Chapter 3

Those who champion the method of extemporary preaching lay great 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]