faith in God the Redeemer becomes the inspiration of a new life. It is precisely this Christian faith which creates in man the true consciousness of his own greatness and worth, quickens irrepressible aspirations to realize the highest possibilities of his being, delivers him from the bondage of passion and desire, quickens him to obey the lofty commands of reason, and to aim to realize the ideals of truth, right, and perfection, makes his obedience spontaneous, and gives him in obedience the consciousness of freedom. This is the service of filial love, as distinguished from the servile spirit of bondage. It is the freedom wherewith Christ maketh free.

ARTICLE VI.

THE THREE FUNDAMENTAL METHODS OF PREACHING.THE WRITING OF SERMONS.

BY EDWARDS A. PARK.

§ 1. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

I. Definition of terms. We speak familiarly, sometimes awkwardly, of "reading sermons," "delivering them from a manuscript," "preaching from notes," "the written method." A man is said to adopt this method when he writes his sermons, and then reads what he has written. He may have penned them with or without a previous study of his theme, plan, and language; he may be a painstaking or an extemporaneous writer. If he commits his sermons to memory, and recites them as thus committed, he adopts the method variously called "preaching memoriter," the "memoriter method." He may first write what he afterwards learns by heart, or he may arrange his thoughts and words in his mind, and in the process of arranging them may impress them on his memory without writing a syllable. The penning of the sermon is no more essential to the preaching of it memoriter, than the antecedent study of it is essential to the writing. When a preacher delivers his discourses without having previously written them or designedly committed them to memory, he adopts what is variously called the "extemporaneous," "extemporary," or "extempore method." As the man who reads his sermons, and the man who recites them memoriter may adopt various modes of preparing them, so the man who preaches extempore may elaborate them in a greater or smaller degree. He may arrange his thoughts precisely as if he were to write them, and then, instead of

writing them or constructing his sentences so that he can commit them to memory, he may deliver them to his congregation in words which do not suggest themselves to his mind until he is ready to utter them. On the other hand, he may rise to speak without having previously arranged his thoughts or formed any plan of discourse, or perhaps without having selected any subject. The extemporaneous method does not necessarily presuppose any degree of meditation before speaking, nor does it necessarily exclude any degree. It does, however, exclude certain kinds of previous labor. So far forth as it is extemporaneous it excludes the intellectual formation of sentences which the author designs to repeat as he has formed them, and still more the penning of sentences which he designs to read or recite before his audience.

That sermon is not extemporaneous which is designedly delivered the second time verbatim et literatim as it had been delivered the first time, or even mentally repeated in private. The extemporaneous preacher may go into the pulpit with the same amount of antecedent study which the writer has performed before he constructs his sentences for his paper. The difference between the two may be simply this: the one begins to speak in the same state in which the other begins to write; the one has meditated and begins to use his tongue when the other has meditated and begins to use his pen.

II. The intermingling of the three fundamental methods.

! When the British orator made the remark: "I think the gentleman is indebted to his memory for his wit and to his imagination for his facts," he was supposed to have spoken extempore; but on inspecting his manuscripts the substance of his remark was found written and re-written, altered and re-altered, each revision being more pointed and terse than the preceding, until the idea took the concentrated form which has now become a classical satire. When Mr. Webster uttered his felicitous words on the drum-beat of England, it seemed as if they had just occurred to his mind; but he is said to have elaborated them long before, while he was witnessing the drill of a British regiment. The most splendid paragraph in his reply to Hayne had been treasured up in his memory for several months before he uttered it in the Senate. He declared to a friend that the majority of those sentences which were most admired by the public, and were delivered as if they had suddenly occurred to him, had been in fact carefully studied, written, and committed to memory.

In point of fact there is a fourth method, which consists in a commingling of the three already named. One man who is called a reader of sermons commits to memory some of his more important sentences, introduces extemporaneous remarks, or even paragraphs, and preserves himself in what may be called an extemporizing state of mind, holds himself ready at any time to deviate from his written manuscript. The man who preaches from memory sometimes refers to his manuscript, and, so far forth, adopts the written method; sometimes deviates from what he has written, and preserves in his mind such a readiness to deviate at any time as forms a distinctive element of extemporary discourse. The extemporaneous preacher often writes a part of his sermon, and either reads the part which he has written, or else commits to memory those sentences which are the most important or critical or delicate. Sometimes his memory is so impressible, at once quick and retentive, that after meditating on his discourse he recalls, and means to recall, in the pulpit the identical words which he had selected in his private meditation. Those words were written only on the tablets of his mind, and although termed extemporaneous are in fact remembered just as if they were written with ink. Robert Hall is called an extemporaneous preacher, but Dr. Gregory says, in a passage which will be referred to more than once hereafter:

The grand divisions of thought, the heads of a sermon " he would trace out with the most prominent lines of demarcation; and these for some years supplied all the hints that he needed in the pulpit, except on extraordinary occasions. To these grand divisions he referred, and upon them suspended all the subordinate trains of thought. The latter, again, appear to have been of two classes altogether distinct: outlined trains of thought, and trains into which much of the detail was interwoven. In the outlined train the whole plan was carried out and completed as to the argument; in that of detail, the illustrations, images, and subordinate proofs were selected and classified; and in those instances where the force of an argument, or the probable success of a general application, would mainly depend upon the language, even that was selected and appropriated, sometimes to the precise collocation of the words. Of some sermons, no portions whatever were wrought out thus minutely; the

language employed in preaching being that which spontaneously occurred at the time; of others, this minute attention was paid to the verbal structure of nearly half; of a few, the entire train of preparation, almost from the beginning to the end, extended to the very sentences. Yet the marked peculiarity consisted in this, that the process, even when thus directed to minutiae in his more elaborate efforts, did not require the use of the pen, at least at the time to which these remarks principally apply. [Mr. Hall, doubtless, varied his manner of preparation in different periods. For three or four years after his settlement at Leicester he wrote down nearly a third of the sermon, and left all the rest to flow from the outlying plan while he was preaching. But for some years afterward he seldom allowed his notes to exceed two pages, and is thought to have indulged himself more than at any other period of his life in entirely extemporaneous eloquence. At that time his sermons were especially distinguished by simplicity and pathos.] For Mr. Hall had a singular faculty for continuous mental composition, apart from the aid which writing supplies. Words were so disciplined to his use, that the more he thought on any subject the more closely were the topics of thought associated with appropriate terms and phrases; and it was manifest that he had carefully disciplined his mind to this as an independent exercise, probably to avoid the pain and fatigue which always attended the process of writing. Whenever he pleased he could thus pursue the consecution to a great extent, in sentences many of them perfectly formed and elaborately finished, as he went along, and easily called up again by memory as occasion required; not, however, in their separate character, as elements of language, but because of their being fully worked into the substance of thought. It hence happened that the excellence which other persons often attain as to style, from the use of the pen, in written, visible composition (employing the eye upon words, instead of fixing the memory upon substantial mental product and, it may be, diminishing the intellectual power by substituting for one of its faculties a mechanical result), he more successfully and uniformly obtained by a purely meditative process. And I am persuaded that if he could have instantly impressed his trains of thought upon paper, with the incorporated words, and with the living spirit in which they were conceived, hundreds, if not thousands, of passages would have been preserved, as chaste and polished in diction, as elastic and energetic in tone, as can be selected from any part of his works."1

III. Which of the three fundamental methods is the preferable one?

1. To this question no answer can be given which is universally true. There is a small class of preachers who 1 The Works (Memoir) of the Rev. Robert Hall (Am. ed.), Vol. iii. pp. 39, 40. VOL. XXVIII. No. 111.

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