OUR CHRISTIAN CLASSICS. SOUTH, TILLOTSON, AND MODERN ONE day, Boswell asked Dr Johnson, "What were the best English sermons for style?-Atterbury?" JOHNSON: "Yes, sir; one of the best." BOSWELL: "Tillotson?" JOHNSON: “Why, not now. I should not advise a preacher at this day to imitate Tillotson's style; though I don't know: I should be cautious of objecting to what has been applauded by so many suffrages. South is one of the best, if you except his peculiarities, and sometimes coarseness of language. Seed has a very fine style; but he is not very theological. Jortin's sermons are very elegant. Sherlock's style, too, is very elegant, though he has not made it his principal study. And you may add Smalridge. All the latter preachers have a good style. Indeed, nobody now talks much of style; everybody composes pretty well. There are no such inharmonious periods as there were a hundred years ago." In the great critic's enumeration, it will be observed that no mention is made of any of the authors who have heretofore passed under our review. The question referred to "style;" * Croker's Boswell, vol. vii. p. 78. and Johnson knew that a sermon constructed as Hall, Baxter, and Taylor constructed theirs, would be a mystery and an amazement to a modern audience. True, anterior to their time, there were sermons of an excellent "style." In the earnest days of reformation, preachers were free, direct, and natural; and it would not be easy to find harangues where the speaker and his audience are in closer contact than the sermons of Latimer and the solitary surviving specimen of Bernard Gilpin-a style which survived as late as the period when Henry Smith inundated with an unwonted audience the Church of St Clement Dane's, and Walter Travers made the vaults of the Temple ring again with his Genevan thunder-peals. But under Queen Elizabeth, who, as an imperium in imperio, was jealous of the pulpit, the ordinance of preaching had almost gone into abeyance; and when, under her sapient successor, it experienced a revival, it studied the tastes and copied the intellectual features of its foster-father. A sermon was no longer a straightforward address of man to man, but a curious scholastic exercise, often prepared with infinite pains, and, when recited from the clerical rostrum, better fitted to display the ingenuity of the speaker than to improve or impress his audience. A text was selected, and, instead of an effort to seize its leading idea, and present it vivid and entire, it was split open with a logical cleaver, and then cut up into curious little morsels, or comminuted still farther into mere particles and atoms, which, spiced with quips, and puns, and verbal jingles, and garnished with Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, were deemed "a dainty dish To set before the king." Of course, the court was followed by the country. Pedantry in the pulpit was a mark of loyalty, and, what was still more important, it was the height of fashion. Not only did the remotest aspirant towards a mitre labour above all things to STYLE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 3 catch the trick of Andrewes, Laud, and Donne, but there was hardly a clown from Kent to Cumberland, who did not think himself ill used unless his parson was a "Latiner," and larded his discourse with scraps from St Augustine and the jargon of Aquinas. Even the most powerful intellects and the most fervent spirits could not escape the infection altogether; and when we think of the peculiar terminology, and of the bizarre and fantastic style of decoration which prevailed, we cannot help regarding the triumphs achieved by the pulpit in the first sixty years of the seventeenth century, as a signal testimony to the power of the truth, and the personal worth of its teachers. Of this mode of sermonising we have already given some account in our notice of Bishop Andrewes.* There was a contemporary writer, the Rev. Abraham Wright, of St Olave's, father of the dramatic antiquary, who published "Five Sermons, in Five Several Styles or Ways of Preaching," + in which the favourite modes are very happily exemplified. The following is in "the Presbyterian way of preaching," and is founded on Luke xvi. 1–9, and thus commences :— "The parable presents to your view the reckoning, or bill of accounts, of the unjust steward, and my text is the summa totalis of that bill, or the moral to this parable; in which our Saviour taught them then, and doth us now, how we should provide against the great audit-the day of judgment. As for this unjust steward-whether he were St Paul before his conversion, as Theophylact would have him, or the Jews, as Tertullian; whether he be only the rich man, or only the statesman, or only the churchman, or rather every man to whom any charge is committed by God (as the doctors have severally given in their opinions), I will not dispute, as being not much to our purpose. Sure I am, he was bad enough; * See Christian Classics, vol. i. pp. 153, 157. + London: 1656. ... yet not so bad neither but our Saviour picks good out of him, as your physical confectioner, the apothecary, extracts treacle from the viper, and the most cordial of antidotes from the deadliest poison. . . . Therefore learn of him: What to do? 'To make you friends.' How? 'Of the unrighteous mammon.' Why? That when ye fail, they may receive you.' Which three queries will direct us to these general parts for our division. The first is the quid, the matter to provide for ourselves by making us friends. The second, the cujus, the manner to use the best means to get them, 'The unrighteous mammon.' The third, the cui bono, the end-That when ye fail,' &c. Of which in their order." Another specimen is modelled after Dr Mayne and Mr Cartwright. The subject is, "As the lily among the thorns, so is my love among the daughters," and it is thus introduced: "The text is a picture or similitude; in which picture, as in all draughts of the pencil, you may behold the lights and the shadows-the lights shining forth in the lily and the love, the shadows masked under the thorns and the daughters: for those black thorns are as the shadow to this white lily, and these foul daughters the foil to set off that fair love. Now, as all pictures must have their place of view, so may it please you to look upon, for a third particular, the seat, or standing, of this lily-it is in μeo akavov, in the middle, or among the thorns; and, last of all, to vouchsafe a glance or two upon the artisan himself, implied in the particle 'my' as the lily among thorns, so is my love,'-'my,' who am the limner that hath drawn and owns this piece, whose hand protects it here, and will new-trim and varnish it hereafter, turning these lights and glories into everlasting shines, and those shadows into utter darkness. Thus have you, from a rude pencil, the chief lines of this landscape, of the Church, and of my present discourse. And first, of the lights," &c. These examples are no caricature, and we hope that to the 66 HEADS AND PARTICULARS." 5 second, at least, the reader will give the praise of something more than ingenuity. It contains such an arrangement of the topics as would have rejoiced the soul, at once scholastic and poetical, of Coleridge: for on a similar passage in Dr Donne he exclaims, "What a happy example of elegant division of a subject! Our great divines were not ashamed of the learned discipline to which they had submitted their minds under Aristotle and Tully, but brought the purified products as sacrificial gifts to Christ. They baptized the logic and manly rhetoric of ancient Greece." Not only were divisions often arbitrary, but they were multiplied to a preposterous extent. In a sermon of David Clarkson, who was nevertheless a man of masculine intellect, and a firstrate theologian, we have counted as many as 128 heads and particulars. It is needless to say that comprehensive views of truth were incompatible with this comminution into microscopic fragments, and profound and enduring impression would seem still more impossible. The stream which, undivided, might set a mill-wheel in motion, if dispersed into a hundred runnels, will hardly spin a baby's whirligig, and is likely to lose itself at last; and although a skilful driver may manage four-in-hand, the canine multitude which pulls a Kamtschatka sledge in all directions, is not the arrangement which a traveller would select as pre-eminently conducive to the despatch of the journey or the comfort of the charioteer. * Coleridge's Literary Remains, vol. iii. p. 137. The following is Donne's admired division. It occurs in a sermon on Matt. xix. 17:-" The words are part of a dialogue, of a conference, between Christ and a man who proposed a question to him; to whom Christ makes an answer by way of another question, Why callest thou me good?' &c. In the words, and by occasion of them, we consider the text, the context, and the pretext: not as three equal parts of the building; but the context, as the situation and prospect of the house, the pretext, as the access and entrance into the house, and then the text itself, as the house itself, as the body of the building: in a word, in the text, the words; in the context, the occasion of the words; in the pretext, the purpose, the disposition of him who gave the occasion." |