the introduction, but it should not 
be so difficult and deep as at once to discourage atten- 
tion ; it should be natural rather than abstruse. (^.) By 
too earnest argument. One should not plunge at once 
into argument, but should enter more cautiously upon 
the open, agitated sea of discussion. (^.) By too im- 
passioned and imaginative language. An introduction 
should generally be calm. Coquerel says the occasion 
is extremely rare in the eloquence of the pulpit, for an 



AiVALVSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON 345 

exordium to enter ex abrupto upon a theme. If the 
first words are uttered with vehemence the orator falls 
under the blow of Horace's question : " Quid dignum 
tanto fcrct Jiic pi'oniissor Jiiatu f * 

And if the speaker succeed in thus commanding atten- 
tion, it is very difficult to keep it up to the end. The 
process will generally be the reverse of what it ought to 
be, namely, from heat to cold, from an artificial earnest- 
ness and excitement to apathy. 

It is better to rise from a calm beginning addressed 
principally to the good sense and understanding of men 
to the height of true feeling and conviction, than to sink 
from the height to the depth. The exordium of Mas- 
sillon's funeral discourse on Louis XIV., " My brethren, 
God only is great," is celebrated and is remembered 
with admiration, while the discourse is forgotten. There 
may be a supposable occasion for a very striking, yes, 
startling introduction, yet these occasions are rare. The 
Bible is our teacher here ; there is a quiet majesty in 
its utterances, a voice of simple nature, unadorned truth 
and calm authority, which it were wise to imitate. 

It is not well, then, to be brilliant immediately, and 
prose is better than poetry to start with. 

One may sometimes use a strong and homely figure to 
begin with, but generally anything like figurative lan- 
guage is in bad taste, until the mind is warmed up to it, 
and it glances off " like sparks from a working engine." 

Appeals to feeling are, as a general rule, altogether out of 
place in the introduction ; for what begins in excited feel- 
ing may end either in frenzy or in the depths of bathos. 
Bold flights of fancy and sensational language at first 
produce dulness at last. Cicero recommends an ornate 
introduction, in order to raise and embellish the character 
of what succeeds ; but that is doubtful advice for the 



346 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

preacher and for the present age. The simplicity of the 
introduction, however, should be rather in the expression 
than in the thought ; for it is a great blunder to begin a 
sermon with a trite truism, as, " The young may die, and 
the old must,'' and a very commonplace beginning gener- 
ally kills the sermon, and is not simplicity. (</.) By in- 
directness of thought or style. One should be nat- 
ural and easy in his introduction. All elaborate and 
circuitous language in the introduction, ingenious sen- 
tences and painfully wrought antitheses, are out of place ; 
for, generally, a direct marching up to a subject is 
best ; and to begin too far off may lead the hearer's 
mind to such a distance from the subject, that it cannot 
be brought back again ; but a simple directness, on the 
other hand, wins the confidence of the hearer. To con- 
ceal the subject of the sermon, and to spring it by surprise 
on the audience, appeals, after all, to an inferior motive, 
and seems to have something of clap-trap in it. The in- 
terest should come from the subject, and from one's 
power and earnestness in treating it ; this is the beauty 
of Robertson's introductions, upon which we have com- 
mented ; they combine originality and clearness of 
thought. (^.) By being too long. It was quaintly said 
by one of John Howe's hearers that " he was so long lay- 
ing the cloth that his hearers despaired of the dinner." 
There is no rule as to the length of an introduction, but 
only that it should be as short as possible without injur- 
ing the clearness of the statement, or the thought. 
Young preachers sometimes use up their best thoughts in 
the introduction, so that there is little more to say. 

The introduction should not be a small homily in itself. 
Palmer says that an introduction should never at longest 
occupy more than an eighth of a sermon. In a word, an 
introduction, almost without exception, should be brief. 



AA'ALVS/S A. YD COMPOSITIOX OF SERMON. 347 

Cut down introductions mercilessly. Hearers like to have 
a preacher get right at the heart of his subject as soon as 
possible, and are wearied with tediously long prefatory re- 
marks ; nor does divine truth lie in such unfortunate and 
obscure circumstances that it needs protracted effort to 
bring it to light, or to introduce it to the human mind. 
Biblical truth does indeed differ from scientific truth in 
this respect, that it is familiar and open to all, and that 
it is outwardly received as authority. 

Augustine's introductions are brief, simple, and beau- 
tiful. Theremin is particularly opposed to long intro- 
ductions ; he says, " time spent in merely paving the 
way for the idea (of the discourse) might better be em- 
ployed in the development of the idea itself." He 
recommends the immediate connection of the idea with 
some one of those plain moral or religious ideas which all 
understand and approve, namely, truth, happiness, or 
duty, and which can be done without circumlocution. 
No introduction is better than one which is long and weari- 
some. In fact, no introduction is best of all, if none is 
needed. Interest in the main subject is wasted, and can- 
not be easily revived. It is the experience of preachers, 
which is itself suggestive, that as one grows older he is 
inclined to cut off several pages of the introductions 
of his earlier written sermons. 

2. Modesty. Self-conceit in the introduction is fatal ; 
and true modesty is ever the most effectual way of gain- 
ing the good will of an audience. 

Allusions to one's self should be rare, and, if made, 
should be made with genuine delicacy ; for any want of 
respect in the speaker's manner toward the audience is 
revenged, often, by their indignation and contempt. 
A lofty style, to begin with, offends modesty as well as 
simplicity ; any exhibition of a sense of superior learn- 



34^ HOMILETICS PROPER. 

ing, wisdom, or thought is unfortunate ; and no modest 
man, even though he assume the office of teacher, will 
have such a feeling. 

In Hobbes's " Brief to the Art of Rhetoric," he says, 
" That the hearer may be favorable to the speaker, two 
things are required : that he love him or he pity him." 
Now no one can love or pity a conceited man ; and yet 
modesty is not to sink into feebleness or self-humiliation, 
though the ancient orators recommend even timidity in 
the introduction, in order to win sympathy ; but this, of 
course, could not be recommended to a Christian preach- 
er ; " for God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of 
power, of love, and of a sound mind." Still, one who 
rises to speak on the great themes of the gospel, with a 
due sense of the responsibility of souls committed to his 
charge and guidance, may have a reasonable fear of not 
being equal to the greatness of the occasion. 

3. Fitness. By this is meant that the introduction 
should be in keeping and harmony with the sermon ; it 
should spring from a thorough knowledge of the definite 
aim one has in view in the sermon. It implies adapta- 
tion, pertinence, and good judgment. 

The introduction should have a proportionate and sym- 
metrical relation, also, to the theme ; it should not be 
invested with independent proportions, as if it were a sub- 
ject of its own, nor should it have the infelicity to fore- 
stall the argument or the important thoughts of the ser- 
mon, so that the interest should be all taken up in the 
introduction ; it should be confined to its own place and 
work. 

4. Suggestiveness. The fruitful, suggestive, and 
original character of Robertson's introductions has been 
dwelt upon ; in them th-e attention of the audience 
is immediately fastened upon a fresh train of thought, 



ajValvsis and composition of sermon. 349 

though simply expressed ; the door is thrown open to 
something new and powerfully attractive ; the mind is 
delighted with the prospect of obtaining new ideas on 
familiar but eternal truth, and of being led into a fresh 
field of instruction ; in a word, he succeeds in arousing 
interest, which is the great thing to be secured in an in- 
troduction. 

Of course the temptation here is to false originality, 
to the saying of striking things ; and some preachers 
have a quaint and pungent way of beginning a sermon, 
which fastens attention, and yet borders somewhat too 
closely on wit ; and it is very easy for a witty minister to 
be too witty. He should try to make his wit a dif- 
fused element of life in the discourse, rather than to con- 
dense it into a sentence which strikes too smartly upon 
the sense of the ridiculous ; and even that which is pro- 
foundly original may be simply and naturally expressed. 
One may, indeed, notice in some of our best New Eng- 
land preachers, past and present, that the first sentence 
of their discourse is often a very weighty one — a sentence 
of true philosophical profundity — though it is so well 
thought through that it is expressed in a plain and simple 
way. The first sentence is thus often the germ of the 
sermon ; and it is often recommended that the first 
sentence of a sermon should be one that sets people to 
thinking ; but this profoundness of thought at starting is 
a hazardous thing, and unless well done, it is a signal 
failure ; unless the thought is truly profound, and at the 
same time put in a plain and practical form, it either con- 
fuses or disgusts an audience, so that simple good sense 
in the first sentence is, generally speaking, the safer 
course. 

The following may be given as one example of a beau- 
tiful and suggestive introduction, from the old French 



35 o HOMILETICS PROPER, 

preacher, Michel le Faucheur, on the text in Rom. 8 : 27, 
" Nous Savons que toutes chases aident ensemble en bien a 
ceitx qui aiment Dieu. 

' ' Notre texte contient fort peu de paroles, mats dont le 
sens est merveilleusement fccond. . . . Tout ainsi que 
qtiand Dieu, a la priere d' Elie, vouliit ouvrir le ciel, comme 
a sa priere il V avait ferme\ la nue'e que ce prophete vit mo7i- 
trer de la mer, en executio7i de cette volonte favorable de 
Dieu, n etait pas plus grande qjie la paume de la main d'un 
homme, mais cepeiidant en inoins de rien elle couvrit le ciel 
de nuc'es et toute la terre de pluie, de meme cette sentence, 
quoique fort brieve, si vous la meditez attentivement, en 
inoins d' une heure vous fera voir, par maniere, tout le ciel 
rempli des merveilles de la providence de Dieu en la direc- 
tion et en la conservation de tous ceux qui V aiment, et vos 
antes seront arrosces de toutes parts des consolations de sa 
grace. ' ' ^ 

The sources of introductions are varied. To speak in a 
general way, introductions may be drawn from the con- 
text, or from the circumstances of the time 

wources o ^^ period in which the text was written, or 
introductions. , _ . , . , . .. 

spoken. In fact the mtroduction, if not 

drawn immediately from these, should at all events not be 
inharmonious in its spirit with the text itself. If after 
reading for our text an affecting narrative we begin to 
preach in a coldly moralizing way, we do in this way 
** rudely cut the nerve of harmony that connects the scrip- 
tural narrative with the hearts of our hearers. " 

But to speak more definitely, the sources of introduc- 
tions, although greatly varied, may yet all be classified or 
brought under four different heads : 

I. The circumstances of the text. The time, place, and 



Vinet's " Histoire de la Predication," etc., p. 107. 



AA'ALVS/S AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 35 ^ 

occasion of the text may be given and described ; as the 
scenic surroundings of Paul preaching on the Areopagus, 
or the description of Athens, of Corinth, of Ephesus, of 
Rome, as forming attractive prefaces to many a text of 
the Acts and the Epistles. The historical period and 
the exact historical circumstances of the text, and also its 
local and philological relations, are always admissible : 
indeed, Theremin lays down the rule that the introduc- 
tion, in some way or shape, should invariably be drawn 
from the context — certainly too rigid a requisition. 

2. The relations and circumstances of the subject. 
These are explanatory observations, prefatory and gen- 
eral remarks ; or, it may be, a single word in the text 
taken and discussed for a moment ; and thus the way 
is prepared for the real subject, e.g., " Holiness, with- 
out which no man shall see the Lord." Here one 
may begin to remark upon the main word "holiness," 
upon its real meaning, its true evangelical import, and 
this will lead on gradually to the subject which shall 
comprehend the whole text of which "holiness" forms 
the essence. 

3. General truth, or truths preparatory to the subject. 
This method of generalizing to begin with may, indeed, 
be carried to excess, and may lead the mind away from 
the definite subject in hand ; and it is therefore better to 
begin as nearly as possible to the thing itself, and not to 
indulge in introductory platitudes, as is often done in the 
introductions of Blair. It is well to take some specific 
truth or fact leading up to the subject, some fit compari- 
son or similitude, some historical fact or proverb, or some 
striking quotation ; and sometimes an imaginary case 
may be supposed : as Massillon's commencing one of 
his sermons with the idea of a trial or court-scene 
going on. 



352 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

4. Circumstances of speaker and audience. This re- 
quires great tact, of which Cicero's " Pro Milone" and 
" In Catilinam" are fine examples. 

Topics of introductions should be taken generally from 
things rather than persons, though historical examples, 
even if they are taken from secular history, are sometimes 
fitted to arouse attention, and they form happy introduc- 
tions.^ 

Introductions are sometimes called ** the crosses of 
preachers," because beginnings are difficult ; but no 
introduction is better than a bad one ; and sometimes 
it is best to plunge at once into deep waters. In fact, an 
informal introduction, which is simply commencing at 
once, is better than a formal one. 

As to the time of writing the introduction, every one 
is his own best judge : perhaps it should not be the first 
or the last thing written ; but it should be done when the 
mind is fully possessed of the subject, and when one can- 
not help saying just what he does, in order to lay the 
theme fitly before the audience. ** As the introduction 
is only a subsidiary and a preparatory part of a discourse, 
the topics which it must embrace, and the form in which 
it should appear, cannot be fully known until the nature 
and form of the proposition and of the discussion are 
well ascertained by the speaker. Hence the proper time 
for the invention and composition of the introduction is 
after the subject has been thoroughly studied, and the 
general form of the discussion well settled in the mind. "^ 
This is also Quintilian's advice, who is especially full and 
excellent on the subject of the ** exordium," proving 
that little can be added to what the ancients have said 



' See Day's " Rhetoric," p. 48. A series of hints as to the sources 
of exordiums, or introductions, is given in Vinet's ** Homiletics," p. 302. 
' Day's "Rhetoric, " p. 48- 



A.VALYSIS AXD COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 353 

Upon oratory.' Vinct says, " There is always an exor- 
dium which is better than any other, and it is that on 
which the true orator ordinarily falls ;" therefore it is 
well for the preacher to have before his mind, or to set 
before his mind, precisely what end he has in view, and 
what he is conscious he is able to do to attain that end ; 
and this will guide him to say the right thing to begin 
with, for the introduction should ever have an eye to the 
end. 

Sec. 15. The Explanation. 

The explanation {Die Erkldriuig) of a sermon embraces 

all that is required for the purpose of elucidating the exact 

meaning and force of the text, and of thus 

obtaining from it the true subject of thedis- ^^^^ ^^ *^^ 
, . , , explanation, 

course, it rerers exclusively to the text. 

Vinet says that " the explanation is purely defi- 
nition, and not judgment." It is the defining of the 
actual terms and contents of the text, so that its true 
theme may be distinctly presented to the mind. It not 
only embraces the etymological definition of the text, or 
that of its verbal terms, but, above all, its rational defi- 
nition, or that of its complete object of thought ; it is, 
in fact, bringing out in its wholeness the full and entire 
meaning which the text is intended to convey. 

An " expository" sermon may be said to be wholly 
taken up with the explanation ; but in every ordinary 
sermon, with few exceptions, the explanation has its dis- 
tinct place, and is applied to the precise matter of defin- 
ing the text, so that its true subject may be presented. 
It does nothing more than this ; it may suggest, but it 
does not formally state the subject ; it leads the way to 



Instit." B. iii.. c. 9. s. 8. 



354 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

the proposition and argument, but it is clearly distin- 
guished from them. 

A sermon, according to Vinet, really consists of but 
two parts — the explanation and the proof ; but we prefer 
to limit the use of the explanation to the simple object 
of defining what the text means. 

As to the extent of the explanation. The explanation, 

to speak in more general terms, comprehends narrative, 

description, or picturing historical discussion 

X en o e ^£ ^^ outer circumstances of the text, com- 
explanation. , . , . , , . . . 

bnied with a drawmg out or the mner sense 

of the passage, its real life, contents, and aim ; not so 
much for the purpose of one's own instruction and satis- 
faction as for the instruction and building up of the peo- 
ple (the Church of Christ) in the faith. The people have 
knowledge and understanding in respect of divine truth ; 
but preaching is to increase, perfect, rectify, and direct 
that knowledge. The preacher is to give a productive 
and practical aim to his explanations and instructions, so 
that the people may see how the truth applies to them. 

The explanation, therefore, should not be scientific 
wholly, but practical and edifying. The preacher's 
conscience and responsibility are often greatly tried in 
endeavoring to give the real explanation of a passage, in 
opposition perhaps to traditional renderings, and to his 
own preconceived ideas. Hs is never to set an erroneous 
rendering in the place of a true one for the sake of 
effect or impression, for this is a pious fraud. Still, a 
young preacher especially should not be too forward, or 
rash, in this rectifying process. The explanation instead 
cf being a dry ought to be a quickening influence. Ex- 
planation deals in words, it is true, but chiefly in things 
{sack erkldrungeii). It goes to the true teaching of the 
word, the substantial or spiritual truth, the real thought 



AiVALYSIS AND COMPOST TIO.V OF SERMON. 3$ 5 

of God, the divine fact involved, that which " is nutri- 
tive, edifying, sanctifying." ' 

But to look more particularly at the extent of the ex- 
planation, we would say that it includes both the fact and 
the sentiment of the text, in other words it has to do 
principally with the narrative and the exposition. 

I. The narrative. This is the investigation and set- 
ting forth of the more purely objective truth of the pas- 
sage in its relations to time, place, and cir- 
cumstance. It is viewinp; the text in the 



'fc> 



narrative. 



concrete. It is the consideration of the 
why, how, and what of the passage, especially in relation 
to the time in which it originated. Great skill may be 
used here in accurately developing, in their order of time, 
all the important and perhaps hidden facts involved in 
the text ; in taking it apart, and showing the true order 
and harmonious relations of the parts to one another and 
to the whole. Where the text is a very easy and familiar 
one, all the explanation that is needed may be included 
in a few words of the introduction ; but, generally speak- 
ing, some discussion is required to set forth the facts of 
the text clearly and distinctly, even without developing 
any new truth from it, or proving anything in particular 
by it. A lawyer usually makes the explanatory narrative 
the most important and telling part of his address or 
plea ; he shows his consummate skill in collating facts, in 
explaining circumstances and events, so as to bear upon 
any particular point or principle that he desires to estab- 
lish ; thus Cicero's oration for Milo has its chief strength 
in the exquisite skill of the narrative. 

This is also the place for description, especially histori- 
cal description, although that refers, strictly, to place 

' See Otto's " Praktische Theologie," v. i., p. 318. 



356 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

rather than to time. Geographical, historical, and pic- 
torial descriptions in a sermon should be brief, truthful, 
and vivid, and not highly wrought or poetical. The im- 
agination may be indulged, but it should be remembered 
that a sermon is prose, not poetry. When the materials 
for description are ample, they should not be so largely 
drawn upon as to make it apparent that the sermon was 
written in order to give the preacher an opportunity to 
discuss the topography of Jerusalem or Athens, or to 
paint a glowing picture of a sacred scene, in order to dis- 
play his fancy and learning ; but, at the same time, every- 
thing which tends to vivify divine truth, and draw atten- 
tion to it, and make it fresh and forcible, is perfectly 
justifiable. Whately says, ** Let not your sermons be 
avowedly hortatory, nor begin with exhortation ; let your 
apparent object be explanation. Ignorance is not the 
greatest, but it is the first evil to be removed ; it is also 
the one most in your power to remove, and it is one which 
people will not be, in the outset, so much disgusted to be 
told of. And do not think anything irrelevant, however 
remote it may seem from Christian practice, that tends to 
interest them in Scripture studies and religious topics." * 
2. The exposition. This is, by all means, the princi- 
pal part of the explanation. It regards the text in the 
abstract rather than in the concrete ; and it 

is more strictly the definition of the precise 
exposition. 

terms and contents ot the text. It does not 

concern itself about the text, so much as it does with the 

very words and substance of the text. It comprehends, 

first of all, a correct verbal definition of the passage, a 

literal explanation of the terms of the text — simple, it 

may be, in its results, yet one that demands thorough 



^ " Life of Richard Whately," v. i. p. 210. 



A NA L YSIS A ND COMPOST TION OF SERMON. 357 

study and scholarship ; and, in addition to this, and 
above all, it includes an honest effort to arrive at the in- 
ternal meaning of the passage. It is viewing the text 
more subjectively. It is looking at it, or rather into it, 
as taken out of its relations to time, place, and circum- 
stance. It is endeavoring to come at the absolute truth, 
or the general principle involved in the text. This is the 
most important idea of the text, because the outward 
facts and circumstances of the text are comprehended in 
this inner meaning. This definition of the idea contained 
in an important passage of divine truth is often the most 
difficult and taxing part of the whole sermon ; for noth- 
ing is more difficult than definition, especially the defini- 
tion of ideas. It is the complete separation of the idea 
from all other ideas and objects of thought. It is look- 
ing at it as a whole, so that the proposition follows this 
mastery of the true idea, or the essential meaning of the 
text, as a matter of course. 

There may exist doubt as to the true meaning of a 
text, and several meanings may be claimed by the best 
scholars and thinkers ; here patient and honest thought 
is required. There may be, also, wholly different ideas, 
and classes of ideas, drawn from the same passage ; and 
there may be, further still, various shades of ideas com- 
prehended in it : in the explanation, therefore, it is 
necessary not only to get at the best exposition of the 
true principle contained in the text, but to have a clear 
and independent idea of our own concerning it ; to come 
ourselves to a distinct and original conception of the 
truth taught in the text. This view should be clearly 
defined, and should be the result of accurate investigation 
with all the helps of scholarship ; and then what follows 
in the other portions of the sermon will have good 
foundations to rest upon. 



35^ HOMILETICS PROPER, 

There are some classes of texts which particularly de- 
mand explanation. Almost every text, being in a dead 
language, requires some brief explanation ; 
Texts that |^^|. those which absolutely demand it may 

, be chiefly divided into three classes : 
demand '' 

explanation ^' Typical and figurative texts. These all 

contain some true meaning, and that true 
meaning, or literal truth, conveyed by them, is to be 
set forth, e.g., Ps. 84: ii, "For the Lord is a sun 
and shield ; the Lord will give grace and glory ; 
no good thing will he withhold from them that walk 
uprightly." Here are two distinct ideas of the na- 
ture of God metaphorically inwoven (it would seem) 
through the whole verse. God is not only a sun — the 
source of light and truth — but a shield — the source of 
strength, protection, daily providential oversight ; he is 
the giver both of glory and grace ; he is so as regards the 
whole of our life, external and internal. 

Take even such a familiar text as the words of our 
Lord in John 4 : 10, its very profoundness lies in its sim- 
plicity. It requires thought to explain clearly what is 
meant by Christ's giving living water and to bring out 
the points of resemblance between living truth and living 
water ; or how they both equally may be called life-giv- 
ing. There are many passages which contain events that 
are figurative, as wxll as texts whose words are simply 
figurative, such as the symbolic acts of the Old Testa- 
ment prophets, and our Saviour's washing the feet of his 
disciples, and his driving out the money-changers from 
the temple, some of which actions are capable of wrong 
constructions. Then there are the parables that require 
study and thought to explain in an edifying way. 

2. Texts whose meaning is complicated and open to 
controversy. 



AXAL YSIS AXD COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 359 

3. Texts of deep and pregnant meaning, not at once 
obvious, but connected, it may be, with some previous 
truth, argument, or fact. Especially under this head 
are to be classed texts of profound spiritual meaning. 

The materials or sources of the explanation are mani- 
fold. 

I. Philological analysis. The f^rst thing Materials 
, . ', . . , - . or sources of 

to be sought m explanation, is a defini- explanation. 

tion of the very terms of the text, the 
coming at its literal meaning. This embraces a close 
and accurate verbal exegesis of the passage, and the 
different modes of stating and explaining the text, 
or the different views which may be and have been 
taken of it, as well as the refutation of false modes 
of interpreting the text, those, perchance, which are 
in common use. One may thus judiciously present 
the more correct translation of a text : e.g., Rom. 
12 : I, " That ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, 
holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable ser- 
vice" {ri)v Xoyixrfv Xarpeiav) ; the closer meaning of 
Xoyixf)y here, as is the sense in other passages, in John 
4 : 23, Rom. 7 : 25, is " spiritual," pertaining to the 
spiritual, or to the soul's life ; or the passage in Phil. 
3 : 20, " Our conversation is in heaven," where the word 
TtoXiTEv/xa^ rendered '* conversation," is, more strictly 
and nobly, " citizenship." The drawing out and binding 
together of a complicated parable, like that of the unjust 
steward, which requires the strict defining of terms and 
their connections, as well as the elucidation of the mean- 
ing of the whole, and the explanation of such a weighty, 
profound passage as i Tim. 3 : 16, are familiar examples 
of the absolute need of accurate scholarly analysis. Most 
of the passages which we may take from the Pauline 
epistles need something of this scientific criticism ex- 



360 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

pended upon them. But, as Coquerel says, the preacher 
should come out of the atmosphere of the school into a 
higher atmosphere of sacred criticism, where there is a 
simple and earnest desire to arrive at divine truth. In 
fine, the critical scholarship and pure learning required 
in the sermon thus generally come in the explanation ; 
there they find a true place, though even there they 
should not be obtruded, and should manifest results 
rather than processes. 

2. Examination of the relative position of the text, or 
the study of what is called the " context." This, in 
another connection, we have before remarked upon ; 
we refer to it now as having relation to the true ren- 
dering of the passage. The detaching of texts from 
their context has been a source of mischief in preaching 
as great as, at the beginning of the recent war, the too 
great separation of our smaller military divisions from 
the main body was to the success of our arms. The 
words of our Lord, as they are of special weight, should 
not be isolated, but should be carefully interpreted as 
they stand in connection with all their circumstances of 
time, place, and occasion. 

3. Comparison with parallel passages and with the 
main scope of Scripture. This fills up cavities, enriches 
the meaning, clears obscurities, and modifies and defines 
the limits of the truth taught by the particular passage. 

4. Development of historical facts. The preacher 
ought not to presume too much on the intelligence of his 
congregation in this respect — that they are all well in- 
formed even on the most familiar historical points ; but 
he should bring to bear the animating influence of a rich 
and wide historical knowledge. This is a great source 
of interest. The most minute historical allusion often 
throws sudden light upon the text. John 7 : 37, "In the 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 3^1 

last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and 
cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me 
and drink." This was uttered upon the very day on 
which the priests employed the symbol of water in the 
temple, and in many ways made this water-symbolism 
strikingly prominent. As another instance, Matthew, 
who relates to us Christ's gracious words addressed to 
publicans and sinners, was himself a publican. In the 
parable of the wedding garment, there is some reason to 
think that the key of the story lies in the Eastern custom 
of the guests accepting as a free gift the wedding robe 
from the host and not himself bringing the robe to the 
feast. Such an historical fact as the military Roman law 
which required the use of any man or beast along the 
road illustrates the sentence, " If any man compel thee 
to go a mile, go with him twain." The closing of the 
gate in Oriental cities, even to this day, at an early 
hour in the evening, gives force to the Saviour's words, 
'* Strive to enter in at the strait gate ; for many, I say 
unto you, shall seek to enter in, but shall not be able." 

5. Scientific illustration. The preacher should lay his 
hand on this boldly ; and he may thus, in an eminently 
scientific age like the present, win new interest for religious 
truth, which is unscientific and undefined. What is called 
the modern science of " Egyptology," and it might also 
be now added the science of ' ' Assyriology, ' ' founded upon 
the inductive process, has totally demolished the triumph 
of false science — in regard to a large portion of biblical 
antiquities — so destructive of the authenticity of the 
Scriptures. 

In like manner geological science is a splendid con- 
tribution to theology, as to the main truth of the unity 
of the cosmical plan of creation. 

Astronomy, the star-eyed science, seems peculiarly 



3^3 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

allied to celestial truth, not only in a figurative sense, 
but analogically, as setting forth the unchangeable and 
orderly character of God's physical laws. 

Chemistry, too, opens fine Illustrations of revealed 
truths ; and of the correlation of forces, not brought 
about by mere laws of matter but by an intelligent cause 
beyond the phenomenal, and absolutely controlling 
changes. 

Scientific investigations upon the subject of the origin 
of man and the law of evolution In creation may also, 
stated In their just limitations, throw light on spiritual 
truth, and lay bare another of the grand and simple laws 
of God's working. 

Science, as well as art, and all the arts, will become 
more and more the auxiliary to the Interpretation of 
divine truth. Chrysostom, Luther, Chalmers, Arnold, and 
even John Wesley, were not afraid of learning and sci- 
ence, considering that the principles of the natural and 
spiritual worlds emanate from the same mind, although 
revelation will never be squared to science ; and we may 
look in vain for this, for the Bible is not, and never can 
be made, a scientific book. But there is one field where 
a little scientific knowledge is all-Important to the preach- 
er ; and that Is, In the geography of biblical lands : he 
should know the difference between Antioch In Syria and 
Antloch In Pisidia, and what was meant by the "Asia" 
of the New Testament, and the history and derivation of 
the ** Galatians" of Asia Minor, and such geographical 
and historical facts as clear up difficulties In biblical inter- 
pretation. 

6. Application of the laws of common sense. Every- 
thing must be brought to that. Great scholars some- 
times lose their common sense ; and the use of the 
homely and independent principle of common sense will 



AA'AL YSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. Z^?> 

do away with many perverse and fanciful interpretations 
of Scripture which have been sustained by learning falsely 
applied. 

7. The setting forth of the animus of the writer. This 
would influence the meaning of much that was written by 
John and James, and Peter and Paul ; and while the marked 
differences of the Pauline, Petrine, and Johannean 
manifestations of divine truth are presented to us in a for- 
cible manner in such a work, for example, as Neander's 

Planting and Training, ' * and in other good works on bib- 
lical theology, the careful study of the inspired writings 
themselves is better still. Inspiration admits the human 
element, and takes form from the peculiarities of individual 
mind and character ; and, indeed, we have reason to sup- 
pose that human idiosyncrasies were taken advantage of 
by the Spirit for the development of particular truths. 
Paul's mind, experience, and culture wonderfully fitted 
him for the expression and inculcation of the liberal doc- 
trines of Christianity, which embrace the human race, 
and the universal application of the moral principles of 
redemption. 

The peculiar condition of the author's mind at the time 
of writing or speaking is also important as affecting his 
meaning. Our Lord himself, when he was in the hum- 
blest and obscurest circumstances, spoke the words, " I 
am the light of the world." When Paul was in the 
gloomy depths of the Mamertine prison he exhorted 
men to glory in the cross of Christ. 

One expression, also, of a scriptural writer may be set 
over against another expression of the same writer, 
uttered in entirely different circumstance? and states of 
mind ; thus the character and history of David abound 
in striking contrasts ; cross lights are strong lights. 

Above all, as the Scriptures are an inspired book, the 



364 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

great aim of the expositor should be to come at " the 
mind of the Spirit," of the real author of revelation. 

8. By setting forth the animus and spirit of the age in 
which the text was written. The celestial utterances of 
the *' Sermon on the Mount," and the broad precepts of 
Christianity in the Epistles, may be contrasted with the 
narrow Jewish theology, the clashing Greek philosophies, 
and the imperious and ferocious ideas of the best Roman 
civilization of the time. 

9. By showing the character and condition of the per- 
sons addressed. " Feed my sheep" would not, in all 
probability, have been addressed to the loving apostle 
John, but rather to the ambitious, impetuous, forth-put- 
ting Peter. In like manner the Epistle to the Philippians 
was written to a kind of people very different from that to 
which the Epistle to the Corinthians was written. 

10. By showing the particular object for which the pas- 
sage was spoken or written. " Sell all that thou hast" 
was not spoken to a poor man, but was addressed to the pe- 
culiar form of selfishness in which a wealthy young man's 
impenitence was garnered up. Our Lord's parables were 
intended to arouse thought, and to sow truth in the 
hearts. of a people where the direct word of truth would 
have been treated with contempt, would have been tram- 
pled under foot. The Oriental indirectness of Scripture, 
not the less powerful because not at once perceived, is 
often a beautiful feature, which should be studied in some- 
thing of the spirit of wisdom and love in which it was 
originally uttered or written. 

11. By bringing forth the hidden tone and qualities of 
the text. That is, by hstening to it not so much with 
the ear of the mind as with the ear of the heart, and 
catching its true spirit. Even its rhetorical qualities of 
naturalness, beauty, and force are not to be neglected ; 



A.VAL YS/S Ah'D COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 565 

♦ 

but by long meditation, and, above all, by prayer, one 
should strive to penetrate into the inmost soul of a 
passage, till its full original tone comes out. One should 
look into his own soul, and see how a text responds to 
his own spirit, since the study of the laws of the soul 
now will give one a key to unlock spiritual truth spoken 
ages ago, for the human heart is the same, and God is 
the same. The study of the laws of the divine mind will 
alone enable one to penetrate into the hidden meaning of 
the divine w^ord ; the spirit only comprehends the mind 
of the Spirit. " The natural man discerneth not the 
things of the Spirit of God, for they are spiritually dis- 
cerned." 

As to the qualities of the explanation, it should be — 

1. True. It should develop the true meaning of the 
text, neither more nor less — not the meaning which this 
one or that one would give it, or which we 
ourselves, perhaps, would desire to give it. Qualities 
Honesty in the explanation strengthens all . ,. 
other parts of the discourse. One may 

strive for the greatest vividness of impression in bring- 
ing out the full idea of the passage ; but when he 
goes beyond the truth taught, then it is an unworthy 
means of impression, which will react disastrously. It 
is even better to understate than to overstate the 
truth. 

In regard to exegetical explanations generally, K. R. 
Hagenbach says : " Practical exegesis must be the result 
of scientific exegesis, and a conscientious preacher will 
offer to the people no exposition which cannot be scien- 
tifically justified." 

2. Perspicuous. The explanation is not the place for 
discursiveness ; there all should be exact and concise, 
clear and convincing. That is laying foundations. Defi- 



366 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

nition should be neat, proper, and finished work.' One 
should avoid learned terms, and should produce the 
results rather than the terms of philological exegesis. In 
the evolution of long passages it is particularly essential 
to avoid obscurity ; and it is well to seize upon the main 
idea of the passage, and make that stand out clearly, 
while the subordinate parts are grouped around it. 

3. Brief. Jonathan Edwards is said, by good judges 
of his sermonizing, to have spent too much time in 
exposition, thus sometimes even confusing the true sense 
of the passage. Modern learning should expedite ex- 
planation. But sometimes it is not possible to make 
the explanation brief, for the whole sermon may de- 
pend upon, and, in fact, consist of, the evolving of 
a particular and perhaps recondite meaning of the text. 
Brevity is violated, {a,^ By explaining things which need 
no explanation ; a sermon is often rendered insuf- 
ferably tedious in this way ; (^.) By seeking to explain 
simple ideas, or absolute truths, which cannot be ana- 
lyzed, such as ** God," ** love," " life," ** spirit ;" (<;.) 
By making side issues, or going out of the way to explain 
difficulties which the text might suggest, but which it 
does not suggest to any in the congregation, and which 
do not fall within the scope of the sermon to clear up. 
The common mind is wearied with such excursions to ex- 
plain difficulties that do not originate in itself, and which 
it cares nothing about. Solid difficulties it can appreci- 
ate, and it will patiently bear with their explanation. 
Those difficulties are chiefly practical — those hard things 
in truth, doctrine, and life, especially in the beginning of 
the spiritual life, of which all men have some experience. 

While the explanation is thus concise, it need not be 



* Quintilian's " Institutes," B. vii., c. 3, s. i. 



ANAL VSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 367 

dry. It should not be a mere analysis of words and sen- 
tences, but a search after the living truth, conducted with 
animation and zest. "Definition," Vinet says, "as 
much as possible, should excite and stimulate the free 
and vital forces of the soul. Perfect definition is that 
which at the same time gives knowledge, comprehension, 
feeling, and faith." ' 

4. Modest. There may be all the scholarship that is 
needed in it, but it should be modestly expressed. Any 
pretentious display of commentators and names of learned 
authors, especially foreign authors, if harmless, is foolish. 

5. It should suggest the proposition or subject of the 
sermon. It should build up the discourse to this point, 
where the proposition stands forth from all these prepara- 
tory scaffoldings of definition, firm and clear. There 
should be a natural and logical step from the explanation 
up to the proposition. The proposition — the explanation 
seems to say — is thus the great lesson of the text. 
"Whatever," says Abbe Maury, "in this part of the 
discourse, doth not lead to the principal parts of a ser- 
mon, is useless." 

6. It should bear upon every part, even upon the con- 
clusion, of a sermon. The explanation should skillfully 
prepare for each after step and thought ; it should lay its 
train for every future blow. While there is development 
after the explanation, there should yet be the introduc- 
tion of no absolutely new or foreign truth in the progress 
of the sermon, the idea of which, or the ground of the 
introduction of which, is not in some way brought out or 
suggested in the explanation. 

As to the time and place of the explanation, its natural 
place is immediately after the introduction ; but it is 



' " Homiletics," p. 169. 



368 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

sometimes intermingled with the introduction, and some- 
times takes the place of it. The more important of the 
two should precede. Nevertheless, although we have 
assigned to the explanation a formal place immediately 
after the introduction, and though the best authorities, 
ancient and modern, would give it this place, yet even 
this rule is not a rigid one ; for however or wherever, in 
the course of a sermon, we define the text, and bring out 
its true sense more clearly, there is the explanation. It 
may be direct or indirect ; it may precede or follow the 
theme ; it may be in the nature of elaborate analysis, or 
of more brief, condensed synthesis ; but the explanation, 
in all cases, is the use of the critical faculty employed 
upon the interpretation of the text, rather than the exer- 
cise of the logical or more strictly reasoning faculty, 
which arrives at general truths, and develops the ultimate 
relations of the truth which is thus distinctly evolved. 

Sec. 1 6. The Proposition. 

" A proposition," says Whately, ** signifies a sentence 
in which something is said, affirmed, or denied, of 
another." 

" That which is spoken of is called the * subject ' of the 
proposition ; and that which is said of it is called the 
* predicate ; ' and these two are called the * terms ' of the 
proposition, from their being in natural order the extremes 
or boundaries of it." 

A proposition is either logical or rhetorical. A logical 
proposition is a judgment expressed in words ; as, ** The 
character of sin is progressive. ' ' A logical proposition 
demands proof. 

A rhetorical or general proposition is the simple an- 
nouncement of any fact or truth ; as " The immuta- 



ANAL YSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 3^9 

bility of the law ;" or, put into a more formal state- 
ment, ** My subject of discourse is the immutability of the 
law." A rhetorical proposition admits of general discus- 
sion without strictly demanding proof. 

But what, definitely, is the proposition of a sermon ? 
The proposition of a sermon {Dcr Hauptsatz) is that por- 
tion in which the subject or the theme of the 

sermon is more distinctly and more formally a is e 

proposition of 

announced. ^ oor.^«« 

a sermon. 

The place of such a proposition may be at 
the beginning or at the end of a discourse, according to 
the method which we pursue — whether we take a given 
truth and analyze it, or from its various scat- 
tered elements we build it up gradually into ^^^ ° 

, ... , , . proposition, 

the enunciation of some general synthetic 

truth. 

The place, time, and method of announcing the propo- 
sition may be thus varied. 

It may, however, be laid down as an almost invariable 
principle, that it increases the facility of apprehension 
and the degree of interest on the part of the audience, to 
announce, as near the beginning of the discourse as pos- 
sible, what is the subject under discussion. 

There should be at all events a definite subject in the 
speaker's mind, a main idea about which all other ideas 
cluster, and toward which all other thoughts tend ; and it 
aids the hearer also to know as soon as may be practica- 
ble what this main thought is. The transition, indeed, 
may be somewhat gradual from the subject lying in the 
preacher's mind to the formal proposition in which it 
becomes embodied ; but the process should be toward 
that formal expression or proposition, thus transferring 
the subject from the mind of the speaker to that of the 
hearer. 



37 o HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Therefore, as a general rule, the proposition, in some 
more or less distinct shape, should, as soon as possible, 
follow the explanation. At all events, the preacher should 
have a definite proposition or subject to speak to, 
whether he announces it sooner or later, or whether he 
announces it formally or not. 

But the subject may be a complex one, involving 
many particular subjects, or propositions, under some 
more general theme ; different parts of the same subject, 
or different views of the same subject. In such cases the 
proposition must be brought forward in parts, in the form 
of a more gradual development of the subject, at various 
stages of the discourse. 

Perhaps, also, in some cases, it would not do to an- 
nounce the subject at once ; the audience are not pre- 
pared for it, or they maybe prejudiced against it, or they 
may be entirely ignorant of it. At all events, some pro- 
cess of preparation is needed to clear the way for the 
definite statement of the subject. 

The word of God is to be placed in a special light, to 
be adapted to the special need of the soul, of the time, 
of the cons^rep-ation. Of course the transition from the 
exordium to the proposition should not be harsh and 
abrupt. It should be free and natural. The principle 
of transition is one especially to be studied in the com- 
position of sermons. 

There are, however, few subjects that a minister is 
called to preach upon which, having drawn them freely 
from the text, he may not clearly and boldly announce 
at the outset, or, at least, in the initial portion of his 
discourse. 

Mullois, the Catholic writer, says, " Let it be perceived 
at once what the subject is, and what you intend to say. 
Sketch out your truth in a few sententious words, clearly 



A XA L YSIS A ND CO MP SI TION OF SERMON. 3 7 I 

and emphatically enunciated. Let there be none of 
those vague and halting considerations which give tlie 
speaker the air of a man who is blindfolded, and strikes 
at random ; none of those perplexing exordiums wherein 
every conceivable fancy is brought to bear upon a single 
idea, and which frequently elicit the remark, ' What is 
he driving at ? What topic is he going to discuss ? ' Let 
the subject-matter be vigorously stated at the outset, so 
that it may rivet the minds and engage the attention of 
the audience." ^ 

It is true that in the meditative discourse, especially 
recommended by Fenelon, in which the thought develops 
itself from within, and flows along in the more hidden 
currents of a contemplative mind, the discourse would 
cease altogether to flow where it was confined in the 
strict bounds of a proposition. In such a discourse the 
proposition is not formally announced, but rather is sug- 
gested through the whole course of the sermon. It 
dawns upon the hearer out of the apparent obscurity of 
the discussion like the gradual light of day. Such a 
style of sermon requires a peculiar theme and a peculiar 
genius ; and in unskilful hands, or from a mind not in 
the highest degree spiritual, if it were very commonly 
adopted, it would be disastrous to profitable and impres- 
sive teaching in the pulpit. 

The significance and importance of the proposition to 
the strength and beauty of the discourse cannot be bet- 
ter illustrated than in the familiar exam- -j-j^^ 
pie of a tree. If the argument forms the significance 
branches, the proposition forms the trunk, and importance 

and the text the root. How can there of the 

,. proposition. 

be a tree without a trunk, or a discourse 

without a proposition ? The trunk, before it disparts 

^ " The Clergy and the Pulpit," p. iiS. 



372 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

itself into divisions, is narrow, rigid, fixed ; it is not 
the graceful part of the tree ; it is not, apparently, the 
living part of the tree ; but how could there be any life 
or grace without it ? The proposition is just this defi- 
nite, unyielding, all-comprehending part of the sermon ; 
the strength of the discourse is bound up in it ; all the 
life of the sermon runs through it to the minutest ex- 
tremity, while it draws its life immediately from the text, 
or the divine word. As one tree has generally one trunk 
and one character, and bears one kind of fruit and leaf, 
and is distinguished from all other trees, so one sermon 
should have one subject and one aim. Dr. Emmons was 
of this opinion. He says of himself, '' For this reason I 
seldom preached textually, but chose my subject in the 
first place, and then chose a text adapted to the subject. 
This enabled me to make my sermons more simple, 
homogeneous, and pointed, while, at the same time, it 
served to confine the hearers' attention to one important 
leading sentiment. Those who preach textually are 
obliged to follow the text in all its branches, which often 
lead to different and unconnected subjects. Hence, by 
the time the preacher has gone through all the branches 
of the text, his sermon will become so complicated that 
no hearer can carry away any more of it than a few strik- 
ing, unconnected expressions ; whereas, by the opposite 
mode of preaching, the hearer may be master of the whole 
discourse, which hangs together like a fleece of wool." ^ 

Although we cannot agree with Dr. Emmons's view of 
textual preaching, and of selecting a subject before a 
text, it is well to have his positive views upon the matter 
of a proposition. 

The rigidity of a previously selected human theme may 



Park's " Life of Emmons," p. 294. 



AXALYSIS AXD COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 373 

sometimes act disastrously upon a sermon and destroy 
the life which runs in freer and at the same time deeper 
currents in a passage of the word of God, whose unity 
should be sought for in itself, and not out of itself in a 
preconceived proposition. 

But whatever may be true of a composition to be read, 
a spoken address needs some distinct subject to speak 
upon ; the speaker needs it to give him concentration, 
and the majority of hearers, also, who do not or cannot 
make accurate discriminations, need to have something 
definite before them. 

As to the substance or matter of the proposition, there 
are some rules to be observed. 

I. There should be a unity of the parts of Substance 
the proposition with the whole. The unity ^"^ matter 

f 1 1 • r 1 °f ^^^ 

of the sermon depends upon the unity of the .^. 

subject, and the subject is one which can be 
stated in a single proposition. There may be differ- 
ent parts, and widely distinct parts, of the subject dis- 
cussed, but still they should all be comprehended, or be 
capable of being stated, in one more general subject ; as, 
(i.) Where the proposition has several subordinate parts ; 
e.g., ** The means of spiritual growth" — (a.^ communion 
with God, (^.) cultivation of the affections, (r.) active ser- 
vice, etc. (2.) Where there is a general predicate of the co- 
ordinate parts of one whole ; c.g,^ " The nature, design, 
and importance of prayer. " It is evident here that the last 
is the main idea, or the general predicate of all, and the 
discussion of the others should tend to the confirmation 
of the last. (3.) Where there are other topics of inquiry, 
to which the proposition fairly leads. Thus, having 
established the proposition that there is such a thing as a 
visible church, we may go on to show our relations to it, 
and its relations to us and other men. 



374 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

2. The proposition should be plainly involved or im- 
plied in the text. Its great beauty is to correspond with 
the meaning and spirit of the text. No theme other than 
that which finds its ground in the text should be em- 
ployed. 

Sometimes the theme is apparent, but generally reflec- 
tion is required, a patient circumspection that takes in the 
connection of the text with all that precedes and follows, 
and that enters deeply into the thought and spirit of the 
writer. It is necessary to understand thoroughly the whole 
environment of the passage, so as to get at its main idea ; 
or, at least, at some legitimate issue, with which the main 
thought is connected ; and, if the text is complex, to 
come at the higher thought which binds all its parts 
together, even if this be not contained in the text itself. 
We may thus take for our proposition a comprehensive 
or a special theme, if it be legitimately drawn from 
the text — let it be, for example, that contained in i Pet. 
2 : II-20. We may inquire here what is the higher or 
comprehensive thought that connects these verses — viz., 
" The elevated mind which the Christian should main- 
tain in relation to earthly things." ' 

Often the text is the theme pure, as in 2 Cor. 3:17; 
and it would be pedantical in such a case to use any 
terms other than those of the text ; but it is generally 
necessary to bring what lies in the text into one particu- 
lar point of view. A sermon has been called an ellipse 
with two points, text and theme. This ellipse should be 
as perfect as possible. Sometimes the proposition is too 
wide for the text ; as John 14 : 13, " And whatsoever ye 
shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may 
be glorified in the Son" — it would hardly be proper to 



Otto's " Prak. Theol.' 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 375 

derive from this the subject of the general use of prayer ; 
the more h'mited subject is, " Prayer in the name of Jesus. " 

Subjects drawn from whatever text, or not drawn from 
any text at all, may sometimes be too big, or comprehen- 
sive, as " religion," " sin," " evil," " Christianity," and 
" God." Sometimes, on the other hand, the proposition 
is too small or too simple ; thus from the text in Ephe- 
sians 4 : 25, " Wherefore putting away lying, speak every 
man truth with his neighbor ; for we are members one 
of another," to make the proposition simply " The put- 
ting away of lying," whereas it is a more positive and at 
the same time more complex subject, viz., " The duty of 
truthfulness as made obligatory by the membership of 
Christ." Subjects may be too curious and insignificant ; 
like "The nature of white lies;" "The necessity of 
attending to one's health;" "The use of tobacco;" 
** The number of times prayer should be made daily ;" 
"newspaper slanders;" and "extravagance in dress;" 
things of considerable practical importance, it may be, 
and which may be noticed incidentally, but which are 
not worthy of forming in themselves the sole theme of 
a sacred discourse, not being the simple expression of 
comprehensive principles, whether good or bad, but 
rather the outcomes of actual life. 

Preachers should strike the parent vice on the head, 
and not run around after the thousand little wriggling 
snaky brood. 

The same text may have different sides to it, and may 
suggest quite different themes ; how many sides, for in- 
stance, a text like Matthew 6 : 13 has ! All that we should 
be careful for is, that the theme be truly grounded in the 
text. Sometimes we cannot find a text which corre- 
sponds precisely to our subject ; the proposition should 
then be made as identical as possible, and we may be 



37^ HOMILETICS PROPER. 

obliged to use a general text in preaching on a particular 
theme, and so vice versa. 

3. The proposition should include, essentially, all that 
is to be discussed in the sermon ; no less and no more. 
The proposition is comprehended in the text, and the 
sermon in the proposition ; one should therefore endeavor 
to make every word in the proposition suggestive of the 
sermon. The sermon or discussion is contained in the 
proposition as parts in a whole. The proposition is a 
handle of the sermon, to take it all up together, and a 
rudder of the sermon, to guide it in its definite course of 
thought. In a doctrinal sermon, especially, the proposi- 
tion should be restricted to exactly what is discussed, ex- 
cept when a special advantage is to be gained by a con- 
nected view of the relations of doctrines ; therefore we 
should strive to make the proposition as wide and com- 
prehensive as we wish to make the discussion itself. 

As to the structure and qualities of the proposition, the 
general idea of a good proposition is, that it 

Structure should be, 

^ , I. Plain and simple. It should be plain 

of the ^ ^ 

proposition. ^^^ simple without being commonplace. 
This simplicity of form may be violated, {a.^ 
By too scientific and philosophical a statement of the 
theme. It should, on the contrary, be as concrete and 
popular as possible. Abstract and singular themes char- 
acterized the preaching of the eighteenth century ; thus 
one of Reinhard's themes for a sermon was, " Upon 
the habit of the human mind to be indifferent toward a 
long and earnestly desired good, when the moment of 
possession came." Another instance of a strained prop- 
osition is also from the German, "That it is not diffi- 
cult for the Christian to make himself friends in entirely 
unexpected and disagreeable situations." 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 377 

(^.) By the typical and metaphysical statement, a form 
not to be used when the text itself is a figure. Figure 
in a proposition, it is true, is sometimes beautiful : such 
as "Christ the good shepherd," ''Christ the rock of 
ages." But this last form of typifying the Saviour has 
been carried to an extravagant pitch ; and German 
preachers have preached upon "Christ a carpenter,** 
"a hat-maker," "a tailor," and "a clucking hen.'* 
Anything fanciful in the proposition is peculiarly out of 
place ; for if plain, strong common sense should appear 
anywhere, it is in the proposition ; there may be carving 
and ornament in other parts of the vessel, but we want 
the rudder to be made of oak and iron. These are some 
illustrations of propositions from the German preacher 
Harms : " Unbelief is ingratitude," or shorter still, 
" Unglaube ist Undank." "The happiness of the un- 
happy." 

" Where your treasure is there your heart is.'* 

(i.) As thou lovest so thou livest. 

(2.) As thou livest so thou diest. 

(3.) As thou diest so thou continuest. 

These are from Schleiermacher : 

" Love is the fulfilling of the law." 

(i.) It teaches all. 

(2.) It does all. 

(3.) It possesses all. 

" What we should fear and what we should not fear." 

(i.) What not. 

(2.) What. 

This is from Tholuck : 

How God draws near to man and how man draws 
near to God." 

This is from Palmer : 

" What we are ; what we shall be ; what we should be.** 



37S IIOMILETICS PJ^OPjEH, 

2. Neat and condensed. Tliis is for its easier use and 
remembrance. All unnecessary synonyms and weakening 
qualifications are to be avoided in the proposition. Com- 
pactness is an especial good quality. Any superfluous dis- 
junctix'cs, such as "or," "notwithstanding." "neverthe- 
less," " so far forth," etc., should be dispensed with, and 
neat strength should be sought for. The proposition 
may sometimes comprehend in itself the divisions of the 
sermon, and announce them, thus making all the merely 
mechanical parts of the sermon as compact as possible ; 
and this, perhaps, is the best way, generally, to construct 
a proposition. The proposition may also consist of the 
grand divisions themselves. There may be several propo- 
sitions ; these form parts of one subject : coming one after 
another, they thus gradually develop the entire thought, 
subject, or comprehensive proposition. 

3. Specific. Even the unity of the proposition must 
be sometimes sacrificed to attain this particularity of 
theme. The discussion of specific subjects — of the 
species under the genus, of the particular under the 
general — is indicative of an acute mind. The more 
restricted a proposition is, the smaller portion of a truth 
discussed, if ably discussed, the more intensity of inter- 
est will be aroused, and the more impression for good 
will be made. Where different kinds of propositions 
offer themselves, then the more specific one is to be 
preferred ; and every proposition should express a definite 
and complete idea. 

4. It should not be stated in the language of the text. 
There should be a fresh form given to it ; and although 
drawn immediately from the text, it should, if possible, 
present some new form or aspect of the old truth. An 
exception to this rule is, where the text is itself propo- 
sitional in form, and makes a complete theme, as in that 



A NA L YSIS A ND COMPOST TION OF SERMON. 379 

noblest and profoundest text in the Bible, " For God is 
love." 

And sometimes, also, the title of a sermon which is 
drawn directly from the terms of the text may form its 
theme. Thus a parable may form both the text and the 
proposition, or theme, of a sermon, without drawing out a 
definite subject in a propositional form, e.g., " The Un- 
just Judge," " The Ten Virgins," '' The Lost Son." 

In like manner in treating a scriptural narrative, the 
subject oftentimes may be simply the gathering up of the 
whole passage into a rhetorical proposition, or a titular 
form, as Mark 14 : 1-9, " Christ in the house of Bethany ;" 
John 13:18-30, "The going out of Judas;" Matt. 
22:15-22, "History of the Tribute Money;" Mark 
16 : 1-18, " The Resurrection of Jesus." 

5. It should be prudently expressed. It should not lay 
out too large a subject, or present it in too ambitious a 
way, e.g., " I shall prove in this sermon the doctrine of 
total depravity." " I shall explain in this discourse the 
apparent contradiction between the absolute sovereignty 
of God and the absolute freedom of man." 

Neither should it be in a paradoxical form, which al- 
ways carries with it something of a vain and egotistic air. 

6. It should be varied. Let there be no stereotyped 
way of stating the subject. Sometimes it is well to keep 
the main proposition in the background, and at other 
times to let it be the first word uttered, the first thing 
announced. As a rare exception, there may be through 
the whole sermon no definite statement of the subject, 
but it may be left to be gathered by the hearer. As a 
rule, however, rarely to be departed from, there should 
be a clear and specific statement made of what one is 
intending to discuss. 

In concluding this subject, the distinct warning should 



3So HO MILE TICS PROPER. 

be repeated, that the propositional form belongs almost 
exclusively to the didactic discourse, and should not, 
therefore, be invariably followed. It presupposes the 
synthetic method of treatment. It requires that a dis- 
tinct topic should be drawn from the text, gathering up 
and combining all the ideas of the text in a definite form, 
and then that the sermon should be built, not upon the 
text, but upon the proposition. This has been our usual 
New England method of preaching, which has come 
down, in fact, from the earliest Protestant preachers ; 
and it is not to be rashly or entirely given up, for it is 
admirably adapted to popular instruction ; but, as has 
been often urged, a return to a simpler and more direct 
method of preaching from the Word of God, and not 
from a human proposition which is drawn from it, would 
be healthful. This would be also, historically speaking, 
the ancient method. We have already seen, in tracing 
the growth of the sermon, how long it was before a distinct 
theme {Thcnia) began to be developed from the text, and 
to form the immediate subject of address, and to tie it 
down to narrowly prescribed metes and bounds. The 
necessities of a later philosophic culture and of a more 
logical habit of thought, especially in Occidental lands, 
demanded and produced the propositional form of treat- 
ing divine truth. Let us be careful, only, and not suffer 
this to become a yoke of bondage confining the free ex- 
pression of truth. 

Sec. 17. The Division. 

The principle of division (Latin, Distributio ; German, 
Die Theile) is a necessary and even beautiful one as ap- 
plied to a discourse when, in the first place, it is not car- 
ried to an artificial extreme, and, in the second place, 
when there is matter worth dividing. It does not invent 



A XA LYSIS AXD COMPOSITIOX OF SERMOX. 381 

the material for a sermon. It is not the original sub- 
stance of thought, but if there be already rich thoughts 
it arranges and disposes them to the best advantage. It 
is sometimes, following the Latin term, called " The 
Disposition," especially by French and German writers 
on homiletics ; but the term " Division" is a common 
one with us, though conveying a somewhat narrow con- 
ception of this not unimportant nor altogether unvital 
principle in sermonizing. 

The fact of having formal divisions in a sermon, and 
the character of these divisions, is influenced, of course, 
by the kind of discussion which a subject 
may require or assume ; since a certain prin- The division 
ciple of division is applicable to the peculiar influenced by 

character of the individual sermon. Thus, , , 

of the 
for example, the sermon may assume the sermon 

logical form of discussion, which proceeds 
in a refjular method of reasonincr, bv a series of connected 
propositions or divisions, each of which is true because 
the one that precedes it is true ; and all of these tend to 
some general proposition or result. This form of dis- 
cussion, it is evident, absolutely requires divisions. It 
needs a clear statement of the proofs, or, at least, of 
each successive part of the argument, and of the connec- 
tions of these parts. It should resemble, in lucidness of 
division and statement, a problem of Euclid. 

Where also the sermon is more natural and rhetorical, 
consisting mainly of a simple discussion of the text, and 
then of a series of inferences, or observations, drawn from 
the subject, expanding the theme into its various rela- 
tions and applications, good divisions are necessary. 
Divisions here are the clear marking of each new observa- 
tion, or thought, which, if not so marked might lead to 
tedious confusion. 



.382 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

This kind of discussion demands, perhaps, the more 
care in its divisional arrangement from its very facility 
and tendency to commonplace remark. F. W. Robert- 
son's sermons abound in inferences ; but they generally 
come in after an argumentative discussion, when he intro- 
duces a number of distinct and interesting observations. 
He thus mingles the logical and inferential form of ser- 
mon, which is a good method. Having thoughtfully set 
forth a particular idea, he draws remarks from it, and 
then proceeds to another part of the subject. This is 
illustrated in his sermon on " The Star in the East," 
Second Series. 

The contemplative sermon almost defies divisions, and 
scorns regular methods. It wanders "at its own sweet 
will." It is more liable to run into the essay style, and 
lose the form of direct address, than the logical or infer- 
ential modes ; and yet even a meditative discourse 
should be somewhat amenable to the laws of method. 

The textual sermon, following closely the terms of the 
text, has and can have no very formal divisions. But 
still, each distinct point or idea of the text should be 
properly marked, else even a textual sermon becomes a 
tangled skein. 

We thus see that regular divisions belong to the logical 
or argumentative style of sermon more fitly than to any 
other ; and yet, that all kinds of sermons demand some- 
thing like ** divisions," which clearly mark or set forth 
the different steps of the discourse. 

How may the divisions of a sermon be defined ? They 

are simply the different parts in which the 

What are the ,^^y^ subject is formally separated and dis- 

^ cussed. They do not refer to the free and 
of a sermon? ^ 

actual development of a subject so much as 
to the special points of view in which the theme is to be 



AXAL YSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 383 

held up and regarded. To make them requires a purely- 
intellectual process, clearly discriminating, analyzing, and 
classifying thought. They give a rapid and condensed 
aspect of the whole subject in its constituent parts, and 
thus the better enable the hearer to follow the thread of 
the discourse, which the preacher is to hold in his hand. 
More than any other part they mark Xho: plan of the ser- 
mon ; they are more important to the plan than is any 
other portion. 

The utility of divisions. An ancient father of the 
Church said, " Shall the adversaries of the faith be able 
to state what is untrue with brevity, clear- 
ness, and plausibility ; while we give so poor e u 1 1 y o 

. , 1 1 . , , divisions, 

an account of the truth that it makes people 

weary to listen to it, prevents them from gaining any 
insight into its real meaning, and leaves them disin- 
clined to believe it ?" 

The utility of divisions is seen in the fact that — 

1. They promote variety in unity. They do not pro- 
mote mere variety, for while they seem to separate, they 
really bind together, in a flexible but strong chain, the 
whole discourse. The articulations and joints of the hu- 
man body do not destroy its unity, but belong to one sys- 
tem, one organized life. Thus all the groups of ideas im- 
plied in divisions and subdivisions are referred to some 
common centre of life ; and they are not merely artificial 
divisions ; they have some good reason for them, bearing 
upon the true power of the sermon. A just classification 
of the various ideas or aspects of a subject implies some 
general law of unity which binds them vitally together. 

2. They promote clearness. Fenelon has made an ob- 
jection to the use of divisions, because, he says, they were 
derived originally from the schoolmen ; but even if they 
were thus derived, if, withal, they are valuable, there is no 



384 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

reason why they should not be used. Natural divi- 
sions of a discourse are older than the schoolmen ; 
they spring from the nature of things. Good divisions 
are nothing more than the clear analysis of any given 
theme of thought. They break it up into its component 
parts or specific ideas ; and this analytic process, when 
not carried into hair-splitting, aids the clear understand- 
ing of the subject. It assists the hearer to follow the 
road which the discussion takes ; and he cannot entirely 
lose his way, even if he should be for a time thrown out. 
It also prevents the sermon from becoming a mass of in- 
coherent and confused matter. 

3. They promote the progress of the discussion. Good 
divisions enable the writer to step easily from a lower 
to a higher level of the subject. They mark the logi- 
cal as well as the natural advancement of thought, and 
prevent it from becoming retrogressive or rotary. They 
thus keep the sermon, or rather the preacher, from 
wasting his power ; they enable every thought to have 
its due weight ; they prevent repetition. Good divisions 
are, in fact, the result of clear thinking. They them- 
selves often constitute intrinsically much of the beauty 
and power of the discourse. ** Aptness to seize the prin- 
ciple of division, and to effect the division correctly and 
fully under it, perhaps more than any other specific capa- 
bility, marks the degree of ability in the construction of 
a discourse." ' 

4. They refresh the mind and memory both of the 
speaker and hearer. They introduce breaks ; they 
enable the mind to repose a moment, and take a view of 
the field, to recall what has gone before, to note the prog- 
ress which has been made, and to look forward to what 



* Day's " Art of Discourse," p. 86. 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 385 

is to come. The mind rests in the trench in which it is 
working its way up to the stronghold, looking both back- 
ward and forward. Divisions also tend to keep up the 
attention and interest in the hearer's mind, to prevent its 
weariness, and to assist in guiding its thought. 

As to the number of divisions, the principle should be 
strongly laid down that there should be as few divisions 
as possible. Divisions tend to make a dis- 
course stiff ; for the sermon should be a liv- Number 

of 
ing growth from the text, a life rather than Hiv'sions 

a work. All mechanical and artificial divi- 
sions should therefore be avoided, nay, more, contemned. 
The number of divisions, however, is governed, as we 
have seen, very much by the nature of the subject itself. 
A very simple subject requires but few divisions. The 
more a subject will bear analyzing, of course the more of 
division, separation, and classification of ideas is needed. 
A difficult theological theme may sometimes require 
many divisions, and even subdivisions. 

There should be no arbitrary number of divisions ; 
and, indeed, it is puerile to multiply divisions merely for 
the sake of doing so, and of giving a logical air to a ser- 
mon. This is not the way wise men talk. Different 
forms of stating the same thing do not demand different 
divisions. One should certainly never introduce a new 
division unless it is absolutely required in order to make 
the sense plainer, and to mark the progress of thought. 

Claude says : " Division, in general, ought to be re- 
strained to a small number of parts ; they should never 
exceed four or five at the most ; the most admired ser- 
mons have only two or three parts." He comm.ends on 
the whole a twofold division ; in which this old writer on 
homiletics singularly agrees with the practice of one of the 
most accomplished of modern preachers, F.VV. Robertson. 



3^6 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Dr. Eleazer Fitch thinks that, as a general rule, three 
principal divisions are enough for a sermon. He takes as 
a model for the sacred oration, the oration of Cicero," Pro 
Lege Maniliay ' ' in which the orator has one design in a 
threefold division: "You must choose a general; you 
must choose an able general ; you must choose Cneius 
Pompeius. " 

Divisions indeed should be rational and natural, and 
they are the best divisions v^hich are clearest, briefest, 
and most easily retained. It is generally well to have 
the first main division theoretical and the second prac- 
tical. Yet if the theme be fertile enough, there may 
be three, but rarely, almost never, more than three, e.g. 
(John 12 : 46-50), " The truth of Jesus a new revelation 
of God to the human mind." 

{a.) Jesus, through his teaching, has given clearer light 
to the human mind than it had before. 

(d.) Through his life and death he has made known 
the will of God more perfectly. 

(c.) He therefore demands an implicit faith in him as 
the condition of the soul's salvation. 

As to the pure philosophy of divisions, every logical 
subject may be said to be in its nature dichtonic, or two- 
fold — the thing and its opposite ; every 

Philosophy metaphysical theme to be trichtonic, con- 

.. . . tainine: the condition, that which it is condi- 

divisions. ^ ' 

tioned upon, and the conception or idea 
which is developed from the union of the condition and 
its postulate. Tetrachotony, or pentachotony, or poly- 
chotony, are therefore opposed to a strictly philosophical 
method, both in relation to the substance of the proposi- 
tion and the reason and design of the division. 

As to the sources and qualities of divisions, there can be, 
in fact, no very definite, or rather rigid rules laid down, be- 



AXAL VSIS AXD COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 387 

cause these divisional qualities depend so entirely upon the 

nature and fruitfulness of the subject. Before, 

however, entering upon this topic, we would ^^"''^^^ *"^ 

11 • / 1 . 1 . t 1 , qualities 

call attention (this being a good place to do r j- • • 

so) to the interesting view of a German writer 
respecting the distinction to be made between the sub- 
jective idea of a theme and its objective and practical 
preaching sense ; and the divisional principle should base 
itself (he thinks) upon the latter rather than upon the 
former, although the former should be grasped. Thus, 
take the subject of " Prayer ;" here the subjective idea is 
the nature or philosophy of prayer, but the preaching 
idea is the power or the blessedness of prayer. This 
may be spoken of : 

(i.) As to the blessedness of the prayer of praise. 

(2.) The blessedness of the prayer of actual petition for 
what is needed. 

(3.) The blessedness of the prayer of thanksgiving. 

The following would be an instance of a subjective 
treatment of a text : 

Matt. 6 : 34, " Take no care for the morrow." 

Subject : " Limitation of our care for the future. " This 
forbidden care concerns itself : 

(i.) With incidental events of life. 

(2.) With unavoidable necessities of the future. 

(3.) With new duties which the future may bring 
with it. 

This plan, an interesting one, dwells upon the nature 
of this care, or the care which is forbidden ; upon the 
instances \\ here it is forbidden ; whereas the more prac- 
tical and preaching-idea of the text would be, " The 
reasons for avoiding anxious care for the future ;" not the 
care itself so much as the avoiding of the care, and thus 
following out the Saviour's positive direction. 



388 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

We would say of this fine and thoroughly German 
distinction, that, while there is force in it, and while 
preachers should, as a general rule, preach objectively, 
yet preaching sometimes gains in depth and richness by 
employing the subjective method. Where, especially, the 
subjectiveness is in the divine idea, and not in the human 
idea, or consciousness, which is usually a weakening 
method of preaching, then the sermon is really deepened. 
It loses something of the apparent element of practicality, 
but gains in the actual knowledge and teaching of divine 
things. 

I. Divisions should correspond to the nature and de- 
sign of the subject. These determine the character of 
divisions, and therefore to make them uniform and rigid 
would be to destroy the free development of thought. 
This rule forbids all stereotyped character of divi- 
sions. " The best practical rule for a preacher would 
seem to be, not to tie himself to any uniform method 
at all. Many men have many minds, and many sub- 
jects require different modes of discussion. As a rule, 
we strongly incline to some form of announced division. 
It may be set forth either in a continuous sentence, or 
by the more strongly marked numerical breaks, according 
as the nature of the subject may require ; but it should 
always be with sufficient distinctness for the hearer to un- 
derstand the general drift of the argument, what is the 
lesson to be enforced, or what is the truth which is to be 
proved. In the case of the extemporaneous speaker, 
especially, a well staked-out course of thought, with 
definite halting-places, seems almost indispensable. Un- 
premeditated forms of illustration may suggest them- 
selves, in the course of preaching, which it were a bond- 
age not to yield to. Yet he must not suffer them to 
carry him too far away ; and the taking up of one of these 



A.VALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 389 

announced heads both facilitates and indicates his coming 
back." ' 

The preacher should guard against two extremes, of a 
pedantic mannerism, running all sermons into one plan, 
and of a too vaguely announced plan, or what may be 
called " the flowing or faintly indicated announcement." 
In the last, which is the modern tendency, the preacher 
may get half through his sermon before the quorsum 
tendit is discovered. 

2. Divisions should be made to comprehend or exhaust 
the contents of the main proposition. This has regard 
to the relations of the division with the theme. This 
is the law of completeness in divisions ; and as to the 
main divisions of the discourse, it is absolutely essential. 
Divisions are to the proposition what the proposition 
is to the text. As the proposition aims to exhaust the 
text, divisions aim to take up into them the whole mean- 
ing and contents of the proposition, and to unfold the 
whole substance of the thought comprehended in it. 
Limit the proposition itself, rather than have it overrun 
the divisions. Divisions may, indeed, sometimes com- 
prise the proposition itself, presenting it indifferent frag- 
ments or parts, which together form the general theme. 
Thus one of Nettleton's sermons — subject, i. The de- 
parting prodigal ; 2. The returning prodigal ; without 
any other general proposition. 

3. Divisions should be governed by a law of unity 
which requires that each division suggest or bear vital 
relation to the proposition. This also has regard to the 
relations of the division with the theme. 

There can be no true theme which does not com- 
prise one generic truth, or one class of truths, so that 



' Moore's " Thoughts on Preaching," p. 108. 



390 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

all its subordinate parts are but specific divisions 
of ore general truth, and bear common relations to 
it. '* The theme in division is ever a class ; and its 
parts are denoted by the terms species, varieties, in- 
dividuals." ^ This subject, or theme, is, of course, made 
up of its own various attributes, bound together by a 
common law of identity ; and in division, this common 
principle of the relation of the specific parts to the gen- 
eric whole should be strictly observed. No other prin- 
ciple of division should be introduced, thus causing con- 
fusion of ideas ; and only those divisions which belong 
to this single class of ideas set forth in the theme should 
be introduced. No new classification of ideas should 
arise under a proposition which suggests one specific class 
of ideas, or one peculiar kind of attributes. To speak 
more generally, the one comprehensive and characteristic 
thought of the proposition should be reproduced in all 
the divisions, and every division should bear a necessary 
and living relation to this one thought, although the par- 
ticular points treated of in each division may be quite dis- 
similar as regards each other. And the division may 
not always distinctly express the matter of the proposi- 
tion, but may only suggest it ; yet it should promote the 
general result, and the great moral truth or idea of the 
proposition should run through every division. It should 
be seen that there is but one bearing to all parts. The 
subordinate parts should not efface the principal part, but 
all the divisions should be such as will conduce to the 
carrying out of the principal idea. 

4. One division should not anticipate or include the 
succeeding one. This, and the remaining qualities of 
divisions which we shall notice, have regard to the re- 



' Day's " Art of Discourse," p. 89. 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 391 

lations of divisions among themselves. The distinction 
which separates into subdivisions should be real ; and 
that which enters into one idea, or forms part of it, 
should not be made the theme of a separate division. 
Ideas which have a very near relation to each other should 
not form distinct divisions. There should be no blend- 
ing or confounding of subordinate parts. If a new part, 
division, or thought is introduced, it should be something 
really new and distinct ; for nothing weakens a discourse 
so much as confusion and repetition of ideas. 

The error may be sometimes the other way, and ideas 
may be produced in divisions which are absolutely novel, 
strikingly incongruous, and entirely trivial, as in a " Long 
Vacation" sermon preached by an Oxford University 
preacher on the character of Abraham : 

(i.) As a patriarch. 

(2.) As the father of the faithful. 

(3.) As a country gentleman.' 

5. Divisions should prepare the way for something to 
come. There should be progress in them. Yet, while 
they look forward to something more to come, they 
should not anticipate results, which are reserved for the 
development of the sermon, and especially for the conclu- 
sion. They should not hinder or break the continuous and 
free movement of the discourse ; they should rather aid it. 

6. Divisions belonging to the same class should be 
similar to each other in form. This gives a neat finish 
to the sermon, and promotes unity. 

In regard to the composition of divisions, which is 

simply the art of bringing into one view 

the several elements of a given subject, Composition 

of divisions, 
or separatmg it mto its component parts, 

we may, in order to obtain just divisions of our theme — 
' Cox's " Recollections of Oxford," p. 225. 



392 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

1. Divide the whole general subject or proposition into 
two or several particular propositions. These may be 
distinct, but true parts of one theme. 

2. Separate the genus into its different species. The 
truths of Scripture are usually given in a generic form, 
and they are thus capable of almost endless specification 
and illustration. 

3. View the truth in its various appropriate relations 
or bearings to other truths. One may be obliged to do 
this in order to eliminate the particular truth in hand, 
and make it stand out clear in its own proper place in 
the field of relative truth. 

4. Marshal and discuss the principal proofs or argu- 
ments of the theme in hand. A truth of Scripture stands 
on Its own ground of inspired authority ; but even this 
may be strengthened and confirmed by reasoning. 

5. Exhibit the grand motives of any given duty, or 
proposition including such duty. 

6. Illustrate the fact or duty involved in the subject 
in various practical ways and observations ; or, in brief, 
divisions may proceed by Classification, Analysis , Rela- 
tions, Proofs, Motives, and Illustration. ' 

A word might be said here before leaving this point 
of the composition of divisions, upon the artificial sys- 
tem of '* Topics" which comes down from the school- 
men, and which, though so artificial, is still worth re- 
garding for a moment. This system might indeed, like 
an old-fashioned fire-arm, still prove valuable if nothing 
better were at hand ; but it is artificial, mechanical, and 



^ The sources of divisions, according to rhetoricians, are manifold. 
One writer, for example, states sixteen of them. We would refer the 
reader, for different kinds of divisions which may be employed, especially 
in the textual sermon, and which are useful for reference in composing a 
sermon, to Kidder's " Homiletics," p. 201. 



ANAL YSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 393 

not to be depended upon. A few of these stereotyped 
" topics," or topical divisions, are the following, which 
may give some idea of their nature. 

Thus, subjects may be treated according, 

(i.) To their origin ; 

(2.) Their nature ; 

(3.) Their effects. 

They may also be looked at, 

(i.) As to qualities ; . 

(2.) As to obligations. 

We may again view, 

(i.) The doctrine, or what is to be believed ; 

(2.) The practice to be derived from it. 

We may still again treat, 

(i.) The theory ; 

(2.) The Ufe ; 
or, 

(i.) The possibility ; 

(2.) The reality ; 

(3.) The necessity ; 
or, 

(i.) The past ; 

(2.) The present ; 

(3.) The future ; 
or, 

(l.) The beginning ; 

(2.) The progress ; 

(3.) The end. 

We may consider the relations of a subject, 

(i.) To God; 

(2.) To ourselves ; 

(3.) To other men ; 
or, 

(i.) As a thought ; 



394 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

(2.) As a word ; 

{3.) As a work ; 
or, 

(i.) The general ; 

(2.) The particular ; 
or, 

(i.) The State; 

(2.) The Church ; 

(3.) The household ; 
or, 

(i.) Man In his nature ; 

(2.) Man as a member of society ; 

(3.) Man as a member of the Christian Church. 

Let us now consider the order and arrangement of 
divisions. The general principle which should 

Order and guide in this is, that divisions should pro- 

rangemen ^^^^ according to the necessity of the sub- 
divisions. i^^^> ^^ ^^^ ^^^ °^ arrangement which a par- 
ticular subject contains within itself when 
evolved by thought ; or, more specifically, (i.) By an 
order of logical necessity, as the discussion of the nature 
of the subject, and then of its circumstances and proofs, 
or of its what, how, and why. (2.) By an order of inher- 
ent dignity or value of ideas. This may be called the 
natural order. (3.) By an order of time ; e.g., reason, 
Scripture, experience, would be generally the best order, 
because Scripture includes reason, and experience, reason 
and Scripture. The order of cause and effect would 
come under this principle. (4.) Order of progressive 
strength of argument. We should advance from the 
weaker to the stronger argument ; or, one may begin with 
the strong and end with the strong, putting the weaker 
arguments in the middle. (5.) Order of progress from 
the abstract to the concrete — from a priori to a posteriori 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 395 

— from arbitrary ideas to the realized consciousness of 
these in fact and experience. (6.) Order of personal in- 
terest. Those thoughts and facts which most nearly con- 
cern our hearers themselves come with more force last — 
God, the Church, yourselves. One should so arrange his 
divisions as to secure progressive interest and moral im- 
pression ; he should bear down on the individual con- 
science and heart. 

As was said of the proposition, each division should be 
plain and perspicuous ; should be clearly cut ; should 
give complete sense by itself ; should not be too com- 
monplace or easy ; and it should be so announced as best 
to promote the clear progress of the discussion, and its 
remembrance by the audience. 

As to the utility of numbering divisions, and of an- 
nouncing numerical divisions, the tendency is certainly, 
at the present time, not to announce divi- 
sions numerically. But if it were not a ""^ ering 

divisions. 
paradox to say so, we think a numerical 

division is useful when it is needed ; that is, when it 
makes more plain the discussion of a truth. If a sermon 
is to hide thought, or to amuse an audience, then, by all 
means, omit the formality of numbers ; yet if divisions 
are useful at all, it may be sometimes useful to number 
them, and the subject itself may demand it. But the 
numbering impairs freedom, and imparts a formal char- 
acter to a discourse ; therefore we think it best never to 
number divisions, or, what is the same thing, actually to 
announce the number of divisions, unless numbers are 
absolutely needed to make the discourse more memora- 
ble and useful ; for, as says Quintilian, " division dimin- 
ishes the appearance of strength." ' Erasmus speaks of 



Institutes," B. ii. c. 12, s. 3. 



39^ no MILE TICS PROPER. 

too many divisions as an unmanageable crowd, vita^tda 
est semper partiuin turba, Fenelon also is greatly op- 
posed to many, and to previously announced divisions. 
He says they break the continuity of thought. A ser- 
mon hampered by these restrictions, he declares, is not a 
beautifully well-veined marble, but a stiff mosaic. Let 
us therefore look upon formal numerical divisions as a 
disagreeable necessity, to be avoided as often as possible, 
not looking upon them as the old Puritan preachers did, 
as an essential beauty. " One Mr. Lye, a minister of 
the seventeenth century, in a sermon on i Cor. 6 : 17, 
first explains the text in thirteen divisions for fixing it on 
the right basis ; and then subjoins fifty-six additional 
topics. Another writer of the same period, a Mr. Drake, 
published a sermon of one hundred and seventy-six divi- 
sions, to which are appended sundry queries and solu- 
tions -; the preacher telling us at the end that many im- 
portant particulars are passed over because he wished to 
limit himself to the marrow and substance !" * 

Those times are passed. Men have less patience than 
formerly for such minute elaboration of truth, such scho- 
lastic dissecting and logic-chopping. Sermons, without 
losing their thoughtful method, must become like other 
natural rapid addresses, in fact like earnest conversation. 
The more intelligent the audience the less necessity of 
formal numerical announcement of divisions at all ; but 
where divisions are absolutely essential for the solid 
mechanism or clear plan of a discourse, they should be 
distinctly made, yet in a workman-like way, and the join- 
tures should be concealed as neatly as possible, as nature 
conceals them. The law of easy transition should be 
observed. 



' Moore's " Thoughts on Preaching," p. 105. 



ANAL YSIS AXD COMPOSITION' OF SERMON. 397 

As to the place, or time, of announcing divisions, this 
may be either before the discussion, during its progress, 
or at its close. The last was frequently Lu- 
ther's mode. Generally speaking, it is best Place 

J. . . *. ^1 u • • or time of 

to announce divisions at the becrinnins^, 

announcing 
especially if the sermon is of a topical char- divisions. 

acter. While a cultivated taste would pre- 
fer never formally to announce divisions, utility is to be 
placed before taste in sermonizing. 

To sum up this whole matter we would say that " Di- 
vision" is simply breaking up a subject into its constitu- 
ent parts. It is exactly the opposite of " generaliza- 
tion." It shows what belongs to a subject by bringing 
into distinct view its several elements. 

It resolves the general into the individual. Divisiori^ 
from a common centre trace differences outward. 

To do this happily one should be familiar with logic, 
though in a sermon the oratorical method is often pref- 
erable to the logical ; but logic is at the basis of 
oratory. 

By neglecting the study of divisional arrangement one 
is apt to produce what Paley calls ** a bewildered rhap- 
sody without aim or effect, order or conclusion." Good 
divisional arrangement gives to a sermon what painters 
call "tone." The sermon which usually makes the most 
impression is that which makes its points clear. 

In extemporaneous preaching it is chiefly order which 
aids the memory, and lends force to the discourse. 

Announcing divisions is simply a question of rhetorical 
propriety, but we should not hesitate to do this if it will 
aid impressiveness and clearness. If we err it is better 
to do so on the side of plainness than of confusion. 



39^ IIOMILETICS PROPER. 

Sec. 1 8. The Development, 

The development {Die Entwickelung) of a sermon is the 
whole body of it as related severally to the text, the sub- 
ject, the proposition, and the divisions which serve the 
purpose of originating, marking, and limiting the devel- 
opment. 

The development, in other words, is the carrying out 
and the filling up of the whole plan, even as the divisions 
are the carrying out of the proposition, and the proposi- 
tion of the text. It is the actual treatment of the theme 
in hand, the free and living current of thought, senti- 
ment, and remark, after the definite subject and the gen- 
eral outline of treatment have been designated. The 
word " body," having in it the vital organism and all 
that goes to make up the living whole of the discourse, 
expresses what is meant by the development better than 
any other word. 

The general character of the development of a dis- 
course is decided chiefly by the character of the subject, 
although the object, or the main purpose we 
What decides have in view, has also great influence. One 

author indeed says, ** The object far more 

development , , , . , . , , 

of the than the subject determmes the natural 

discourse, order of our discourse. If our object is to 
convince, we must naturally seek the most 
regular way of advancing proof ; if to impress, we must 
follow the course of human feelings. Should we wish to 
make comparisons, we must enumerate all the parts of 
argument. Would we narrate, our clue then is the suc- 
cession of events. Thus then, each has its peculiarity, 
and the only art is to get at the true nature of the mat- 
ter in hand."' There may also be different modes of 

^ " Manse of Mastland." 



ANAL YSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 399 

development of the same text according to our object ; 
we may treat it in a logical or a popular way, a textual 
or a topical method. But the subject, nevertheless, as 
we should naturally suppose, determines its own method 
of treatment and exerts, therefore, the chief influence 
upon the development of the theme in hand. 

There are many methods of development laid down by 
different authors ; thus Moore treats of the development 
of a sermon by amplification, or the expan- 
sion of the leading thought of the text ; by Various 
implication ; by observation ; by confirma- development, 
tion ; by argumentation ; and by investiga- 
tion.' 

In order not to enter into unnecessary and confusing 
detail here, we will confine ourselves to the more common 
nomenclature, and will say a few words on five principal 
modes of discussion or development : the Expository ; 
the Illustrative ; the Argumentative ; the Persuasive ; 
and the Meditative. 

I. Expository development. If indeed one of the 
great aims of preaching is to instruct or edify the people 
in scriptural truth, then expository preach- 

ing[, in brinq-ing" before the people a lar^^e ^P°si ory 
^ , . , development, 

amount of truth and a wide scope of scrip- 
tural knowledge, and in compelling the preacher himself 
to study the Scriptures comprehensively, is one of the 
most valuable kinds of sermonizing, if not the most valu- 
able. Expository preaching ends in making a passage of 
Scripture plain to the hearer's mind and heart, i.e., not 
only in making the ancient truth clear, but in bringing it 
into the living present, in drawing out its varied lessons 
to the soul. It is not simple exposition, but it is the ex- 



" Thoughts on Preaching," pp. 96-99. 



400 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

pository sermon, or the real use and adaptation of the 

truth that has formed the subject of exegesis. 

Expository sermons may be of two kinds : 

(^.) A simple exposition of the several clauses of a 

passage of Scripture in their order. This is 

xposi ory ^g^f^j when the portion of Scripture is frag- 
sermons 
of two kinds "lentary, and affords no very contmuous 

thread of argument, and also when there are 
difficulties and ambiguities in the text to be critically ex- 
plained. Such sermons may embrace the exposition of a 
single passage of Scripture, or of a whole book of Scrip- 
ture in the exact order of passages. In such a sermon 
the lesson or the application generally follows the exe- 
gesis of each passage, in the order in which it occurs. 
This kind of discourse is more truly a simple exegetical 
lecture or running commentary than a finished sermon ; 
yet it was the method of Chrysostom and Augustine, and 
of the early preachers. 

{b.) The setting forth, after the exposition, of the 
whole, of the definite truth or truths which the passage 
thus explained conveys, especially in the way of practical 
observations and lessons. This comes nearer than the 
other mode to the topical form of discourse, but it re- 
quires a lengthened exposition, which really forms the 
body of the sermon. Chalmers's lectures on the Epistle 
to the Romans are fine examples of this kind of exposi- 
tory preaching ; he shows the connections of thought be- 
tween many detached passages, and develops their truth 
in more general practical propositions. This mingling 
of the textual and topical styles is perhaps the most 
profitable and instructive method of preaching, as well 
as the most popular and interesting. Were it more gen- 
erally adopted, it would infuse a new life into our ser- 
mons. 



A XA LYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 401 

Some preachers fail to make expository preaching in- 
teresting by their extremely dry and barren manner of 
treating the Scriptures. They bring their 
cxegetical process, instead of its results, Reasons of 

• 1. 4.U 1 •*. failure in 

into the pulpit. 

expository 

"In this kind of preaching you should preaching- 
take up your subjects, and treat them in a 
free, popular manner, and never exegetically, as in the 
schools. In your private study, and for your own bene- 
fit, cut and trim an exegesis as much as you will ; but 
never think of carrying your pruning knife and grafting 
tools into the desk with you ; or, if you do, keep them 
out of sight. Common minds love to see good work 
when it is done, but they dislike the labor of doing it 
themselves, and the tedium of standing by to see how 
others do it." ' 

Other preachers fail in expository preaching because 
they have no skill in grasping and grouping ideas, and 
the sermon has no unity as a work of art, and more than 
all, it leaves no definite impression. It is but a stringing 
together of short explanations, without recognizing the 
deeper connections of parts, the law of combination, the 
hidden root of doctrine. 

But the reason why preachers most commonly fail in 
expositor^" preaching is, that they do not put stud}^ 
enough into it ; they do not give close thought to the 
exegesis of the passage, to make it full and rich. They 
think they can " get up" an expositor}^ sermon in a short 
time ; whereas that method, above all, requires original 
investigation, and, perhaps, more close and searching 
study than any other, for in it there is less left to inven- 
tion. 

True expository preaching is, as we have said, profit- 

' " New Englandcr," Jan. 1866. 



402 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

able to the preacher himself, because it enriches his scrip- 
tural knowledge, and leads him deep into the word of 
God. It gives him broad views of revealed truth, it teaches 
him to read the sacred writings in a connected way, and 
it follows out an inspired train of thought or argument 
sometimes through a whole book. It prevents him, also, 
from misapplying and misusing individual texts, by tak- 
ing them out of their right relations. It lends variety to 
preaching, and does not shut it up to a few doctrinal sub- 
jects ; it ranges through the broad fields of the word, 
and goes from theme to theme, as the stream of revela- 
tion flows on through the varied regions of divine truth. 
Expository preaching may lose its interest by being made 
too formal, by becoming too orderly and topical, by 
drawing out the truths of a passage into propositions too 
distinct and rigid ; whereas the mind of the preacher 
should hover around the passage, should recur to it again 
and again, should (as has been said) suck the sweetness 
from it like a bee ; should, in ever nearer and more pene- 
trating ways, draw out its life and exhaust its deep and 
precious meaning. Exhaust, did we say ? That w^ould 
be impossible ; for, after all the preaching, how much 
there is still in the divine word which is fresh, unex- 
plored, and almost entirely unknown ! Expository 
preaching also suggests numberless subjects for sermons. 
It gives an opportunity to remark upon a great many 
themes on which one would not desire to preach a whole 
sermon, and it also gives an opportunity sometimes to 
administer salutary reproof in an indirect way. It is, in 
fact, the most free and practical method of preaching ; it 
comes home to the heart the quickest. It is, above all, 
feeding the people with the " bread of life," with real 
biblical nutriment, with that spiritual food which all souls 
need, and which this age and every age requires. There 



.LV.ILVS/S A\D COMPOST no. V OF SERMON. 403 

Is also in it less of the exclusively human element than in 
topical preaching ; the Holy Spirit seems to suggest and 
to provide the materials for the sermon. It is, therefore, 
a good change from the logical method, where the form 
often tyrannizes over the substance ; and a mingling of 
the two methods of topical and expository preaching will 
serv^e to correct the false tendencies of both. Dr. John 
M. Mason's remarks maybe quoted on this point, though 
they should be received with some reservation. He says, 
" Do not choose a man who always preaches upon insu- 
lated texts. I care not how powerful or eloquent he may 
be in handling them. The effect of his power and elo- 
quence will be, to banish a taste for the Word of God, 
and to substitute the preacher in its place. You have 
been accustomed to hear that word preached to you in 
its connection. Never permit that practice to drop. 
Foreign churches call it lecturing ; and when done with 
discretion, I can assure 5-ou that, while it is of all exer- 
cises the most difficult for the preacher, it is, in the same 
proportion, the most profitable for you. It has this 
peculiar advantage, that in going through a book of 
Scripture, it spreads out before you all sorts of character, 
and all forms of opinion, and gives the preacher an oppor- 
tunity of striking every kind of evil and of error, without 
subjecting himself to the invidious suspicion of aiming 
his discourses at individuals." ' 

2. Illustrative development. Under this form come, 
<^i.) The historical sermon ; (2.) The bio- 
graphical ; (3.) The descriptive ; (4.) Those Il»"st''*ti^« 
, . 1 . 1 , , development. 

discourses which are mainly formed upon 

natural, scientific, or even symbolical and figurative illus- 
tration ; (5.) Allegorical. 

' See Stanley's " Life of Dr. Arnold," on his method of " Exegetical 
Preaching" (Scribner's edition), v. i. p. 194, seq. 



404 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

The historical sermon has reference to the illustration 
of truth by the proof and evolution of facts, rather than 
of words or ideas. 

As the Bible is pre-eminently a book of 

historical r i 

sermon. facts, and has a noble historical develop- 
ment in itself, this may form a legitimate 
and interesting mode of preaching, as it was, indeed, the 
method of the apostles. As all men love to see truth in 
living forms, they will listen with interest to lessons 
drawn from sacred history and biography, which is, in- 
deed, the rich residuum of the deepest experience of the 
race. The great features and facts of Paul's life, in con- 
nection with the old religions and civilizations of the age 
in which he lived, cannot fail to arrest attention, and lead 
to nobler and higher thought. We are not to become 
simply historians in the pulpit, but to set forth and im- 
press the higher truth through the living lessons of his- 
tory, of all history, not only that of the Bible times 
and personages, but of man, and of the Church in all ages 
— of the great facts and events of modern days bearing 
upon the spiritual welfare of man and the interests of 
Christ's kingdom in the earth. Protestant preaching has 
doubtless lost something here ; and, in this respect, we 
may learn a lesson from the Roman Catholics ; they 
choose, as themes for illustrative preaching, the times 
and examples of eminent Christians, both ancient and 
modern. 

This kind of preaching has its own mode of developing 
a subject, and allows of a more discursive and generaliz- 
ing method. It permits a freer use of the imagination, 
where it does not transcend the bounds of truth. It per- 
mits the drawing of various, and sometimes unaccus- 
tomed, remarks and lessons from the facts evolved — les- 
sons often of a homely, personal, and direct kind. It 



^XAL VS/S AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 405 

has been said that " Demosthenes' arguments were 
Demosthenes' facts ;" and so the argument of every ser- 
mon should rest sohdly on facts. 

This species of sermon has already been spoken of 
under the topic of the interpretation and handling of 
texts. 

Biographical sermons, applying the scriptural axiom 
that " as face answereth to face, so the heart of man to 
man," are, if well composed, of great didac- 
tic value, and give opportunity for dramatic ^°S^^P ^^^ 

M 1 1 sermons, 

impression bearmg forcibly upon the con- 
science. It is truth run into living forms. The " CEdipus 
Tyrannus" and the "Antigone" have had more of 
moulding influence upon the moral character of men and 
nations than have Aristotle's " Ethics." 

Descriptive preaching should not be too frequently 
used, but if a man have power in word-painting he can 
find good use for it in the pulpit. 

But illustrative preaching is, naturally, chiefly preach- 
ing by illustrations ; and we would speak 

a w^ord more especially of the use of illus- ° 

^ ^. , . -T^i • 1- • illustrations 

trations m preaching. The judicious use .^^ preaching. 

of illustrations is to be highly commended. 
When Christ pointed to the lilies of the field by way of 
interpreting moral and spiritual truth, he opened the 
volume of the visible world to the preacher, as a reve- 
lation of God full of spiritual types. In like manner 
the Psalms, and especially the book of Job, are drawn 
from the evidences of the divine working in and through 
living things. They teach from the known to the un- 
known, from the visible to the invisible. 

The true preacher is shown in his ability to body forth 
spiritual ideas in forms that may, as it were, be seen and 
handled. This is to take truth out of its hidden rela- 



4o6 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

tions and make it distinctly seen by the most simple 
mind. This is putting the abstract into the concrete, 
which is the form of life. If the illustrations are fresh 
and vivid they light up a sermon, and aid both its inter- 
est and comprehension. Illustrations should be — 

{a.^ Real, i.e., true to fact, and true to things that do 
exist or might exist. They should not relate to things 
that are unreal and fanciful. 

(^.) Common, or suggested by objects that lie, as it 
were, in one's pathway, at home with him, or about him ; 
picked up when he walks through the streets and over the 
fields, or as he mingles in the common business and occu- 
pations of life. While there may and should be true 
poetry in preaching, yet illustrations should not be 
merely poetical or beautiful, drawn simply from the 
imagination, or even from the imagined history of the 
past, but rather from actual things in life, so that they 
form in themselves analogues and arguments. An illus- 
tration from the last war in America is better than one 
from the Punic wars. An illustration from a black- 
smith's shop, or a carpenter's bench, is better than one 
from Vulcan's smithy or the realms of cloud-land. All 
life and fact, and the thousand forms and events of real 
being and action, are open to the preacher of truth. 
Everything real should become a winged vehicle of 
truth. The old preachers and prophets possessed this 
faculty of perceiving the spiritual sense in the homeliest 
and most natural things. From Isaiah to John Bunyan 
this has been the special prophetic or preaching gift. 

(<f.) Drawn from Nature itself. Nature becomes an 
organ for the preacher of truth to play upon ; and he 
who penetrates into this symbolism of Nature has a 
deeper insight into spiritual things than the merely pro- 
saic reasoner. 



AXAL VSIS AXD COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 4^7 

Illustrations thus true, fresh, homely, natural, forcible, 
form an element of preaching that may be called its 
vital expression, and which is, after all, nothing more nor 
less than stating truth itself in such real forms that it 
comes home to the mind with living power, and delights 
and fastens it as with a nail. Old truths are brought out 
in new lights. Abstruse subjects become picturesque. 
The most metaphysical discussion beats with the life- 
blood of the present. There is to be found divine in- 
struction in everything. The elements of common sense, 
truth, reasonableness, shrewdness, wit, and sagacity, skill, 
sympathy, and humanity, are in such preaching. It is no 
longer dry and technical but is full of nature and the human 
element. We should assuredly cultivate this " nature- 
preaching," as the Germans call it, this power of homely 
illustration that causes the present actual to throw light 
on the past actual, that interests men and makes the 
people a part with yourself, that strikes the real current 
of their thinking, that speaks as if speaking out of their 
own thought. Mr. Spurgeon has this popular illustra- 
tive power. Dr. Bushnell had it in a more lofty and 
ideal use of Nature. Savonarola, Wyclif, Latimer, Lu- 
ther, Chrysostom had it ; the apostle Paul made use of 
it ; and above all, our Lord himself. 

Allegorical preaching is hardly fitted to the Occidental 
taste, though much practised in Europe during the Middle 
Ages, and later still in England. It has in the 
past, as we have seen, led to great abuses and -^^^^goncal 
•I- • ^ r r- . . . , orcaching. 

puerilities ; but of our Saviour it is said, that 

"without a parable spake he not unto them." Truth 
was indeed too precious a jewel to be presented pure and 
simple to an unbelieving age. So it may sometimes be 
now. This was the method of John George Hamann, 
the German apologist for Christian faith in the times of 



408 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

the height of German neological scepticism. In a 
grotesque view of this fact the author of " Sartor Re- 
sartus" wrote his obscure enigmas and taught righteous- 
ness in ironical allegory. 

3. Argumentative development. This is to con- 
vince the judgment by bringing out and establishing the 
truth through proof and evidence. Thus in 
Argumenta- ^j^^ ^^^^ .. g^ ^^^^^ ^^ ^^^ saved," the 

tive -11 11 

, . . argumentative development would reason 

upon and show the truth of this ; while the 
expository development would simply set forth the scrip- 
tural account of the method of salvation by grace, and 
the illustrative development would exemplify it. All 
subjects are not fitted for the argumentative develop- 
ment, although, perhaps, reasoning may be applied to 
any subject which admits of being true or false ; but doc- 
trinal subjects — those which contain scriptural teaching, 
that may be confirmed by reasons and proofs — are the 
chief subjects for argumentative development. 

This method also has its advantages ; indeed many 
writers, among them Dr. Fitch, prescribe it as the best 
and invariable method of sermonizing. Argument im- 
presses truth already believed, and convinces of truth not 
before believed. An enlightened faith rests on proper 
grounds of evidence, either external or internal, and the 
more fully these grounds are set forth, the more firmly 
established will be the faith. 

Argument is also often useful in arousing the feelings. 
The mind becomes interested in a truth which is capable 
of clear proof, and it is overcome by the spiritual weap- 
ons of reason and truth. The most successful preachers, 
as instruments of producing immediate conversion, the 
most successful revival preachers, are often at first 
severely argumentative, thereby gaining power to bear 



ANAL YSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 409 

down forcibly upon the conscience and heart. The argu- 
mentative style of sermon is so common with us in New 
England that we usually speak of the " body" or " de- 
velopment" of the discourse as " the argument." 

The argumentative development of a sermon is of two 
kinds : the indirect and the direct. i. The indirect. 
Under this comes, (<?.) The refutation of The indirect 
objections. This should generally be in the argument, 
first part of the body of a discourse, because the last 
words should be the strongest, and should leave a posi- 
tive impression. When the objections are trivial, they 
need not be noticed ; but when they are real, and pre- 
sent truly intellectual difficulties, it is best to discuss them 
one by one. Refutation removes the obstacles and clears 
away the rubbish, before we begin to build the argu- 
ment. And there is nothing like grappling with an 
antagonist to excite interest, for man naturally loves 
fighting, and almost every one is more forcible in refuting 
than in proving. But the preaching should not stop at 
the refutation ; for Christianity is not a negative system 
— it is full of reasons. 

In refutation, good sense dictates that we should be care- 
ful to be candid, since in this way we gain the confidence 
of our hearers when we proceed to the proof. We may gain 
an advantage, sometimes, in turning an objection into a 
proof ; we thus carry the war into Africa. But no trifling 
objections should be stated. No time should be spent 
in demolishing men of straw. And above all things, 
acrimony in refuting opposing arguments should be 
avoided, ib.) The hypothetical form of argument. This 
is another form of indirect argument. It consists in 
bringing up several different forms of suppositions, begin- 
ning with the least plausible ; and, by discussing and dis- 
proving these in succession, you lay the way for the one 



41 o HO MILE TICS PROPER. 

which you wish to establish. Thus the doctrine of 
human sinfulness may be proved by gradually annihi- 
lating the various hypotheses of human goodness which 
men adduce for their own escape from this humbling and 
consuming truth, and by leaving it as the only possible 
truth. (^.) The serial or gradual argument. This form 
of indirect argument begins with some distinct and com- 
mon truth, that is readily conceded by your hearer, and 
then comes up by making the predicate of one proved 
truth the subject of another, until what you wish spe- 
cially to prove presents itself in an irresistible form, as a 
The direct foregone conclusion. 2. The direct method 
argument, of argum.ent. This consists in the adducing 
of direct and positive proof. The subjects of pulpit dis- 
course are commonly those which come under the general 
department of moral evidence. This permits, and even 
requires, proof. Proof is that mental act or process by 
which we arrive at certainty or something like certainty, 
in our judgments respecting truth ; and when the argu- 
ment relates strictly to truth, or to fact, the proofs are 
called reasons ; when it is concerning right, or duty, 
they are called motives. Argument deals chiefly with 
the first, or with reasons. 

As to the sources of proof, they are commonly divided 
into two classes, mediate and immediate, i. The imme- 
diate are those which spring from, (a.^ Con- 
Sources o sciousness, or that which appeals to the 
proof. . , . . . . . 

internal sense of right in the mere statement 

of a truth, {b.^ Perception, or that which is the object 
of our own observation as regards cause and effect — as, 
poison kills, (r.) Testimony, or the related perceptions 
of others — in fact, a common and universal perception. 
{d,) Intuition, which pertains to the apprehension of 
abstract truths — as purely mathematical and rational 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 411 

truths that arc the objects of spontaneous belief, because 
the reasons for them exist in the mind itself. 

Dr. Fitch would add to these Common Sense, which is 
a kind of induction from general grounds of human thought 
and observation. 2. The mediate sources of proof are 
those which are founded upon the principle that all truth 
is one, and that its various parts have essential relations 
to each other. This admits of reasoning from what is 
known to what is unknown — from what is established to 
what is to be established ; in a word, if such and such 
things are true, other things must be true : it is the usual 
method of deductive reasoning. 

We would make two or three suggestions in relation to 
the strictly argumentative development of a discourse : 

(i.) In taking an argumentative position 

one should be sure that it is a strong one. Suggestions 

The premise taken in the beginning should 

, 1 r 11 1 11 t argumentative 

be thoughtfully taken ; and the truth you development. 

seek to establish should be fairly reasoned 

out, or be capable of being reasoned out, and not be a 

mere assumption. 

(2.) In the arrangement of an argument one should 
exercise great judiciousness and care. One should ob- 
serve the two great principles of attending to the force of 
probability that unites the proof to the conclusion, and 
to the right connection among the arguments themselves. 

Without entering into all the rules upon the method 
and order of argumentative preaching, we would just 
notice the common argument from the Scriptures. As a 
general rule, when the direct testimony of Scripture 
forms a part in a series of arguments, it should occupy 
the first place. If the series relates to God, it should 
always be first — e.g., " the veracity of God ;" the natural 
and true order would be, i. His own word as to his 



412 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

veracity. 2. His conduct as showing this. But in speak- 
ing of man we should sometimes take this testimony of 
God last, since he is omniscient and infallible. If we 
speak to unbelievers, we may adduce Scripture first, and 
then the proofs from reason, which are stronger in their 
minds ; but when we speak directly to Christians, the 
Scripture proof should be used last. They may distrust 
your reasoning, but they will bow to the Scriptures while 
still the reasoning may be useful in confirming the truth. 

(3.) The discourse should rarely or never be exclusively 
argumentative. Thought should not lose its life by 
going through a strictly dialectic process. The sermon 
is not, after all, a proposition of Euclid. No part of it 
should be entirely disconnected from the will, the feel- 
ings, and the experience of men. It should not become 
a matter of pure intellect. The preacher may in this way 
conquer, but he will not convince nor convert. 

To this suggestion that the sermon itself should rarely 
be wholly or exclusively argumentative, might be added, 
that the general style of preaching should not be wholly 
argumentative. 

We v/ant, often, simpler practical sermons — sermons 
that do not discuss, but only earnestly express, religious 
truth and feeling ; sermons that spring from the heart more 
than the head ; sermons, too, that have a more attractive 
literary form where the imagination plays freely ; ser- 
mons that cast aside the stiff robes of argumentation, and 
are unbound., spontaneous, spiritual. The preacher of 
an argumentative cast of mind should especially guard 
against the temptation of this tendency, and should cul- 
tivate freer forms of discourse ; and so, on the other hand, 
the illogical and sensational preacher should cultivate a 
severer, solider style, just as we give mathematics to a 
dreamer to make him think. As the argumentative 



AXALYSIS AXD COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 4^3 

method implies the predominance of the human over the 
divine element in preaching, a more cautious use of it, 
and a return to a simpler, less ambitious, and more 
spiritual manner of preaching are to be commended. 

(4.) The argument should not be too high or abstruse 
for the audience. It may be very close and powerful, 
but it should ground itself in human nature, or in the 
common laws, truths, and motives of the human mind, 
which all men appreciate and understand. It has been 
said that "the foundations of argument in the pulpit 
must, to a great extent, be commonplace." 

4. Persuasive development. This, too, is a kind of 

argumentative discussion for the purpose of conviction, 

but it deals chiefly with motives, rather than 

proofs or reasons. It does not end with ersuasive 
. . , 1-1 • development. 

mere conviction, but rather with persuasion. 

It addresses the will with motives of good, urging it 
to the performance of immediate duty. If the w^ill of 
the hearer is opposed to the truth, the aim is to 
remove the will from its present object of choice, and to 
fix it upon another and true object ; if the will is 
apathetic or indifferent, the aim is to awaken it to action 
and choice ; if the will is favorable, the aim is to encour- 
age and strengthen this good purpose. This method of 
development partakes somewhat of the hortatory style of 
sermon, being addressed to the feelings as well as the 
reason. It requires something more than proof, since a 
man may be convinced by proof ; but he must be per- 
suaded to act and choose by motives. Few preachers can 
afford to leave out the persuasive element. One great 
end of preaching, as we have said, if not the great end, is 
persuasion ; it is not mere instruction, but persuasion ; it 
is to persuade men to love and obey God. 

Not only the confessedly hortatory sermon, but every 



414 HO MILE TICS PROPER. 

sermon should have in it the element of persuasion, 
should tend to this end. ** Now, then, we are ambassa- 
dors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us ; we 
pray you in Christ's stead be ye reconciled to God." Cold, 
intellectual, argumentative, passionless preaching, without 
a thought steeped in the heart, or an appeal warmed in. 
the emotions, has no precedent in apostolic preaching. 

Knowing the terrors of the Lord, the apostle persuaded 
men. Above all, the love of Christ constrained him in 
preaching the gospel to others. We must move men to 
act, we must persuade them to obey the word of the 
Lord. We must bring them to a choice. 

But there must be some ultimate ground of choice, or 
there could be no object or ground of persuasion. Choice 
implies the existence of an alternative. Now, it is the 
object of persuasive reasoning to show others the true 
reasons and motives of choice, that, these being fully set 
before the mind, and deliberately weighed, the mind may 
be led to make the good choice. The end of all persua- 
sion is to show that the greatest good lies on the side of 
duty, and thus to lead men to do what is right. The ob- 
vious means to this are, presenting inducements, consid- 
erations, motives ; for that which moves a man to do any- 
thing is a motive. Of course the preacher of righteous- 
ness can deal only with good and true motives. What, 
then, are the sources of persuasion ? 

Vinet reduces all motives which the preacher can employ 
to two — goodness and happiness — in fact to happiness. 

As all human action aims at some good, in presenting 
the motive of happiness, one should be care- 
e sources £^j ^^ present the supreme aim or the his^h 
of persuasion. , , r i 

and true idea of happiness, ending in the 

blessedness of the Christian ; he should show that good- 
ness and happiness are necessarily and finally united, are 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 4^5 

really one, and that the old stoic axiom, "To be con- 
scious of virtue is happiness," is realized in an infinitely 
higher sense in the Christian life. There is even a true 
self-love which may be justly appealed to. In fact, the 
tastes, desires, sympathies, and affections of our nature — 
all that powerful side of our nature — are not to be lost 
sight of, since it is not mere reason that moves men to 
act ; it is also feeling, desire, affection. 

Nothing is more wonderfully adapted to move our 
deepest feelings than the motives presented in the gospel- 
Christ, being lifted up, docs draw all men unto him. 
The attractions of the cross are even greater than the 
terrors of the law. There is, however, the motive of fear 

as well as the motive of love ; and how 

, Motive of 
and where to appeal to the passion of ^^^^ 

fear in preaching is an interesting theme. 
Preachers may fatally err both in leaving it out of ac- 
count and in employing it unwisely and unscripturally. 
One thing is certain, that scriptural preachers did appeal 
to the motive of fear ; they preached strongly the peril 
and the condemnation of the obdurately unrighteous ; 
and who did this in more tremendous words than Christ. 
We must preach the law as well as the gospel. 
But the law should be preached in the right way, not 
merely as a system of fear, punishment, and condem- 
nation, but in its just relations to the constitution 
of the mind and the principle of conscience, in order 
to show how the law may be disobeyed, and thus 
how there may be sin. In this way the law becomes a 
means of conviction. The law should be preached, 
therefore, however severely and terribly, yet with dis- 
crimination, and should make its appeals to the reason 
and the moral nature of men ; and in this way the 
penalties of the law have their proper effect. 



4-1 6 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

The apostles preached the condemnation of the law in 
the spirit of compassion. They spoke this truth of 
Christ in love. " Knowing the terrors of the Lord, we 
persuade men." They preached it persuasively as a mo- 
tive. As Christ spoke of the wrath to come, and yearned 
to gather those who rejected the mercy of God into the 
kingdom ; as the apostle Paul, in the spirit of Christ, pro- 
claimed with unfaltering lips the curse of those who were 
guilty of unbelief, and yet wept when he talked of " the 
enemies of the cross of Christ," so preachers should not 
preach to the fears of men without true love to men in 
their hearts ; they should not brandish the thunderbolts 
of the law in one hand, without offering the grace of the 
gospel in the other. If they fail to do this, the persua- 
sive quality vanishes from their preaching. 

We would now treat more specifically of those motives 
of persuasion which a preacher of the gospel may legiti- 
mately employ. Looking at them as moral 
Motives motives, and to such only can the preacher 
o persuasion g^pp^g^]^ they would come under the three 
to be 

emoloved general heads of Happiness, Duty, and Chris- 
tian Virtue or Love. 

I. Happiness. ((3;.) Temporal happiness, the lowest view 
of happiness, is greater on the side of righteousness than 

of unrighteousness. The man who has real 
Happiness. . , . . . . 

uprightness oi heart is the most apt to se- 
cure human friendship, honor, and worldly prosperity, 
and to be successful in whatever he undertakes to do 
with his fellow-men. Religion has the promise of this 
life as well as of that to come. All the sources of 
heavenly happiness itself are with us as rational and 
moral beings even now, for these depend upon the right 
disposition of the heart. Wherever God is, there must 
be happiness. But for every earthly or material enjoy- 



AXAL YSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 41? 

merit of a lawful and not injurious nature, the good man, 
as a general rule, has a better prospect than the bad man. 
A long and happy life is promised to the obedient (Ps. 
91 : 16 ; Dent. 11 : 21). Religion fosters a state of mind 
conducive to soundness of body and mind, for it leads to 
an observance of those laws by which health is main- 
tained. It is living and doing well. It is the highest 
reason in all things. Yet one should be guarded here in 
not dwelling exclusively, as is sometimes done, on this 
merely prudential range of motives ; for often God blows 
them all away and afflicts the righteous, like Job, with 
great and crushing sorrows. Even the old Greek said 
that a man could not rightly be called happy until after 
death. Yet, on the other hand, one should not be de- 
terred from employing this motive of temporal happiness. 
God uses it. He has made our natures for happiness, 
and if we fulfil the true ends of our being, if we live in 
accordance with the principles of our normal nature, we 
are happy. Sorrow as well as sin is an incident to our 
nature, not its original property. God, the source of 
joy, would pour joy through the hearts of all his creat- 
ures, and human demerit alone diminishes and destroys 
this happiness. A legitimate happiness, which may 
thus be experienced even in time, also springs from self- 
approbation in well-doing. He who does a good act is 
rewarded in his own mind. This happiness, from the exer- 
cise of holy affections to ourselves and others following 
from virtuous actions {ai uar apeTi)v evipysiai), is some- 
thing not liable to change, but is lasting and inalienable. 
If happiness is thus a true motive to persuade to good 
action, then the misery which accrues from the opposite 
course, since it is a dissuasive from evil, operates as a 
persuasive to good. The condemnation and misery of 
wicked men form an indirect persuasive to goodness. 



41 S HOMILETICS PROPER, 

Just fear as well as true happiness is a strong motive to 
right action. Both the light and the shadow, the joy 
and the terror, impel the soul toward God. 

(<5.) Eternal happiness resulting from righteous action. 
He who does the will of God shall share the blessedness 
of God, not only in time but in eternity. 

2. Duty. This deals essentially with the moral part 
of our nature, and appeals to motives that have their 
seat in the conscience. Duty is a higher 
motive than happiness. Call conscience 
what we may, account for its origin as we may, it is that 
part or faculty of our being which responds instinctively 
to the law of right. We call it, and call it justly, the 
voice of God within us, because it is that in us which 
answers to the voice of our moral ruler. It thus rises 
above the idea of expediency and of happiness. It is an 
unselfish and divine faculty. It interprets and reiterates 
the righteous law. That law would be powerless did it 
not appeal to the nature of the mind itself, which is 
made harmonious with and confirmatory of the law. We 
cannot help acknowledging the rightness of right, the 
wrongness of wrong. We are so formed that we must 
feel that we ought to do right, and here is the ground of 
the law of duty. Here is its great motive of persuasion. 
The doing of right because it is right, for its own sake, 
is the grand motive of duty to which as preachers of 
righteousness we can and should ever appeal. We must 
tell men that they should do right because it is right, and 
they will at least feel the tremendous power of this 
motive, and either yield to it and be saved or resist it 
and be condemned. In this appeal we have a still more 
potential and awful helper — God himself ; for God is in 
the conscience more intimately than in the outer intel- 
lection, and he speaks there mysteriously as from an in- 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 419 

ward throne, so that what the moral nature itself dictates 

to be right is reinforced by all the sanction of the divine 

will.' 

3. Christian virtue or love. The love of God is the 

root-principle of Christian virtue. The moving power of 

the loving will of God, made known in his 

Son Jesus Christ, is the central motive to be Christian 

virtue 
set forth by the Christian preacher. "I, if or love 

I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." 
The love of God in Christ to sinners is, in fact, the 
gospel itself. This is the gospel preachers are to preach. 
Gratitude, faith, love, are appealed to in the strongest 
terms. God " first loved us" — a motive which, when 
once realized, creates a soul under the ribs of death. 

As a natural and irresistible sequence of this divine 
love toward us, human love, or the Christ-like love of 
man for man — the Christian preacher's love for the souls 
of his hearers — forms a strong motive to be brought to 
bear upon them, and through this channel as it were of 
human love and sympathy the divine love flows. This is 
the secret of truly moving and persuasive preaching. 
One of his boy-hearers says of Dr. Arnold's preaching : 
" It was not the cold, clear voice of one giving his advice 
and warning from serene heights to those who were sin- 
ning and struggling below, but the warm, loving voice of 
one who, fighting for us and by our side, and calling on us 
to help him and ourselves and one another." Let us 
cultivate more than we do these holy affections and pas- 
sions of the soul, this capacity of love and this power of 
sympathy. He who feels that he himself is a sinner 
saved, if saved, by the love of God, and who is thus 
brought in true love and sympathy with other sinners like 



' See arL " Theism," Brit. Quar., July, 1871. 



420 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

himself, will, like Paul, speak to them with a power of 
persuasion which is resistless. 

Another form, perhaps, of this love of God to us, and 
our love to him, as a motive, is the appeal to men to live 
to the glory of God, in the true sense of God's glory. 
This is seeking the love of God in an unselfish spirit, and 
without reference to ourselves at all. This shuts out 
heaven and quenches hell. To the true and perfect mind 
this is the highest motive, and, in one sense, the only 
motive. 

In these motives which have been mentioned, we ap- 
peal both to the lower and to the higher elements of our 
nature — to our self-interest, and to the pure, unselfish 
principle of the good of others and the glory of God. 

As to the legitimate methods of persuasion, whether 

indirect or direct, there may be mentioned 

'^*"'°''^ as some of them : 
of persuasion. 

I. The indirect method of the use of dis- 

suasives to wrong action springing from the evil which 
will certainly accrue. As has been said, the dissuading 
from evil is, in fact, one method to persuade to good. 
The evils and final miseries of sin are the persuasives of 
holiness. 

2. The indirect method of the presentation of the 
alternative choice — i. e., if one is not moved by the good 
consideration which is offered, he must take the alterna- 
tive. 

3. The use of mixed proofs and motives, blending the 
argumentative and persuasive forms of development. 

4. The use of direct motives, without any abstract rea- 
soning or circumlocution, addressed to the simple end 
to move the will and heart. This is comprehended in 
what is usually termed the hortatory discourse. 

Of course our method of persuasion should be adapted 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 421 

to the class of hearers we address ; and we should pro- 
ceed in a natural way, by first interesting the intellect, 
bringing out intelligently the motives of persuasion, 
showing their importance, and their personal importance, 
and pressing them home upon the heart. 

Vivid description, moral painting, is a powerful method 
of persuasion, in which one is led to see his own heart in 
the masterly delineation of character. 

In striving to overcome prejudices, before the true 

motives can be presented, there are two methods : first, 

to endeavor to do away entirely with the 

false impression, by showing how unjust and 

, . • 1 11 1-1 overcome 

absurd it is ; and, secondly, to admit the nj-ejudices 

feeling, or prejudice, or passion, as having, 
perhaps, some ground for its existence, but to give 
it a truer direction. One says, for instance, " If I were 
only a Christian, I w^ould be a better man than some 
Christians whom I know." Then press him to be such a 
Christian as he boasts that he would be. Another says, 
" I am too ambitious to be a follower of Christ. I 
freely confess that I am too aspiring to be thus lowly and 
humble." Then tell him that Christianity does not ex- 
tinguish the natural motive of ambition, but leads to a 
purer ambition for things truly great and honorable. 

Paul's reasoning with the Athenians in respect to the 
** unknown God" is one illustration of the skillful employ- 
ment of this kind of persuasive argument, yielding as it 
does to the feeling or opinion of others for the moment, 
so far as it is not harmful to do so, in order to use it with 
power for the conviction and persuasion of those very 
persons, for one does not often persuade a man to do 
right by proving to him that he is wrong ; but if, by 
kindly and skillfully showing him that he is condemned 
by himself, by his own truer impulses and nobler reason, 



422 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

you may convict him of wrong without injuring his self- 
respect and arousing his antagonism, and you not only 
convince but persuade. 

What may be termed the motive of probability — some- 
times used by preachers^should be employed very cau- 
tiously, if employed at all — e.g., probably this may be all 
true ; probably there may be eternal peril to the totally 
irreligious. Such reasoning is of doubtful character 
and is apt to cause injurious reaction. It is better to 
preach the things that are, or the things that we believe 
— whatever they are — rather than those that may be. 

5. Meditative development. We will not dwell long 
upon this. It is of two kinds. It may either signify a 
sermon in which the preacher follows out in a free, in- 
formal method his own course of quiet thinking upon 
some more purely spiritual theme, thinking aloud, as it 
were, and pursuing a monologue rather than making an 
address to others, revealing his experience, opening to 
view the secret recesses of his own mind and heart, 
rather than reasoning from objective views and relations 
of truth ; or, it may mean a sermon founded upon a text 
which was originally a strictly meditative utterance from 
the depths of the writer's religious experience, as many 
of the Psalms, or portions of the Psalms of David, and 
which, from its contemplative and subjective character, 
naturally induces religious contemplation and self-exami- 
nation in others. This meditative preaching is not mere 
vague musing, but it is rather sinking down by pure 
thinking, of a prayerful and devotional kind, to the in- 
most depth and meaning of a subject. It arrives at 
principles by contemplation rather than by logical 
methods, and is a great art, too rarely possessed by 
preachers of divine truth. If we should hear the apostles 
preach in these days, we should doubtless say that the 



AXA LYSIS AXD COMPOSITION OF SERMON. ^23 

apostle John was a meditative preacher and perhaps 
the profoundest preacher of them all. Yet this style 
is not greatly to be encouraged in ordinary preachers. 
Where it is literally subjective, in the sense of turning 
the thoughts inward into the preacher's own mind, it 
tends to weakness. Objective preaching, for the great 
mass of preachers, is the boldest, the safest, and decided- 
ly the most effective. It does not deal in subtle refine- 
ments of thought. It takes the revealed word of God, 
sees its beauty, draws forth its power, uses its mighty 
forces of persuasion, is content with its simple teachings. 
All these different modes of development which have 
been mentioned will, of course, vary wide- 
ly in their form, style, and spirit ; but still Q^^^^^^^s 

. 1 • . 1 1- • of true 

there are some simple prmciples or qualities develooment 

which should be found in the development 

of all kinds of sermons ; these are, the qualities of unity, 

perfectness, progress, and proportion. 

I. Unity. This has been and will be often mentioned 
in various relations ; but it cannot be too much urged. 
One general aim, one main impression, 
should, if possible, be given to one dis- 
course ; and this is all we ought to expect for one dis- 
course. This unity should run through its whole sub- 
stance, and animate eveiy fibre. This unity may be 
destroyed by yielding to the temptation of dwelling too 
long upon an interesting but isolated thought ; by treat- 
ing entirely diverse topics in one discourse, with no gen- 
eral principle uniting them ; by mixing up two or more 
similar thoughts ; by following out metaphorical language 
wearisomely or trivially. Any discussion, on any of the 
parts of the sermon, however profitable and forcible in 
itself, which is not pertinent to the main subject, impairs 
unity. Any discussion of a purely dialectical or theo- 



424 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

logical character should not be carried out wearisomely 
or form the exclusive substance of the sermon. It is 
good for foundations, but there should be reared upon 
it a more beautiful superstructure. " The foundations," 
as another has said, '* should be covered in.*' The whole 
development should have regard to every part. 

2. Perfectness. This regards the parts as well as the 

whole. There should be freedom in carrying out every 

part of a discourse to its legitimate end of 
Perfectness. , . 

interest, employing all the stores of thought 

and illustration. This is the portion of the discourse for 
its life to flow out in fullest currents, and not to be ham- 
pered by plans and rules. Each thought should be as 
thoroughly developed as if there were no other thought 
in the discourse. The idea of the main development 
should not override or destroy the complete finish, both 
intellectual and literary, of each of its parts. It is inter- 
esting where the preacher seems to give unlimited play 
to every faculty and every emotion, carrying out a 
thought to its furthest ramifications, drawing from all the 
richness of nature and life, and yet not without a method 
or a sagacious purpose which points each illustration, 
guides each flight of fancy, and, while seemingly most 
unrestrained, brings all to bear with power upon some 
one practical truth or lesson. 

This free development of each of the parts, combined 
with the workmanlike welding together of all in one 
whole, so that there is no imperfect, meagre, flat, and un- 
satisfying portion of the sermon, constitutes completeness. 

3. Progress. This has reference to the right ordering 
of thoughts, so that one thought should prepare for and 

be succeeded by another which forms an 
Progress. . . 

advance ; this secures an mcreasmg mo- 
mentum of impression. The sermon should not repeat 



AXALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 425 

itself, or retrace its steps, but go on with accelerated 

power to the end. 

4. Proportion. This has relation to the proportionate 

space each part or thought should occupy in regard to the 

main development, and to each other part 

Proportion, 
of the discourse. This gives balance and 

symmetry to a discourse. Vigorous brevity is thus se- 
cured where it is needed, and careful elaborateness where 
it is essential. Of course the object we have in view, and 
the peculiar character of the sermon, must decide this. 
In an expository sermon the explanation, which is com- 
monly brief, becomes the elaborate part of the discourse. 
It is a great beauty when a preacher knows in what part 
the real pith of liis sermon lies, and where to lay out his 
strength. This gives consistency to the sermon. The gen- 
eral idea of proportion is, that there should be a well-made 
and powerful body to the sermon. The strength should 
be, as it were, in the loins of the discourse. The sermon 
should be thoroughly compacted, and able to carry itself 
nobly ; not a dwarf with a giant's head and a feeble body. 

That which is wanted in the body of a sermon is so- 
lidity of thought, rapidity of discussion, and a spiritual 
earnestness of purpose rising above every merely intel- 
lectual aim, and pressing the truth with every reason and 
motive drawn from time and eternity upon the individual 
heart. There should be an expanding fulness here, an un- 
bound, rich, and living thought, a development which is 
a real growth from the germ of scriptural truth taken 
into the fructifying soil of the soul's meditation, ample 
and beautiful, and filled with nourishing fruit. 

We are to regard also not only what we speak, but to 
whom we speak. What are the audience in the church 
there for? In what condition of heart and life are they? 
" Men, as a general rule feel, though feebly, the need of 



420 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

religion ; and this common feeling or consciousness of 
the need of religion should be wrought upon and 
awakened still more. Men do not receive all that is 
proved, but that which agrees with their own modes of 
thinking. The mind is not closed against the preacher, 
but only barricaded. There are two accessible ways to it, 
through the conscience and the heart. The heart of no 
man is entirely shut up to nobler affections ; the criminal 
weeps at the thought of his children." 

We might conceive of the ideal of a Christian sermon, 

not yet attained, or not attained by all, but which is 

adapted to the needs of our highest mod- 

® ^ ®^ ern civihzation, while it does not lose the 
sermon. ... . . 

earnestness and practical ann of the gos- 
pel. It is unpretentious, devotional, springing from the 
profound study of a holy soul of the word of God, with 
Christ as the central, burning theme ; tender and full of 
love, but strong in apostolic faith, like the preaching of 
masculine Paul and Luther ; courageously hopeful for man 
and filled with the true ** enthusiasm of humanity ;" 
thoughtful and substantial in reasoning, rich and interest- 
ing in ideas, but not intellectual so truly as spiritual ; not 
bound in any set forms but free with that liberty wherewith 
Christ makes free ; with an internal rather than external 
method of thought ; of the highest literary style because 
fresh and simple, almost plain and homely, so that the 
ignorant man and the child may understand what feeds 
the most highly educated hearer ; as well fitted for back- 
woodsmen as for philosophers, because it is deep and 
penetrating, is drawn from the common wells of truth and 
salvation, appeals to the common wants and desires of 
the heart, and is fitted to convert men from sin, and to 
lead them to and build them up in the life of God. 

Nothing could be so simple and yet nothing so high 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 427 

and difficult as such a sermon. It could not be learned 
in the schools for it is not theological, though it teaches 
a true theology. It must be taught by the Spirit of 
Christ to the consecrated mind that has conscientiously 
and laboriously done its own part in the way of thorough 
preparation. 

Such preaching is a true " prophesying" in the New 
Testament sense of the term, for it speaks through man 
to the whole man, intellectual, affectional, and spiritual, 
as by the very voice of God. 

The development of such a sermon will be but the ex- 
pansion and filling out of thoughts and words furnished 
by the secretly inspiring influences of the Holy Spirit, 
and it will therefore be divinely adapted to the salvation 
of sinful men, and the edification of the church of Christ. 

Sec. 19. TJic Conclusion. 

The conclusion {Schhissredc) of a sermon is the fit 

winding up and the practical application of all that has 

preceded. In oratory it is called the " per- 

oration" and holds the same relation to the 

conclusion, 
end of the sermon that the " exordium" or 

" introduction" does to the beginning. It is not really 
the sermon itself, but is the taking leave of the subject 
in such a way as to gather up and forcibly impress its 
teachings. In the conclusion, the preacher, if he has wan- 
dered away from his hearers, is drawn back to them ; he 
is reminded that it is for them he is preaching, and for 
their spiritual welfare ; he is to leave the truth in their 
hearts. 

The conclusion is a trying and perilous part of the dis- 
course, because it is always difficult to stop gracefully, 
to finish effectively. Boileau says : 

" Qui ne sut se borner ne sut jamais ecrire." 



428 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

It is indeed a great thing to know when to stop. Luther, 
speaking of the qualities of a good preacher, says that '* he 
should know when to make an end." There is a true 
conclusion to every discourse. The god Terminus alone, 
at the building of Rome, would not yield to Jove him- 
self. The conclusions of great literary works, such as 
'* Paradise Lost," " Jerusalem Delivered," and Gibbon's 
" Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," are memora- 
ble for their beautiful simplicity. Many an effective ser- 
mon has been greatly weakened by drawing out its con- 
clusion to too great length ; as some one has quaintly 
said, " when a preacher has driven a nail in a sure place, 
instead of clinching it, and securing well the advantage, 
he hammers away till he breaks the head off, or splits the 
board." 

The importance and advantages of a good conclusion 
are seen in the following reasons : 

I. It enables the preacher to carry out the true idea 

and aim of preaching, i.e.^ to give a practi- 
Importance cal application to what he preaches, directing 

it to the conscience and heart of his hearers. 

. d -^^ ^^^ preacher has in his own mind no such 

conclusion, determinate aim or purpose, he probably will 

not effect it by the most approved conclu- 
sion;; illustrating the lines of the poet : 

•" In ever}' work regard the author's end, 
rSince none can compass more than they intend." 

The end of preaching is the actual conversion and 
sanctification of souls. There may be, however, excep- 
tions to the rule that the application should come in the 
conclusion, (a.) When, from the nature of the discussion, 
there is necessarily a continuous application in the body 
of the sermon. In certain kinds of discourse, as, for 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 429 

instance, expository, hortatory, and historical discourses, 
the application may naturally run along with the develop- 
ment of the sermon, or, where the divisions of a topical 
sermon are themselves practical, no direct practical appli- 
cation is needed at the end. The less elaborate and 
argumentative the discourse, the less need of reserving 
the application for the end. {b.) When, from the nature 
of the audience or the occasion, there is necessarily a 
continuous application of the subject. The more gen- 
eral, illiterate, or youthful the audience, the more need 
of a running application of the theme to the conscience 
and heart, in order to keep attention alive, and to pro- 
duce a vivid impression. 

But, notwithstanding these exceptions, a good conclu- 
sion is needed to enforce the moral impression of a whole 
sermon ; and in the case of a strictly topical and argu- 
mentative discourse, it is almost without exception es- 
sential. 

Some audiences, or some persons in an audience, it is 
true, from the fact of their possessing higher intelligence 
and conscientiousness than others will make the applica- 
tion of a sermon for themselves ; but these exceptional au- 
diences and individual minds are not to be the invariable 
rule for others. The preacher is to leave the application, 
or the lesson of the sermon, more or less directly in the 
hearts and consciences of his hearers. A conclusion 
which is always concluding and never seems to come to 
an end, because there is no particular aim or purpose in 
the mind of the preacher himself, is a weak and unfor- 
tunate conclusion. 

2. It combines the scattered impressions of a sermon 
into one powerful impression, and thus adds to the effect 
of whatever has gone before. The skillful preacher un- 
derstands this, and shapes his whole sermon so as to 



430 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

make the conclusion effective, and to leave a deep im- 
pression at last. 

3. It preserves the sensibilities of preacher and hearer 
from being exhausted. It does this by retaining all the 
freshness and force of feeling for the final appeal. 

4. It avoids a rude abruptness in closing. It gives a 
moment's opportunity for the mind to pause and reflect 
upon the whole subject gone over ; it is the attainment 
of a momentary superior elevation, from which the eye of 
the speaker and hearer may sweep back over the sermon, 
and take in its entire moral impression. 

In a word a forcible conclusion may sometimes save a 
weak sermon, and a weak conclusion is enough to spoil a 
strong sermon. 

We will now look at the different parts of the conclu- 
sion. The " conclusion" or " peroration" of a discourse 
was, in ancient oratory, divided into the re- 
eren capitulation and the appeal to the passions. 
of conclusion -^^ modern times, and especially in the ser- 
mon, the conclusion, rhetorically treated, is 
commonly divided by writers on homiletics into the re- 
capitulation, the inferences, and the appeal to the feelings, 
or the personal appeal ; and each of these, or all com- 
bined, may form the conclusion. 

And what the conclusion should be — whether one of 
these parts should be chosen, or all of them — is to be 
decided by the character of the development, and by 
studying how to increase the force of the moral impres- 
sion, which should be strongest at the end. There ought 
to be no set manner of ending a sermon ; and, generally 
speaking, a good sermon ends itself. Those are the 
best conclusions that make themselves, and that are not 
too long in the making. Joseph Hall, in his preface to 
his ** Virtues and Vices," says, " I desire not to say all 



ANALYSIS AiVD COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 431 

that might be said, but enough." The famous Dr. 
Barrow, after preaching three mortal hours, was finally- 
blown down by the organ's setting up to play ; and old 
Thomas Fuller gives a ludicrous account of an Au- 
gustine friar who came to an end more summarily still 
relating that the friar " bellowed so loud that he lost 
his argument, conscience, and voice, at once and to- 
gether. 

I. Recapitulation. This can be borne only by a decid- 
edly argumentative discussion, and it is borrowed from the 

forensic address. That legal and terse kind of 

. , . . . , - Recapitulation. 

recapitulation often increases the power of a 

discourse by compressing its substance into a small space. 
It likewise strengthens the whole argument, by binding 
up weak and strong arguments, thus giving an impres- 
sion of finish and strength to the whole. It serves, above 
all, to aid the memory, and it is addressed to the intel- 
lect more than the feelings. The recapitulation should 
be, {a.) rapid and clear. In the closing remarks, or the 
winding up of a sermon, nothing is so fatal as tedious- 
ness ; everything should be condensed, rapid, hastening 
ad event urn. There should be nothing stiff, formal, and 
statistical in the recapitulation ; its design, in addition 
to assisting the memory, is to concentrate the force of 
the separate heads of argument into one, thus preparing 
the way to the application, {b.^ It should not repeat 
arguments in precisely the same language as that employ- 
ed in the body of the sermon, but these should be cast in 
a fresh form, (r.) It is sometimes effective to vary the 
order of the arguments themselves, generally by arrang- 
ing them in a climactic order. (^/.) The recapitulation 
should have certainty and confidence of tone. It sup- 
poses that the truths enumerated have been proved and 
settled ; that they have come out from the vague and 



432 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

contradictory condition of the beginning of the sermon 
into distinct and established shapes. 

As has been hinted, the recapitulation is not always de- 
sirable, particularly if one has nothing especial to reca- 
pitulate, if he has not preached a solid sermon, or if 
the ideas of the sermon have been ill digested and ill 
arranged. The recapitulation, in some instances, may 
be made during the progress of the discussion, in order 
to give a clearer view of the connection of parts while 
passing on, and to impress and gather up all the thoughts, 
so that at the close there is no need of any further men- 
tioning of these. Above all, a recapitulation is inadmis- 
sible when the appeal to the feelings grows naturally out 
of the last topic discussed, or the last division introduced. 

2. Inferences and remarks. These indicate the use 
which is made of the subject after the discussion is con- 
cluded. They form a method of making the 

Inferences. ,. . r i t r 

direct application of the arguments. Infer- 
ences may be made to bring out more clearly the syrnmetry 
of truth. Thus, after discussing the doctrine of moral evil 
in a series of inferences, one may show its deep relations to 
other and brighter doctrines of the gospel, and may thus 
take a broad and rapid sweep from the basis of the dis- 
cussion, around the whole circle of related truth. Infer- 
ences may also conduce to unexpected, powerful impres- 
sions. 

** People think more of the explanation and application, 
not so much of the argument." 

The argument is in fact preparing the way for the 
application. 

After thoroughly discussing a topic, we may in an in- 
ference suddenly open a hidden relation in an entirely 
different direction ; and this may have been deliberately 
prepared for during the whole sermon, or the mine may 



ANALYSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 433 

have been silently dug under the citadel of the unbeliev- 
ing heart. Inferences should not, however, be suffered 
to destroy the unity of the discourse, which is their ten- 
dency, and which is to be carefully guarded against. 
Rather than do this, they had better be left out altogether. 

As to rules for inferences : 

I. They should be drawn directly from the develop- 
ment of the sermon. Thus in the argumentative sermon, 
after we have given the hearers a view of 

the proofs, we may in the application bring " ^^ °^ 
^ 1 1111 1 inferences. 

home the truth that has been proved, more 

particularly to the hearers' own minds ; we thus follow 
out the same design we have heretofore pursued. 

In the expository sermon, we may close with the uses 
and lessons we have gained, as applied to the different 
conditions of our hearers. In the persuasive sermon, 
there should be at the end a more close application 
of the motives as directed to the particular action to 
which we would persuade men. Thus the subject and 
our own particular aim in its discussion should shape 
the character of the inferences. They should be parts 
of the body of the sermon ; they should bear the 
stamp of their common origin, and belong to the same 
family of thoughts and ideas. There may be sometimes 
an exception to this rule, when the whole discussion of a 
theme is intended to be only subsidiary to a different 
application of the subject. Thus, in a biographical dis- 
course, after one has set forth the virtues and character of 
an individual — in the conclusion he may enforce some 
one or more moral truths that have been livingly exem- 
plified. So, too, the explanation in the body of a ser- 
mon, of a certain truth, may be subservient to the set- 
ting forth of some other nearly-related truth ; or it may 
show a personal duty, or may lead to a distinct sclf-ap- 



434 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

plication, or self-examination. An argument upon a 
truth may lead to the conviction of a duty ; indeed, what- 
ever the character of a sermon is, the use of it in the con- 
clusion should be persuasive. 

Coquerelsays : '* The peroration should be drawn from 
the very heart of the subject, should be something strik- 
ing, something felicitous, something by itself apart, 
something different from what has gone before, though 
derived from it, something more vehement and direct, 
which completes and forms the crown of the whole ser- 
mon." 

2. They should be forcible, i.e.j they should not be 
feeble or frivolous inferences ; and they should not be all 
the inferences that could possibly be drawn from a subject. 
There should be weight and freshness in them. In the 
application, we go beyond the bare general truth of our 
subject, and present those forcible conclusions which are 
to persuade our hearers in particular. Inferences may be 
drawn from other inferences, if they are still in harmony 
with the general discussion, and if they grow out of it. 

As has been said, there may possibly be cases where 
the inference is entirely aside from the definite subject of 
the sermon — thus, a lesson to the impenitent may fol- 
low a sermon addressed to believers. This kind of side- 
issue, or divergent inference, should at least follow a dis- 
course which abounds in solid thought, which carries all 
before it, and which makes room for itself to send its 
messages in every direction. As a general rule, it is 
more forcible to make, in the conclusion, a final concen- 
tration upon one point which has been more widely dis- 
cussed and illustrated in the body of the sermon, rather 
than to make a final diffusion of thought, or widening 
out of the discussion into general remarks. 

Dr. Fitch says that it is best always to make the appli- 



AiVALYSlS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 435 

cation of the whole subject, and not of the particular 
thoughts. Build the fortification as nicely and elabo- 
rately, piece by piece, as you may, and then fire from it. 
Subjects, however, differ. Some lead irresistibly to 
broad and universal conclusions, especially those which 
relate to the nature of God. 

3. They should have regard to the character and state 
of mind of the hearers, as well as to the character and 
design of the subject ; e.g.y when the hearer is reasonably 
supposed to be persuaded of the truth or necessity of 
a certain duty, he should then be told how to perform 
that duty, and should be helped to overcome its difficul- 
ties. You do not wish so much to add anything more 
to convince him, as to aid in doing the thing of which 
he is presumed to be already persuaded. Christians and 
unbelievers, as they are in different states of mind, are 
to be differently addressed in the conclusion. Encourage- 
ments, alarms, hopes, fears, choices, affections, are differ- 
ent in each. 

4. They should increase in force and importance. Re- 
marks relating to truth or conviction should precede 
those respecting duty or persuasion. And in persuasion 
we should address those first who are most favorably dis- 
posed, and therefore, ceteris paribus, we should address 
the converted before the unconverted. 

5. They should be free from stiffness, dulness, and 
monotonousness. Never should those qualities appear 
in a conclusion, if they do anywhere else, as it is abso- 
lutely needful that there should be variety, individuality, 
and vivid life in our concluding remarks, for here the per- 
suasive element in the discourse is concentred and in- 
tensified. 

If there be life and warmth in any part of the discourse 
it naturally comes in that portion of it where the infer- 



436 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

ence is drawn, where the lesson is enforced, where the 
argument is driven home. Here the weightiest and most 
solemn truths should be spoken with earnestness and 
power. If, as the rule of the old Greek dramatist was, 
that there should be a plain or a dead level somewhere in 
the drama where the mind might rest awhile in the more 
commonplace statement of thought, or fact, or action — 
and the same might be said of a sermon — this certainly 
should not be at the end. 

Some preachers draw pretty much the same inferences 
from all subjects ; but we had better make one bold, 
impressive, original inference, than a dozen that are com- 
monplace. F. W. Robertson, though abounding in in- 
ferential remarks, rarely cast his conclusion into a set of 
formal inferences, but in closing usually made one strong 
remark, one unexpected deduction, driven with tremen- 
dous power by all that had gone before. Thus, in a 
sermon to men of wealth he says, " To conclude ;" and 
in a few condensed words he pours out a burning torrent 
of rebuke upon the clergy of England for their flattery of 
men of wealth, and their cowardly apologizing for the 
vices of the rich. Such a sermon was not forgotten. It 
left an ineffaceable impression on the conscience of those 
persons it was meant to reach. 

Doddridge says that the conclusion of a sermon should 
be striking. Massillon sometimes closed with a suppli- 
cation. Each remark of a conclusion should rise in 
power, should be free and untrammelled, and often 
abrupt as a thunder-peal, smiting the conscience with 
terror. 

Dr. Fitch says, that in the application there is more 
occasion for vehemence and force than in any other part. 
Jonathan Edwards was inclined to be prolix in his conclu- 
sions ; they were often more full of thought than feeling. 



AXALYSIS AXD COMPOSITION OF SERMON: 437 

I. Appeal to the feelings. There are usually three 
modes of ending a sermon : {a.) In the form of a series 
of inferences as just suggested ; {p.) In the 
form of detached observations following ^PP^^^ *° ^^« 
generally biographical and historical sub- 
jects ; {c.) In the form of direct address or appeal, which 
follow^s out the aim of the sermon, or is appended 
directly to the body of the discourse. In this direct ad- 
dress is generally the place for the appeal to the feelings. 

This address to the feelings is something above all art, 
and the more spontaneous and natural it is the better. 
That is often the inspired moment of the discourse ; it 
is inspired or not ; it is real or artificial ; it is everything 
or nothing. There should be true feeling in it, or the 
speaker should not attempt an appeal to the feelings of 
others. 

(1.) The w'hole sermon should be more or less arranged 
for the moral and emotional appeal of the conclusion. 
This should be unconsciously rather than artfully done. 
All should hasten to the end. One should begin the 
sermon with the end in view. He should strike the 
same chord at the end which he did at the beginning, 
though with tenfold force. If one has this aim, to 
leave a deep and lasting impression on the heart of 
the hearers, pathetic and passionate thoughts will present 
themselves while he is composing the sermon, and these 
should be remembered and gathered up for the conclu- 
sive appeal. 

(2.) The appeal should not be for rhetorical, but for true 
effect. The conclusions of Demosthenes' and yEschines' 
orations " On the Crown" were introduced to cause 
in their hearers the feeling which the orators wished 
to create. Their banishment or triumph, their poli- 
tical life or death, depended on the result. They 



43 S HOMILETICS PROPER. 

reserved their strong word for the last. They hurled 
it with all their force upon the hearts of their hear- 
ers. It was a real thing v/ith them to succeed. It was 
no child's play. And has the preacher any smaller 
stake ? Has he any less enduring crown in view ? 
Should he himself have less feeling ? Baxter says, in his 
** Reformed Pastor," " I know not what others think, 
but for my own part, I am ashamed of my stupidity, and 
wonder at myself that I deal not with my own and 
others* souls as one that looks for the great day of the 
Lord, and that I can have room for almost any other 
thoughts or words, and that such astonishing matters do 
not wholly absorb my mind. I marvel how I can preach 
of them slightly and coldly, and how I can let men alone 
in their sins, and that I do not go to them and beseech 
them, for the Lord's sake, to repent, however they take 
it, or whatever pains or trouble it should cost me. I sel- 
dom come out of the pulpit but my conscience smites me 
that I have been no more serious and fervent in such a 
cause. It accuses me not so much for want of human 
ornaments and elegancy, but it asketh me, * How couldst 
thou speak of life and death with such a heart ? ' " 

(3.) The appeal should not be overdrawn. Hamlet's 
advice is still good ; there should be a calmness, a self- 
possession, even in the very torrent and flow of the most 
pathetic appeal. One must control himself, to control 
his audience. He should not go before them in the 
manifestation of emotion. Pathos in the conclusion does 
not so much consist in a strained, high-pitched voice, or 
an agitated manner, or intense and harrowing language, 
as in a certain deepening of the tone of feeling, a con- 
centration of thought, and a profound earnestness of the 
whole man. Sometimes a preacher must weep, and he 
would not have a true heart if he did not ; but it were 



ANAL Y'SIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 439 

better for him not to weep. Yet if he cannot prevent 
tears, let them flow ; Christ wept over Jerusalem. It is 
no weakness to feel deeply, but restrained emotion is 
often more powerful than its expression ; and the appeal 
should be made not so much to the superficial as to the 
spiritual sensibilities. 

(4.) All appeals to feeling should be brief. Thus the 
most touching, the most direct remark one has to make 
comes naturally, and it were better, spontaneously. 

It should be said in as simple and few words as possible. 

** Tears dry fast." Let nature's short road to the feel- 
ings be studied. A particular case, or a personal fact, 
is more apt than a general observation to touch the feel- 
ings. An allusion to some individual, or to some circum- 
stance, is more moving in the conclusion than the best 
philosophical generalizations. For the real close itself, so 
far as the feelings are concerned, nothing is more impres- 
sive and moving than a feeling, solemn passage of Scrip- 
ture, either the text or some other perhaps still more 
pointed word of Scripture. Then the sermon begins and 
ends with the word of God. The voice of God first breaks 
the silence, and after the voice of man has been heard for 
a while, the voice of God comes again at the close ; and if 
this is the warm expression of the love of the gospel, sim- 
ple, genuine, pure, it will be so much the more powerful. 

(5.) An indirect appeal is often effective. Men are 
jealous of appeals to their feelings : and perhaps the 
strongest appeal, after all, is so to construct the whole 
discourse as that it shall make its own appeal. 

" Of every noble work the silent part is best, 
Of all expression that which cannot be expressed." 

We are more and more inclined to think that the con- 
clusion of a sermon should not be highly wrought, but 



440 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

simple. This is the trial of the conclusion. If there is 
an appeal to the feehngs, it should flow naturally from 
the last remark or thought of the sermon, rather than 
arouse a distinct expectation that now an appeal is to be 
made to the impenitent, to the young, to church mem- 
bers. This tends to deprive the conclusion of its effect. 
Sometimes the whole concluding appeal ma}^ be in a 
single sentence. This was peculiarly char- 

" ^^® acteristic of Luther's "conclusions." A 
conclusions. ^ . .. x i i- i i 

German writer says, Luther did not lay 

great stress on the conclusion, and many of his sermons 
are without any recapitulation. He ends some of his 
sermons abruptly, with the words, * Enough now has 
been said upon this Scripture ; let us call upon the grace 
of God. * In other discourses he simply, in conclusion, 
repeats the main thought of the last division of the dis- 
course, and says, * Have faith and love ; abide in them ; 
so you can have and do all this.' Or he closes with a 
wish : * God grant that we also may comprehend ; ' or 
* God keep us, save us, and grant that we may earnestly 
hold to this teaching, so that we may not fall into shame- 
ful sin and reproach.' " 

The concluding words of mediaeval sermons were 
usually some brief devotional formula like this: ''Per 
Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum qui cum Deo Patre et 
Spiritu Sancto vivit et regnat omnipotens in secula secu- 
lorum. Amen.'' 

The following is the ending of an old English sermon 
of 1430 : 

" Now our swete Lord Ihesu Christo gyfte vs grace 
swa Godd for to honour, and oure euencristen for to 
liefe, and oure selfe for to make, that we may for oure 
honourynge be honourede, and for oure liefe be liefede, 
and for oure mekeness be lyftede up into heighe blysse 



ANAL YSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 441 

of heven, that he boghte vs with his swete blude and his 
preciouse passion. Amen." 

The concluding of a sermon with a text of Scripture, 
either the text of the sermon, or one similar to it in 
meaning, as has been said, ahvays makes an appropriate 
and sometimes impressive ending. 

Stereotyped forms of appeal, of direct appeal to the 

unconverted, have lost much of their power. There is 

sometimes an impressiveness in leaving 

them off altogether. ^^^^ ^^ 

° forms 

In the homiletical writers of the seven- ©f appeal. 

teenth century there was much of this 

formal character given to the application or conclusion. 

A sermon was made to end so as to subserve five uses, 

the 

(l.) Us us didasculus. 

(2.) Usus elencJiticus. 

(3.) Usus epanortJiotiais, 

(4. ) Usus pczdan t iciis, 

(5 . ) Usus paracleticus. 
or, for instructing, proving, correcting, disciplining, 
consoling.* 

But this is evidently asking too much of every sermon, 
and of every conclusion of every sermon. These good 
results should rather belong to the whole sermon and its 
uses, than simply to the conclusion ; yet the above 
psychological distinctions, which are in themselves true 
and valuable, show that, according to the judgment of 
these old writers, a sermon should never be without 
point, or particular serviceability for some definite end. 

This end, however, should be skillfully brought about. 
It is vain to spread the net in the sight of any bird. 



' Henke, p. 530 (note). 



442 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Even the solemn appeal to the unconverted may be 
overdone and fall without effect. 

But it may possibly be that — the custom of direct ap- 
peal having gone so much into disuse, and sermons having 
become so essayish and impersonal, and devoid of direct- 
ness and point — a return now and then to the old method 
of direct appeal to the impenitent, at the close of the 
sermon, might, in some cases, be deeply effective. 

Earnestness on the part of the preacher to do good to 
the souls of his hearers is something that cannot be con- 
fined to rules, that overrides all forms, and that usually 
makes its own methods. 

The conclusion of Whitefield's sermon on the " King- 
dom of God" is an example of this intensely earnest kind 
of personal appeal. 

The great and only question is, How is the deepest 
impression to be made by a sermon ? It certainly de- 
pends very much on the conclusion. The sermon has 
been compared to a river ; it may be small at its begin- 
ning, but at its close, when it pours itself into the ocean, 
it should be the fullest in volume, the profoundest in 
depth, the most majestic in movement, though, perhaps, 
at that very moment, it may be the calmest to all appear- 
ance, from the fact that it is pouring along its greatest 
volume. So the conclusion of a sermon on divine truth 
may be apparently the most tranquil part of the sermon ; 
but that is, and should be, the tranquillity of the deepest 
feeling, of the fullest thought, of the most solemn and 
momentous truth ; for it has then reached a point where 
it is about to mingle with the ocean of eternal life or 
death ; it is *' the savor of life unto life, or of death unto 
death ;" the word has been spoken, and it returns to 
God ; the conclusion may be calm, and even joyful, but 
it should be the calmness of earnest and solemn feeling. 



ANAL YSIS AND COMPOSITION OF SERMON. 443 

As a suggestion in closing a sermon, let the preacher 
be ki)id in his words and manner, even to the wickedest 
and worst. 

In the moment of the most solemn adjuration, or 
even burning rebuke and denunciation, let the affec- 
tionateness of the gospel glow. This personal appeal 
in all cases is difficult, and is often better to be in- 
dicated than actually made ; but there should be, direct- 
ly or indirectly, with boldness, but in love, a personal 
application of the sermon ; and there may be times 
when nothinsr else is suitable, or nothing will reach the 
point, excepting the words of Nathan to David, " Thou 
art the man !" Love in the heart will teach us, and it 
alone will teach us, how to reach the hearts of our sinful 
fellow-men. 

The preacher should ever keep in mind that the end of 
preaching is not preaching itself, but a lodgment of the 
renovating truth in the hearts of those who hear ; in the 
language of Vinet, " God has purposed that man should 
be the channel of truth to man. Not only are words to be 
transmitted and repeated ; a life is to be communicated,'* 



FIFTH DIVISION. 

CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 

Sec. 20. Classification of Sermons according to their 
treatment and form. 

Sermons may be classified according to two general 
methods : first, as having mainly reference to the charac- 
ter of the discourse itself, or what might be 
Sermons called its formal treatment ; and second, as 
classified having reference mainly to its mode of de- 
according livery. We will now notice the first of these, 

,. , or sermons classified according to their real 
essential ^ 

character and character and form of treatment. 

treatment. In no part of the science of homiletics 
(if it be a science) is there more of con- 
fusion than in the attempt of authors to classify ser- 
mons according to their intrinsic qualities — their essen- 
tial form and treatment. Every writer has a system of 
his own ; therefore we have not thought it worth the 
while to enter largely into this matter of the classifica- 
tion of sermons according to their nature and form ; but 
would name only a few of the principal kinds of sermons, 
some of which have been already more fully treated of. 

As an example of the great fertility of analysis in this 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 445 

field we would point to " Gerard and Campbell's" list of 
different kinds of sermons, as chiefly adopt- 
ed by Dr. Fitch, i. Critical expository lee- P«>"ti^i^y °f 
,.^^ , r . . classification, 

ture, on a text difficult of exposition. 2. 

Practical expository lecture, on a text not so difficult of 
exposition. 3. Explanatory sermon ; in other words, 
"instructive" and "explicatory." 4. Biographical ser- 
mon ; in other words, " commendatory," " panegyrical." 
5. Particular demonstrative, setting forth some one act 
or quality of a good life. 6. General demonstrative, 
presenting the sum of virtues of one life. 7. Argumen- 
tative ; in other words, " convictive" or "probatory." 
8. Pathetic, presenting motives without particular refer- 
ence to duties. 9. General persuasive ; a duty enforced 
by fit motives. 10. Particular persuasive ; a duty en- 
forced by some one motive taken for text, etc., etc. 
Dr. Fitch, however, thinks that all sermons, in respect of 
their method of treatment, may be comprehended under 
the three simple divisions of Explanatory, Argumenta- 
tive, and Persuasive. Argumentative discourses Dr. Fitch 
considers to be best for young writers, for youth is the 
argumentative age, and such discourses are the most easily 
susceptible of unity of treatment. But stiff, scholastic 
forms of argumentation should be avoided ; the logic 
should be animated with sentiment and feeling. The 
unity of the Persuasive discourse consists not so much 
in having one subject or argument, as in having one ten- 
dency in the various parts to affect the will and feelings. 
Perhaps the simplest classification which could be made, 
and which would embrace the most of all ordinary de- 
scriptions of sermons, is, I. The textual The simplest 
(analytic) ; 2. The topical, som.etimes called classification, 
theme sermons, or subject-sermons (synthetic) ; 3. The 
textual-topical, (analytic-synthetic). If desired, how- 



44^ HOMILETICS PROPER, 

ever, to be more full and explicit, we would offer the fol- 
lowing classification of sermons according to their subject- 
matter and internal treatment : 

I. As depending upon the manner of treating the text : 
{a.) textual ; (^.) topical ; (c.) expository. 

2. As depending upon the manner of 

" ^^ treating the subject : {a.\ doctrinal ; {b.\ 
classification. , . , , , \ ■ \\ ys , • • , 

ethical ; (c.) metaphysical ; (a.) historical. 

3. As depending upon the general rhetorical treat- 
ment : (a.) argumentative ; (d.) meditative ; (c.) descrip- 
tive ; (d.) hortatory. 

One sermon sometimes, in fact, combines all, or nearly 
all, the characteristics which have just been mentioned ; 
although generally in one sermon some one quality, or 
some one characteristic of matter or form, decidedly pre- 
dominates, which gives it its stamp ; but even the simple 
classifications which we have given show the great variety 
there may be and should be in the treatment of religious 
truth from the pulpit. Let us look at this 

ane y quality of variety in the treatment of divine 
of treatment. 

truth necessary for the pulpit, and, by way 

of illustration, at a few of the different kinds of treat- 
ment, which it were well to consider, since the preacher, 
from his peculiar habit of mind, may and does naturally 
fall into one stereotyped style of sermonizing ; it may be, 
for example, dealing principally with the rational methods 
of presenting truth, which demand a style of discussion 
more or less philosophical. 

(a.) The metaphysical or philosophical sermon. This 

method, dealing almost exclusively with thought, is a 

noble method ; but great care should be 

Metaphysical ^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^^^^ ^j^j^ ^^ become a rigidly 

uniform mode of sermonizing. The preacher 
must consult all kinds and capacities of minds. The 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 447 

main part of a miscellaneous congregation is composed of 
men, women, and children, of many who are illiterate 
and ignorant, are not highly intellectual, are not meta- 
physical reasoners, and must be addressed through the 
common understanding, sensibility, and imagination, by 
facts, illustrations, and a style of discussion that touches 
the popular conscience and heart. One should therefore 
now and then write simpler sermons, and occasionally a 
descriptive sermon. 

{b.^ The moral-dramatic sermon. This form of preach- 
ing has gone too much out of vogue ; but in the hands 
of a master it is powerful. Two of the 
most interesting of Dr. Eleazer Fitch's dis- ^'^^ " 

courses, which he delivered to the students ^^, „ 

' sermon. 

of Yale College, are upon " The sacrifice 
of Isaac," abounding in eloquent descriptive writing 
in which the picture is wrought to the highest degree 
of the morally picturesque. The conversation between 
Abraham and Isaac, and the thoughts of Abraham, as 
the father and child climb Mount Moriah, are im- 
agined with great pathos and power, and every minute 
circumstance in the narrative was seized upon and en- 
larged with the greatest dramatic skill. This is a legiti- 
mate use of art. Such sermons cannot be forgotten. 
We neglect too much this dramatic element. Power is 
lost by shutting up ourselves exclusively to the didactic 
style, and not taking advantage of the rich narrative, 
poetic, and dramatic portions of the Bible, and of the 
vast field of human life. 

(<:.) The expository sermon. This is happily beginning 
to reassert its place in the pulpit. We 

have already dwelt with some particular- ^P^si ory 

sermon, 
ity upon this kind of sermon. Its advan- 
tages are manifold. It was the style of the early ages. 



44^ HOMILETICS PROPER. 

It is more like the scriptural and apostolic method 
of preaching than any other, confining itself more 
exclusively to the Scriptures, and thus drawing forth 
their marrow of doctrine. Whether simply the ex- 
position of a passage comprising one sermon, or of a 
continuous series of passages, or a book comprising a 
number of sermons, it drives preachers and hearers to a 
study of the Scripture in its connection of parts. The 
great reason why it is not more popular is, as has been 
suggested, that it is made too easy a matter — something 
for rainy days and hot afternoons ; and in the form of it it 
is not always well-arranged for practical effect, the texts 
are not massed, the leading thought is not seized, and 
the whole lacks unity of aim ; for a genuine expository 
sermon is not a shambling commentary or set of running 
remarks, but is a practical discourse upon a passage of 
inspiration — if the passage be a number of doctrinal texts, 
the development of the ground-idea ; if it be a narrative, 
the aim, sense, and lesson of the whole. In a word, then, 
there should be healthful variety in the ministrations of 
the pulpit. Preachers should have no cast-iron plan of 
making sermons, no bullet-mould form, but should intro- 
duce novelty into their methods of presenting truth, not 
recurring constantly to the same themes ; not going over 
and over the same beaten path, but opening the infinite 
fields of truth ever fresh and green ; and, above all, 
preaching with adaptation to men's wants, sorrows, 
duties, and faults, and consulting all kinds of minds. It 
should be remembered by the preacher that the world is 
full of ignorance and sorrow as well as sin, and that the 
comforts and hopes of the gospel are addressed not only 
to the consciences but to the troubled hearts of men 
borne down by the astonishing changes and terrible dis- 
appointments of a harsh world. If preaching is indeed 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 449 

rooted in the Word of God, it will tend to have this 
varied originality ; all the plants of the Lord's garden 
will appear by turns in their manifold beauty, wet with 
morning dew, and there will be eternal freshness in 
preaching. But we now proceed to a form of sermon- 
izing which has been and is still held by able men, 
and which deserves a respectful consideration, viz., 
the theory that preaching consists pre-eminently and 
even exclusively of the argumentative discussion of the- 
ology. 

{d.) The theological sermon. It has been thought that 
the great results of preaching are to be obtained, and 
obtained only, by the ratiocinative method 

of setting forth doctrinal truth. Dr. Em- 

theolo^ical 

mons. Dr. Eleazer Fitch, and many others ^^.._^„ 
' ' J sermon. 

of our eminent New England preachers, both 
dead and living, have been and are advocates of this 
theory. Dr. Lyman Beecher's quaint prescription for a 
sermon was that it should be ''heavy and hot." The 
style of his preaching has been characterized in the 
familiar phrase of ** logic on fire. " Those preachers who 
were mostly of a revival order — or that was their aim — 
like Nettleton, and President Finney of Oberlin, a 
man of logical mind, and bred a lawyer, had a predomi- 
nance of the argumentative element in their sermoniz- 
ing ; and they introduced the ratiocinative method with 
a deliberate purpose to reach the conscience through the 
reasoning faculty, and thus to enhance the impression of 
divine truth. The sermon was set whirling with the 
momentum of a constantly revolving argumentation and 
powerfully increasing reasoning, that it might strike an 
indelible die on the heart. Dr. Alexander, of Princeton, 
in his suggestive work, entitled " Thoughts on Preach- 
ing," was in favor of this style of sermonizing, which, in 



45 o HOMILETICS PROPER. 

the past, has been the chief method of American, and 
especially New England, preaching. Dr. Fitch's funda- 
mental conception of good preaching was to make truth 
stand in a clear light to the reason, by addressing the 
understanding with those irrefutable arguments that are 
drawn from a consistent system of doctrinal theology, 
appealing to the laws and principles of the mind which 
are cognate to the truths of revelation. " The gospel," 
he said, " should be preached as a system of consistent 
truth, bearing with one harmonious design on the great 
object of repentance and salvation. Now if a preacher 
of the gospel would hope to bring its salutary power on 
the hearts of men, he should enter into the design of God 
in this very respect, and set forth the various doctrines 
and precepts of the gospel as one harmonious system, 
having in all its parts one salutary and practical bearing 
on man. The harmony of which we speak is the agree- 
ment of the truths of the Scriptures in their practical 
bearing ; the harmony not only of the doctrines with one 
another, but of the doctrines with the precepts. It is 
obvious that a system of doctrinal representation agree- 
ing with itself in all its parts might be made out, and yet 
the various parts in themselves be erroneous and aside 
from the practical intent of the gospel. But we refer 
to that system and harmony which exist in doctrines ; 
their agreeing with each other not merely in abstract 
speculation, but, above all, in this respect that they 
have all one practical tendency, lending their united 
power to the one object of promoting faith and sal- 
vation. One will be sustained in its practical bear- 
ing with the whole force of all the others. And if 
there is any way of making bare the sword of the Spirit 
and presenting it to the heart in all its sharpness, if 
there is any way of presenting the full power of the 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 451 

gospel before the minds of hearers, this is the way." 
This mode of argumentative theological preaching he 
himself followed almost exclusively, as the art of moral 
persuasion bearing upon the reason and conscience. In 
the hands of such a man (and no one has a higher opin- 
ion of Dr. Fitch as a preacher than the writer), and 
of such men as Nathaniel Taylor, Lyman Beecher, Dr. 
Emmons, Samuel Hopkins, Jonathan Edwards, this kind 
of preaching was a consistent, powerful, and successful 
method ; for it had strength in itself and strong, good 
men were behind it ; but even with such examples we 
venture to say that this is not the only method, nor the 
oldest method, nor, perhaps, in the main, the best con- 
ceivable method of preaching Christ. Although the pres- 
entation of theology in its systematic form is one legiti- 
mate (as much so as the ethical or the exegetical) depart- 
ment of preaching, and although Christian "doctrine," 
in the right view of it, is the staple of preaching, yet 
unless we consider theology to be a synonym for Scrip- 
tural teaching, or divine truth, which it certainly is not, 
since our most orthodox creeds are, as their technical 
name is, only " symbols" of the faith — we can but con- 
sider theological preaching, scientifically such, though 
true and fit in its order, to be partial rather than uni- 
versal. It has its proper place. Theology, we would 
say, is quite indispensable in the preacher himself, if not 
always — or too much of it — in the sermon. A preacher 
should be ashamed not to have a thorough knowledge of 
the philosophy and literature of his profession — even as 
any well-educated lawyer or physician has of his profes- 
sion. Scientific theology is a department of learning than 
which there is none higher, for it comprehends the history 
of the struggles of the best and purest minds the world 
has seen to reduce to principles the verities of religion, 



452 HO MILE TICS' PROPER. 

although theology is not coextensive with religion. The 
Bible and the phenomena of spiritual experience given, 
men have attempted to bring them to the purely dogmatic 
statement, and combine them in a system harmonious in 
its parts — a praiseworthy effort and one absolutely in- 
evitable, since the reason seeks unity. In one sense a 
doctrine which has no idea in it that the reason can 
grasp, which is not apprehended by the last analysis oi 
the judgment, is no proper object of faith, or even of 
knowledge, especially if we view reason, not merely as 
the faculty of judging, but as the organ of spiritual 
truth, "the eye of the mind which perceives the sub- 
stantial in the phenomenal." Theology is also a pro- 
gressive science, and one may be thus ever perfecting his 
own theological system. The theological discussions of 
such an independent and vigorous thinker as Mark Hop- 
kins — himself a humble and spiritual Christian — are 
among the most elevating and educating exercises that the 
mind can subject itself to, and the closer they are and 
the more concentrated the attention they demand, the 
more ennobling is their influence, carrying the mind into 
the world of divine ideas and near to God, the supreme 
reason. We confess that there is to us an austere charm 
in the picture of such a primitive New England theo- 
logian as Nathaniel Emmons sitting in his unadorned 
study — where he had thought and worked for fifty years 
— ever ready to converse with his parishioners and stu- 
dents on high subjects : of God, the divine purposes, fore- 
knowledge, the human will, sin, faith, and redemption, 
as if these things were the only real things, the only 
things worth thinking upon or living for. It does not 
present to us, it is true, the picture of the nearest resem- 
blance to Christ as a teacher and pastor of souls, but it 
has its own high import and worth. But we ought not 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 453 

to forget that it Is the Holy Ghost, not man's thinking, 
that makes the strong preacher ; that enables him to say 
" Pie teacheth my hands to war, so that a bow of steel is 
broken by mine arms." This is because the renewing 
power is divine, and the mightiest preaching is that 
which is " with the demonstration of the Spirit and with 
power." Men are gifted with freedom — they are to 
choose God freely — that is their noblest prerogative and 
highest obligation ; but, in the death of sin in which 
they lie, the Holy Spirit must awaken the native energy 
of soul to love and obey God, " for it is God which work- 
eth in you both to will and to do." They are not com- 
pelled nor forced to act, having the pov/er to act and to 
resist ; but as they are acted upon, they act ; as they are 
moved, they move ; as they are called, they obey, and by 
a free movement of the human will with the divine, they 
are borne on into the kingdom of God. The mighty 
impulse of a new life is from above, and without it 
preaching is powerless. " It is not of m.an that willeth 
but of God that showeth mercy." Philosophical think- 
ing has, however, its important uses on the human side 
of the preacher's work. It is seen especially in the 
thoughtful method of his sermons. Without a philos- 
ophy of religion, preaching would run the risk of being 
of a boneless and molluscous sort. It would fail in the 
quality of intellectual substance. It would also lack 
depth, which is the power to arrive at principles through 
a great number of individual objects and circumstances, 
and that presupposes a penetrative force of mind. // 
^voidd be a sad day for preaching ivJicn the intellectual 
element ivas left ont of it. It must not lose its hold 
upon thinking minds. There can be little rehgion that 
is worth much which is not the clear act of the intel- 
lect, as well as of the conscience, the will, and the 



454 HOMILLTICS PROPER. 

affections. He who views truth in its broadest philo- 
sophical generalization can bring to bear with immense 
force his w^hole system upon one point, like the com- 
plicated machinery of a factory that ail comes down in 
one trip-hammer blow. The decline of interest in a bib- 
lical theology in our seminaries and pulpits, if not com- 
pensated by something higher and better, is a disastrous 
blow to preaching ; and it is a disastrous blow in any 
event ; and the influence of the great modern realistic 
and practical preachers on the sermons of young men in 
respect of vagueness and obscureness in the expression 
of Christian truth, is noticeable. While we thus hold to 
theology as the ' * scientia scientiarum, ' ' and to its place 
in preaching, yet divine truth is not always to be pre- 
sented in a strictly philosophical and doctrinal form — as 
is never done in the Bible, since " there is not a single 
abstraction in the Scriptures," ^ but also in concrete and 
vital methods. 

The following passage is, we think, to the point : 
" Where religion is regarded exclusively or principally as 
a matter of the understanding, there the tyranny of In- 
tellectualism is soon felt. It is this tendency which 
overrates the value of a correct conception of faith, even 
to the detriment of the spiritual life, and confounds the 
subjective conception of truth with truth itself. This in- 
tellectual bent easily degenerates into an unhealthy 
gnostic tendency, which attempts to grasp religious truth 
merely by the reasoning and speculating understanding, 
and confounds thought with knowledge, while. distinction 
between religion and theology is gradually lost. Since, 
however, this system must not only be formulated, but 
also defended, the Intellectualist is very easily drawn into 



^ Shedd's " Homiletics and Pastoral Theology," p. 78. 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 455 

the path of Doctrinalism, which discovers the nature of 
religion exclusively in dogma as such. Doctrinalism 
may exhibit the form of Rationalism, as well as that of 
supra-naturalism. The former considers reason not 
merely as the organ, but as the very source and supreme 
arbiter, of religious truth ; the other accepts the exist- 
ence and the contents of a supra-natural revelation, but 
receives this rather as a doctrine announced by supreme 
authority. The adherent of the last-named view easily 
becomes a strict orthodoxist with regard to the tradi- 
tional confession, valuing soundness of faith even at the 
expense of the faith itself. From this standpoint the 
intellect works only receptively, whilst with the rational- 
ist it has more a critical sway. Where the sovereignty 
of this partial tendency is not encountered by any other 
forces, it may finally lead the believer to the precipice of 
unbelief, the Protestant into the arms of Rome." ^ 

Theologians of the most orthodox sect sometimes for- 
get that revelation is mainly in the sphere of pure being, 
and that it is not so much a revelation of doctrine as of 
fact — of the most significant and world-renovating facts 
of Christ's life, death, resurrection, ascension, and gift 
of his spirit to men ; that by a corresponding act of 
faith on their part there is a spiritual reception of him 
— the revealed word and the personal Christ — in the 
heart, and thus the actual realization of an eternal 
life. This is a matter of fact and spiritual experience, 
sometimes totally inarticulated by the breath of a new- 
born life in the soul of the believer. We thus do not 
absolutely need a philosophy of religion, but we need 
religion. Scientific theology brings unrest, but faith 
brings peace. The time will come, doubtless, when faith 



Van Oosterzee's " Christian Dogmatics," vol. i. p. 94. 



45 6 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

and knowledge shall be perfectly correlated, and when 
that which is objective shall be one with what is subjec- 
tive in religion ; but that time is distant. The preacher, 
as has been often said in these lectures, is, first of all, an 
interpreter — he is a pure medium. He is not to bring 
the human thought, the human philosophy, between the 
heart and the divine word. His own mind is to work 
upon the original truth, to mould it into teaching forms, 
to methodize its matter into abstract principles of thought 
it may be, but mainly he is to interpret it simply and 
spiritually to men, to render it pure to the people, that 
they may feed upon the bread of life, so that to preach 
primarily from a system of theology instead of primarily 
from the Word and Spirit of God is, we cannot but think, 
a partial and one-sided view. 

In regard to the introduction of the argumentative ele- 
ment itself in preaching, none but a man who is totally 
ignorant of the philosophy of mind would 

ogic in e ^gj^y -^.g claims. There can be no forcible 
pulpit. 

presentation of truth to the reason which 

is not itself psychologically rational, or is not based upon 
a true philosophy of thought. A sermon should have 
logical, in opposition to illogical, thinking, and re- 
quires reasoning, or the giving of reasons, otherwise it 
would go forth unballasted on the rough and stormy sea 
of human opinion. Logic, regarded in its highest sense 
as the science of the process of thought, and as the neces- 
sary evolution of the reason, cannot and should not be 
excluded from the pulpit any more than it -should be 
from education. The study of the classics in this con- 
nection, even of Greek particles, commonly held to be 
dry and unpractical, as showing the connection of thought 
and how the ancients syllogized, as illustrating the sci- 
ence of reasoning, and the art or philosophy of thought — 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 457 

this is by no means without its value in training the mind 
of the preacher to think and reason ; but formal iogicy 
which treats of the act of thinking totally aside from any 
relation to real existence, though it has its uses in philos- 
ophy, is out of place in a field of truth where the laws of 
the forms of knowledge are of little importance compared 
with the substance and contents of knowledge itself, or 
the objective reality of divine things ; it seems mockery 
to bring the barren methods of the schools, the endless 
and enfeebling analysis of scientific theology, into the pul- 
pit where Christ is preached to sinful men — it is feeding 
them with husks. Religion is, primarily, faith, love, and 
obedience, not logic. Religion subjectively, is the sense 
of dependence upon God, and objectively, the actual re- 
binding of man in his affections and purposes to God. 
It necessarily comprehends the intellect, or the reason, 
and also the will ; but we come to the real possession of 
the great truths of God, Christ, Eternal Life, not original- 
ly through the judgments of the logical understanding, 
but vitally through the soul's apprehension of them by 
faith and love, through the teaching of the Holy Spirit, 
through the intuitions of consciousness and of the higher 
reason and spirit in man. " Every one that loveth is 
born of God and knoweth God." Even the poetic in- 
sight of Schiller enabled him to see this when he wrote : 

" Allen gehort was du denkst ; dein eigen ist nur was du fuhlest, 
Soil er dein Eigenthum sein, fiihle den Gott, den du denkst." 

Men are often most illogically saved. Dr. Emmons, who 
preached with a purpose, force, and perspicacity that makes 
him the model of a sermonizer in these respects, was 
often borne on by his untempered reasoning into positions 
and statements from which his better intuition, if he had 
allowed it to speak, must have revolted. He shunned no 



458 BOMILETICS PROPER, 

statement that his primary syllogism forced him into. 
In seeking the logical he forgot the higher rational and 
synthetic relations of truth ; so that he ran the risk of 
crushing souls whose moral nature was at all sensitive and 
just. In this way one may destroy souls logically. In this 
Nvay logic is weak and superficial. Logic and philosophy 
may become as unchristian as art may become. The higher 
truths of faith cannot be philosophically formulated and 
then forced upon the soul with the hydrostatic pressure 
of argument. The argument or the soul is shattered by 
the impact. The postulates of mathematics, so beautiful 
in their completeness, do not fit the freely undulating sur- 
face of spiritual truth. You could as well screw down 
the Atlantic Ocean with a copper cover. But moral and 
spiritual truths are nevertheless the proper subject of 
right reasoning. 

Robert South, a highly intellectual though not spiritual 
preacher, shows us how we may reason with interest and 
success upon moral subjects, because he did not run into 
sheer abstractions, but kept his feet on the facts of human 
nature and experience. He did not strive to go beyond 
what nature and the Scriptures taught ; he was a sound 
and robust reasoner ; and yet he is a very poor illustra- 
tion of what we mean compared with some other greater 
preachers, and with Emmons himself, when he forgot to 
be the mere dialectician and became the practical rea- 
soner of the gospel with sinful men. 

In all proper discourse there are two main methods of 
development — the logical and the oratorical, the first being 
more the method of art and the second of nature ; and in 
the reasoning of the pulpit the method of art, the formal 
logic of the schools, is not so fruitful, nor is it always to 
be preferred to the living modes of persuasion that the 
higher reason, the imagination and the heart, and above 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 459 

all, the Spirit of God, teach. The sermon should be 
dynamic rather than scientific or artistic. It should be a 
living growth rather than a dead work. The apostle 
Paul's reasoning (which is often held up as 
the errand model of argumentative theo- ^ Apost e 
1 • , 1 . N , . . 1 . Paul's 

logical preachmg) was natural, spiritual, in- reasoning. 

spirational. It was rhetorical, too, in the 
best sense of the word. He was an analogical rather 
than strictly logical reasoner. He was forensic rather 
than syllogistic. He never uses the syllogistic weapon 
that Aristotle had already shaped and sharpened to his 
hand, since he was doubtless more or less conversant with 
the forms of Greek dialectics. He was too rapid a rea- 
soner and too much in earnest to play with a method 
which is often but a petitio principii. His mind was emi- 
nently synthetic rather than eminently analytic. He 
dealt in concrete forms of truth presented in all their 
vividness. The " cross of Christ," as he commonly used 
the phrase, stood to him for all that Christ was, and did, 
and suffered for man. The ** blood of Christ" was the 
life of such universal and representative value which was 
poured forth for the sins of the world. There is a train 
of most powerful and magnificent reasoning in Paul's 
epistles and addresses, appealing to the understanding 
as well as to the conscience ; but often it is as artless or 
inartificial as if he loved the truth — which he did — more 
than the argument. He seizes upon an analogy almost 
as readily as upon a reason, to bring out his thought. 
He seems sometimes to despise rigid reasoning. He 
scatters its serried links to the winds. He is readily taken 
by the parallelisms of words, by associations of ideas, by 
swiftly glancing aspects and resemblances of thought that 
come up in succession from a mightily working intellect 
and glowing imagination that beheld spiritual truth in all 



4^0 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

things. Thus while in 2 Cor. 9 he is discoursing in an 
unusually systematic way of the duty of the Church in 
the matter of giving to the necessity of saints, he sud- 
denly ends the chapter by turning the attention of those 
whom he addresses to the free and unspeakable gift of 
God to man — Jesus Christ. The connection of thought 
in this passage is oratorical rather than logical. In the 
second chapter of the Epistle to the Colossians he meets 
the objections of false teachers by proving the great fact 
of the resurrection of Christ from the dead — his actual 
ascension from the tomb — and then he goes on at once to 
show by a kind of inspired figure, though full of substance 
and living truth, that the purely spiritual resurrection of 
Christ from the power of sin and death draws up also his 
believing followers along with him into his risen life of 
holiness at the right hand of God. There is in this far 
more of what old Thomas Fuller calls " the oratory of 
God which converts souls" than of rigid logic. In this 
living way which reached the conscience — the ''man of 
the heart" — making Felix tremble as "he reasoned of 
righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come." 
Paul's preaching was successful because it had the power 
and voice of God to the soul in it ; it was apodictic and 
did not stand in the wisdom of men. He preached 
Christ as a living power and by the " Spirit of Christ." 
Chrysostom said '' He converted the world not only by 
miracles, but by his continual preaching." It was, in a 
true sense, doctrinal preaching ; and doctrinal preaching 
like that of Paul in which is the kernel of the nut, the 
marrow of the bone, in which is the essence of the wisdom 
of Christ, the life of the Spirit, is true preaching. The 
truths of God the Creator, creation, the law, sin, repent- 
ance, the incarnation, the atonement, faith, the new 
birth, righteousness, love, eternal life, the resurrection, 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 4^1 

immortality, the judgment and the awards of eternity — 
these, with their mystery and solemn depth, mingling 
fear and hope, awe and joy, will always be the themes of 
Christian preaching, because these truths satisfy the soul. 
They reach the deepest hunger and trouble of sin. They 
pacify and cleanse the conscience. They open vistas of 
light and hope to the higher spirit in man. Natural 
truths cannot do this ; they go no further than nature 
goes, with the apology that what is higher is unknow- 
able. But Christ makes the supernatural truth both 
knowable and known ; he brings the hidden things of 
God to light. *' Christ and him crucified" is the sum of 
Pauline preaching, which imparts light, heat, and move- 
ment to all. God's love is here focalized. There can be 
nothing higher, nothing deeper. Faith in the Christ 
who died for the life of the world is the way to pardon, 
purity, and eternal life ; and it is well that this central 
truth of the atonement as the way of righteousness is 
again becoming the theme of the deepest interest and 
most intense study, and that new light is streaming in 
upon what might be called the human-divine side of the 
nature of Christ, opening fresh and attractive views of 
this doctrine. 

We talk much of " doctrine,** and " doctrinal preach- 
ing," but what, after all, is " doctrine," but simply that 
which is " taught" by God's Word and Spirit ? Its specu- 
lative sense is an entirely secondary one. Therefore, we 
aver that it is better and more natural to find that " doc- 
trine," that " teaching," in the Scriptures themselves — 
to press out the contents of inspiration, and present 
them in their original power and spiritual pungency to 
the mind, than to dilute them too much by the artificial 
processes of human dialectics. 

Yet let us not be understood as arguing against logic. 



4-62 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

President Finney says in his autobiography that a cer- 
tain district in England, where he was laboring at the 
time, needed more logical preaching. We do not doubt 
it. The popular religious intellect, it may be, had been 
enfeebled by hortatory platitudes or ecclesiastical senti- 
mentalisms from the pulpit, that touched no living inter- 
est and aroused no profound thought in men's minds. 
The logical element in American preaching has imparted 
to it a strength and a firm consistency that, however it 
may be lacking in other qualities, perhaps still more im- 
portant, has, in these respects, made it superior to the 
English, French, and German pulpits. The logical fac- 
ulty is needed to try, judge, and establish positive truth. 
It tests, squares, and lays the stones furnished at its hand. 
Every mind upon whom the burden of instructing others 
falls should have the discipline which a severe course of 
logic affords. The sermons of preachers, especially of 
beginners, are often wofully deficient in this quality. 
They could not stand by themselves. They topple over 
with an adverse breath. Some subjects also absolutely 
demand logical treatment ; and every genuine " dis- 
course" which is carefully arranged according to the rules 
of art and with a view of producing a particular impres- 
sion upon the minds of hearers, gains force from a clear 
plan. Bourdaloue said he could forgive anything but a 
poor method. We argue only against the claim some- 
times set up with dogmatic positiveness that the rigidly 
logical and theological method is the only productive 
method in the search and treatment of spiritual truth, 
and that it is the exclusive mode of reasoning, of persua- 
sion, of converting men to God. Even in the field of 
revival preaching do we not have a logical Finney and an 
illogical Moody ? We contend for spiritual freedom, for 
nature, for God's teachings of individual genius, for rhetor- 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 4^3 

ical and scriptural variety, for the inspirations and illumi- 
nations of the Holy Spirit, for feeling as well as argument, 
for that love of men which every great preacher must 
have in his heart which stamps him as a true successor of 
the apostles, and without which the cold splendors of the 
intellect play and shine in vain. There is too little of 
this Pauline sensibility, or, as the French say, " onction,'' 
in our American preaching, and before we shall see 
more of it there must be a total revolution wrought in 
our whole theor}^ of preaching. It must become m.ore 
truly spiritual ; Christ must have a thorough control of 
the being, mind, and spirit of the preacher. Christ must 
be his inner life, prompting to utterance. He must draw 
from those divine fountains of Christ's heart, those hid- 
den inspirational springs that issue from the Holy Spirit 
through a living faith in that great union of the divine 
with the human, which was brought about in the incarna- 
tion and work of the Son of God, vivifying, deepening, 
spiritualizing, making divine the affections and energies, 
and all the outflowings and expressions of the human spirit. 

The earliest preachers were spiritual, prophetical, and 
expository preachers. Chrysostom preached ethical and 
expository rather than theological discourses. Augus- 
tine, though intensely theological in his other writings, 
is extremely simple and practical in his sermons. Ber- 
nard of Clairvaux was almost altogether an exegetical ser- 
monizer. Luther, though his pulpit addresses were full 
of polemic theology, had also besides this a great human 
heart, nature, wit, sarcasm, anecdote, allegory, passion- 
ate eloquence, and the widest and most intimate use of 
the Scriptures. 

We have thus far spoken of the variety of treatment 
which subjects of divine truth discussed in the pulpit 
should have. 



464 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

We come now, under this general subject of the 

classification of sermons according to their treatment 

and form, to say a few words upon the 

Form of the ^^^.^^^ r^^^ ^^ ^j^^ sermon. While the clas- 

serraon. .^ . . ■ ^ ■ 1 

smcation of sermons m this respect has 

been with all homiletical writers a fruitful one, we have 
already suggested that the simplest method of classifica- 
tion would be, first, into the textual ; secondly, the topi- 
cal, sometimes called ** subject sermons ;" third, the 
textual-topical. A more elaborate classification which 
was proposed, would regard the form of the sermon as 
depending upon the manner of treating the text, the 
manner of treating the subject, and the general rhetorical 
treatment, and would bring into view the various kinds 
of textual, topical, expository, doctrinal, ethical, his- 
torical, argumentative, meditative, and hortatory ser- 
mons ; but we will not enter into this wide field, or re- 
peat what has been said on these points, and will notice 
only, for a moment, the two grand divisions of the 
textual and the topical forms of sermon. 

If we were asked what style of sermonizing should 
be mainly recommended, not by any means as the ex- 
clusive one, but as the most ordinary method of preach- 
ing, year in and year out, for a pastor's regular work of 
instruction from the pulpit, we should answer, that 
without making it a dry excogitation of the Scriptures, 
and without bibliolatry — for the Bible itself is but a 
book, which ought not to be worshipped, and only Him 
whom it revealed should be adored — the expository 
should be employed, or, rather, what might be called 
the ** textual" as contrasted with the " topical" style of 
discourse. We use "textual" here not precisely in its 
technical sense. 

A " textual sermon," technically, is one that follows in 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 4^5 

its treatment closely the words of the text, clause by 
clause and word by word. We would em- 
ploy " textual" here, rather in the sense of ^^ "^ 

,.,,,. , . 1 and topical 

text preachmg, that is, makmg the text sermons 

the absolute subject of the sermon, and not 
an abstract subject evolved from the text ; holding firmly 
to the text, drawing the real material, the real thought, 
and the real inspiration from the word of Scripture. It is, in 
fact, " biblical preaching" instead of " theme preaching. " 
It takes a long time to be emancipated from the tyranny 
of the topical or theme sermon, which has dominated 
over our pulpits. This, we grant, has done a great w^ork, 
and will continue to do so ; the most cultivated audiences 
are best pleased with it and also profited by it ; but its 
exclusive use has engendered many errors of preaching, 
and has sometimes led astray from the true object of 
preaching. It has, above all, spoiled variety and free- 
dom. Topical preaching, as has been hinted, draws from 
the text a particular theme, or, what is often the case, 
takes a topic before taking a text, and makes that topic 
the subject of the sermon. Here is its unity. It requires 
an artistic handling, like an oration, or a piece of sculp- 
ture. It is a perfect discourse formed upon the rules of 
art. It is something, after all, outside of the text, 
though it should be in strict accordance with it. It re- 
quires brief texts containing complete themes, and themes 
capable of didactic development. But this style of ser- 
monizing is very apt to lead to a neglect of the word of 
God. The sermon, in fact, hangs on the proposition or 
topic instead of the text ; and how many wrong topics, 
such as the text never taught, have been drawn out to 
serve as themes of this kind of sermon ; e.g., by a German 
preacher, who made the subject of Acts 26 : 24, " Festus 
said with a loud voice, Paul, thou art beside thyself ; 



466 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

much learning hath made thee mad" — " The doubtful 
and perilous character of religious enthusiasm." A ser- 
mon should spring up from the word of God studied 
within the circle of a minister's pastoral duties, needs, 
and requirements ; and while sometimes the topic will be 
suggested before the text (though we think this is not a 
good rule), and there should be all proper freedom here, 
since the pastor has two books to study, his Bible and his 
people ; yet when the text is once chosen, however and 
whenever done, then it should be treated with honor and 
thoughtful attention, as the utterance of God upon the 
specific duty or subject in hand. Topical preaching is 
needed for the wants and emergencies of the pulpit, and 
will continue in vogue, and all will follow it who aim at a 
high standard of scientific excellence in sermonizing, but 
uniformly pursued it will present the human side of 
preaching predominantly, will hide Christ, and injure 
the cause of Christian truth ; and a return to nature, to 
biblical preaching, to the teachings of the " Spirit of 
Christ," will constitute a real reform. 

Textual preaching, in the sense in which we have ex- 
plained it, where the text forms the actual basis of dis- 
course and is immediately and mainly treated of, enables 
the preacher to interpret the Word of God more closely ; 
which course is in harmony with the main theory already 
advanced, that preaching is primarily interpretation — in- 
terpretation not of a dead but living sort, adapted to 
spiritual awakening and persuasion. It also enables the 
preacher to employ texts that comprise longer or shorter 
portions of Scripture, and this is the beauty of this method, 
that the texts may be longer, and thus embrace a wider 
range of truth, like the parables of our Lord, or like the 
extended figures in the 15th chapter of Luke, I Cor. 
9 : 24-27, Eph. 6 : 14-17 ; or narrative and historical 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 467 

texts ; or texts containing some important subject fully- 
treated, as I Cor. 13, and Mark 10 : 33-50 where humil- 
ity is the underlying lesson of the whole passage ; or 
meditative texts, as many of the Psalms, in which 
the inmost religious life of the writer is set forth. 
The textual discourse honors the word of God by 
thus keeping near to it and dwelling ever upon it. It 
gradually develops the riches of the text, following it 
out in its details, not perhaps running into a formal 
proposition and argument, but at the same time not dis- 
regarding the ground truth of the passage (das inncres 
Factum), the essential unity of the thought, the broad 
generalization which comprehends the whole. It has a 
true subject, which may be usually defined by some gen- 
eral title, such as " The Centurion's Faith," " The 
Healing of the Blind Man," " The Golden Rule," " The 
New Commandment." Thus the teaching is brought 
directly out of the Scriptures in an original way, in all 
its spiritual power, with nothing, as it were, of human 
invention intervening between the living word and the 
living hearts of men. This is apt to be edifying preach- 
ing, feeding souls upon the bread of life. This kind of 
preaching, mixing in with it the topical, so that the ser- 
mon shall partake of the synthetic as well as analytic 
character, is a profitable form of sermonizing. This was 
F. W. Robertson's usual way of preaching. While we 
would thus strongly urge a return to biblical preaching, 
as coming back again to the living springs of power, as 
being the most spiritual as well as the most ancient form 
of pulpit address, continuing until, in the fourth and fifth 
centuries, Greek speculation and rhetoric began to destroy 
the free exposition of Scripture and the inartificial style 
of interlocutory address or homily, and to mould the 
discourse upon the formal principles of Greek art, yet 



468 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

we would not be understood as denying art and philoso- 
phy their proper place in the sermon. 

Thought implies art. Emerson says, "The conscious 

utterance of thought by speech or action, to any end, is 

art." As Christian truth meets the advance 

-^^^ of civilization and the needs of occidental 

an iterary ^j^q^^j^^^ \^ assumes, doubtless, to a certain 

pow^er 

. ^^ „ extent, the forms of cultivated thought. It 

m sermons. ' ^ 

may do this if it does not depend upon 
this method for success. A mind of severe philosophical 
culture, like that of F. W. Robertson, is apt to get at the 
heart of a subject and the heart of a hearer more readily 
than a half-educated man can do. Perhaps also, as a 
matter of secondary moment, there is greatly needed in 
our modern sermons the interest of fresh thought. Origi- 
nality, says Goethe, is clothing old truths in a new garb. 
Beauty is ever new while truth is old. Nature may 
sometimes be ugly, but she has infinite variety, and 
the desert itself, to a scientific or aesthetic eye, is never 
utterly uninteresting and unprofitable. The pulpit of 
the present day has more formidable rivals than perhaps 
it ever had. The book, the review, the lecture, even 
the daily newspaper, constantly dazzle by their bright 
discoveries and new ideas. If preachers cannot learn 
to write in the same vigorous and idiomatic English 
style, teeming with fresh thoughts — the food of the intel- 
lectual hunger of this age — that Tyndall and Darwin and 
Huxley employ, how can they compete with these men? 
Not, assuredly, by repeating and indorsing all their phi- 
losophy ; but that preachers can compete even' with such 
brilliant men upon their own ground, considering the 
subject solely on this literary plane, our own New Eng- 
land prince of preachers, Dr. Bushnell, is a striking ex- 
ample. Power despises criticism, and there was certainly 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 469 

native as well as spiritual power in this man beyond his 
art. His " faith-talent" alone (to use his own phrase) 
surpassed his literary and intellectual gifts, brilliant as 
they were ; and in fact it is a question whether so strong 
and original a genius as his could have developed to its 
full perfection unless it had burst its way through the 
rigid conditions of a particular school of religious thought. 
But he took old, biblical, common truth, and made it 
luminous in his intense realization of it. 

He spoke to earnest, honest minds, whether educated 
or illiterate, because he pierced beneath the surface of 
the accidental and touched the real man, the common 
reason, conscience, and heart. He was great enough to 
be popular, and yet, like Robertson, he despised popu- 
larity, and restrained himself from saying anything be- 
cause it was popular ; breasting the tide of public opinion 
like a strong swimmer. His childlike delight in God's 
works and his susceptivity to the poetry of the natural 
world into whose spiritual symbolism his prophetic in- 
sight penetrated, took whatever he said out of common- 
place and stamped it with fresh beauty. He helped to 
unbind the imagination and to give freedom and play to 
the aesthetic faculty in the Puritan pulpit. One spark of 
God and nature is enough to give the preacher power. 
Dr. Bushnell had broad views of his great office as an inter- 
preter of the " Word." The whole w^orld was to him a 
thought of God, was full of God and of his ideas, so that 
he could not close his eyes to anything that was divine in 
the world, or in man, or in literature (which is the soul of 
man embodied in thought), or in art, which is the study 
of the beauty, rhythm and harmony of God's mind. 
Should not every man, he held, be a Milton if he could 
be one ? Should not ever^- man be a Michael Angclo if 
he could be one ? Should not every man be a Paul, or 



47° HOMILETICS PROPER. 

a John, If he could be one ? He had no petty views of 
the preacher's work. He set to it no narrow and con- 
ventional metes and bounds, but regarded it as the high- 
est and most comprehensive calling in the world — the 
work of reading the mind and love of the infinite 
" Word," and teaching these to men, so that they should 
love, obey, and grow themselves Christlike, His crea- 
tive imagination that made all things new ; his knowledge 
of living facts and of men, his mastery of the hidden 
sources of language wherein it is tropical, emotional, 
original, were brought to bear in the pulpit. He dis- 
comfited, as by a stroke of lightning, the demon of ser- 
monic dulness. How could he be dull with such bold 
originality, such scope of illustration, such " sweetness 
and light" springing from his inner spiritual life, such a 
hearty and manful sympathy with truth and with the 
struggles of other minds in their search after truth ? He 
confessedly sought truth before orthodoxy, preferring the 
unfading crown of God to the withering crown made by 
men's hands. Thus while he preached on the most lofty 
and supernatural themes he brought to his feet unbe- 
lievers, doubters, humanitarians, nothingarians, hard in- 
tellects, w^orldly and wicked men, as well as holy men and 
believers. He convinced them that there was something 
divine in this gospel that he preached. His large liber- 
ality, caught from communion with the spirit of Christ, 
took away the arguments of sceptics ; and the minds of 
men were astonished and overwhelmed and borne down 
with the resistless force, the gracious magnanimity, and 
the celestial majesty of the truth he uttered. Who can 
say that the pulpit has lost power with thoughtful men, 
let them be of what cast of philosophical opinion they 
may, when such preachers as Bushnell, and Robertson, and 
Schleiermacher, and Lacordaire, have Hved and spoken, 



CLA SSIFICA riON OF SERMONS. 4 7 1 

and the air is still vibrant with their nervous words ? Yet 
these men did not speak, we believe, merely to be elo- 
quent — ad complcndas aiircs. They obeyed the impulse 
of a deeper inspiration. Some of the best models of ser- 
mons, in a purely literary point of view, that combine this 
fresh thinking Avith a free, strong, natural, and at the 
same time exquisitely moulded literary style — satisfying 
the highest taste and yet open as the day to the uncul- 
tured mind — are those of J. H. Newman before their 
true light was confused and obscured by the sombre and 
unprogressive ecclesiasticism of the Romish Church. 

In this connection, and as having also a great deal to 
do with the form of sermonizing, w^e would remark that 
the development of science adds a new ele- 
ment of power to the enlig^htened pulpit of cience 
1 . , 1 , 1 , , ; 1 in the pulpit, 
this day, because the knowledge of the 

laws and facts of the natural world increases our knowl- 
edge of God. In a scientific age preaching takes more 
or less of a scientific form. The preacher of light 
should gladly welcome every opening of the great volume 
of facts which God has written in the physical universe. 
** There is no rest possible for man in nescience, in nega- 
tion. He needs a rock and not the pivot of a balance to 
sustain him." The relation of the pulpit Avith science is, 
to our mind, a theme promising much of novel interest 
and profound value. The preacher should rejoice in this 
revival and mighty stir of scientific thought, in whose 
troubled waters he can cast his line ; since the most vio- 
lent disturbance is better than stagnation in regard to 
knowledge, whether spiritual or material. He should 
prove to the world that the Christian Church pos- 
sesses an intellectual vigor equal to all demands made 
upon it, and that it is able to cope with living prob- 
lems. He, the follower of truth, ought to cultivate a 



472 HO MILE TICS PROPER. 

catholic mind which is hospitable to new ideas, nor 
should he look with a narrow jealousy upon the ad- 
vance of science, since science is but the formal recogni- 
tion of proven knowledge. That is true science which 
presents to us facts which are the fruits of induction, and 
are capable of proof and logical classification, of exact 
statement, in whatever field of knowledge the pursuit 
may be. The truth of revelation cannot be imperilled by 
the progress of true science ; and, moreover, as the two 
do not, as a general rule, move in the same plane, it is 
lost time spent in trying to reconcile science and the 
Bible. At the same time, the spirit of inquiry which de- 
velops the laws of the natural universe, while it narrows 
the domain of superstition, facilitates the interpretation 
of God's moral and spiritual manifestation of himself in 
his word and in human consciousness ; not willingly 
always, for the labors of some modern scientists are like 
the strokes of giants guided by a higher intelligence than 
their own, so that they build better than they know. 
But in spite of the atheistic intent impelling their activity, 
and in spite of their stopping in the material world, which 
furnishes no explanation of force, mind, and spirit, they 
are none the less the authors of spiritual light. They are 
men of bright intelligence, essentially of the light. They 
should be regarded with gratitude and with patient hope 
as CO- laborers in the field of truth. Take even the much- 
berated Darwinian theory, for example, has it not already 
widened our vision of physical knowledge ? It is but one 
phase of the problem of creation, which has regard mainly 
to the mode of divine causation, and is consistent with a 
divine theory of the universe. It denies, it is true, the 
necessity of a new creative act in the production of new 
species, but relegates all to an original power impressed 
upon nature, which, through the working of certain 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 473 

change-producing laws, is sufficient to account for the 
formation of species and the progress of the race without 
further intervention of creative power. It thus denies 
the action of blind force, and asserts the uniform reign 
of law. It has seized upon a certain great truth of cos- 
mic development, of the existence of the working influ- 
ence of law, of the evolution of higher out of lower forms, 
of the principle of orderly progress in creation which 
has long ago been observed, but never before so clearly 
emphasized and reduced to scientific analysis. It seems 
as if heretofore we had simply taken the truth of crea- 
tion — that God created the universe — and were satisfied 
with that, perhaps wisely so ; now the Darwinian scien- 
tist searches under this grand truth into the modes of cre- 
ation, and is not this legitimate ? Through his guidance 
we seem to be catching glimpses of one of those simple 
laws, like that of gravitation, upon which God invariably 
works — the law of evolution in the creation of the forms 
of organic life. We catch here and there fragments of 
this great law, if law it be. At enormous intervals we 
seem to see through the mist of past ages the substantial 
evidence of a creative plan or law of evolution. But it 
is as yet fragmentary. It is unestablished and unproved. 
Darwinism, by the confession of its most credible teach- 
ers, cannot, upon its admitted principles, account for all 
the facts of the universe. It is, therefore, open to doubt. 
While there is much in its favor, there is a great deal to 
be said upon the other side. There is so much to be 
said, that DarAvinism, technically speaking, may be en- 
tirely untrue. Nevertheless it is deserving of a candid 
and patient hearing, especially from the theologian, who 
is more deeply interested in it than any man outside of 
the pure scientist ; and while we believe that the Dar- 
winian theory, technically speaking, has as yet failed to 



474 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

establish its proofs, that the missing links have not been 
found, that the fathomless gaps which separate lower from 
higher life, which separate life from no life, have not 
been bridged over, we think that the arguments against 
Darwin's view sometimes exhibit an inexcusable want of 
thorough appreciation of what his theory of ontology is ; 
and many of the replies made to scientific doubt by 
theologians and preachers are injudicious, often weak. 
They evince timidity as well as ignorance. Scientific in- 
fidelity should be met by scientific knowledge, not only 
knowledge of the facts of the natural universe but of 
archaeology and of a true historic criticism. Is not every- 
thing aiding the elucidation of truth, from the revelations 
of the highest physical science, the remarkable facts of 
ethnological research, and the brilliant era in philological 
investigation, to the last Egyptian discovery or broken 
fragment of cuneiform inscription from new-risen Chaldea 
and Assyria ? The battle may be hard, but there is no 
doubt of the result where the gospel of hope contends 
against the gospel of despair. Protestantism and true 
science are one. 

The pulpit of this age, in order to meet its wants, must 
be, as has already been said, to a certain extent scien- 
tific ; for the scientific statement of truth is the most 
exact statement, and the inductive and scientific is 
healthfully corrective of the ultra tendencies of the 
metaphysic and deductive method. Science and religion 
may be of mutual help to each other, for the one 
searches the causes of natural phenomena, the other the 
cause of causes — " science is nature revealed, while re- 
ligion is nature's God revealed." The Christian pulpit 
has always claimed the liberty to discuss scientific ques- 
tions where they cross lines of revelation, having an ex- 
ample in the apostle Paul, who suggests in his discourse 



CLA SSI PICA TION OF SERMONS. 475 

at Athens the necessity and mode of meeting philosophic 
denial, as he met the atomic theory of the Epicureans 
Avhich has come around again in our day — by kindness, 
wise firmness, and an intelligent presentation of the 
truth, so congenial to human reason, of a personal 
Creator. The preacher must be willing to come down 
from the region of abstractions to meet error in the con- 
crete forms of a materialistic philosophy, which is the 
present phase of denial. Pure theism is a proposition 
which can be defended scientifically as well as meta- 
physically, without dogmatism and unchristian bitter- 
ness, and with the very weapons that science herself so 
liberally furnishes. Already those who have lived a 
quarter of a century in the thinking world have seen great 
scientific names — even such a name as that of John 
Stuart Mill — waning with the theories belonging to 
them, which theories, though now subsided, we are will- 
ing thankfully to confess have left behind them much 
good and enrichment, with the devastation they have 
occasioned. 

The extreme limits of atheistic principles which have 
been already attained indicate a reaction to a sounder 
philosophy, a more rational and truly scientific theory of 
being. This the pulpit, with a divinely nurtured intel- 
ligence, should aid, as something correlated to its higher 
aim and work ; since, in one sense, the kingdom of spirit 
is built up from beneath by such means ; and we have 
been of the opinion that Christian thought has heretofore 
ignored too much the importance of those lower physical 
and material facts which have their influence upon the 
gradual improvement of the race by the harmonious 
working of physical and moral laws ; but we would in 
no sense depend upon scientific culture, any more than 
upon philosophic and literary culture for the power of 



47 6 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

the pulpit— if we do God sends his prophets in the guise 
of herdsmen and coal miners to break the illusion — but 
at the same time Luther himself did not despise the 
aids of learning, literature, art, and eloquence, and if he 
had lived in these days he would joyfully have hailed 
science also as a handmaid of Christian persuasion, while 
he would have despised it as compared with the power of 
a spiritual faith, of a living Christ. 

In the forms of the sermon, in the modes of present- 
ing divine truth to the people, therefore, we contend for 
a generous and wholesome breadth of treatment, taking 
in the whole nature of man ; for absolute freedom within 
the true sphere of the Christian preacher ; for a cheerful 
hope in humanity ; for the use of every genuine method 
of persuasion and every form of effective address which 
nature, true sympathy, and the Spirit of God teach. 

In concluding these remarks upon the general subject 
of the classification of sermons according to their treat- 
ment and form, and the discussion of the best forms of 
preaching, the suggestion would be in place that some reg- 
ular course of pulpit instruction is advisable — something 
like a plan that embraces a long period, per- 
genera j^^ips a season, or a year ; like the method of 

ureachi e- o^'^erly reading and expounding the Scrip- 
tures in the English, German, and Lutheran 
churches; in fact the system of "the Christian year." 
A campaign, carefully planned beforehand in all its de- 
tails, sometimes shows astonishing results, as seen in the 
Prussian part of the German-French war. The very 
lines of operation that were laid down in the silence of 
the study months before were strictly followed out, and 
the enemy was forced to do just what his more prescient 
adversary had marked out for him to do. We do not be- 
lieve in quite such a rigid system of operation in the spirit- 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 477 

ual field, but certainly a comprehensive intelligence should 
preside over it, and on beginning his work, and begin- 
ning every new year of his ministry, the preacher would 
do well to have some clear idea of what he is intending 
to do, and what should be the style, method, and aim 
of his preaching, whether it should be doctrinal or prac- 
tical, of a revival or didactic character, governed often by 
the character and wants of the people, by the changing 
seasons of the year, and, above all, by the guidings and 
movings of the Holy Spirit. 

We would reiterate the recommendation already made, 
that, under the condition that the purpose of preaching 
is right, that it is unselfishly aimed at the spiritual 
good of the hearers, that it is the truth as 

it is in Jesus, the greater variety that the ^"^ ^ ^" 
1 • 1 . 1 t /• preaching, 

preacher can give to his style and form 

of sermonizing the better. As has been hinted, every 
sermon should exhibit this variety ; it should not be 
exclusively doctrinal without the practical element, nor 
should it be entirely practical without the doctrinal 
and didactic element. Our modern revivals, it is said, 
reach the great middle classes of society ; but they 
do not reach the two extremes — the intellectual or 
the working classes. But preaching should be such 
that all should be reached. For a man to preach 
exclusively sermons addressed to the logical under- 
standing, is like feeding a child upon only one kind 
of food ; he must sometimes preach some sermons ad- 
dressed more exclusively to the affections — hortatory and 
awakening sermons. Historical sermons and sermons es- 
pecially upon the life of our Lord, with their multitude of 
lessons to the present time and to the universal soul of man 
— truly Christian discourses — are very" interesting as well 
as enriching. There should be this attractive element of 



47 S HOMILETICS PROPER. 

variety in sermonizing ; a discourse on the application of 
the Christian principle to political economy now and then 
interposed among discourses of a more purely religious 
character, might lead some minds to enlarged views of 
duty and new apprehensions of the responsibility of 
citizenship. But it seems to us extremely unfortunate 
when a preacher runs on an iron track of sermon- 
izing — let it be a theological style of preaching, where 
the sermon is but the reproduction of theological treat- 
ises ; or a sentimental style of preaching, where ser- 
mons are little more than pathetic illustrations and pic- 
ture-drawing ; or moralizing preaching, where the sermon 
never rises into the heights and glories of the supernat- 
ural truth. And we would even say that a preacher may 
dwell too much and too long in the supernatural re- 
gions of thought, so that he himself shall become a 
kind of spiritualized essence, dehumanized and bloodless, 
sublimated beyond human feelings and passions, and 
having no power to come down to the wants, interests, 
and sympathies of living men. Such a man ought to be 
put in a glass case and enshrined on the top of the 
steeple. Let us return to biblical preaching and then 
we will get this variety. Let us have a simpler and 
more primitive and apostolic style of instruction, drawn 
freshly from the Scriptures of God's truth, and from 
nature. The preacher is called upon to exercise con- 
stantly his best invention, the genius God has given him, 
to introduce an interesting and healthful style of sermoniz- 
ing addressed to all classes. Let him adapt divine truth 
to the real wants of his hearers, studying those wants. Let 
him not strike ever the same chord that renders back a ter- 
rible and gloomy tone — sin and perdition — solemn truth ; • 
but is this the only string of divine harmonious truth that 
the gospel has ? Let him not, on the other hand, see noth- 



CLA SSIFICA TIOJV OF SERMONS. 479 

Ing but the hopeful side and dare not draw the dark pic- 
ture, so that his preaching lacks shadow, background, 
and power. Let him not in like manner deal with the 
metaphysic and philosophic dogma till he dries up the 
fountains of his hearers' hearts as with the breath of a 
desert-wind ; neither let him dwell so entirely in the 
busy, unreasoning present of fact, that thinking minds 
are not helped in their metaphysical and philosophical 
difficulties, and do not get to the foundations of truth, 
rationally speaking. Here, then, is scope afforded for 
the best talent, the most fruitful invention, the boldest 
imagination, the keenest study of human nature, and 
the most active, growing spiritual knowledge and faith. 

Sec. 21. Classification of Sermons according to their 
method of delivery. 

From the fact that the manner of delivery shapes the 
conception and plan of the sermon, and bears directly 
upon the whole object and design of preaching, a course 
of lectures upon Homiletics would be imperfect which 
did not give careful attention to this subject ; and so 
great is its importance in a practical point of view, that 
we have reserved it for the last place, where indeed it 
logically belongs. 

We sometimes listen to thoughtless flings against 
theological seminaries that the art of oratory is not cul- 
tivated at the present day by them. 

It would be more proper to charge modern civilization 
itself with a neglect of the rhetorical art which was once 
considered to be, as in the old Greek state, the crown of 
a liberal education. Many causes might be adduced for 
this ; but while the charge against theological seminaries 
is not an entirely just one, and while we venture to say 



480 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

that at this moment more attention is paid in our best 
theological schools to oratory, than in the colleges, law 
schools, or other educational and professional institutions 
of the land, much more should be done. Theological 
schools, instead of bending all their aim to make learned 
theologians, should, while doing this, make their pre-emi- 
nent object the turning out of effective preachers. All 
their instruction, of whatever kind, should aim at this. 

The Christian orator in the pulpit, as he has the noblest 
field, so he should have the loftiest ideal of the orator, 
the "great orator," who, Quintilian said, '* had not yet 
appeared, but who would appear hereafter, and who 
would be as consummate in goodness as in eloquence." 
The age of the Reformation was a period of marked elo- 
quence in the pulpit. Concerning the eloquence of Cal- 
vin, Farel, and Viret, an epigram of Theodore de Beza is 
recorded, to this effect, that " Never one showed more 
learning than Calvin ; never one thundered with more 
force than Farel ; never one spake with more honied 
sweetness than Viret." Luther and Zwingli laid the 
foundations of the Reformation in the eloquence as well 
as spiritual fire and faith of their preaching. 

The European Protestant Church has always cultivated 
the oratorical art, and in France especially it has rivalled 
the senate and the bar as well as the academic chair, in 
the purity, grace, and finished elegance of its oratory. 
Coquerel says that " Religion imposes this upon itself ; 
even the highest truth is not self-evident to the becloud- 
ed and corrupt mind, but needs to be explained, proved, 
and established. It must be recommended to men with 
all the energies of the soul, all the faculties of the intel- 
lect, all the resources of oratory. One can never plead 
for religion with too much eloquence, and no preacher 
is excused, if he has received from God any good gift, 



CLASSIFICATION- OF SERMONS. 481 

any quality that belongs to the orator, such as mem- 
ory, voice, facile elocution, presence of mind, easy and 
natural gesticulation, an expressive countenance, and a 
piercing glance, above all, power of thought and forceful 
expression — he is culpable in not training these powers 
to the highest perfection in the service of his Master." * 

Coquerel regrets that preaching has been excluded 
from the domain of literature. He points to Massillon, 
who worked over his sermons ten years before publishing 
them ; and he recommends the establishment of institu- 
tions like that at Augsburg, called a " Prediger - Seminar ,' * 
where the sole aim is to fit young men to be preachers. 

The modes of delivery have greatly influenced the 
oratorical power of the pulpit ; they have increased or 
diminished it in a marked degree, both in respect of 
periods and individuals. Let us then look at this point, 
and we now^ proceed to notice the classification of ser- 
mons, especially in regard to their methods of delivery. 
This classification would divide sermons into three kinds 
(though these methods may sometimes be combined in 
one), viz. : 

Written sermons, or those delivered from written 
notes ; Memoriter sermons, or those recited from 
memory ; and Extemporaneous sermons. 

I. Written sermons. 

This method is not without its great names in the 
pulpit. 

W^ho would find fault with the preaching Written 
r u TT t:» T- 11 • !_• sermons, 

of such a man as Horace Bushnell m his 

prime, when the manuscript before him seemed to vanish, 

and he soared above it, and above all art, by the force of 

his strong thinking, and the inspiration of a divine and 

expanding theme ? 

' " Observations Pratiques sur la Predication." p. 264. 



4^2 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Dr. Chalmers, that pulpit-monarch, was also a preacher 
of written sermons. Van der Palm, the most eloquent 
preacher of Holland in modern times, pursued this plan. 
This method, we conclude, must still continue to be 
practised by those who, if they should die for it, can 
neither speak from memory nor off-hand. The preaching 
of written sermons will not be abandoned in haste. But 
still, it should be remembered, that this was not the 
method of the first preachers. 

They were free men in speech, if but children often in 

knowledge. "All the examples of Christian antiquity 

and of the beginnings of the Reformation are 

° ^ against the practice of the reading of writ- 
ancient TVT • 1 T-. M ^1 

method ^^^ sermons. Neither Basil nor Chrysos- 

tom, neither Augustine, nor Luther, nor 

Calvin, nor their contemporaries, read their discourses, 

and later down this method never prevailed in French 

churches, and is now renounced almost entirely." ^ 

In Germany the use of written sermons has never pre- 
vailed. In Holland, about fifty years since, it was the 
custom ; but it is now given up, and this is true to a great 
extent in Scotland. Its introduction into England, where, 
together with New England and America it has most pre- 
vailed, has been sometimes ascribed to Archbishop Til- 
lotson ; but Bishop Burnet gives a more reliable account 
of the manner in which it came into vogue in England. 
He says, in substance, speaking of the Middle Ages, that 
preaching had been restricted to Lent, at other seasons 
only to festival days, panegyrics of martyrs, etc. The 
friars, seeing danger ahead, felt that they must use the 
instrumentality of preaching to ward off the influences 
of advancing reformed ideas. Thus " by passionate and 



Coquerel's " Observations Pratiques," p. 175. 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 4^3 

affecting discourse" they kindled the devotion of the 
people toward shrines and pilgrimages, and in this way- 
filled their coffers. 

The reformers, on the other hand, saw the value of 
this instrumentality, but they at first used it indiscreetly. 
They indulged in highly controversial and acrimonious 
preaching, which, responded to in the same vein, pro- 
duced complaints to the king, and after that preaching 
was confined to the reading of written discourses.^ 

But this practice was not adopted by the later re- 
formers of the English Church, and was really revived 
by the Puritans ; so much so that it was considered a 
Puritan innovation, and hence the proclamation of 
Charles II., October 8th, 1674, to the University of Cam- 
bridge, forbidding, on pain of his Majesty's displeasure, 
the practice of reading sermons, as one " which took its 
beginnings from the disorders of the times," and which 
was characterized as " a supine and slothful" method. 
But the practice had gained too strong a foothold, and 
has maintained its ground ever since in England, where, 
at the present time, not one preacher in ten extemporizes, 
perhaps not one in twelve ; very few memorize ; but the 
preaching is from pretty full notes or entirely written ser- 
mons. Thus this mode did not come in till after the 
Reformation, and has led, as we have said, to the decline 
of pulpit eloquence. 

Sydney Smith's witty gibes were directed especially 
against this method of preaching in England. " Pulpit 
discourses," he says, "have insensibly dwindled from 
speaking to reading ; a practice of itself sufficient to 
stifle every germ of eloquence. It is only by the fresh 
feelings of the heart, that mankind can be profitably 



Burnet's " Hist, of the Reformation of the Ch. of En-'land. 



4^4 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

affected. What can be more ludicrous than an orator 
delivering stale indignation and fervor of a week old ; 
turning over whole pages of violent passion written out 
in fair text ; reading the tropes and apostrophes into 
which he is hurried by the ardor of his mind ; and so 
afTected at a preconcerted line and page, that he is un- 
able to proceed any further? The great object of modern 
sermons is to hazard nothing ; their characteristic is 
decent debility ; which alike guards their authors from 
hideous errors, and precludes them from striking beau- 
ties. " 

It cannot at the same time be denied that this method 
has some advantages. 

(i.) The written sermon admits of and calls for a 
thorough treatment of the subject. It does not allow the 
loose, inconsequential method of thought 
van age q{^q^ found in the false extemporaneous 
sermon style, when, as an old preacher said of him- 
self, "if he was persecuted in one text he 
might flee into another;" but it demands, especially in 
pulpits of a highly educated community, careful treat- 
ment of the theme and precise and well-considered state- 
ments. 

(2.) It secures a more finished style. There is indeed 
great temptation to run into the literary and essay, in- 
stead of the direct oratorical, style in the written dis- 
course ; but he who writes out his thoughts fully is 
forced to pay some attention to his style ; and he who 
never writes out his sermons, if he do not specially guard 
against this tendency, will be in danger of losing his 
power of accurate writing. Writing makes a clear and 
rich style. 

" The remedy of sterile reverie is the pen. State down 
every attainment in your thinking by a verbal proposi- 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS, 4^5 

tion. The thing of emphasis is the prepositional form. 
We never have the full use of language as an instru- 
ment of thought, unless we cause our thoughts to fall in 
an assertory shape." The familiar advice of Cicero, 
in the First Book of the ** De Oratore, " is, " Cap2it 
auteinest . . . qiiam plurimu7nscribcre. Stilus optimus 
et prcBstantissimus dicendi effector ac magister. 
Ipsa collatio conformatioqiie verborum pcrficitiir in scribcii- 
do J non poetico, scd quodain oratorio Jiumero et inodo.'' 
Professor Shepard, in his discourse on the " Congrega- 
tional Pulpit," preached at the annual meeting of the 
American Congregational Union, in 1857, makes these 
strong remarks : " We insist, then, that we are not to 
cease following the fathers in a fervid use of the pen, 
more or less, in connection with preparing for the pulpit. 
Some of them, doubtless, placed too much reliance on it. 
Some come under a servile bondage to it. But it does 
not follow from this that our wisdom consists in throwing 
it wholly away. We have said that some of these writers 
for the pulpit proved themselves as among the most 
effective that ever stood there. They made men see the 
truth, believe, it, confess it, and be Christians. They 
made them thinkers, reasoners, orators. The sage of 
Franklin was the teacher of logic to lawyers. The great- 
est mathematician of the age was the product of that 
pulpit ; at any rate, he sprang out from before it. In 
the light of our history we pronounce the clamor raised 
in some quarters against all writing for the pulpit a mis- 
erably shallow and most senseless clamor. The pulpit 
cannot maintain its moulding efficacy, its ruling position, 
unless the men thereof are men of the sturdy pen, as well 
as of the nimble tongue. People, take them as they rise, 
are greatly given to be lazy ; hard thinking is hard work, 
and lazy men won't do it if they can help it. Let the 



486 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

mere off-hand be the mode and the law, and we shall 
have mere flippant, off-hand, extemporaneous dribble. 
It will answer for exhortation, but not for doctrine, for 
correction, for instruction in righteousness. There are 
discourses which ought to be made, but cannot be made 
in this way ; crises, wants, demands, which cannot be 
wholly met in this (extemporaneous) way." 

Certainly funeral and occasional discourses, and medita- 
tive sermons, cannot possibly be constructed in this off- 
hand way. 

(3.) It assists the preacher in many practical ways. The 
written method gives him a feeling of confidence. He is 
sure of having something to say. He is relieved from 
anxiety in this respect ; and he can give all his powers to 
an effective delivery. Then, too, he accumulates a preach- 
ing-capital of sermons for future use. These are like 
well-filled barrels in the cellar that the house- master 
thinks of with complacency in view of hard times to come. 

An American clergyman who died a quarter of a cen- 
tury ago left three thousand neatly and perfectly com- 
posed sermons ; which, it must be said, however, though a 
celebrated preacher in his day, have not been disturbed 
since that time. 

As to the actual working of this method of preaching, 
it cannot be denied that reading from notes is apt, with- 
out great and constant care, to lead into radi- 
Disadvantages cal faults. 

° ^ (i.) It tends to an indolent and monot- 

written ^ ^ , , 

sermQn. onous style of preachmg. 

We have quoted from Sydney Smith, 

and we would quote a sentence or two more, premising 

that what he says does not pointedly apply to American 

preaching : 

" Preaching has become a by-word for long and dull 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 487 

address of any kind ; and whoever wishes to imply in 
any piece of writing, the absence of anything agreeable 
and inviting calls it 'a sermon.' To this cause of the 
unpopularity of sermons may be added the extremely 
ungraceful manner in which they are delivered. The 
English people, 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 pul- 
pit. A clergyman clings to his velvet cushion with either 
hand, keeps his eye riveted upon his book (notes), speaks 
of the ecstasies of joy and fear with a voice and a face 
which indicate neither, and pinions his body and soul into 
the same attitude of limit and thought, for fear of being 
called theatrical and affected." ... " 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 body ; he articulates 
with every limb, and talks from head to foot with a thou- 
sand voices. Why this holoplexia on sacred occasions 
alone ? Why call in the aid of paralysis to piety ? Is it 
a rule of oratory to balance the style against the subject, 
and to handle the most sublime truths in the dullest lan- 
guage and the driest manner 1 Is sin to be taken from 
man as Eve was from Adam, by casting them into a deep 
sleep ?" 

(2.) Unless guarded against, the use of written sermons 
also weakens the native power of thought, as well as of 
delivery. One becomes so habituated to the use of the 
pen that he cannot think without writing, which is a 
real loss of power. 

(3.) The loss of time in the mechanical process of writ- 
ing and copying, to the detriment of study. 

The chief things to be guarded against in this method 
are : 



4^« EOMILETICS PROPER. 

{a.) Against mere reading. 

The main difficulty in employing this method is to avoid 
the idea of writing and delivering the written discourse as 

_ . if it were a literary production to be read in- 

Cautions. '^ ^ 

stead of an address to be spoken. Many con- 
tend that writing must be read and not spoken ; that it is 
a virtual deception to attempt to speak it. Thus Co- 
querel says, "If one reads in the pulpit, it is better 
read openly and boldly, taking no other pains than to 
have the manuscript easily legible and properly smoothed 
down on the front of the pulpit ; then to turn the leaves 
without affecting a disguise which is useless and unbe- 
coming. We may be certain that the hearers are not 
deceived in this respect ; they always know when the 
orator is reading." 

Dr. Chalmers also warned his pupils against the custom 
of mingling reading with free speaking, but recommends 
that preaching should be either one or the other. Never- 
theless, if there be an earnest man in the pulpit, who is 
resolved that his audience shall be affected by the truth, 
and whose own mind is possessed by the truth, we believe 
there is a possibility, even with a written discourse, of 
the preacher's rising above mere reading into something 
like genuine address, suffering the manuscript to be before 
him rather as a guide than a restraint. This depends upon 
the preacher's theory of the sermon, whether he regards it 
as a means to an end or a means in itself ; whether it is a 
living word or a written composition ; whether his preach- 
ing is to end in pen, ink, and paper, or in the hearts, 
souls, and lives of men. But we are assuredly less robust 
than our ancestors ; and sometimes (by no means always, 
for many of the best and stoutest-hearted men in the 
world are in the pulpit) the clergyman who goes forth 
complacently on Sunday morning, armed and equipped 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 489 

with his nicely written discourse, is about as near to 
Martin Luther groaning with his message to the people, 
or John Knox burning with his prophetic fire, or Hugh 
Latimer who charged Henry VHL to his face with adul- 
tery, as is a child playing to be a soldier with a wooden 
weapon compared to a long-sworded moss-trooper, hero 
of a hundred fights. One cannot strike hard who is 
encumbered by this paper armor. Some who are older 
and cannot readily learn new ways may find it difficult and 
even impossible to free themselves from the bondage to 
written sermons, but young men should take heed in time. 

(b.) Against a poorly prepared manuscript. 

Be careful to have the manuscript in a good condition, 
and to be perfectly familiar with it. The preacher, by 
skillful management, by gaining a thorough familiarity 
with his notes (having them written out in a clear, large, 
bold hand), and by becoming in some measure independent 
of the manuscript, and rising above it — by filling his mind 
with the subject-matter — may perhaps be able, in the 
delivery of the written sermon, to do away almost en- 
tirely with the impression that it is not, in form at least, 
a spontaneous discourse. But the usual awkward and 
confused manner of reading written discourses is unen- 
durable. He who has good sight and good memory 
should deliver his sermon standing erect, and looking at 
the people, so that they can look into his eyes, and he 
into theirs, and as if he had no shred of manuscript be- 
fore him. To see a preacher of the free gospel with his 
head continually bent over his sermon, and tied down to 
his manuscript, as if there were no living audience before 
him, is certainly a most pitiable spectacle. 

This familiarity with the manuscript is indeed indis- 
pensable to success in using written sermons. 

If one's time is occupied in catching at the sense of 



49° HOMILETICS PROPER. 

the written page, what opportunity is left for the de- 
livery ? The mechanical effort nullifies the spiritual 
power. The mind is on the manuscript, not on the con- 
gregation. It is taken up with the gun, not fixed on the 
mark. How can the speaker powerfully impress his own 
feelings and ideas on an audience, when he is laboriously 
grappling with the difficulties of rescuing his ideas from 
the unfamiliar page of written characters before him ? 
He is a slave to the letter, bound hand and foot. He 
cannot speak freely. To do this he must have obtained 
previous mastery of his manuscript. Every heading, 
division, word, should be so familiar that a glance recalls 
the whole, a word a sentence, a sentence a paragraph, 
a paragraph a division. 

Then he breaks his chain and rises superior to his 
manuscript, and speaks with something of the freedom 
and power of an extemporaneous speaker. In no other 
way can he do this. For though it be true that the man 
behind the manuscript is the great thing and that the 
earnest preacher will always be effective, whatever mode 
he adopts, yet if any method in itself have positive draw- 
backs and essential disadvantages, he is bound to con- 
sider these, and either guard effectually against them, or 
adopt an entirely different way of preaching. 

ic.) Against repeating old sermons. 

Do not repeat a written sermon without re-writing or, 
at least, re-thinking it. A preacher of old sermons in 
Oxford is called an " Oxford hack," and when he 
attempts to make an old sermon new by giving it a 
new text and a little refurbishing, it is " an Oxford hack 
with a new saddle and bridle." ' 

In respect of old sermons the matter of the sermon 



Cox's " Recollections of Oxford," p. 224. 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 49 ^ 

may be as good and fresh as ever, but all will agree that 
the feeling in which the sermon is produced should be 
also fresh. There ought to be something new in every 
sermon, because there is some new development of ex- 
perience, thought, or feeling in ourselves in regard to the 
same old and yet ever new truth that we treat. 

In repeating written sermons, it is too much the habit 
of preachers to snatch up at the last moment, for an ex- 
change, or for a second preaching, a manuscript sermon, 
without studying it carefully. Every sermon preached, 
whether written or unwritten, whether preached the first 
or the fortieth time, should be a fresh discourse. There 
should be not only an intellectual, but a spiritual repro- 
duction of the sermon ; it should be thought out 
afresh ; it should be re-created ; it should be prayed over 
and breathed upon by the same intense feeling as that in 
which it was composed. It is seldom, indeed, that an old 
sermon does not need correction and improvement, and 
even re-writing ; for one may have gained new thoughts 
and experiences on the same subject ; and at all events, 
none will dispute that every sermon preached should 
bear a fresh coinage — if repeated it should be re-minted. 

2. Memoriter sermons. 

Memoriter speaking has in its favor the example of the 

ancient orators, and, in all probability, of Demosthenes, 

who did not trust himself without a careful 

and even verbal preparation. The memory M<^"^o"*®^ 
11 11 , . , sermons, 

was regarded as almost the greatest of mtel- 

lectual gifts for the orator, as Quintilian says, "It is 

not without reason that the memory has been called the 

treasury of eloquence." This style has also in its favor 

the example of a few distinguished English preachers, and 

of the German and French pulpit as a body. 



492 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

A French writer says : " By memorization one escapes 
from the sudden imprudences, the irreparable mistakes 
and failures of a juvenile extemporization. As to the 
objection that memorization gives to the delivery some- 
thing of constraint, of formality, of overstrained empha- 
sis, an affected gesture, a redundant accent, and that 
extemporization, on the contrary, draws with it a deliv- 
ery more natural, fervent, and sympathetic ; examples 
militate against the justice of these alternatives ; if the 
memory is only sure of itself the elocution does not incur 
these reproaches, while the delivery of an extemporaneous 
discourse may be as confused as the discourse itself." 

De Ravignan recommends it as the only proper method, 
and he repeats a saying of Massillon, *' My best sermon 
is the one I know best." He drew from this the conclu- 
sion that we ought to know some sermons by heart, and 
added : 

** I know very well the trouble of learning by heart ; 
but the more trouble the better — trouble is just what we 
ought to have. This wretched fear of taking trouble it is 
that does all the harm. Would you like m.e to tell you 
something, of the truth of which I am deeply convinced ? 
Sloth is what chiefly palsies talent and hinders success. 
I remember a very sensible remark made to me by a 
speaker of experience ; he said that we must let a speech 
rot, yes, rot in the memory. Beware of losing the power 
of learning by heart ; nothing can supply that want." 

Sach preachers as De Ravignan, Lacordaire, and P^re 
Hyacinthe, who, whatever their errors, would be called 
great orators, and who made the Gothic pulpit of Notre 
Dame resplendent in these modern days, were memoriter 
preachers ; but it must be said that Notre Dame is a 
metropolitan show-pulpit, where a display of eloquence 
was expected ; yet, as a general rule, French and Ger- 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 493 

man preachers, both Catholic and Protestant, among 
them Adolphe Monod, Athanase Coquerel, Vinet, and 
above all, Reinhard, in the last centurj^ held that any- 
other kind of preaching than the memoriter was inefficient, 
indolent, and unworthy of the occasion and the truth. 

By this method, as the example of these eminent 
preachers proves, the sermon being written out is apt to 
be carefully composed ; the written style thus intended 
for delivery is better adapted to speaking, and whatever 
is stiff is taken out of it ; and if one can overcome the 
fear of breaking down much is gained in accuracy of lan- 
guage and deliberation of thought. The memory, it is 
admitted, is capable of immense cultivation. 

Dr. Immanuel Christlieb, of Bonn, has stated that in 
his own case, while it took him at first four days to commit 
a sermon to memory, he soon reduced it to two days ; 
and that now it is only necessary for him to read it over 
twice, once Saturday night, and once on Sunday morn- 
ing. He did not state how soon he forgot it ! 

The testimony also of the late Dr. Thomas Guthrie, 
who is commonly supposed to have been an extempo- 
raneous speaker, is interesting. Speaking of the man- 
ner of preparing for the pulpit he says : 

" Thus the only time left me for preparation for the 
pulpit, composing my sermons, and so thoroughly com- 
mitting them that they rose without an effort to my 
memory (and therefore appeared as if they were born on 
the spur and stimulus of the moment), was to be found 
in the morning." ' 

The example of such a man, and of nearly all the con- 
tinental preachers of Europe, cannot be entirely disre- 
garded. Have we not possibly erred in America in hold- 



" Autobiography," v. i. p. 19. 



494 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

ing this method in especial disesteem ? and may not its 
confessed disadvantages of confinement, task-work, and 
want of freedom, entirely vanish in particular cases, and 
great relief and power be obtained from it when success- 
fully mastered ? 

Robert Hall, it is well known, mingled the extem- 
poraneous and memoriter methods ; and on most occa- 
sions made use of his memory for the delivery of the 
most important and finished parts of his sermon. The 
following is related of him : 

" Once, in a conversation with a few friends who had 
led him to talk of his preaching, and to answer, among 
other questions, one respecting the supposed and report- 
ed extemporaneous production of the most striking parts 
of his sermons, in the earlier period of his ministry, he 
surprised us by saying that most of them, so far from 
being extemporaneous, had been so deliberately prepared 
that his words were selected, and the construction and 
order of the sentences adjusted." ^ 

In this connection it is well to notice what Dr. Samuel 
Hopkins says of Jonathan Edwards's preaching. ^ 

He was wont to read so considerable a part of what he 
delivered, yet he was far from thinking this the best way of 
preaching in general, and looked upon using his notes so 
much as he did a deficiency and infirmity ; and in the lat- 
ter part of his life he was inclined to think it would have 
been better if he had never been accustomed to use his 
notes at all. It appeared to him that preaching wholly 
without notes, agreeably to the custom in most Protestant 
countries, and in what seems evidently to have been the 
manner of the apostles and primitive preachers of the 



^ Foster's " Essay on Robert Hall." 

- Works of Edwards, London ed., p. ccxxxi. 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 495 

gospel, was by far the most natural way, and had the 
greatest tendency, on the whole, to answer the end of 
preaching ; and supposed that no one who had talents 
equal to the work of the ministry was incapable of speaking 
vicjHoriter, if he took suitable pains for this attainment 
in his youth. He would have the young preacher write 
all his sermons, or, at least, most of them, out, at large ; 
and instead of reading them to his hearers, take pains to 
commit them to memory ; w^hich, though it would require 
a great deal of labor at first, yet would soon become 
easier by use, and help him to speak more correctly and 
freely, and be of great service to him all his days." 

Reinhard, before mentioned, early adopted the memo- 
riter style. His reasons for it, strongly urged, may be 
found in his " Letters on Preaching." 

Dr. Hagenbach, in his " Liturgik und Homiletik," 
recommends the memoriter style first of all, the written 
next, and the extempore not at all. 

Memoriter preaching, sometimes called ** reciting," 
and in Scotland " mandating," a process which it is said 
may be heard going on with great energy in a Scotch 
parsonage every Saturday night, was never so much in 
favor in America as in Europe. 

It has certainly, as has been said, some advantages. 

(i.) The sermon is first written out and is 
thus apt to be carefully composed. Advantages 

(2.) It serves to correct the written style, ° 

, ,. . , memoriter 

for one readily discovers in delivering the preaching- 
sermon away from the manuscript, whatever 
is stiff and essayish in it, whatever is not suited to be 
spoken, whatever cannot be delivered easily and natu- 
rally. 

(3.) In the delivery, also, if one can conquer the ap- 
prehension of breaking down, he has gained accuracy 



49^ HOMILETICS PROPER. 

of language and deliberation of thought, and he can 
stand erect and look the audience in the face and be 
free and unconstrained in action. This is an immense 
gain, and this method, which has heretofore seemed alto- 
gether the least fitted for the pulpit, has some serious 
claims to our regard ; and if it could be united with 
the extemporaneous method it would seem to be the 
ideal of preaching. No one at least should say that he 
cannot adopt this style who has never tried, who has 
never laid the tax upon his memory. 

It is, at all events, a great acquisition to a minister to 
have his memory stored with passages of Scripture, and 
even if a preacher adopts a written rather than a memo- 
riter style, he should be so thoroughly familiar with his 
manuscript that it amounts to a memoriter style. 

But this method of preaching has immense disadvan- 
tages, which, unless well overcome, make 

Disadvan- jt the least commendable style of all, and 

'^^^^ °^ one to be avoided. 

memoriter / s rr-, , r • • • • 

oreachine- ^^v ^ ^^^^ ^ time m committmg a ser- 

mon to memory. Few men can commit a 
sermon in less than two days, so as to be perfectly free ; 
for unless one speaks without a conscious effort at re- 
membering he is of all speakers the most constrained. 

(2.) In the monotonous process of the memory the 
power and animation of the mind must receive a check. 
It is tying down the memory to a set task, and it be- 
comes doubly a rote-work, first of writing, then of re- 
membering. 

(3.) It has the disadvantages of the written method, 
without securing the advantages of the extemporaneous 
method. It is the written method, though apparently 
unwritten ; one is confined, though seemingly free ; he 
is attempting two processes at once— that of remember- 



CLA SSIFICA TION OF SERMONS. 497 

ing and delivering ; and this real want of freedom will 
surely make itself manifest, if in no other way, by the 
abstracted expression of the eyes, gazing at vacancy, by 
which it will be soon discovered that the preacher is 
"reading from his memory." There is more honesty 
and power in openly delivering the sermon from the 
manuscript ; for the secret being out that one is speaking 
from memory, the virtue has departed from the discourse. 

Then, as to the sermon itself, by repeating it so many 
times the preacher is apt to get tired of it ; the fire will 
be taken out of it ; and, after all, it is quite impossible 
to conceal the idea that it has been written, and thus the 
air of delivering a thoughtful sermon as if it were com- 
posed on the spot will have a shade of insincerity. 

But, as I have said, all these objections may vanish 
in particular cases ; and the example of so many great 
preachers deserves our earnest consideration. 

Let us now proceed to consider the last method of pul- 
pit deliver>% for we cannot stop until the ideal of preach- 
ing is reached, and the preacher stands forth a free man, 
the master of all his resources of mind and body, to speak 
his message directly to the soul, as if it were indeed a 
" word of life" (and all preaching should be living, or 
life-creating), just as it is given him to speak, with no 
painful thought as to the words ; but these are truly 
"winged words," flying forth as on the breath of the 
soul. 

3. Extempore preaching. 

It is sometimes imagined that this method is a new 
thing, a discovery- of these latter days, and 
a great and wonderful reformation of the ^Ixtempore 
pulpit. P""^'^"^- 

If it be a reform of the pulpit (and we hold it to be so) 



49 S HOMILETICS PROPER. 

it will only be travelling back to the earliest times, to 
the apostolic age, and to the way that nature, the free 
spirit of man, and the Spirit of God dictate. 

Among the classic orators a modified species of im- 
provisation was doubtless in vogue. The practice of 
writing out the discourse beforehand com- 
T e ancien j^ej^^e^j^ j^ is said, among the Greeks in the 
method. . r t^ . , , . , 

time of Pericles, and was m some degree a 

sign of the decadence of Greek eloquence, though De- 
mosthenes himself, in a former age, was, as has been 
said, not wholly an extempore speaker. 

From the Gorgias of Plato it is easy to deduce the 
proof that the extemporaneous method was frequently 
resorted to. Cicero says : 

' ' Is orator erit, hoc tain gravi nomine digniis qui qitae- 
cunique res inciderit, qucs sit dictione explicanda, prudentery 
et composite^ et ornate^ et memoriter dicat, cuin quadam 
etiam actionis dignitate. ' ' ^ 

This " memorization" here spoken of was evidently the 
recalling of ideas instead of words, and described doubt- 
less, in general terms, the orator's facility of clothing his 
remembered ideas in fit language, in fact the power of 
accurate and forceful extemporization. This, as we have 
said, was the method of the earliest preachers, and can 
there be any doubt that it was the apostolic method ? 
Did the apostle Paul need to have his manuscript ser- 
mon before him when he stretched forth his hand and 
said " Men and brethren" ? 

Dr. Neander, speaking of the first centuries, says : 

" The sermons were sometimes., though rarely, read 
from notes ; sometimes freely delivered ; and sometimes 
they were altogether extemporary." 



" De Oratore," I. 15. 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 499 

This statement of Neander's, that in the early ages ser- 
mons were sometimes read, has been controverted, and 
the evidence against this is pretty strong ; but doubtless 
there was some preparation in thought and composition ; 
and in set orations, or occasional sermons, like pane- 
g>Tics, there was actual writing ; yet, notwithstanding 
all this, that the earlier patristic preachers were in the 
common habit of using written notes, there is no proof 
that we have seen. 

A writer in Blackwood (February, 1869), generalizing 
upon this point says : " The ancient mode of preaching 
was, of course, extempore, with what amount of previous 
preparation would depend on the powers or habits of the 
preacher. The sermons of Origen are the first which are 
recorded as having been taken down by short-hand writ- 
ers ; and it was probably not until a date comparatively 
recent that any preacher thought of actually writing out 
his sermon at any length beforehand, with the view of 
delivering it from memory, as has been the habit of some 
of the most successful preachers. 

" The practice of reading from a manuscript seems only 
to have come in after the Reformation, and even then to 
have been a long time exceptional and unpopular." 

It is said that Archbishop Tillotson, after a most con- 
clusive failure, declared he never would attempt extem- 
poraneous speaking again ; and his influence was so great 
that he has been sometimes called, as was mentioned, 
the originator of reading written sermons. 

It is also related that Dr. South broke down on one 
occasion at the very opening of an essay at extem- 
poraneous preaching, and with the exclamation, " Lord 
be merciful to our infirmities," descended rapidly from 
the pulpit. 

Dr. Chalmers mic^ht also be mentioned as another in- 



SOO HOMILETICS PROPER. 

stance of failure ; but many instances might be adduced, 
on the other hand, of preachers who, not succeeding 
at first, have in the end become powerful off-hand 
speakers. 

Shakespeare says he has seen ** great clerks" 

*' Shiver and look pale ; 
Make periods in the midst of sentences ; 
Throttle their practis'd accents in their fear ; 
And in conclusion doubly have broke off." 

But the preachers who have produced the most impres- 
sion in ancient and modern times, especially the great 
revival preachers, have, as a general rule, been extempore 
speakers ; for this method comes nearest to the true idea 
of preaching, which is bringing to bear a personal influence 
upon men, and is a kind of prophesying in which a sanc- 
tified personality, cleansed and prepared by the Holy 
Ghost, becomes the direct medium of divine imparta- 
tions of truth. 

The Holy Spirit more readily speaks through the per- 
sonality of him who yields himself at the moment, body 
and soul, to be played upon, filled and voiced, by this 
higher personality and power of God. 

This is the testimony of Dr. Finney, who, whatever his 
faults may have been, was confessedly a powerful and 
successful revival preacher. He claimed even a pro- 
phetic gift, and, however he may have erred on the side 
of fanaticism in this, we believe he was a sincere and 
holy man. 

The idea of inspirational rhetoric was, as we have seen, 
a favorite one of Origen's, and of other great preachers 
of past ages, who claimed for it a direct and essentially 
prophetic character. Whether or not this apostolic in- 
spiration be still vouchsafed to the true preacher of 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 50 1 

Christ, and how far it may accompany his earnest studies 
and efforts to interpret the word of God to men, are 
open questions ; but there can be no question that he who 
has acquired the ability of speaking freely as God moves 
him, of uttering the thoughts and emotions that sway his 
mind with ease and power, is more apt to be God's 
effective mouthpiece. 

Then there is the regeneration of speech. Then 
speech is electric. It is like lightning from the skies. 
Then there can be eloquence and something higher — 
convicting and converting power. 

Not that men have not been converted by written ser- 
mons, and that great revivals of religion have not been 
forwarded by written sermons ; but this has been, so to 
speak, in spite of them, and over them, as a torrent rolls 
over obstructing obstacles and sweeps all before it. 

But extemporaneous preaching, with the uninspired 
successors of the apostles, rarely can mean unpremedi- 
tated preaching, though often, in respect of the immedi- 
ate preparation of the discourse in hand, it does amount 
to that. 

The great preachers of the Reformation, and since 
their day such men as Wesley, Robert Hall, Jonathan 
Edwards, who lived in the sphere of divine contempla- 
tions, and whose meat and drink it was to think upon the 
things of the kingdom of God, were ready to preach at 
any time, on any occasion, to any length ; for it was but 
starting a spring whose sources were exhaustless, open- 
ing as they do into the infinite thoughts of God. 

Calvin in ten years preached four thousand and thirty- 
four sermons, and John Wesley a far greater proportion 
than this for fifty years. But it is evident that a great 
deal has to be done in the case of ordinary men before 
extemporaneous address is possible. 



502 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

Coquerel lays down three inexorable pre-requlsltes of 

successful extemporaneous preaching. 

^ ,, (i.) That the preacher should have an 

Coquerel s ^ ^ ^ 

requisites abundant supply of ideas, especially of relig- 
of an extern- ious and moral ideas, without which all the 

poraneous advantages of facile delivery amount to 

preac er. nothing ; for a lack of ideas leads to the bare 
repetition of thoughts — to words, words, words. 

(2.) There is also needed a rich, intimate, and verbal 
knowledge of the Scriptures, and especially of the New 
Testament (we venture to say that a full knowledge of 
the Old Testament also gives a devotional flavor to the 
preacher's imagination that hardly anything else can ; it 
smells as of Carm.el and Lebanon and the gardens of 
spices). But a familiarity with, and a facility in repeat- 
ing, texts, analogues, proofs, allusions, figures, promises, 
threatenings, proverbs, precepts, reasonings, from the 
Bible, are of inestimable aid. If the Bible be not a per- 
fectly well-known book to the preacher his improvisations 
are apt to become mere moral declamations and philo- 
sophical platitudes. 

(3.) A fluent and idiomatic use of his mother tongue. 
Otherwise there will be stiffness and mannerism, hiatuses, 
strained and inverted sentences, confused parentheses, 
and absolute blunders in the construction of sentences, 
which will take away one of the great charms and powers of 
extemporaneous speech — its easy, natural flow. It is not 
so difficult to commence a sentence, but the difficulty is 
to end it. Unless with prompt and practised speakers, 
the decisive word, the key-word of the sentence, which 
binds it together, is wanting, and the sentence is naught 
but a jumbled ineffective mass. 

We might be allowed to add to these three admirable 
pre-requisites — 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 503 

(4.) A disciplined power of thought, that is able to look 
a subject through to the end. 

While extemporization is, in one sense, the easiest, be- 
cause inspirational, method of speaking, yet in fact it is 
the most difficult ; it is the ideal, and therefore hardest 
to reach ; and to extemporize successfully before one has 
anything to say, and knows how to say it, is not to be 
thought of. There must be methodized thought before 
there can be forcible speech. 

Thinking, the trained power to think clearly and 
steadily, keeping the main idea in view as the Olympic 
racer keeps the goal in sight, this is the golden secret 
of extemporaneous address. A philosophically trained 
mind is, intellectually considered, the deepest source of 
successful extemporization that does not lose itself in a 
sea of words. Quintilian, in that very striking passage 
already quoted, says : 

* * Extemporalis oratio nee alio mihi videtur mentis vigor e 
con stare. 

In regard to the actual amount of preparation needed 
for the act of extemporaneous preaching, Mcllvaine, 
in his able work on elocution (p. 119) re- 
marks : " The extent or thoroughness of the Amount 

, - . oi preparation 

preparation required for extempore speak- needed 

ing is greater or less, according as the mind 
of the speaker acts with more or less precision and 
rapidity. Too minute preparation resolves extempore 
into memoriter preaching, and instead of relieving 
the mind from the burden of sub-processes, only ex- 
changes one class of them for another. The principle 
which will enable each one to decide this point for him- 
self, turns upon the question how far he can relieve 
himself from the labors of invention and style, without 
loading his memor\^ As a general rule, however, the 



504 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

speaker, whenever it is possible, ought to prepare before- 
hand, either mentally or with the aid of the pen, a com- 
plete analysis of his discourse, including the distinct 
statement of the proposition, the arrangement by co- 
ordination of the general heads, and by subordination of 
the secondary topics, together with a general statement 
of the thought contained in each paragraph. 

** Such an analysis, which rhetoric teaches us to prepare, 
may either be carried in the memory without loading it, 
or it may be committed to paper and referred to when 
speaking without serious disadvantage. With a fine 
memory the former method is to be preferred ; with a 
poor memory the latter." 

The process of learning to extemporize will naturally 
differ with different characters of mind. Some men, we 
believe most men, will succeed better by writing a great 
deal. They must use written and memoriter crutches 
perhaps for a long time until they can fling them away. 

This is Zincke's famous method. He says : 

" Nor will the practice of extempore speaking deprive 

a man of the advantage of attaining to that 

^"^ ^ ^ accuracy which is a result of written composi- 
method. . ... 1 r 1 1 

tion. 1 am addressmg myselt to those who 

have energy enough to persevere for some years, or for 
whatever time may be required, in the practice of care- 
fully compiling their sermons during the week, and then 
preaching them extemporarily on Sunday. The time 
will come when full notes, containing only the more im- 
portant parts m cxtenso, will be sufficient, and at last 
nothinp" more in most cases be needed than such a sketch 
as may be written on one side of half a sheet of note 
paper, the rest of the study being carried on mentally, or 
without the aid of writing. I suppose that for several 
years more or less of writing will be necessary, because 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 505 

that alone will demonstrate to the preacher that he has 
mastered the subject, and properly arranged his mate- 
rials, and so will enable his mind to rest on the fact that 
it has already produced what it now has only to produce 
in the pulpit. 

" And I can imagine persons preferring to the last to 
write very full abstracts of what they intend to say, and 
doing this from a religious regard for their work. A ser- 
mon, such persons will feel, is too important a work, too 
much depends upon it, to justify the preacher in leaving 
anything to the chances of the moment. This must be 
done to some extent in a debate, and it may be done 
generally in secular oratory, when the main object is to 
please ; but it is irreverent and unwise to trust in this 
way to the moment for the matter or arrangement of a 
sermon. It will, therefore, I think, be better that the 
preacher, however practised, should never wholly lay 
aside the pen." * 

Notwithstanding the wisdom of these counsels of 
Zincke, we are convinced that some men — perhaps they 
are exceptions — do better by bold effort, forcing them- 
selves at once to hardy thinking and free expression, and 
by daring winning. If they stand shivering on the brink 
in their half-resolve and caution, betokened by their con- 
tinually keeping up the writing- process, they will never 
plunge in and succeed as swimmers. These bolder men, 
if they succeed, will make the best extempore preachers, 
because they trust themselves and lay their power of 
speaking in tJiinking, in the energy of the mind rather 
than in rhetoric or the outward expression. But all 
would agree, who know anything about the subject, or 
have any personal experience in regard to it, that there 



' " The Duty and Discipline of Extemporary Preaching," p, 33. 



5o6 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

must be a severe preparation, that there must be in- 
tensely hard study, planning, even composition of the 
discourse — it may be wholly mental — before coming up 
to the act of speaking. 

Thought and method, like a strong engine and snow- 
plough, should clear the track for the train to go 
smoothly and swiftly over. 

Dr. Richard S. Storrs, in his lectures on this subject, 

gives essentially the same advice. He says : 

"It is indispensable, therefore, that the 

°"^ main plan of the sermon be from the start 
on extempore , . , . . . . . . ,. 

oreachina- ^^ plamJy m view that it comes up of itself, 

as it is needed, and does not require 
to be pulled into sight at any effort. To this end, 
it must be simple, obvious, natural, so that it fixes 
itself in the mind ; it must be clearly articulated in 
its parts. If possible, let it be so arranged that one 
point naturally leads to another, and, when the treat- 
ment of it is finished leaves you in front of that which 
comes next. Then take up that and treat it in its order, 
until through that treatment you reach the third, and find 
it inevitable to proceed to consider that. By such a pro- 
gressive arrangement of thought you are yourself carried 
forward ; your faculties have continual liberty ; you are 
not forced to pause in the work of addressing yourself 
directly to the people. There must be connection as 
well as succession, in the thoughts which one would ex- 
press without notes ; and the more fully and deeply the 
plan of the discourse is imbedded in the mind, and made 
self-suggestive, the more elastic and buoyant is the tread 
of the mind in all the discussion. If needful to this re- 
sult, I would write the plan of the sermon over twenty 
times before preaching it ; not copying, merely, from 
one piece of paper upon another, but writing it out, care- 



CLASSIFICA TIOiV OF SEKMOXS 507 

fully and fully each time independently, till I perfectly 
knew it ; till it was fixed absolutely in the mind." ' 

The late Rev. Henry Ware, of Cambridge, Mass, author 
of a most valuable essay upon Extemporaneous Preach- 
ing, though a peculiarly retiring and mod- 
est man, was really the pioneer of this great ^"^^ ^^^ 
. . , . , ,. • 1 . o" extempore 

reformation ni pulpit delivery in this coun- oreachine- 

try, which reform has been so exceedingly 

slow in its progress that it seems even now to halt as if 

uncertain of future success. 

In the biography of Mr. Ware the difficulties he en- 
countered in taking this bold step are graphically told. 
He was not naturally fluent and was constitutionally diffi- 
dent. His first attempts were in his weekly prayer-meet- 
ings, and perhaps but one to six or seven of his sermons 
followed this method ; and he put so much labor into 
these efforts that his regular extempore sermons gained 
for him very little time or study. But when his eyesight 
became impaired he realized the benefit of this method, 
and his extempore speaking was distinguished for its 
simplicity, gravity, and impressiveness. He says in a 
letter to his brother : 

" Don't give up the ship for one unfortunate fire. 
Why, I have suffered more than Indian torture fifty 
times ; but then I had Indian perseverance, and it is 
only by not flinching that we can gain the end at last. 
You must expect, as a matter of course, sometimes to do 
ill. The state of the mind, of the health, of the digestive 
organs, all these unaccountably affect the intellectual 
powers. And then, sometimes, you will make too much 
preparation, that is, trying to arrange the words ; and 
sometimes make too little, that is by arranging no 



' "Conditions of Success in Preaching without Notes." p. 109. 



5o8 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

thoughts ; and in either case you will flounder. But 

after beginning it were wicked to be disheartened." 

But before we proceed further in a more practical 

direction let us ask, What is extemporaneous preaching ? 

Extempore preaching, according to Co- 

What IS querel's definition, has been described to be 
extempore ,,<...,, , , , , 

achine- ? ^ ^^ ^"^ which the speaker knows what he 

has to say, but does not know how he is to 

say it." C' La veritable improvisation consist e en deux 

traits inseparables : V or at cur sait ce qitil va dire et 7te sait 

pas comment il le dira.'*) 

Its chief force and inspiration are in the thought, the 
idea, the substance of the matter, not in the words. It 
is in fact trusting to the moment of speaking for the 
form of words in which the thought is expressed. That 
is all, though that is a great thing. 

Extempore preaching, as has been said, is not im- 
provident or unpremeditated preaching. If extempore 
preaching be made to refer to unpremeditated thought 
as well as language, we would have none of it. 

Thus purely extemporaneous speaking is almost out of 
the question except as regards brief expressions of opin- 
ion and feeling which occur spontaneously in the excita- 
tion of the mind upon a particular theme, and do some- 
times in a written as well as an extemporaneous dis- 
course. 

Schleiermacher, although he preached extemporane- 
ously, gave this counsel (and these words have been already 
quoted) to preachers : " Before going into the pulpit, 
the sermon as a whole, that is, the separate thoughts in 
their relation to all the members, and to the whole, 
should be clearly in the mind." ' 



Hagenbach's " Homiletics," p. 137. 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 509 

The argument sometimes used for not making a faith- 
ful preparation for preaching, that God will now, as in 
apostolic times, put into the mouth of preachers the 
words they shall utter, borders, at least, upon presump- 
tion, and may lead to fanaticism. It is also a false view 
of Scripture, and is sometimes made an excuse for indo- 
lence and hypocrisy. 

There is an inspiration which at favored moments 
comes upon true preachers, in which they do become the 
mouthpieces of God's Spirit ; but this is a different thing 
from the venturesome assumption that God will inspire 
one at the moment of utterance with just what he 
should say. 

Bautain's definition of extempore speaking is this : 
" Extemporization consists in speaking on the first im- 
pulse ; that is to say, without preliminary 

arrangement of phrases. It is the instan- ^" ^^" ^ 
. . definition, 

taneous manifestation, the expression, of an 

actual thought, or the sudden explosion of a feeling or 
mental movement. It is very evident that extemporiza- 
tion can act only on the form of words." ' 

Now let us set forth briefly, in encouragement of this 
method, rightly understood, a few of the advantages be- 
longing to this mode of pulpit delivery, some of which, it 
is true, are obvious and familiar, though for that reason 
none the less important. 

(i.) It stimulates the preacher. It wakes him up. It 
makes him a quick thinker. It makes him master of his 
mental powers. It goads him by the pres- Advantages of 
ence and sympathy of an expectant audience, extempora- 
It often originates entirely new thoughts, neous 
of living power, that could not have come speaking, 
into the mind in the calm silence of the study 
' " Art of Extemporaneous Speaking," p. 3. 



5IO HOMILETICS PROPER. 

We quote here a few words from a letter of Rev. 
Henry Ware, Jr., whose little work on " Extemporane- 
ous Preaching" has been commended. He was meditat- 
ing the change in his own method of preaching, and 
writes to his father concerning a distinguished English 
preacher named Spencer. He says : 

" Much, too, of his animation and effect must be attrib- 
uted to his extempore speaking, which gives a liveli- 
ness, an energy, and a glow to eloquence that is not other- 
wise attained. I have already begun to consider seri- 
ously whether I shall not attempt learning the art. I do 
not mean for constant practice ; but some subjects may 
be better treated by extemporaneous discourse than by 
written, and much of the illustration and exhortation of 
every sermon might be left for the management of the 
moment. It is unquestionable there is a life, a soul, 
as it were, transfused into unpremeditated expressions, 
which appeals with far greater force to the sympathy of 
hearers than anything which can be written. There is a 
je ne sais qiioi in the countenance, the tone of the voice, 
the gesture, which goes directly to the heart, and which 
you in vain try to give to a written production. 

" Animated declamation, even if it be rather flat sense, 
will be more effectual than the most elaborate composi- 
tion read in the usual way. 

** Dugald Stewart, in his * Essays,' intimates, you may 
remember, that the art may be acquired by any one ; 
and, if I could obtain it, what a saving of time there 
would be." ^ 

(2.) It breaks up a stiff, artificial style. 

Gossner, quoted by Hagenbach, said : "He who is a 
true preacher is not obliged first to meditate and conceive 



^ " Life of Henry Ware Jr.," by his brother, John Ware, M.D., p. 72. 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS 511 

at a writing-desk what he has to say, but with trustful 
courage to mount the pulpit and speak, even as, on the 
day of Pentecost, fiery tongues, not writing pens, fell 
from heaven on the apostles." In extempore speaking, 
the preacher learns to go at once to the heart of things, 
and to express himself in a direct manner. He thus ac- 
quires a manly straightforwardness. The elaborate beau- 
ties and fastidious elegances of a highly rhetorical style 
are inconsistent with extempore speaking. Extempore 
speaking tends also to the concrete rather than the 
abstract ; to vivid manifestation and illustration of 
thought, rather than technical reasoning. It is less 
philosophical, but has more of flesh and blood in it ; it 
makes the hearer thrill with something that is taken from 
the hour in which he lives, the thought his heart is busy 
with, and the work his hands are glowing with. 

(3.) It is adapted to produce immediate effect. It en- 
ables the speaker thus to feel the pulse of an audience, to 
meet its exact wants, and to judge of its state by those 
fine and delicate signs which a skillful extemporaneous 
preacher learns to detect. It gives the impression that 
one is. really talking to the audience before him, and to 
no other. Hence extemporaneous preaching is peculiarly 
adapted to times of revival ; and it is a strong argument 
in its favor, that it does unconsciously take the place of 
other methods in times of real urgency. 

(4.) It has more of outward and inward freedom. 

It enables one to stand erect and look the audience in 
the face. The hearer naturally seeks the eye of the 
speaker, but if that is upon his notes, and there is no 
response, a dulling, deadening effect is produced. The 
eye has wonderful influence ; and the extempore method 
gives play to the eye, the arm, the finger, the whole 
body, and also to the subtler motions of the soul ; so that 



512 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

the whole man becomes an instrument for God's Spirit to 
speak through. 

Thus extemporaneous preaching is really the most 
philosophical method, and comes nearest to the ideal of 
preaching, which is the bringing to bear a personal in- 
fluence upon hearers. 

Perhaps the highest conceivable efficiency of the orator 
and of the preacher has been brought out in extemporane- 
ous speech. Though every speaker is not capable of elo- 
quence, every true preacher has probably done Jiis best at 
a moment when he was free, when the pressure was on 
him, when he must speak or die, and when to his own 
apprehension, it may be, he was making the most entire 
and conclusive failure. But the people at once see the 
difference between what is free and what is artificial — be- 
tween sincerity and false confidence. Once let it be 
understood that the strait-jacket has been thrown off, 
that the soul acts unrestrainedly, and the congregation 
feels it and rejoices in it. 

In this method, the preacher is able to use whatever 
thought occurs to him at the moment. He is not pre- 
vented by fears that it will spoil the unity of his sermon. 
Locke says, " Thoughts are best which drop into the 
mind." With all previous preparation, room, neverthe- 
less, should be left in extemporaneous speaking for purely 
new thoughts — thoughts which literally occur at the 
moment. Sometimes one may change the whole current 
of his discourse, and dwell upon a thought as the main 
thought, which he intended to make only a side thought, 
or, perhaps, not to introduce at all ; and this is the ideal 
of extemporaneous preaching : not often reached, it is 
true, but sometimes reached when the speaker is inspired 
with perfect freedom of utterance. 

Then too, oftentimes, in speaking new exigencies arise, 



CLA SSI PICA TION OF SERMONS. 5 1 3 

sudden needs present themselves, individual cases sug- 
gested by the countenances before him come up to the 
preacher, that he should be able to meet at the moment, 
and if he is not hampered with a written discourse, he is 
better able to do this. The people feel that he is preach- 
ing to tJicm, not to an imaginary audience, or as one who 
is beating the air. 

(5.) It enables one to use a more conversational and 
sympathetic style, both of thought and delivery. 

This, perhaps, is the greatest advantage of the extem- 
poraneous method, that it serves to abolish a strained 
style, which supposes certain circumstances, and certain 
characters, and certain antagonisms, and certain wants 
that do not exist in an audience — in which style one may 
write, but cannot talk — and tends to make preaching 
more like ordinary conversation, without at the same time 
losing its dignity. 

" Human nature runs to extremes. Some ministers 
offend our taste and shock our sensibilities in a mistaken 
effort to be all things to all men. A reverent remem- 
brance of the Master whom they serve, should save 
them from real or affected coarseness, levity, egotism, 
and effrontery. A minister may stoop too low as well as 
stand too high above the people. The old high pulpits 
are taken away, and the low reading-desks are put in 
their places, and that is well. But if the preacher does 
not stand high enough for the people to look up a little, 
and for him to have a clear, broad outlook at them, both 
they and he lose something. 

" It is true that ministers may aim too high, and all 
their sermons go over the heads of the people ; but there 
is one type of sermonizing current to-day that aims too 
low. In breaking away from the old professional formali- 
ties and pulpit conventionalities, and cultivating a natural, 



514 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

direct talking to the people, something of the real dignity 
and nobility of religious truth is sacrificed. A preacher 
should be sure to hit his hearers. The truth should go 
straight from his heart into theirs. He should study and 
practice all methods of attack, that there be no armor 
proof against his weapons. But this can be done by lifting 
them up to his level, as well as by stooping down to 
theirs. A skillful general decoys the enemy from their 
low retreats that he may meet them on good vantage 
ground. Truth need not borrow the livery of any strange 
master ; it need not clothe itself in garments that have 
been draggled in the mire. Its own robes will fit any 
form of humanity. The best a man has in him, used in 
the best way, is never too good for God's work, though 
his particular part of that work may seem humble and 
insignificant. 

'* Then let God's ambassadors meet men through the 
best there is in them. Let the minister make men feel 
that he too is a man with comprehension and sympathy 
for whatever enters into humanity, but let him choose 
wisely and purely his points of contact, never forgetting 
that he is preaching God's truth." 

Let a man talk to his audience, and if he do it sensibly 
and earnestly, with sufficient care not to be low in lan- 
guage, every one will listen ; just as everybody will listen 
to any one who converses well. The moment a preacher 
ceases declaiming, and begins talking, every one wakes 
up. That is the power of many of our greatest living 
orators, both clerical and secular. These men do not talk 
spasmodic nonsense, but their " forte" lies in uttering 
fresh and substantial thought in the natural language of 
ordinary and earnest conversation among men ; they talk 
to an audience as one clever man talks to another ; they 
gradually bring an audience into their own way of think- 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. $15 

ing by thus stooping to conquer. This style, when kept 
free from famiharity or lowness, is the perfection of 
close, affectionate, reasonable, interesting, and effective 
preaching. 

We remember an extemporaneous sermon preached by 
the French Roman Catholic Bishop of Quebec. His dis- 
course was, for the most part, in its substance and doc- 
trine, sheer Mariolatry ; yet the immense assembly hung 
entranced on his words, as he stood, simply erect, with- 
out gesture, his hands laid passively on the cushion before 
him, while he talked in a natural tone, in plain but beau- 
tifully-flowing periods, and without hesitation. 

It was like listening to a strain of pleasing music, with 
nothing highly wrought, but bearing the minds of the 
hearers steadily upon its even, calm, and rapid flow. It 
was not eloquence, but it was nevertheless potent to hold 
a great multitude in wrapt attention, and by its simple 
charm of natural, unaffected, fluent speech, to command 
and sway men's minds. 

If, therefore, extemporaneous speaking of the true kind 
has in it more of nature, more of animation, more of liv- 
ing appeal to the heart and eye, voice and gesture, than 
any other method ; if it tends to put preachers en rap- 
port with their congregations, we would say. Let every 
preacher who can do so begin at once to practise it, even 
if it cost him a complete revolution of his mental habits. 
Better live in a cave six months until he has become 
master of his own faculties of mind and body, than to 
be a dead preacher, who cannot, with all Practical 
his writing, reasoning, and preaching, reach hints for ex- 
an audience or a soul. temporaneous 

Let us now give a few practical hints for preaching, 
extemporaneous speaking, at the risk again of some 
repetition. 



5l6 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

{a.) Train yourself to think without writing. This 
power of mental abstraction, or what Dr. Brown calls 
"the imperial presence of mind/' is the source of ex- 
tempore speaking, which has its spring in the thinking 
faculty. Mental discipline tells on the power of extem- 
poraneous speech. One should have some logical and 
theological training before he can speak clearly on divine 
themes; for "that which is well conceived is clearly 
enunciated," says Bautain. The real ability for extem- 
poraneous speaking comes from having clear ideas, not 
merely from having the faculty of language. It comes 
from thinking. Its rationale is vigor of mind disciplined 
by culture. As we have said, it did not probably require 
much preparation for Luther, nor, in more modern times, 
Robert Hall and John Wesley, to preach on any subject 
connected with divine truth ; and so it may be with any 
man who is a working and growing theologian, and who 
has cultivated a homiletical habit of mind. Such a man's 
actual preparation for speaking may be brief. But one, 
unless he have extraordinary talent for this method of 
speaking, when beginning to preach extemporaneously, 
should make careful and particular preparation for it. 

{b.) Think through the subject beforehand. 

Everything in extemporaneous speaking depends on a 
complete mastery of the subject. The great difficulty 
with extemporaneous preaching is that it may run into 
something superficial. Here is its danger ; so long as 
that is avoided it is safe. If one does not give as much 
study to this method of preaching as to any other, or 
even more, he will not succeed in it. The foundations of 
the sermon should be laid firm and deep. There should 
be no indefiniteness or obscureness here. Never trust to 
the inspiration of the moment for the solid parts of the 
discourse, the main ideas, the arguments, the proofs, the 



CLA SSIFICA TION OF SERMONS 5 1 7 

conclusions. These should be thoroughly settled. See 
the whole discourse clear through to the end like sunlight 
on a road. 

It is a fatal mistake to suppose that extempore preach- 
ing will succeed without such previous study ; here is the 
mistake that has lain at the root of failure. Bautain 
makes a great deal of what he calls the ** main idea ;" 
there must be this main idea in every living discourse, and 
this should be firmly fixed in the speaker's mind. How- 
ever he may be moved by passionate thoughts, however 
freely he may speak, whatever digressions he may make, 
whatever new thoughts or illustrations come into his 
mind, let him not lose sight of the end he has in view, 
and this will remain master of his mind, of his subject, 
and of his hearers. This will even form its own plan, and 
every detail will group itself naturally about this princi- 
pal idea. This sustains all, and must never for a moment 
be lost sight of. " Nothing," says Bautain, *' is so fatal 
to extemporization as this wretched facility of the mind 
for losing itself in details, and neglecting the main point." 
One should also avoid the common error, in extem- 
poraneous speaking, of talking a great deal about unes- 
sentials ; of introducing long and stereotyped phrases of 
parliamentary or argumentative persiflage as to what he 
intends to prove or say. 

(f.) Prepare beforehand, either mentally or on paper, 
the actual wording of your main proposition and the 
principal divisions, and perhaps of some of the most im- 
portant passages. 

The actual composttion of the discourse, to use this 
word in its largest sense, should indeed be complete in 
all its parts, before it is preached. It is the height of 
foolish audacity for one to go into the pulpit with no 
definite preparation of the sermon, with a text unstudied, 



5i8 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

with no clear plan, with confused ideas, and with a few 
hurried notes, perhaps, trusting to the moment to 
clear up difficulties and make all plain and forcible. The 
price of good extemporaneous preaching is good prepara- 
tion. It may be recommended, indeed, to some beginners 
to combine the two methods of the written and extem- 
poraneous sermon ; i.e., to write a good portion of the 
sermon — the body of the sermon — and trust the rest to 
the utterance of the moment. The illustrations, for ex- 
ample, may be given extemporaneously, and will gain 
decidedly in freedom, vividness, and life. But perhaps 
it is best at first to write out the sermon altogether, and 
then if you choose destroy it. That will have aroused 
and clarified the mind ; the subject will have become a 
familiar road for the mind to travel ; by and by one can 
diminish or ^w^ up altogether the written preparation. 
The German preachers pursue this method of previously 
writing their sermons, and then preaching them without 
the manuscript. The Welsh do it also, and they arc re- 
markable preachers. This, we have seen, is F. B. Zincke's 
famous method of making an extempore preacher. 

Into the pulpit itself, Dr. J. W. Alexander advises, 
** carry not a scrap of paper. But if a little schedule would 
give more confidence at first, take it." We should say, 
quite decidedly, take into the pulpit a written sermon, 
or nothing. 

One can learn to SAvim only in the water. Bautain is 
strongly opposed to making use of any notes in extem- 
poraneous speaking ; he does not even think that the 
advice of Cicero should be regarded. Dr. Mcllvaine says : 
" Use no notes." Confidence in speaking comes from 
trust in one's own mental resources. We are well con- 
vinced that Avhen one has acquired a tolerable ease in ex- 
pressing himself, that to have clear thoughts is of more 



CLASSIFICATION- OF SERMONS. 519 

importance than anything else ; and if one have the whole 
sermon orderly arranged from beginning to end, leaving 
no gap, something more than a mere skeleton, a well- 
knit continuous frame-work, if he have the ideas thus well 
arranged and woven together, the words will take care of 
themselves. 

But many have not this power of ready expression, and 
it is necessary for such to make some written preparation, 
or, at all events, some mental composition of the more 
important portions of the discourse. The old motto ap- 
plies to it, " rise up early, and late take rest, and eat the 
bread of carefulness." It ought to be the best kind of 
preaching, because its principle is thought, not words. 

id.) Cultivate the faculty of expression. We have 
already spoken of this. 

" For you must not," says Bautain, " grope for your 
words while speaking, under the penalty of braying like 
a donkey, which is the death of a discourse." 

Not only the power of thinking, but the power of utter- 
ing, is to be cultivated ; and to have this power — never 
to be at a loss for the fit word — this itself is a noble 
accomplishment. The faculty of expression is a part of 
clerical education that has been too much neglected. 
Pitt used to translate aloud, in a running method, from 
foreign languages, being critical in the choice of his 
words ; Cicero's method was to read an author, and then 
repeat the author's thoughts in his own words. The 
principle of association is a great law of facile expression ; 
for one may accustom himself to remember what he has 
to say even by a word in each proposition or division — 
by some word naturally suggested from the text itself ; 
but it is better to remember by the association of ideas 
than of words. This clue, or thread of ideas, the extem- 
poraneous speaker should never lose or he is lost. The 



520 HOMILETICS PROPER, 

text itself, faithfully kept in mind, and frequently re- 
curred to, is the best and most natural clue. There is, 
perhaps no better way of cultivating the power of expres- 
sion, than by cultivating the habit of conversing with 
facility, accuracy, and correctness. Let no one allow 
himself to converse loosely, vaguely, or incoherently — 
avoiding both undue precision and undue laxness. Yet 
there is a certain mere facility of expression, or fluency, 
which may become a dangerous gift to a speaker. It 
serves him in the place of thought, and it will be soon 
discovered to his injury. It also tends to destroy his 
power, by giving him an appearance of arrogance, or a 
dictatorial manner. More of humility, and hesitancy of 
speech, is sometimes effective in a young speaker. What 
have been called ** fluent, complacent, mechanical utter- 
ances" are not enough for the pulpit. 

(£.) Make a beginning at once. Stand not shivering 
on the brink. Eloquent speaking is gained by always 
working and striving for the power of free and forceful 
utterance, and by giving one's whole attention to it — by 
coming up to it again and again, even if one fails at first. 
It is doing it, and not preparing to do it. Robert Hall, 
at an earlier day, as well as some distinguished extem- 
poraneous preachers of the present day, made, it is said, 
miserable failures at first in attempting extemporaneous 
addresses. 

(y.) Do not choose too easy or familiar subjects. This 
is a common error. The mind should be interested in 
the development of some new and specific truth, in 
which it may be thoroughly roused and tasked. 

Yet once more before leaving this subject would we 
emphasize the truth that in order to become a good ex- 
temporaneous speaker one must put more study and labor 
into an extemporaneous discourse, than he would Into a 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 521 

written one. When men are willing to do this then they 
may talk about extemporaneous speaking. The failure 
arises in making this method an excuse for not studying, 
in making it too easy, in not making sufficient prepara- 
tion. Better far the written sermon than the incoherent 
off-hand address, without good work in it. 

(^.) Look beyond and above the opinion of men upon 
your preaching. 

To speak extemporaneously one must have courage, 
faith, enthusiasm. 

Let one think more of his duty than of his reputation. 
If one has this spirit, he will not be disheartened at a 
blunder, nor even if he now and then breaks down. A 
little incorrectness of language, or halting hesitation, in 
extempore speaking, is of small importance, and will not 
be censured by the audience so much as the speaker im- 
agines — especially if they see he is in earnest. A modern 
writer well says of a young speaker, " Sometimes a 
momentary pause — a hesitation to collect the thought 
and utter the right word — is a becoming act of deference 
to an intelligent audience." One who has " a mission to 
teach" is apt to forget that " reserve is an element of 
strength." It is better not to be always finished and 
polished. A rough, ragged, imperfectly expressed re- 
mark, boldly thrown out and left, is sometimes more 
suggestive to the hearer's mind than the most elaborate 
paragraph. One should not go back to improve a sen- 
tence in extemporaneous speaking. Let him press on 
boldly to the end, no matter how he comes out. 

But as the undue fear of man vanishes, so much of the 
im.aginary difficulty of extempore speaking vanishes. If 
a great part of extemporaneous speaking consists in pre- 
serving one's presence of mind, what will better enable 
one to do this than to look beyond man to God ? 



522 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

{h.) Cultivate oratorical delivery. Here elocution is of 
great importance. The written sermon depends much 
for its interest upon its carefully condensed thought ; but 
the extempore speaker must have everything in himself : 
he must have the charms of good delivery, the trained 
voice, the natural gesture, and the dignified and expres- 
sive attitude. He needs all the helps that can be given 
by the eye, the hand, the *' eloquence of the body ;" for 
it is with him good delivery or nothing. He should 
acquire a clear, distinct articulation, rising and falling 
naturally with the thought ; varied and yet even ; neat 
and yet capable of feeling, and of vehement, rending 
force ; and, above all, free from tones of earthly passion, 
and breathing pure, holy, spiritual emotions. 

There is a great tendency in extemporaneous speaking 
to run into a hurried method of delivery. The speaker 
should retain his calmness. He should take a respiration 
of the right length to speak the whole sentence with ease 
and effect. He should not get into a run, so to speak, 
and hurry his throat beyond its powers. 

Cicero says : '' Longissirna est complexio verborunt, quae 
volvi uno spiriiu potest. " " The longest phrase is that which 
one is able to pronounce with one act of respiration." 

It is a great thing to keep cool, to preserve a mastery 
of all one's resources. Therefore it is better to speak 
slowly at first, and be careful to frame every sentence 
carefully and grammatically, and to finish it neatly in all 
its parts. By and by, as the mind gets roused and active, 
it can frame sentences more rapidly, without conscious 
effort. The preacher may be his own master of delivery 
and elocution-teacher. It is thought, chiefly, that does 
this. It is said that Macready studied the play of 
" Hamlet" seven years before he felt himself equal to act 
it. Every sentence, every syllable, had received thought, 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 523 

SO that he was able to bring out its full meaning in de- 
livery, to give it its effective emphasis, to be the vehicle 
of the spirit's winged words. 

We conclude this special topic of the classification of 
sermons according to their delivery, and indeed the whole 
theme of Homiletics proper, with three practical sug- 
gestions, as summing up the results that we have been 
able to arrive at on this important subject of the method 
of preaching. 

I. Let the preacher who earnestly desires to be effective 
in the pulpit, but to whom has been denied the extem- 
poraneous gift, make a brave attempt to se- 

, . 1 , r 1 Final 

cure and combme the advantages of the gue-eestions 

three methods that have been mentioned, 
since, as has been seen, there is good in them all. Let 
him write out his sermon carefully and fully. Let him 
commit it to memory, or, at least, make himself perfectly 
familiar with it ; and then let him preach it as a free dis- 
course, without a scrap of writing before him, and with- 
out great care to adhere strictly to the preconceived or 
precomposed language. This, if we mistake not, is 
essentially the method of the Rev. Dr. John Hall, the 
eminent Presbyterian minister of New York. 

If one will only take the pains, the unwearied pains, to 
follow out this plan, or something like it, he can secure 
the benefits of the written method with its thouq"htful 
composition and precision of style ; of the memoriter 
method with its ease and sense of confidence which it 
brings ; and of the extemporaneous method with its 
freshness, naturalness, vivida vis animi, and freedom of 
attitude and spirit. This is doing in the way of prepara- 
tion all that one, humanly speaking, can do. It is the 
employment of all his powers, the very utmost of his 
effort and care. 



524 HOMILETICS PROPER. 

2. Let one who is learning to preach and who finds 
himself tempted to facile methods of preparation, for a 
time at least, and it may be, to the end of his life, mingle 
the two styles, viz., that of preaching from written notes 
and that of preaching extemporaneously. Let him speak 
half of the day in one and the other half in the other 
method. This is strongly recommended by the Rev. 
Dr. Shedd.' 

In this way the valuable exercise of the pen will not 
be lost. The clear arrangement, the accuracy of style, 
the literary and artistic elaboration in the shading of 
thought, and the elegant finish and brevity which the 
constant use of the pen is fitted to secure, will be main- 
tained, while at the same time the extemporaneous 
method will be restrained from its extreme and loose ten- 
dencies, and will gain also real strength. This is the 
method which, we sincerely believe, most preachers could, 
with the best success, follow. 

3. Let him who is strong enough, and has the apostolic 
faith (for preaching is faith) dare to make use of a more 
excellent way. We speak especially to young preachers. 
The all-absorbing desire to save men's souls, the working, 
and .thinking, and living for that purpose, being taken for 
granted, let the young preacher cut loose entirely from 
the trammels of writing. Let him dwell in communion 
with the Spirit of truth. Let him train himself and trust 
to hardy .thinking. Let him forget himself. Let him 
purify himself to become the true exponent of God, not 
aiming to be eloquent, but to speak only what God gives 
him to speak, what is simple, what is the exact fact, what 
is the real verity respecting God, nature, the soul, the 
law of God, Christ .and his cross, repentance, faith, the 



" Homiletics and Pastoral Theology," p. 242. 



CLASSIFICATION OF SERMONS. 525 

experience of the heart, its real trial, anguish, doubt, sin, 
fear, hope, joy, love ; in a word, living truth, and the plain, 
earnest thought and feeling which correlate this truth, 
and which the Holy Ghost teaches, and thus by despis- 
ing eloquence, by not meaning to be eloquent, to be elo- 
quent. Let him rise above the fear of man and yield 
himself boldly and wholly into the hands of God to guide, 
to teach, to inspire, to use. Let him abjure the slavery 
of the writing-desk, though not the severe labor of study, 
and, having given all his powers to the interpretation of 
the word, and having his mind filled with the truth and 
his heart with the love of his flock, let the preacher stand 
up in his simple manhood on a level with those he ad- 
dresses, and speak like a prophet, like a messenger of the 
love of God in Jesus Christ to men. 

Should this become the method of preaching for the 
next hundred years of our American Christianity, as it 
was of the apostles and earliest preachers of the faith, 
then will a great light spring up, and it will be recorded 
in this New World what was written aforetime in old 
Judaea : ** So mightily grew the Word of God and pre- 
vailed." ^ 



^ " We soon learn to speak what we love ; the heart supplies us much 
better than the memory, and has also a language which the memory 
does not know. A holy pastor, moved by God, and by regard for the 
salvation of souls which are confided to him, finds, in the liveliness of his 
zeal, and the fulness of his heart, expressions having the impress of the 
Holy Spirit, the Spirit of love and of light, a thousand times more power- 
ful to move, to reclaim sinners, than all those which are furnished by 
labor and the vain artifice of human eloquence. The talent of an orator 
is not what is required ; it is the talent of a father ; and what other talent 
does a father need in speaking to his children but affection for them, 
and a desire for their welfare." Massillon : " Dix-Septieme Discours 
Synodal." 



PART SECOND. 

RHETORIC APPLIED TO 
PREACHING. 



FIRST DIVISION. 
GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF RHETORIC. 

Sec. 22. Definition of Rhetoric. 

Rhetoric was formerly an absorbing study in schools of 
learning when they were more truly theological schools 
than they are at present, and in ancient times it com- 
prised the full half of education ; and since knowledge of 
rhetoric implies an acquaintance with logic, metaphysics, 
and the science of language, Milton assigned to it the 
last, and, as it were, crowning place in a system of educa- 
tion ; but we are now specially to discuss some of the 
uses of rhetoric as applied to preaching — its advantages 
in enabling the preacher to master and methodize truth, 
so as to present it with the most power to the minds of 
men, that they may more readily grasp it, and that it 
may, by God's blessing, produce immediate and lasting 
results. 

As it is needful, for this purpose, that the preacher 
should make use of his natural powers ; as he must call 
into exercise his reason and persuasive faculties ; as he 



GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF RHETORIC. 5-7 

must avail himself of the laws of mental science and the 
capacities of human speech, just as he does in conveying 
any natural truth to the mind — it thus becomes essential 
for him to understand those universal principles of per- 
suasion, and those laws of thoughtful discourse, which 
form in themselves an important subject of inquiry, and 
mark a definite science. 

The word " rhetoric" is derived from p?;tg9/), a speaker, 
or orator (from stem /3f, to speak, seen in the fut. fpc^, I 

will speak). This primary meaninc: of the 

,111 ,1 . , . . . , Derivation 

word should not be lost sight of m consid- ofthev/ord 

ering the true scope and functions of the 
art of rhetoric ; for it shows that the term was origi- 
nally exclusively applied to the art of public speaking, or 
to a spoken discourse. 

Before endeavoring particularly to define what true 
rhetoric is, let us notice some of the leading ideas which 
have prevailed concerning it. 

(i.) Ancient ideas of rhetoric. These are represented 
principally by Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle 
confined rhetoric almost entirely to the art Ancient ideas 

r 1 1 • 1 . T 1 • 1 1 o^ rhetoric. 

of public speakmg. In accordance with the Aristotle 

genius of the free Greek state, where every 
citizen was an independent thinking and governing 
power, and the state was chiefly composed of the 
voting citizens who resided in the city, and could thus 
be reached and swayed by the public orator, the popu- 
lar deliberative assembly, in which the civil leader or 
counsellor could come directly in contact with the 
popular mind, was the great field for the practice of 
the rhetorical art. This art formed one of the chief 
means of obtaining mastery over men — of the science of 
politics. It therefore became associated with the arts, 
managements, and sophistries of political leaders, and 



528 RHETORIC APPLIED TO PREACHING. 

began to be looked upon with suspicion, as meaning 
something in itself artful, or artificial. 

Aristotle, although he gave rhetoric a place in ethical 
science, and discusses under this term the nature of the 
moral sensibilities and passions, still, in the main, he re- 
garded it in the light of purely instrumental art ; he 
looked upon it as a means of masteiy ; as a means to an 
end. If he regarded virtue and truth as true rhetorical 
forces, yet he considered them as secondary or incidental 
elements in the dynamics of rhetoric. Rhetoric, with him, 
was the art of proving. It was nearly identical with 
logic, or reasoning. Whatever would enable one to carry 
his point, to gain the victory, came under the faculty of 
'' 'Pr^ropiKT}.'' The end of rhetoric, with Aristotle, was 
persuasion. He called it " a faculty of considering all 
the possible means of persuasion on every subject." ^ It 
was thus, in his idea, a kind of offshoot of dialectics and 
politics. It was the wrestling of mind with mind ; the 
skillful and strenuous assault upon minds, with every 
means of argument and persuasion to subdue them. It 
was the art of making men believe as we would wish 
them to believe, and do as we would wish them to do. 
Every one might come, good or bad, and gather weapons 
from this art, and make himself a powerful man to carry 
his ends with the people. Aristotle's view thus gave the 
turn to the ancient idea of rhetoric, and it came to be 
looked upon as a species of dialectic skill that might be 
taught and acquired, by which the public mind could be 
influenced, and ambitious ends attained. By the dexter- 
ous use of words, plausible arguments, striking terms of 
speech, and tricks of delivery, the orator could lead the 
people at will. Aristotle argues, as has been said, that 



* Aristotle's " Rhetoric," B. i. c. ii, s. i. 



GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF RHETORIC. 529 

truth itself has an inherent rhetorical power, and he has 
much to say upon the ethical aspects of the art ; but, if 
we mistake not, the view which has been given was, in 
the main, Aristotle's conception of rhetoric ; and, doubt- 
less, in the technical sense of the term, he was correct — 
that rhetoric is the art of persuasion by public discourse. 
Grote says that Aristotle preferred philosophy to rheto- 
ric, and therefore he has made his " Organon" on the 
logical far more thorough than on the rhetorical side. In 
fact, the " Organon" itself is the collection of Aristotle's 
logical writings. He also failed in the sensibility which 
distinguishes an aesthetic from a logical science ; and he 
therefore treated style as a merely subordinate depart- 
ment of dialectics, instead of being a science by itself.' 
His own style was good as far as it went, and he was 
greatly opposed to the ambitious and empty style of 
Isocrates ; but he did not appreciate the very highest 
qualities of style. His faults v/ere those of elliptical 
brevity and obscurity. But he is chiefly anxious to lay 
down the principles of impugning and defending theses. 
Rhetoric, he thought, had chiefly to do with words and 
discourse, not with thoughts, facts, and things. It was 
the power and accomplishment of discourse. It does not 
deal with universal or scientific facts, but with opinions, 
accredited opinions, and its great aim is to persuade an 
audience into a favorable opinion. It does not go deeper 
than opinion, and does not concern itself with principles, 
or with establishing by induction such principles as may 
serve as the basis of proof. Rhetoric was, with Aristotle, 
an ingenious setting forth of the general opinions cur- 
rent among orators and public men. He prescribes the 
dialectic exercise to speakers, familiarity with popular 



* Grote, Aristotle, v. 1. p. 3S5. 



S30 RHETORIC APPLIED TO PREACHING. 

views, and power of talking to and comprehending the 
people — such as now we should almost call the art of the 
demagogue, or popular tribune. He does not require the 
rhetor to prove but only to persuade. Notwithstanding 
all this, Aristotle had a more thoroughly scientific view 
of rhetoric than Plato, though morally not so noble. 

Plato also thought that rhetoric belonged to the pro- 
vince of opinion ; but he would address men with argu- 
ments drawn from common sense and ris^ht 

Plato. 1 1 r 

rather than from scientific dialectics. Plato 
in heart was opposed to the strictly scientific method of 
Aristotle, but he adds much that is noble to the science. 
Morally speaking, he held higher views than Aristotle, 
and came very near to the best modern conceptions of 
rhetoric. Under the name and sanction of Socrates, in 
various treatises, above all in the "Gorgias," Plato attacks 
the mere art or artifice of rhetoric, showing the unphilo- 
sophical and unprincipled character of the sophistic idea 
of rhetoric, as a mere art to win by ; that if it were solely 
the application of means to an end, that end might be the 
basest imaginable, and the art of rhetoric might thus be 
wholly the art of deceiving and corrupting. This kind of 
rhetoric, founded on empirical rules, aiming at immediate 
success, and exalting the seeming over the true — Plato 
pronounced worthless. He proves, also, that it is no 
true art ; that it is but a kind of skill or knack, like the 
boxer's art. After refuting this low idea of rhetoric, he 
gives his own conception of the orator ; the true orator 
is shown to be the man who, though he strives for mas- 
tery (and Plato, in so many words, calls eloquence " the 
art of ruling the minds of men"), yet the true orator is 
he who does not strive alone, or mainly, for mastery, but 
who aims to build up truth and justice in the state, 
and to exalt himself by just means, and for the good 



GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF RHETORIC. 531 

of the people, and who, even if unsuccessful In carrying 

his point or in obtaining rule, is, nevertheless, declared 

to be the true orator. 

Cicero held the views of Aristotle, from whom he draws 

his own. He speaks of his own art with the enthusiasm 

and zeal of an orator, rather than with the 

1-1 1 1 TT • Cicero. 

conscientiousness 01 a philosopher. hie is 

even more intense than Aristotle in the idea of the purely 
instrumental character of rhetoric, and he applies oratory 
chiefly to the business of civil polity, and to the acquiring 
of mastery in that. He exults in it as an art of fence, 
or as a strong weapon not possessed by every one, and 
which is to be skillfully wielded for the purpose of self- 
defence, power, and conquest ; he says, " What is so 
useful as at all times to bear about those weapons by w^hich 
you can defend yourself, challenge the infamous, and, 
being wounded, revenge?"* Cicero was naturally cold 
in his disposition, and inclined to ornament for its own 
sake ; and, though often affirming it, he nevertheless, in 
spirit, differed from the high Platonic or Socratic view, 
which made so much of the moral idea in rhetoric ; and 
he conceded almost everything to outward grace, orna- 
ment, and attraction. " There may be many good 
speakers," he said, " but he alone is eloquent who can in 
a more admirable and noble manner amplify and adorn 
whatever subjects he chooses, and who embraces in 
thought and memory all the principles of everything re- 
lating to oratory." ' 

Quintilian's idea of the art of oratory was nearly the 

same as that held by Cicero, although he 

•.-,., , , . , Quintilian. 

maintained, with much more emphasis than 

Cicero did, that eloquence was an ethical quality, and 

' " De Oratore," B. ii. c. vii. ^ Idem, B. i. c. viii. 

^ Idem, B. i. c. xxi. 



532 RHETORIC APPLIED TO PREACHING, 

that the orator must be a good man/ His practical idea 
of rhetoric, however, was, that it is a means to an end, 
and that the end often justifies the means ; and his brief 
definition of oratory is, *' the science of speaking well ;" 
affirming the great object and the ultimate end of oratory 
to be, " to speak well." 

(2.) Modern ideas of rhetoric. In considering these, 
we should not forget that ages have passed away, bring- 
ing great changes of manners and thought 

Modern ^j^j^ th^^m ; that the enlargement of the 
ideas 

of rhetoric ^^^^^ of popular address, and of the diffu- 
sion of ideas, chiefly through the press, has 
widened the field of rhetoric ; and that the whole moral 
revolution which Christianity has wrought in the intel- 
lectual and social world has tended to elevate the concep- 
tion of the rhetorical art. As one of the forces of the 
world, Christianity has claimed rhetoric, and permeated 
it with something of its own spirit, so that there is felt 
and acknowledged to be such a thing as Christian elo- 
quence. 

As to the actual field which the modern idea of rhetoric 
embraces, it has extended itself beyond the ancient limit, 
which was confined almost entirely to public speaking, or 
oratory, properly so called, and has taken in the art of prose 
composition, and even some kinds of literature, in addi- 
tion to the art of public speaking. It has come to signify, 
in general terms, the art by which one communicates 
thought by means of language, to other minds. But it 
must have a limit. It cannot include all kinds of litera- 
ture. It cannot include logic, or poetry, or philosophy, 
or science strictly so called. It is not itself so truly a 
science as an art. It is an art which is or should be 



Quin. Instit., B. ii. c. xx. s. 4. 



GEXERAL PRINCIPLES OF RHETORIC. 533 

founded on a scientific basis — on the science of thinking 
or logic ; and on the science of intellectual philosophy. 
But it must confine itself more especially to that species 
of composition which relates to the means of popular 
persuasion, to the art of discourse, and which belongs, 
directly or indirectly, to the business of the public speaker. 
It also legitimately includes all that literary and dialectic 
training which fits one to be powerful in speech, whether 
he speaks in the popular assembly, the court, or the pul- 
pit. The education of the speaker or orator in these days 
comprehends, of course, a wider field than in the ancient 
days, especially if he is a preacher of the great truths of 
Christianity ; yet, after all, the area of the rhetorical art, 
though enlarged, is essentially the same as of old. It 
continues to be in the main a formal science, having to 
do more exclusively with the regulation of the form and 
method of public speech than with the materials of 
thought or contents of speech. It is now, as then, the 
art of public speaking for the purpose of persuasion ; and 
we would give the following as a definition of rhetoric, 
applying to ancient times as w^ell as to the present : 

Rhetoric is that art or science, which has 

, . r, , .1,1 1 1 Rhetoric 

chiefly to do with the laws that regulate defined 

public discourse ; and it properly compre- 
hends all that necessarily goes to make up the education, 
training, and true power of the public speaker. The prin- 
cipal term in this definition — " discourse" — maybe itself 
thus defined : " In rhetoric, a discourse, in its widest ac- 
ceptation, is a series of sentences and arguments arranged 
according to the rules of art, with a view of producing 
some impression on the mind or feelings of those to 
whom it is addressed. In logic this term is applied to 
the third operation of the mind, commonly called reason- 



534 RHETORIC APPLIED TO PREACHING, 

Eloquence is a term allied to that of rhetoric, but 

differing from it, as a gift, or a power, differs from an art. 

Rhetoric is indeed the art of eloquence ; but 

Eloquence rhetoric is not eloquence. Eloquence comes 
in its . , 

. , . nearer to the source of true power or to the 

to rhetoric, human speaker himself ; while rhetoric has 
more to do with the means which that 
speaker employs, or with the language and form of dis- 
course. Eloquence is to be regarded as a gift of nature 
rather than an art of rhetoric. It belongs to a man's 
personality, and to those powers of persuasion with which 
God originally endowed him. 

But what, more specifically, is eloquence ? It is de- 
rived from " e-loqui'* " to speak out," as it were to speak 
from the inmost strength, the deepest convictions, the 
central personality of the orator. It is the power of the 
soul manifesting itself in speech to move and sway other 
souls. It is an original power, however cultivated, rather 
than an acquired skill. 

Many definitions or descriptions of eloquence have been 

given, and we will mention some of these, so that from 

them it will be more easy to come at a com- 

arious prehensive idea of this great power which 
definitions 
f 1 ence ^^^ always exerted, and always will exert, so 

mighty an influence in the world. For a 

more general conception Tacitus' description of the 

orator might suffice : '''Is est orator qui de oinni ques- 

iione pulchre, et ornate, et ad persuadcndiim apte dicere, 

pro dignitate reruin, ad ut Hit at em temporutn, cum volup- 

tate audientium possit.'' ' The true orator is one who 

is able to speak upon every subject with a diction 

pure, elegant, fitted to persuade, according to the im- 



" Dialogue upon Orators," xxx. 



GEXERAL PRIXCIPLES OF RHETORIC. 535 

portance of the theme, the fitness of the occasion, and 
with pleasure to his hearers. 

Milton's definition of, or more properly allusion 
to, eloquence, in his *' Smectymnuus" is this : " True 
eloquence I find to be none but a serious and hearty 
love of truth — of a mind fully possessed with the pur- 
pose to infuse truth into the minds of others ;" and 
he adds that " that is most eloquent which turns and 
approaches nearest to nature ;" and again he says, " True 
eloquence is the daughter of virtue. Great acts and 
great eloquence go commonly hand in hand." 

The illustrious French Parliamentary orator. La Bru- 
yere, gives this definition of eloquence : " The gift of the 
soul which makes one the master of the mind and heart of 
others, and enables him to inspire them as he wills, or to 
move them to do what he pleases." Dr. Webster's defi- 
nition is, " The ability to utter strong emotions in an 
elevated and forceful manner." Craig's view of elo- 
quence is similar to Webster's, viz., that it " represents 
the strong emotion in the speaker adapted to excite cor- 
responding emotion in the hearer — that it comprehends 
also fluency, grace, good delivery, and animated action." 

Rees' definition is, " The art of representing our 
thoughts and feelings in precise form and elegance, and 
the illuminating of the reason by the colors of the im- 
agination." Professor Goodrich simply called eloquence 
" the power of persuasion." Professor H. N. Day calls 
it "the power of fluent and continuous expression." 
Goldwin Smith's definition is, " The fusion of reason 
in the fire of passion." Ralph Waldo Emerson's de- 
scription is, " Eloquence is the appropriate organ of the 
highest personal energy ;" and again he says, " Elo- 
quence is to take sovereign possession of an audience." 
Vinct defines eloquence to be " the power of sympathy 



53 6 RHETORIC APPLIED TO PREACHING. 

in speech, or, of communicating thought and feeling by 
apprehending the condition of the hearer's mind, and by 
so chording in with his thought that a certain magnetic 
union of minds is evolved, in which the hearer's mind is 
penetrated with new life and power." ^ 

Each of the definitions which have been given contains 
some truth, and sets forth some essential quality of elo- 
quence, such as fluency, imagination, feeling, the highest 
or the lowest quality ; but of all these definitions Vinet's 
is