II. THE MODERN SERMON.

NO. I.

BY PROF. GEORGE P. FISHER, D. D., YALE College.

THE modern sermon dates from the Reformation. The sermon is not an isolated thing. It is one element in the activity of the Church at any given time. It is a part and parcel of the collective agency of Christian people in building up and diffusing Christian piety, and in thus discharging the work committed to them of the Master. Hence the sermon reflects of necessity the intellectual and religious spirit of the age. It is moulded and animated by the intellectual and religious spirit of the time. It takes form and varies its form with the changing phases of spiritual life. No great preacher who has flourished in the past could have been what he was in any other atmosphere than that in which he was born and lived. It was inevitable that the Reformation, the great turning-point in the history of the Church in these later ages, should stand as a land-mark in the progress of the pulpit. As it was a new epoch in religious thought and in Christian life, so it could not fail to be a new epoch in preaching. That great movement, which turned the current of theology into a new channel, modified the character of Christian experience, and both illuminated the understandings and kindled the hearts of its authors and promoters, had the effect to re-cast the sermon and to give to all popular addresses on the Gospel, wherever Protestantism spread, a new and peculiar form. We have in mind chiefly at present, the Protestant pulpit; but it may be remarked, in passing, that the Roman Catholic pulpit has felt indirectly the influence of the Reformation. In all the lands where the two Confessions exist side by side, preaching among the Roman Catholics is necessarily affected by the presence of the antagonistic body; the preacher is commonly stimulated to greater efforts, as well as influenced in the selection and treatment of his themes.

The first of the two elements of Protestantism, which immediately determined the character of preaching was the truth of the free grace of God in the Gospel. This truth, like the rising of the sun, woke the hearts and minds of men to a new life. The forgiving love of God, salvation without money and without price, was like the discovery of a long hidden treasure. The joy and enthusiasm which it inspired gave to the first reformers an unexampled freedom and ardor in the pulpit, and furnished them with inexhaustible themes to which they had been strangers before. The second characteristic of the Protestant movement, which instantly manifested itself in the sermons of the day, was the authority given to the Scriptures, and not

the authority of the Scriptures alone, but the living interest in the contents of the Bible, and the new insight into its meaning.

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But before going farther in this line of remark, it is well to remind ourselves of the true sources of power and success in the pulpit. In an admirable lecture on Preaching, by Phillips Brooks, preaching is defined as "the bringing of truth through personality." There is the truth. This the preacher does not originate. It is a message which he is commissioned to deliver. It is given him from above; it is not the product of his own invention; it does not derive its sanction from human authority. When the preacher aspires to set himself above the truth, to propound doctrines that his own brain has hatched, he is not only unfaithful to his office, he is likewise shorn of his strength; for his strength depends on his consciousness that he is the organ of a Power behind him and above him, and on a sense of this fact on the part of his hearers. But it is not truth apprehended in an external way which it is the preacher's function to impart. The truth is to be personally appropriated by him. It must be made his own through a living experience. It is to be assimilated and reproduced in an expression native to his own mind and soul. Then it will fall from his lips, warm with his own feeling and tinged with the hues of his own individuality. The sermon, moreover, is an essentially religious production. There breathes through it, if it is what it should be, a sense of the supernatural. If the preacher discourses on moral duties, it is moral duties as discerned in the light of the Gospel and based on Gospel motives. The morality of the pulpit is suffused with Christian emotion. When, for example, the Christian preacher speaks on the forgiveness of injuries, he finds the leading incentive for the practice of this virtue in such considerations as that "God for Christ's sake has forgiven us," and the prayer of Jesus, "Father, forgive them." Again, preaching is practical. Its end is not the exposition of a theme. The Church and the School are distinct from one another. The preacher aims at an effect on character and on conduct, he seeks to move his auditors. His direct endeavor is to make them to be what they have not been, or to do what they have not done. These qualities then properly belong to preaching: it should be Scriptural; it should have the earnestness and unction which flow from a living experience of the truth; it should be religious, rather than merely scholastic or ethical, and it should be practical.

These traits have actually belonged in a fair measure to Protestant preaching since the Reformation. There were mighty preachers in the earlier ages. When we glance back, such names as Chrysostom, Augustine, St. Bernard, Wycliffe and Savonarola, remind us that "there were brave men before Agamemnon." But, on the whole, there have been, since the Reformation, numerous preachers of a higher order of merit than existed in the centuries preceding, back to the

Apostolic age. Luther himself combined in his preaching all the excellencies which we have enumerated above. He drew his material from the deep well of the Scriptures. He made his listeners feel that they were listening to the Word of God. They saw that the truth which he proclaimed was the light and life of his own soul. It was plain that he lived upon it, that he rejoiced in it. His tone was intensely religious. The grace of God in Jesus Christ was the underlying theme in all his discourses. And he spoke to the conscience and to the heart. To save men from their sins, to quicken their consciences, to comfort the penitent and sorrowing, was obviously his aim. The language that he used was the homely speech of common men. Zwingli was a preacher only second in rank to the Saxon Reformer. One of his auditors said that when Zwingli preached he made him feel that his hair stood on end. Calvin differed in his natural qualities from Luther and Zwingli and had less fitness to be a popular orator. He was more adapted to be a teacher of teachers; and yet his gifts as a preacher were remarkable. Looking back to the last century, when have there appeared preachers of greater capacity for their work than Wesley and Whitefield? Wesley was a scholar, trained at Oxford; yet when he discoursed of Christ and the Gospel to rough miners, tears coursed down their cheeks. Whitefield's intellectual resources were far less, yet it is doubtful whether there has ever appeared in the pulpit a more captivating orator, and at the same time an orator more deeply imbued with the evangelical spirit. The coming of such a man to New England was certainly an interesting phenomenon. The quiet and thoughtful rural congregations, who were in the habit of listening on Sunday to the calm doctrinal discourses of the Puritan clergy, on a sudden were stirred by the unmatched eloquence of a prince among preachers. "Good Mr. Edwards," so Whitefield wrote in his diary, when he first preached at Northampton, wept through the entire discourse. Mrs. Edwards wrote to her brother in New Haven and spoke of the music of his voice. In our own day there have not been wanting preachers whose names are worthy to stand on the same roll on which the Reformers of preceding generations are inscribed.

The first trait of the true sermon may be termed Scripturalness, and its core must be a truth drawn from the Scriptures. From the beginning, the sermon has ostensibly connected itself with the Scriptures, and founded itself upon them. It professes to be built upon a text. Even the Saviour, besides the priceless teaching, altogether new, which He uttered, not unfrequently linked His teaching to passages of the Old Testament. In the synagogue at Nazareth He expounded the prophecy of Isaiah respecting himself. References to the ancient Scriptures, and quotations from them often occur in His discourses. The Apostles, although they were themselves the organs of Revelation, ap

pealed to the Ancient Scriptures in support of their declarations. Justin Martyr, in his First Apology, written about A. D. 140, has occasion to describe the meetings of Christians on Sunday for worship. In those assemblies, he informs us, the records of the Apostles or the writings of the Prophets are read as long as there was time. Then, he proceeds to say, the reader concludes, and the President verbally instructs and exhorts us to the imitation of these excellent things. Thus it appears that the addresses of the Pastor grew out of the Bible lesson; and such, no doubt, was the customary practice. As the gifts of prophecy and of inspired utterance, which belonged to the Apostolic Age passed by, and methodical instruction took their place, that instruction, as in the Jewish synagogues of old, attached itself to passages of Holy Writ. Preaching in the early centuries may justly be styled Scriptural. But one of the principal drawbacks to its excellence in this particular in those days was the allegorical fancies which disfigured interpretation. Origen, although his genius enabled him to mark an epoch in the development of preaching, unfortunately gave a pattern for this imaginative way of handling the Word, which did not lack imitators. In the Western Church, in the earlier centuries, we find that allegorizing has full swing. Ambrose, the famous Archbishop of Milan, a renowned preacher, who exerted so salutary an influence, was full of it. Augustine, himself, profound and spiritual as he often was in the discernment of Scriptural truth, follows in the same path. As we advance to a point two centuries later, the age of Gregory the Great, we find that this loose and fanciful exegesis has broken through all restraint. In the Eastern Church, in the best part of the patristic age, there is a more sober and sound method of interpreting the sacred oracles. This was fostered by the school of Antioch. Chrysostom is an example of the class of expositors of high merit. They understood the claims of philology. In the Middle Ages the fathers of the Latin Church, especially Augustine, provided the models and, to a large extent, the materials of sermons. There were individuals in the heart of the medieval period who were eloquent in the pulpit and in harangues by the way-side, and whose sermons were of wholesome efficacy. The epoch of the Crusades was marked by the appearance of stirring preachers. In that period, and later, men of great power, of whom St. Bernard is one of the most famous, devoted themselves to preaching. It was not, however, until the revival of learning had brought a scholarly discipline that the vagaries of allegorical exposition took their flight.

III. REV. DR. STUART ROBINSON AS A PREACHER.

BY B. M. PALMER. D.D., NEW ORLEANS.

It is true of the orator as of the poet that "he is born-not made": in both the verdict holds good, "nemo vir magnus sine afflatu aliquo divino unquam fuit." None the less however, as in the case of Samson, do we seek the hiding-place of this supernatural power. It is a chapter in metaphysics to trace the combination of qualities necessary to true greatness, or to learn the discipline by which it mounts to the height of its fame. A conspicuous illustration of this divine gift of speech is furnished in the career of the distinguished gentleman whose name graces the head of the present paper. His eloquence threw its spell over audiences of every grade of culture, from the rude mountaineers of his favorite Virginia, to the polished assemblies of Baltimore and Louisville. It was exhibited in every form of address, in the pulpit, on the platform, upon the floor of ecclesiastical councils, and lost nothing of its force during a period of forty years. Everywhere, and under all surroundings, in whatever country or clime, his speech swept irresistibly on-either rippling with humor, or else foaming with the rush of vigorous logic.

The first element of power in Dr. Robinson as a speaker, lay in the breadth of his sympathies. Perhaps this is the core of Quintillian's definition of a perfect orator, that "he must be a good man ;" and it is refreshing to know that true eloquence roots itself in the character, the hidden ground of all its richness and strength. It calls for no proof, that he who would lay his hand upon the key-board of the human heart must first thrill with the music which his touch produces. In vain can he hope to sway an audience by the contagion of emotion which does not first throb in his own breast. Through his own sensibilities he knows the chords which should tremble beneath the breath of his inspired passion. In this broad sympathy with human life Dr. Robinson had no superior. His great Irish heart gave a quick response to every cry of joy or sorrow that came up from the soul of the race. In this regard, he particularly resembled the great London preacher, Mr. Spurgeon; in whom, as in himself, this was found to be the ultimate secret of oratorical success. The resemblance extends even to the external appearance of the two. The innate benevolence was reflected in the outward aspect of both. It needed no expression in words, for it lay in the open countenance and in the well-rounded figure, over which was an air of repose such as can be cast only by a sense of inward goodness. In neither was there any gush of sentiment, or parade of virtue; but the "nil humani alienum " gleamed in every look and breathed in every tone, bringing the speaker and the