stress on two points. (I) The extemporary preacher has a natural
warmth and earnestness of conviction that goes straight to the
heart. (2) These, they maintain, can never accompany the prepared
discourse. Let us examine these two statements. It is true that
when men speak under the influence of strong emotions, passion
may, in a large measure, compensate for accurate expression and
sequence of thought, especially with a rude or half educated
audience. In proof of this, Peter the Hermit and Mahomet are
striking examples. We are dealing, however, not with
extraordinary but the ordinary demands on a priest's powers, and
it would be poor wisdom to stake all his success on the chance
moods of his temperament. To-day the tempest may rock his soul
and his words bear the breath of flame; but, by next Sunday, the
spirit has passed, his passions are ice chill; he is confronted
with the duty of preaching, and on what support shall he now
lean? We must also remember that with increasing education the
popular mind is becoming more analytic, and congregations less
willing to accept emotions, no matter how sincere, as a
substitute for reason.
The second statement--that the written sermon cannot be vitalized
with fervour--seems childish in face of the fact that even
actors, speaking the thoughts of men dead three hundred years,
move people to tears or cause their blood to blaze. The great
pulpit orators, to whom allusion has already been made, preached
carefully written sermons, yet over ten thousand hearts they
poured lava tides that swept every prejudice in their fiery
breaths.
[Side note: Shiel]
What, then, becomes of this trite assumption when there are iron
facts like these to fall upon it? Again, it is objected that the
freshness disappears in elaborate preparation, and an
oft-repeated sermon becomes stale to its author. Shiel, we are
told, "always prepared the language as well as the substance of
his speeches. Two very high excellences he possessed to a most
wonderful degree--_the power of combining extreme preparation
with the greatest passion_."
[Side note: Wesley]
That disposes of the first statement. Now, does the repetition of
the same sermon cause it to grow flat? Listen to the actor on his
hundredth night, and see have he and his words grown weary of
each other. Wesley wrote every sermon, and repeatedly preached
the same discourse, with the result that so far from losing by
repetition it gained; and Benjamin Franklin, who was the American
ambassador in England at the time, assures us he never became
truly eloquent with a sermon till he had preached it thirty
times. The following graphic picture of the effects produced by
the preaching of Wesley and his two companions will scarcely help
to support the theory that a sermon preached frequently becomes
fruitless:--"He looked down from the top of a green knoll at
Kingswood on twenty thousand colliers, grimy from the Bristol
coalpits, and saw, as he preached, the tears making white
channels down their blackened cheeks. . . . The terrible sense of
a conviction of sin, a new dread of hell, a new hope of heaven,
took forms at once grotesque and sublime."[2]
[2] Green--"Short History of the English People."
We have heard preachers from whose lips each thought fell as
fresh and as hot as if that moment only it welled up from the
fountains of the heart; yet each rounded and chiselled sentence,
that seemed to flow so spontaneously, cosily nestled between the
covers of their manuscripts. We have watched the varied gestures,
the cadences of voice and facial expression to harmonize with and
so express the sense of the words that one seemed to grow out of
the other; still these graces of elocution, that looked so
artless and so charming, were the fruit of long years of study.
All was fresh! All was natural! All palpitated with the blood of
life, yet all were the products of previous toil. It is nonsense,
then, for any man to assert that the written sermon must bear the
stamp of artificiality or that the fire evaporates in the passage
from the desk to the pulpit.
[Side note: II.]
But I may be told there is small time for writing sermons. It is
singular that where there is most time on a priest's hands there
are fewest sermons on his desk. But to the objection. One of the
strongest motives urging the writer to insist on the written
sermon is his deep conviction of the shortness of time, for there
is no more expeditious way of squandering that precious gift of
God than by preaching extemporary sermons.
This is how the case stands. You have to spend as much time in
gathering and arranging the matter for the extemporary as for the
written one. Next year you may have to preach on the same gospel
or feast; of what use will your notes be then? The ideas,
arguments, and illustrations that now spring to your mind with a
glance at this cipher or note will then have vanished. The cipher
remains, but its inspiring power has passed. The oracle is dumb.
You may summon spirits from the vasty deep--but will they come?
You have again to face your old task; year after year the same
drudgery awaits you with less hope of success. The brain, at
first stimulated by novelty, poured forth the hot tide of
thought; now it will answer only to the lash. At the end of five
years what hoarded reserve have you laid by? Your hands are as
empty as the day you started, with this disadvantage, that you
have lost the habit of labour you acquired at college--a serious
loss. When a man permits the fine edge of college industry to
become blunted, the best day of his usefulness is passed. This
treadmill of ineffectual toil fills with disgust, till finally
all efforts are abandoned, and the people are treated to Hamlet's
reading: "Words, words, words." This is the usual series of
evolutions through which an extemporary preacher passes. He
begins with good intentions and bad theories. The system breaks
down, but his habits are now too set to try another, and so he
runs to seed. Here you have explained the fruitlessness, indeed
the paralysis, of many a pulpit.
In the written sermon, on the other hand, you have a treasure for
life; years pass, but your sermon remains, an instrument becoming
more flexible and telling every time you use it. You are
independent of your mood, on which the extemporary preacher has
to lean so much. You can also defy chance that may call you to
the pulpit at a day's notice. Your motto is: _Semper paratus_.
Your brain may be barren and your feelings frigid, but here are
thoughts already made and shaped. They are your own; and the mind
instinctively responds to the children of its own birth. It
rises, clasps, and embraces them. The passion glow enkindles
afresh; and heart and words are aflame with the ancient fires.
When for the first five years you lay aside a well-written sermon
a month, what a handsome stock-in-trade is at your disposal for
life--your fortune is made.
[Side note: Incitements to toil]
The world is in no humour to stand half-hearted work; it will bow
its proud head only to the man who pours out sweat; and
Bourdaloue's standard of excellence will hold for all time. His
answer to the question "What was your best sermon?" is: "The one
I took the most pains with." His labour at the desk was the
precise measure of his success in the pulpit. The French have a
proverb, "_Tout vaut ce qu'il coute_." ("Everything is worth what
it costs.")
See how laymen put our lethargy and its apologists to shame. Look
at the author with pallid cheek and fevered brow, half starving
in an attic, perfecting his style, polishing his periods. There
is the actor, haggard, jaded, toiling for hours at a single
passage, that he may interpret its meaning and enchain his
audience. While the world is dreaming the barrister is studying
his brief, ransacking tomes, wading through statutes, in search
of one to support his contention, knitting his defence in logical
terseness, cudgeling his brains for ingenious appeals to move a
jury. The lives of eminent lawyers are records of appalling
drudgery.
Turn to the great doctors of the church. After preaching for
thirty years, St. Augustine did not consider himself free from
the obligation of writing his sermons. He prepared, he tells us,
_cum magno labore_. "I have," says St. John Chrysostom,
"traversed land and ocean to acquire the art of rhetoric." If
giants so laboured, who are we to expect exemption? Ah! if our
bread entirely depended on our sermons, as a lawyer's on his
briefs or an actor's on his parts, what a revolution we should
behold! Yet how humiliating the thought! Every time you go into
the pulpit it is to plead a brief for Christ. The destiny of many
a soul hangs on your effort. Will you permit yourself to be
outdone in generous toil by the lawyer, who consumes his night
not to save a man from an unending hell, but from a month's
imprisonment?
To-day the devil's agents put forth sleepless activity. The world
rings with the clash of warring forces. The priest, then, that
idly folds his arms and manufactures sops for a gnawing
conscience, while the very air is electric with the energies of
assault, that priest is set up not for the resurrection but the
ruin of many in Israel.
CHAPTER FOURTH
HOW SHOULD THE YOUNG PRIEST PREPARE HIS SERMONS?
The pulpit, as an instrument for the salvation of human souls,
holds, after the Sacraments, first place. Indeed the
frequentation and proper reception of the Sacraments themselves
largely depend upon it.
Never since the first Pentecost was its agency a more pressing
necessity than to-day. The apostles of evil are busy. The
printing press teems beyond all precedent, obscuring truth and
belching forth poison over the world of intellect with a reckless
audacity that scorns all restraint. The powers of darkness have
seized, polished with unstinting labour and sharpened into
slashing efficiency, the varied weapons in the armoury of the
orator--crispness of style, brilliancy of diction, a declamation
that covers the want of argument and gilds sophistry till it
passes for truth. The question for us is--how shall we meet the
enemy with steel as highly tempered as his own?
Cicero embraces within the compass of three words the whole scope
of the orator.
_Docere_.--To instruct the intellects of his hearers.
_Placere_.--To use those varied arts and graces by which the
instruction is rendered palatable and agreeable.
_Movere_.--To move their wills to action.
The last function is by far the most important.
The preacher's triumph lies not in the conviction of the
intellect, nor in the approbation of the tastes, but in the
arousing of the wills of his hearers. The will is the goal-point
at which he aims from the beginning.
A doctor may persuade his patient that bitter medicine and active
exercise are necessary, but so long as the sick man lies on the
sofa and nods assent this barren conviction is of little profit.
When, however, the persuasion forces him to take a six-mile walk
and swallow the revolting draught, then, and only then, is
triumph secured. So a preacher may convince the habitual sinner
of the heinousness of sin; he may win his applause by the cogency
of his reasoning and the brilliancy of his style; but not till he
has moved his will to fling the old fetters to the winds, not
till he brings him a tearful penitent to the confessional, is his
work complete.
We shall now take the three words of Cicero in order.
[Side note: _Docere_]
How shall we accomplish all implied in that word "_docere_?" How
embed conviction in the minds of our hearers? Fill your own head
to repletion with the subject; be ambitious to leave, if
possible, no book unread, books of even collateral bearing. The
more thought stored up the more complete will be your mastery
over the subject and the more abundant the materials from which
to select. I was struck by a letter from Father Faber to a
friend:--"I intend writing a book on the Passion. I have already
read a hundred works on the subject; see if you can get me any
more." A hundred volumes, yet he looks for more! Hence his brain
was saturated with his subject, and when he tapped it, how
copiously it flowed! What books should I read?
[Side note: What books to read]
The solid matter in Theology and the Sacred Scriptures and their
developments. A book of sermons is the last to open. Why? You
wish to raise a structure, then go to the original quarry where
you have material in abundance. The arguments that bear the
shaping of your own chisel, though not as polished as those you
would borrow, will fit more naturally and adorn with greater
grace. There are two great risks in reading sermon books--a
tendency to imitate the style and a temptation to filch the
jewels. The style may be very sublime, but the question is will
it suit you. Your neighbour's clothes may fit him admirably, but
on you they would hang lop-sided.
The second danger is even more fatal. A struggling tyro who makes
an inartistic attempt to adorn his discourse with the most
brilliant passages from Bossuet renders his production not only
worthless but grotesque. The man who can build a labourer's
cottage handsomely should be content; but when he attempts to
engraft upon it the turrets and pilasters of the neighbouring
mansion he covers his work not with ornament but ridicule. "Am I
then," you will ask, "to cast aside the brilliant thoughts and
happy imagery I meet in my reading?" No, I only ask you not to
use them _now_. Note them for re-reading. Cast them as nuggets
into the smelting-pot of your own brain. Trust to time and the
alchemy of thought to transmute them. Wait till these thoughts
become your thoughts. The intellect will assimilate this foreign
material and send it forth on some future occasion, palpitating
with the warm blood of natural life, to strengthen the frame-work
of your reasoning or adorn your composition with veins of natural
beauty.
[Side note: How shall I read?]
Read with a pencil and paper slip beside you, not only to jot
down arguments and illustrations, but to seize on the
inspirations that may come. The thoughts we get from books are
not at all as valuable as the train of natural ideas these books
excite. When the mind is once set going there is no knowing what
rich ore it may strike. When the brain throbs in labour with
thought struggling for birth, when the soul is full and the
imagination in flame, this is the golden moment. Each idea now
stands out clear cut as a cube of crystal, and colours of
unwonted richness are draping the fancy. Hence, at all hazards,
lay hold of this inspiration. Close the most interesting work;
leave the most fascinating society; heed neither food nor sleep
till it is secured.
For you this spirit may never breathe again. Let this moment
pass, and when you do invoke the intellect it is cold and barren,
and the heart that yesterday blazed with living fires holds
lifeless ashes now. It is not always when you have pointed your
pencils and spread the virgin page before you thought will come.
The ideas that have revolutionized the world came at times and in
places most unlooked for.
When musing on the swaying Sanctuary lamp during Benediction,
Galileo discovered the laws of the pendulum. Such a trifle as the
fall of an apple suggested the laws of gravitation to Newton; and
the first idea of the steam engine came to Watt while he was
watching the lid rising from the boiling kettle. During a royal
banquet the argument to crush the Manicheans grew on the great
mind of St. Thomas, and the king made his secretary write it down
on the spot. Had not these men trained themselves to admit and
welcome the angel visitant, no matter when or where he came, the
stagnant pool of the world's ignorance might have remained for
ever unstirred.
Your notes are now before you, some the offspring of original
thought and others culled from reading. The former require only
polishing and shaping, but the latter must pass through your own
intellect; every thought must feel the brain heat before it
becomes palatable. We do not ask people to eat meat raw, so we
should take care not to offer them ideas cold and untouched by
the warmth of our own reasoning. Think over, ruminate, roll them
from side to side, let them sink down through the tissues of your
own brain and settle there; then when you send them out warm,
bearing the stamp of your own minting, they will be found
effective.
Remember that to translate dry theology into questionable
English, encumbered with technical expressions, is not writing a
sermon; but the man who takes up the theological principles,
simmers them in his own thought, wraps them in the transparency
of clear language, illustrating them with his own imagery, and
thereby bringing them within the grasp of the meanest
intelligence, that man, in a sense, creates the truth anew.
You begin the work of construction by making out a sketch
argument. Let a well-jointed syllogism underlie and form the
framework of your sermon. The conclusion of that syllogism must
be the goal point at which you aim. That once selected, all other
parts of the sermon should tend towards it. As all roads lead to
Rome, so all members of the argument should converge to this
point. The congregation should leave the church with that idea
fixed and clear as a star of light before their minds.
In writing, as in committing to memory, you should keep the
audience ever before the mind's eye. Attack it on every side;
pursue it with argument, and never leave it in the power of an
intelligent man to say: "I do not understand what he means."
This habit of writing with the audience before us not only
secures cogency and point for our arguments and clearness for our
illustrations, but it saves us from the fatal mistake of
producing not a sermon but an essay.
Here our meditations assist us. The daily habit of balancing and
introspection enables a man to read and analyse his own heart,
its strength and weakness. He becomes familiar with the springs
and levers that move it, the storms that convulse and the
sunshine that gladdens the mysterious world within his own
breast. How useful this knowledge when he comes to train the
artillery of the pulpit on the hearts of others!
[Side note: _Placere_]
So far we have been studying how to mortise the joints of our
arguments into well-knit and shapely strength; the pure
scholastic, however, possesses but half the weapons of the
preacher. The best built skeleton is repulsive till it is clothed
with flesh, colour and beauty. This is the rhetorician's task. He
comes with his graceful art, and drapes the dry bones of hard
reasoning, clarifies the arguments by illustrations, clothes them
in language crisp and sparkling, weaves around them the warm glow
of fancy and renders the hardest truths palatable by the grace of
diction and delivery. He accomplishes all implied in the word
"_placere_."
When rhetoric and logic clasp hands the standard of triumph is
fairly certain to be planted above the stubborn heart. We must,
however, remember that the arts of rhetoric are subordinate to
the reasoning, and must be brought forward only for the purpose
of driving the reasoning home. But since man's faculties are not
divided into watertight compartments, neither should the sermon
intended to influence him.
Our reason is not independent of our passions; our feelings so
influence our judgment that even in our greatest actions it is
hard to disentangle and say so much is the product of one and so
much of the other. The sermon should be constructed to fit the
man; argument and emotion should not stand apart, but dovetail
and interlace.
[Side note: Sheil]
In the art of entwining the garlands of rhetoric around the
framework of argument, Sheil stands conspicuous. Lecky says of
him--"His speeches seem exactly to fulfil Burke's description of
perfect oratory--half poetry, half prose. Two very high
excellencies he possessed to the most wonderful degree--the power
of combining extreme preparation with the greatest passion and of
_blending argument with declamation_.
"We know scarcely any speaker from whom it would be possible to
cite so many passages with all the _sustained rhythm and flow of
declamation, yet consisting wholly of the most elaborate
arguments_. He always prepared the language as well as the
substance of his speeches. He seems to have followed the example
of Cicero in studying the case of his opponent as well as his
own, and was thus enabled to anticipate with great accuracy."
The hint contained in the last paragraph is invaluable to the man
who proves or expounds doctrine. It sometimes happens that there
is an objection so natural that it seems to grow out of the
reasoning. Perhaps, while the preacher is speaking, it is taking
shape on the minds of the hearers; at least sooner or later it is
certain to recur.
How is it to be dealt with? Let it pass, and the audience carry
away the argument with a cloud of doubt hanging around that goes
far to destroy its force. Or it may be that when he opens the
morning paper it confronts him, set forth in the most convincing
shape, with the advantage of having, at least, twenty-four hours
to rest on the public mind before he can touch it. Therefore, let
no such objection pass, but grapple with it here and now, and
tear it to shreds. Here you are master of the situation, and can
present the objection in a shape most accessible to your own
knife. By anticipating an antagonist you break his sword and
render your own position unassailable.
Before our preacher goes into the pulpit just one word in his
ear--Beware of two very common defects--(I) _Rapidity of speech_
and (2) _Want of proper articulation_. A people who think warmly,
as we Irish do, speak rapidly. Thought is rushed upon thought and
sentence telescoped into sentence. Before sending forth an idea,
take care that its predecessor has got time to settle on the
minds of your hearers. In articulation try to earn the eulogy
passed on Wendell Philips: "He sent each sentence from his lips
as bright and clear cut as a new made sovereign from the mint."
[Side note: _Movere_]
What is the main weapon of the orator? Demosthenes answers--
"Action." Mr. Gladstone--"Earnestness." But St. Francis Borgia
probably explains what both mean when he advises us to preach
with an evidence of conviction that makes it clear to the
audience you are prepared to lay down your life at the foot of
the pulpit stairs for the truth of what you say.
Without this deep-seated conviction and the enthusiasm that flows
from it, your fire is but painted fire, your thunder the thunder
of the stage. This living earnestness is the spark that illumines
and vitalizes all. Without it the best built sermon is but a
painted corpse; but when the soul gleams forth in the flashing
eye and quivering lip, waves of unseen fire are issuing with
every sentence, and arrows of light silently piercing every
heart. The most stubborn prejudices are forced to melt and the
most depraved wills are swept on the crest of the grand tidal
wave, slowly gathering from the start; but when the preacher
forgets himself and his surroundings, flings self-consciousness
away, goes outside himself, pouring the hot tide from his own
glowing heart, till every flash of his eye and every wave of his
hand becomes a palpitating thought, then his audience surrender;
their hearts are in the hollow of his hand, wax to receive any
impression; their wills can be braced and lifted to the sublimest
heights of heroism--this is triumph.
[Side note: O'Connell]
It is said that the great mastery O'Connell exercised over the
people mainly sprang from the passionate earnestness of his
conviction. The nation's heart seemed merged into his own. He
stood forth her living, breathing symbol. When he spoke it was
Ireland spoke. Her passions rocked his soul; her humour flashed
from his eye; her scorn gleamed in his glances, and her sobs
choked his utterance. Ah! if preachers were as filled with the
Spirit of Christ as this man was with the spirit of patriotism,
what a revolution we might witness!
You ask--"How then do actors move people since there can be no
enthusiasm when men know they simulate unreal people and unreal
passions?" I answer, that the first step towards becoming a great
actor is to fling aside that knowledge and hand yourself over the
willing victim of a delusion. You must not _act_ but _live_ your
part: persuade yourself that you are the character you personate:
surrender your heart to be torn by real passions and wrung by
real sorrows.
The answer is well known which a celebrated actor once gave to a
divine:--"How is it that you so move people by fiction and our
preachers fail to move them by truth?" "Sir, we speak fiction as
if it were fact, and your preachers speak truth as if it were
fiction."
Here we leave our preacher facing his audience and filled with
but one idea: I have a great message to deliver and I will lay
hold of every means to send that message home; voice, passion,
style, gesture, these are my arms, and with these I hope to
conquer.
[Side note: Parting glance at the preacher's mission]