Vol. 102

No. 2

HE spirit of Hannah More is abroad in the land. It does not preach the same code of morals that the good Hannah preached in her lifetime, but it preaches its altered code with her assurance and with her continuity. Miss More preached to the poor the duty of an unreasonable and unmanly content and to the rich the duty of personal and national smugness. Her successors are more than likely to urge upon rich and poor the paramount duty of revolt. The essence of preaching, however, is not doctrine, but didacticism. Beliefs and behavior are subject to geographical and chronological conditions, but human nature lives and triumphs in the sermon.

Hannah More was not licensed to preach. She would have paled at the thought of a lady taking orders or climbing the pulpit steps. She had no intellectual gifts. Her most intimate critic, the Hon. Augustine Birrell (the only living man who confesses to the purchase of her works in nineteen calf-bound volumes, which he subsequently buried in his garden), pronounced her to be "an encyclopædia of all literary vices"; yet for forty years she told her countrymen

what they should do and what they should leave undone, in return for which censorship they paid her boundless deference and thirty thousand pounds, a great deal of money in those days.

Miss More is a connecting-link between the eighteenth century, which moralized, and the nineteenth century, which preached. Both were didactic, but, as Mr. Austin Dobson observes, "didactic with a difference." Addison was characterized in his day as "a parson in a tie-wig," an unfriendly, but not altogether inaccurate, description, the tie-wig symbolizing a certain gentlemanly aloofness from potent and primitive emotions. Religion is a primitive emotion, and the eighteenth century (ce siècle sans âme) was, in polite life, singularly shy of religion, reserving it for the pulpit, and handling it there with the caution due to an explosive. Crabbe, who also lapped over into the nineteenth century, was reproached by his friends for talking about heaven and hell in his sermons "as though he had been a Methodist.'

From such indiscretions the tie-wig preserved the eighteenth-century moralists. Addison meditates for a morn

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ing in Westminster Abbey, and the outcome of his meditation is that the poets have no monuments, and the monuments no poets. Steele walks the London streets, jostling against vice and misery, and pauses to tell us that a sturdy beggar extracted from him the price of a drink by pleading mournfully that all his family had died of thirst, a jest which took easily with the crowd, and might be trusted to raise a sympathetic laugh to-day. It is plain that these gentlemen felt without saying what Mr. Henry Adams said without feeling, that "morality is a private and costly luxury," and so forbore to urge it upon a bankrupt world.

§ 2

The paradox of our own time is that clergymen, whose business it is to preach, are listened to impatiently, while laymen, whose business it is to instruct or to amuse, are encouraged to preach. I open two magazines, and am confronted by prophetic papers on "The Vanishing Sermon" and "Will Preaching Become Obsolete?" I exchange them for others, and find lengthy articles entitled "Can We Control Our Own Morals?" and "Spiritual Possibilities of Business Life." Now, if a disquisition on "Spiritual Possibilities of Business Life" be not a sermon, of what elements is a sermon composed? Yet when I endeavor to ascertain these possibilities, I read that business men often refuse to listen to professional preaching because, while their democratic ideals, their enthusiasm for human values, and their passion for scientific perfection in their products "leave them not far from the Kingdom of Heaven," the church, unhappily for itself, "has not been

big enough or strong enough to captivate their imagination and hold their allegiance."

This would seem to imply that business men are too good to go to church, a novel and, I should think, popular point of view. Congregations hear little like it from the pulpit, the average clergyman being unable to observe any signs of a commercial Utopia and having a tiresome and Jeremiah-like habit of pointing out defects. As for asking a group of magazine-readers if they can control their own morals, the query is a vaporous one, not meant to be answered scientifically, but after a formula settled and approved. Even the concession to modernism implied in its denial of religion as a compelling force gets us no nearer our goal. "The faith we need is not necessarily faith in any supernatural help, but only in the demonstrated fact of the possibility of controlling our own minds and morals by going at it in the right way.' The tendency of a simple truth, that abstraction which we all admire, to develop into a truism is no less noticeable when set forth in the persuasiveness of print than when delivered with ecclesiastical authority.

Personally, I cannot conceive of a sermonless world. The preacher's function is too manifest to be ignored, his message too direct to be diverted. Joubert said truly that devout men and women listen with pleasure to dull sermons because they recognize the legitimate relation between priest and people, and their minds are attuned to receptivity. And if a dull sermon can command the attention and awaken the sympathy of a congregation honest enough to admit that dullness is the paramount note of human intercourse, as well developed in the listen

ers as in the speaker, think of the power which individual intelligence derives from collective authority. This is the combination which so fascinated Henry Adams when he speculated upon the ecclesiasticism of the thirteenth century, its nobility, lucidity, and weight. "The great theologians were also architects who undertook to build a Church Intellectual, corresponding, bit by bit, to the Church Administrative, both expressing and expressed by-the Church Architectural."

§ 3

With the coming of the printed word, the supreme glory of the spoken word departed. Reading is the accepted substitute for oratory as for conversation, a substitute so cheap, so accessible, so accommodating, that its day will wane only with the waning warmth of the sun or the exhaustion and collapse of civilization. Yet even under the new dispensation, even with the amazing multiplicity of creeds (twenty-four religions to one sauce, lamented Talleyrand a hundred years ago), even though ecclesiastical architecture has ceased to express anything but a love of comfort and an understanding of acoustics, the preacher holds his own. There are always people interested in the relation of their souls to God, and when it happens that a man is born into the world capable of convincing them that the only thing of importance in life is the relation of their souls to God, he becomes a maker of history.

John Wesley was such a man. I read recently that, when he was preaching at Tullamore, a large cat leaped from the rafters upon a woman's head, and ran over the heads and shoulders of the closely packed congregation.

"But none of them cried out any more than if it had been a butterfly." There was a test of the preacher's supremacy. What other influence could have been so absolute and coercive? When I was a very little girl I was taken to see Edwin Booth play Hamlet in the old Walnut Street theater of Philadelphia. That night a cat entered with the ghost, and paced sedately in his wake across the ramparts of Elsinore. The audience shouted its amusement, and the poignancy of a great scene, interpreted by a great actor, was temporarily lost. "Spellbound" is a word in common use, expressing, as a rule, very ordinary attention. Booth cast a spell, but it was easily broken. Wesley cast a spell which defied both fear and laughter. Nothing short of dynamite could have distracted that Tullamore congregation from the business it had on hand.

When

That the sermon was tyrannical in the days of its pride and power is a truth which cannot be gainsaid. Eloquence in the pulpit has no more bowels for its victims than has eloquence on the rostrum. History is full of instances that move our souls to wonder. Darnley, new wedded to Mary Stuart, and seeing himself in the rôle of peacemaker, went to hear Knox preach in St. Giles, that uncompromising divine likened him to Ahab, who incurred the wrath of Jehovah by acquiescing in the idolatry of Jezebel, his wife. James Melville says that when Knox preached "he was like to ding the pulpit to blads, and fly out of it." Darnley, furious or frightened, or both, left the church while the victorious preacher was still marshaling the hosts of Israel to combat.

Charles II was wont to recall with

bitter mirth a certain Sunday in Edinburgh when he was forced by his loyal Scotch subjects to hear six sermons, a heavy price to pay even for loyalty. Paris may have been worth one mass to Henry of Navarre, but all Scotland was not worth six sermons to Charles Stuart, and the memory of that Sunday sweetened his return to freedom and to France.

It is a far cry from Knox hurling the curses of his tribal God at alien tribesmen, from Wesley convicting his narrow world "of sin, and of justice, and of judgment," even from that "good honest and painful sermon" which Dr. Pepys heard one Sunday morning with inward misgivings and troubled stirrings of the soul, down to the sterilized discourse which sins against no assortment of beliefs and no standards of taste. Mr. Frederick Locker gives us in his "Confidences" a grim description of the funeral services of Mr. George Henry Lewes, at Highgate Cemetery. Twelve gentle men of rationalistic views had gathered in the mortuary chapel, and to them a thirteenth gentleman, also of rationalistic views, but who had taken orders somewhere, delivered an address, "half apologizing for suggesting the possible immortality of some of our souls."

§ 4

This may indicate the progress of the ages, but does it also indicate the progress of the ages that the moral essay, which was wont to be satiric, is now degenerating into the printed sermon, which is sure to be censorious; that the very men who once charmed us with the lightness of their touch and the keen edge of their humor are now preaching thunderously? For years Mr. Chesterton gave us reason to be

grateful that we had learned to read. Who so debonair when he was gay, who so incisive when he was serious, who so ready with his thrust, who so understanding in his sympathy? We trusted him never to preach and never to scold, and he has betrayed our trust by doing both. He calls it prophesying, but prophesying is preaching, plus scolding, and no one knows this better than he does.

The earth is a bad little planet, and we hope that other planets are happier and better behaved. But the vials of Mr. Chesterton's wrath are emptied on the heads of people who do not read him and who have no idea that they are being anathematized. Swift used to say that most sermons were aimed at men and women who never went to church, and the same sort of thing happens to-day. We, Mr. Chesterton's chosen readers, are not capitalists or philanthropists or prohibitionists or any of the things he abhors, and we wish he would leave these gentry alone, and write for us again with the old shining wit, the old laughter, the old mockery, which was like a dash of salt on the flavorless porridge of life.

Eighteen years ago Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson published the American edition of the "Letters from a Chinese Official," a species of sermon, it is true, but preached delicately and understandingly in suave and gleaming sentences, its burden of thought half veiled by the graceful lightness of its speech. American readers took that book to heart. We could not make over the United States into a second China. "Some god this severance rules." But we accepted in the spirit of reason a series of criticisms which were reasonably conveyed to our intel