He was a man of spotless fame--unless it be a spot on his fame that he
could please the most selfish of sinful monarchs well enough to be that
monarch's chosen preacher during a longer time than any other pulpit
orator whatever was tolerated at Versailles. He is described by all who
knew him as a man of gracious spirit. If he did not reprobate and
denounce the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, that was rather of the
age than of Bourdaloue.
Sainte-Beuve, in a remarkably sympathetic appreciation of
Bourdaloue--free, contrary to the critic's wont, from hostile
insinuation even--regards it as part of the merit of this preacher that
there is, and that there can be, no biography of him. His public life is
summed up in simply saying that he was a preacher. During thirty-four
laborious and fruitful years he preached the doctrines of the Church;
and this is the sole account to be given of him, except, indeed, that in
the confessional he was, all that time, learning those secrets of the
human heart which he used to such effect in composing his sermons. He
had very suave and winning ways as confessor, though he enjoined great
strictness as preacher. This led a witty woman of his time to say of
him: "Father Bourdaloue charges high in the pulpit, but he sells cheap
in the confessional." How much laxity he allowed as confessor, it is, of
course, impossible to say. But his sermons remain to show that, though
indeed he was severe and high in requirement as preacher, he did not
fail to soften asperity by insisting on the goodness, while he insisted
on the awfulness, of God. Still, it cannot be denied that somehow the
elaborate compliments which, as an established convention of his pulpit,
he not infrequently delivered to Louis XIV., tended powerfully to make
it appear that his stern denunciation of sin, which at first blush might
seem directly leveled at the king, had in reality no application at all,
or but the very gentlest application, to the particular case of his Most
Christian Majesty.
We begin our citations from Bourdaloue with an extract from a sermon of
his on "A Perverted Conscience." The whole discourse is one well worth
the study of any reader. It is a piece of searching psychological
analysis, and pungent application to conscience. Bourdaloue, in his
sermons, has always the air of a man seriously intent on producing
practical results. There are no false motions. Every swaying of the
preacher's weapon is a blow, and every blow is a hit. There is hardly
another example in homiletic literature of such compactness, such
solidity, such logical consecutiveness, such cogency, such freedom from
surplusage. Tare and tret are excluded. Every thing counts. You meet
with two or three adjectives, and you at first naturally assume, that,
after the usual manner of homilists, Bourdaloue has thrown these in
without rigorously definite purpose, simply to heighten a general
effect. Not at all. There follows a development of the preacher's
thought, constituting virtually a distinct justification of each
adjective employed. You soon learn that there is no random, no waste, in
this man's words. But here is the promised extract from the sermon on "A
Perverted Conscience." In it Bourdaloue depresses his gun, and
discharges it point-blank at the audience before him. You can almost
imagine you see the ranks of "the great" laid low. Alas! one fears that,
instead of biting the dust, those courtiers, with the king in the midst
of them to set the example, only cried bravo in their hearts at the
skill of the gunner:
I have said more particularly that in the world in which you live---I
mean the court--the disease of a perverted conscience is far more
common, and far more difficult to be avoided; and I am sure that in
this you will agree with me. For it is at the court that the passions
bear sway, that desires are more ardent, that self-interest is keener,
and that, by infallible consequence, self-blinding is more easy, and
consciences, even the most enlightened and the most upright, become
gradually perverted. It is at the court that the goddess of the world,
I mean fortune, exercises over the minds of men, and in consequence
over their consciences, a more absolute dominion. It is at the court
that the aim to maintain one's self, the impatience to raise one's
self, the frenzy to push one's self, the fear of displeasing, the
desire of making one's self agreeable, produce consciences which
anywhere else would pass for monstrous, but which, finding themselves
there authorized by custom, seem to have acquired a right of
possession and of prescription. People, from living at court, and from
no other cause than having lived there, are filled with these errors.
Whatever uprightness of conscience they may have brought thither, by
breathing its air and by hearing its language they are habituated to
iniquity, they come to have less horror of vice, and, after having
long blamed it, a thousand times condemned it, they at last behold it
with a more favorable eye, tolerate it, excuse it; that is to say,
without observing what is happening, they make over their consciences,
and, by insensible steps, from Christian, which they were, by little
and little become quite worldly, and not far from pagan.
What could surpass the adaptedness of such preaching as that to the need
of the moment for which it was prepared? And how did the libertine
French monarch contrive to escape the force of truth like the following,
with which the preacher immediately proceeds?
You would say, and it really seems, that for the court there are other
principles of religion than for the rest of the world, and that the
courtier has a right to make for himself a conscience different in
kind and in quality from that of other men; for such is the prevailing
idea of the matter--an idea well sustained, or rather unfortunately
justified, by experience.... Nevertheless, my dear hearers, St. Paul
assures us, that there is but one God and one faith; and woe to the
man who dividing him, this one God, shall represent him as at court
less an enemy to human transgressions than he is outside of the court;
or, severing this one faith, shall suppose it in the case of one class
more indulgent than in the case of another.
Bourdaloue, as Jesuit, could not but feel the power of Pascal, in his
"Provincial Letters," constantly undermining the authority of his order.
His preaching, as Sainte-Beuve well says, may be considered to have
been, in the preacher's intention, one prolonged confutation of Pascal's
immortal indictment. We borrow of Sainte-Beuve a short extract from
Bourdaloue's sermon on slander, which may serve as an instance to show
with what adroitness the Jesuit retorted anonymously upon the Jansenist:
Behold one of the abuses of our time. Means have been found to
consecrate slander, to change it into a virtue, and even into one of
the holiest virtues---that means is, zeal for the glory of God.... We
must humble those people, is the cry; and it is for the good of the
Church to tarnish their reputation and to diminish their credit. That
idea becomes, as it were, a principle; the conscience is fashioned
accordingly, and there is nothing that is not permissible to a motive
so noble. You fabricate, you exaggerate, you give things a poisonous
taint, you tell but half the truth; you make your prejudices stand for
indisputable facts; you spread abroad a hundred falsehoods; you
confound what is individual with what is general; what one man has
said that is bad, you pretend that all have said; and what many have
said that is good, you pretend that nobody has said; and all that once
again for the glory of God. For such direction of the intention
justifies all that. Such direction of the intention will not suffice
to justify a prevarication, but it is more than sufficient to justify
calumny, provided only you are convinced that you are serving God
thereby.
In conclusion, we give a passage or two of Bourdaloue's sermon on "An
Eternity of Woe." Stanch orthodoxy the reader will find here. President
Edwards's discourse, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," is not more
unflinching. But what a relief of contrasted sweetness does Bourdaloue
interpose in the first part of the ensuing extract, to set off the grim
and grisly horror of that which is to follow! We draw, for this case,
from a translation, issued in Dublin under Roman Catholic auspices, of
select sermons by Bourdaloue. The translator, throughout his volume,
has been highly loyal in spirit toward the great French preacher; but
this has not prevented much enfeebling by him of the style of his
original, to which we here do what we can to restore the tone:
There are some just, fervent, perfect souls, who, like children in the
house of the Heavenly Father, strive to please and possess him, in
order only to possess and to love him; and who, incessantly animated
by this unselfish motive, inviolably adhere to his divine precepts,
and lay it down as a rigorous and unalterable rule, to obey the least
intimation of his will. They serve him with an affection entirely
filial. But there are also dastards, worldlings, sinners, terrestrial
and sensual men, who are scarcely susceptible of any other impressions
than those of the judgments and vengeance of God. Talk to them of his
greatness, of his perfections, of his benefits, or even of his
rewards, and they will hardly listen to you; and, if they are
prevailed upon to pay some attention and respect to your words, these
will sound in their ears, but not reach their hearts.... Therefore, to
move them, to stir them up, to awaken them from the lethargic sleep
with which they are overwhelmed, the thunder of divine wrath and the
decree that condemns them to eternal flames must be dinned into their
ears: "Depart from me, ye accursed, into everlasting fire" (Matt.
xxv). Make them consider attentively, and represent to them with all
the force of grace, the consequences and horror of this word
"eternal."...
It is not imagination, it is pure reason and intelligence, that now in
Bourdaloue goes about the business of impressing the thought of the
dreadfulness of an eternity of woe. The effect produced is not that of
the lightning-flash suddenly revealing the jaws agape of an unfathomable
abyss directly before you. It is rather that of steady, intolerable
pressure gradually applied to crush, to annihilate, the soul:
... Struck with horror at so doleful a destiny, I apply to this
eternity all the powers of my mind; I examine and scrutinize it in all
its parts; and I survey, as it were, its whole dimensions. Moreover,
to express it in more lively colors, and to represent it in my mind
more conformably to the senses and the human understanding, I borrow
comparisons from the Fathers of the Church, and I make, if I may so
speak, the same computations. I figure to myself all the stars of the
firmament; to this innumerable multitude I add all the drops of water
in the bosom of the ocean; and if this be not enough, I reckon, or at
least endeavor to reckon, all the grains of sand on its shore. Then I
interrogate myself, I reason with myself, and I put to myself the
question: If I had for as many ages, and a thousand times as many,
undergone torments in that glowing fire which is kindled by the breath
of the Lord in his anger to take eternal vengeance, would eternity be
at an end? No; and why? Because it is eternity, and eternity is
endless. To number up the stars that shine in the heavens, to count
the drops of water that compose the sea, to tell the grains of sand
that lie upon the shore, is not absolutely impossible; but to measure
in eternity the number of days, of years, of ages, is what cannot be
compassed, because the days, the years, and the ages are without
number; or to speak more properly, because in eternity there are
neither days, nor years, nor ages, but a single endless, infinite
duration.
To this thought I devote my mind. I imagine I see and rove through
this same eternity, and discover no end, but find it to be always a
boundless tract. I imagine that the wide prospect lies open on all
sides, and encompasses me around: that if I rise up or if I sink down,
or what way soever I turn my eyes, this eternity meets them; and that
after a thousand efforts to get forward I have made no progress, but
find it still eternity. I imagine that after long revolutions of time,
I behold in the midst of this eternity a damned soul, in the same
state, in the same affliction, in the same misery still; and putting
myself mentally in the place of this soul, I imagine that in this
eternal punishment I feel myself continually devoured by that fire
which nothing extinguishes; that I continually shed those floods of
tears which nothing can dry up; that I am continually gnawed by the
worm of conscience, which never dies; that I continually express my
despair and anguish by that gnashing of teeth, and those lamentable
cries, which never can move the compassion of God. This idea of
myself, this representation, amazes and terrifies me. My whole body
shudders, I tremble with fear, I am filled with horror, I have the
same feelings as the royal prophet when he cried, "Pierce thou my
flesh with thy fear, for I am afraid of thy judgments."
That was a touching tribute from the elder to the younger--tribute
touching, whether wrung, perforce, from a proudly humble, or freely
offered by a simply magnanimous heart--when, like John the Baptist
speaking of Jesus, Bourdaloue, growing old, said of Massillon, enjoying
his swiftly crescent renown: "He must increase, and I must decrease." It
was a true presentiment of the comparative fortune of fame that impended
for these two men. It was not, however, in the same path, but in a
different, that Massillon outran Bourdaloue. In his own sphere, that of
unimpassioned appeal to reason and to conscience, Bourdaloue is still
without a rival. No one else, certainly, ever earned, so well as he,
the double title which his epigrammatic countrymen were once fond of
bestowing upon him--"The king of preachers, and the preacher of kings."
Jean Baptiste MASSILLON became priest by his own internal sense of
vocation to the office, against the preference of his family that he
should become, like his father, a notary. He seems to have been by
nature sincerely modest in spirit. He had to be forced into the
publicity of a preaching career at Paris. His ecclesiastical superior
peremptorily required at his hands the sacrifice of his wish to be
obscure. He at once filled Paris with his fame. The inevitable
consequence followed. He was summoned to preach before the king at
Versailles. Here he received, as probably he deserved, that celebrated
compliment in epigram from Louis XIV.: "In hearing some preachers, I
feel pleased with them; in hearing you, I feel displeased with myself."
It must not, however, be supposed that Massillon preached like a prophet
Nathan saying to King David, "Thou art the man"; or like a John the
Baptist saying to King Herod, "It is not lawful for _thee_ to have
_her_"; or like a John Knox denouncing Queen Mary. Massillon, if he was
stern, was suavely stern. He complimented the king. The sword with which
he wounded was wreathed with flowers. It is difficult not to feel that
some unspoken understanding subsisted between the preacher and the king,
which permitted the king to separate the preacher from the man, when
Massillon used that great plainness of speech to his sovereign. The king
did not, however, often invite this master of eloquence to make the
royal conscience displacent with itself. Bourdaloue was ostensibly as
outspoken as Massillon; but somehow that Jesuit preacher contented the
king to be his hearer during as many as ten annual seasons, against the
one or two only that Massillon preached at court before Louis.
The work of Massillon generally judged, though according to Sainte-Beuve
not wisely judged, to be his choicest, is contained in that volume of
his which goes by the name of "Le Petit Careme"--literally, "The Little
Lent"--a collection of sermons preached during a Lent before the king's
great-grandson and successor, youthful Louis XV. These sermons
especially have given to their author a fame that is his by a title
perhaps absolutely unique in literature. We know no other instance of a
writer, limited in his production strictly to sermons, who holds his
place in the first rank of authorship simply by virtue of supreme
mastership in literary style.
Still, from the text of his printed discourses--admirable, exquisite,
ideal compositions in point of form as these are--it will be found
impossible to conceive adequately the living eloquence of Massillon.
There are interesting traditions of the effects produced by particular
passages of particular sermons of his. When Louis XIV. died, Massillon
preached his funeral sermon. He began with that celebrated single
sentence of exordium which, it is said, brought his whole audience, by
instantaneous, simultaneous impulse, in a body to their feet. The modern
reader will experience some difficulty in comprehending at once why that
perfectly commonplace-seeming expression of the preacher should have
produced an effect so powerful. The element of the opportune, the
apposite, the fit, is always great part of the secret of eloquence.
Nothing more absolutely appropriate can be conceived than was the
sentiment, the exclamation, with which Massillon opened that funeral
sermon. The image and symbol of earthly greatness, in the person of
Louis XIV., had been shattered under the touch of iconoclast death. "God
only is great!" said the preacher; and all was said. Those four short
words had uttered completely, and with a simplicity incapable of being
surpassed, the thought that usurped every breast. It is not the surprise
of some striking new thought that is the most eloquent thing. The most
eloquent thing is the surprise of that one word, suddenly spoken, which
completely expresses some thought, present already and uppermost, but
silent till now, awaiting expression, in a multitude of minds. This
most eloquent thing it was which, from Massillon's lips that day, moved
his susceptible audience to rise, like one man, and bow in mute act of
submission to the truth of his words. The inventive and curious reader
may exercise his ingenuity at leisure. He will strive in vain to
conceive any other exordium than Massillon's that would have matched the
occasion presented.
There is an admirable anecdote of the pulpit, which--though since often
otherwise applied--had, perhaps, its first application to Massillon.
Some one congratulating the orator, as he came down from his pulpit, on
the eloquence of the sermon just preached, that wise self-knower fenced
by replying, "Ah, the devil has already apprised me of that!" The
recluse celibate preacher was one day asked whence he derived that
marvelous knowledge which he displayed of the passions, the weaknesses,
the follies, the sins, of human nature. "From my own heart," was his
reply. Source sufficient, perhaps; but from the confessional, too, one
may confidently add.
There is probably no better brief, quotable passage to represent
Massillon at his imaginative highest in eloquence, than that most
celebrated one of all, occurring toward the close of his memorable
sermon on the "Fewness of the Elect." The effect attending the delivery
of this passage, on both of the two recorded occasions on which the
sermon was preached, is reported to have been remarkable. The manner of
the orator--downcast, as with the inward oppression of the same
solemnity that he, in speaking, cast like a spell on the
audience--indefinitely heightened the magical power of the awful
conception excited. Not Bourdaloue himself, with that preternatural
skill of his to probe the conscience of man to its innermost secret,
could have exceeded the heart-searching rigor with which, in the earlier
part of the discourse, Massillon had put to the rack the quivering
consciences of his hearers. The terrors of the Lord, the shadows of the
world to come, were thus already on all hearts. So much as this,
Bourdaloue, too, with his incomparable dialectic, could have
accomplished. But there immediately follows a culmination in power, such
as was distinctly beyond the height of Bourdaloue. Genius must be
super-added to talent if you would have the supreme, either in poetry or
in eloquence. There was an extreme point in Massillon's discourses at
which mere reason, having done, and done terribly, its utmost, was fain
to confess that it could not go a single step farther. At that extreme
point, suddenly, inexhaustible imagination took up the part of exhausted
reason. Reason had made men afraid; imagination now appalled them.
Massillon said:
I confine myself to you, my brethren, who are gathered here. I speak
no longer of the rest of mankind. I look at you as if you were the
only ones on the earth; and here is the thought that seizes me, and
that terrifies me. I make the supposition that this is your last hour,
and the end of the world; that the heavens are about to open above
your heads, that Jesus Christ is to appear in his glory in the midst
of this sanctuary, and that you are gathered here only to wait for
him, and as trembling criminals on whom is to be pronounced either a
sentence of grace or a decree of eternal death. For, vainly do you
flatter yourselves; you will die such in character as you are to-day.
All those impulses toward change with which you amuse yourselves, you
will amuse yourselves with them down to the bed of death. Such is the
experience of all generations. The only thing new you will then find
in yourselves will be, perhaps, a reckoning a trifle larger than that
which you would to-day have to render; and according to what you would
be if you were this moment to be judged, you may almost determine what
will befall you at the termination of your life.
Now I ask you, and I ask it smitten with terror, not separating in
this matter my lot from yours, and putting myself into the same frame
of mind into which I desire you to come--I ask you, then, If Jesus
Christ were to appear in this sanctuary, in the midst of this
assembly, the most illustrious in the world, to pass judgment on us,
to draw the dread line of distinction between the goats and the sheep,
do you believe that the majority of all of us who are here would be
set on his right hand? Do you believe that things would even be equal?
Nay, do you believe there would be found so many as the ten righteous
men whom anciently the Lord could not find in five whole cities? I put
the question to you, but you know not; I know not myself. Thou only, O
my God, knowest those that belong to thee! But if we know not those
who belong to him, at least we know that sinners do not belong to him.
Now, of what classes of persons do the professing Christians in this
assembly consist? Titles and dignities must be counted for naught; of
these you shall be stripped before Jesus Christ. Who make up this
assembly? Sinners, in great number, who do not wish to be converted;
in still greater number, sinners who would like it, but who put off
their conversion; many others who would be converted, only to relapse
into sin; finally, a multitude who think they have no need of
conversion. You have thus made up the company of the reprobate. Cut
off these four classes of sinners from this sacred assembly, for they
will be be cut off from it at the great day! Stand forth now, ye
righteous! where are you? Remnant of Israel, pass to the right hand!
True wheat of Jesus Christ, disengage yourselves from this chaff,
doomed to the fire! O God! where are thine elect? and what remains
there for thy portion?
Brethren, our perdition is well nigh assured, and we do not give it a
thought. Even if in that dread separation which one day shall be made,
there were to be but a single sinner out of this assembly found on the
side of the reprobate, and if a voice from heaven should come to give
us assurance of the fact in this sanctuary, without pointing out the
person intended, who among us would not fear that he might himself be
the wretch? Who among us would not at once recoil upon his conscience,
to inquire whether his sins had not deserved that penalty? Who among
us would not, seized with dismay, ask of Jesus Christ, as did once the
apostles, "Lord, is it I?"