the beautifullest, most touching objects one sees on the earth. This Speaking Man has indeed, in these times, wandered terribly from the point; has alas, as it were, totally lost sight of the point: yet, at bottom, whom have we to compare with him? Of all public functionaries boarded and lodged on the Industry of Modern Europe, is there one worthier of the board he has? A man even professing, and, never so languidly, making still some endeavour, to save the souls of men: contrast him with a man professing to do little but shoot the partridges of men! I wish he could find the point again, this Speaking One, and stick to it with tenacity, with deadly energy; for there is need of him yet! The Speaking Function-this of Truth coming to us with a living voice, nay, in a living shape, and as a concrete practical exemplar; this, with all our Writing and Printing Functions, has a perennial place. Could he but find the point again, take the old spectacles off his nose, and looking up discover, almost in contact with him, what the real Satanas, and soul-devouring, world-devouring Devil, Now is. CARLYLE. Oh, the unspeakable littleness of a soul which, intrusted with Christianity, speaking in God's name to immortal beings, with infinite excitements to the most enlarged, fervent love, sinks down into narrow self-regard, and is chiefly solicitous of its own honour! W. ELLERY CHANNING. It is a strange folly to set ourselves no mark, to propound no end, in the hearing of the gospel. COLERIDGE. How fast does obscurity, flatness, and impertinency flow in upon our meditations! 'Tis a difficult thing to talk to the purpose, and to put life and perspicuity into our discourses. JEREMY COLLIER. A young raw preacher is a bird not yet fledged, that hath hopped out of his nest to be chirping on a hedge, and will be struggling abroad at what peril soever. The pace of his sermon is a full career, and he runs wildly over hill and dale till the clock stop him. The labour of it is chiefly in his lungs; and the only thing he has made in it himself is the faces. His action is all passion, and his speech interjections. He has an excellent faculty in bemoaning the people, and spits with a very good grace. His style is compounded of twenty several men's, only his body imitates some one extraordinary. He will not draw his handkerchief out of his place, nor blow his nose without discretion. His commendation is that he never looks upon book; and indeed he was never used to it. He preaches but once a year, though twice on Sunday; for the stuff is still the same, only the dressing a little altered; he has more tricks with a sermon than a tailor with an old cloak, to turn it, and piece it, and at last quite disguise it with a new preface. If he have waded further in his profession, and would show reading of his own, his authors are postils, and his school-divinity a catechism. By hearing him [Whitefield] often, I came to distinguish easily between sermons newly composed, and those which he had often preached in the course of his travels. His delivery of the latter was so improved by frequent repetition, that every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice was so perfectly well turned an i well placed, that, without being interested in the subject, one could not help being pleased with the discourse; a pleasure of much the same kind with that received from an excellent piece of music. This is an advantage itinerant preachers have over those who are stationary, as the latter cannot well improve their delivery of a sermon by so many rehearsals. BENJ. FRANKLIN: Autobiography. Reasons are the pillars of the fabric of a sermon, but similitudes are the windows which give the best light. The faithful minister avoids such stories whose mention may suggest bad thoughts to the auditors, and will not use a light comparison to make thereof a graven applica tion, for fear lest his poison go further than his antidote. T. FULLER. comes from the T. FULLER. Surely that preaching which soul most works on the soul. There are but few talents requisite to become a popular preacher; for the people are easily pleased if they perceive any endeavours in the orator to please them; the meanest qualifications will work this effect if the preacher sincerely sets about it. Perhaps little, indeed very little, more is required than sincerity and assurance; and a becoming sincerity is always certain of producing a becoming assurance. "Si vis me flere, dolendum est primum tibi ipsi," is so trite a quotation that it almost demands an apology to repeat it; yet though all allow the justice of the remark, how few do we find put it in practice! Our orators, with the most faulty bashfulness, seem impressed rather with an awe of their audience, than with a just respect for the truths they are about to deliver: they, of all professions, seem the most bashful, who have the greatest right to glory in their commission. The French preachers generally assume all that dignity which becomes men who are ambassadors from Christ; the English divines, like erroneous envoys, seem more solicitous not to offend the court to which they are sent, than to drive home the interests of their employer. GOLDSMITH: Essays, No. XVII. Their discourses from the pulpit are generally dry, methodical, and unaffecting: delivered with the most insipid calmness; insomuch that should the peaceful preacher lift his head over the cushion, which alone he seems to address, he might discover his audience, instead of being awakened to remorse, actually sleeping over this methodical and laboured composition. GOLDSMITH: Essays, No. XVII. What special property or quality is that, which being nowhere found but in sermons maketh them effectual to save souls, and leaveth all other doctrinal means besides destitute of vital efficacy? HOOKER. There prevailed in those days an indecent custom; when the preacher touched any favourite topic in a manner that delighted his audience, their approbation was expressed by a loud hum, continued in proportion to their zeal or pleasure. DR. S. JOHNSON. When Burnet preached, part of his congregation hummed so loudly and so long that he sat down to enjoy it. DR. S. JOHNSON. Intelligible discourses are spoiled by too much subtilty in nice divisions. LOCKE. hearers and detain them with long and tedious I would not have preachers torment their preaching. LUTHER. It will be perhaps objected, that by confining the excellences of a preacher to proper assurance, earnestness, and openness of style, I make the qualifications too trifling for estima- Tillotson still keeps his place as a legitimate tion; there will be something called oratory English classic. His highest flights were indeed brought up on this occasion; action, attitude, far below those of Taylor, of Barrow, and of grace, elocution, may be repeated as absolutely South; but his oratory was more correct and necessary to complete the character: but let us equable than theirs. No quaint conceits, no not be deceived: common sense is seldom pedantic quotations from Talmudists and schoswayed by fine tones, musical periods, just atti-liasts, no mean images, buffoon stories, scurriltudes, or the display of a white handkerchief; oratorial behaviour, except in very able hands indeed, generally sinks into awkward and paltry affectation. GOLDSMITH: Essays, No. XVII. A hard and unfeeling manner of denouncing the threatenings of the word of God is not only barbarous and inhuman, but calculated, by inspiring disgust, to rob them of all their efficacy. If the awful part of our message, which may be styled the burden of the Lord, ever fall with due weight on our hearers, it will be when it is delivered with a trembling hand and faltering lips; and we may then expect them to realize its solemn import when they perceive that we ourselves are ready to sink under it. "Of whom I have told you before," said St. Paul, "and now tell you weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ." What force does that affecting declaration derive from these tears! An affectionate manner insinuates itself into the heart, renders it soft and pliable, and disposes it to imbibe the sentiments and follow the impulse of the speaker. Whoever has attended to the effect of addresses from the pulpit must have perceived how much of their impression depends upon this quality, which gives to sentiments comparatively trite a power over the mind beyond what the most striking and original conceptions possess without it. ROBERT HALL: Discouragements and Supports of the For the instruction of all men to eternal life it is necessary that the sacred and saving truth of God be openly published unto them, which open publication of heavenly mysteries is by an excellency termed preaching. HOOKER. ous invectives, ever marred the effect of his grave and temperate discourses. His reasoning was just sufficiently profound and sufficiently refined to be followed by a popular audience with that slight degree of intellectual exertion which is a pleasure. His style is not brilliant; but it is pure, transparently clear, and equally free from levity and from the stiffness which disfigures the sermons of some eminent divines of the seventeenth century. LORD MACAULAY: Hist. of Eng., ch. xiv. If a cause the most important that could be conceived were to be tried at the bar before qualified judges; if this cause interested ourselves in particular; if the eyes of the whole kingdom were fixed upon the event; if the most eminent counsel were employed on both sides; and if we had heard from our infancy of this yet undetermined trial; would you not all sit with due attention, and warm expectation, to the pleadings on each side? Would not all your hopes and fears be hinged upon the final decision? And yet, let me tell you, you have this moment a cause of much greater importance before you; a cause where not one nation, but all the world, are spectators; tried not before a fallible tribunal, but the awful throne of Heaven; where not your temporal and transitory interests are the subject of debate, but your eternal happiness or misery; where the cause is still undetermined, but perhaps the very moment I am speaking may fix the irrevocable decree that shall last forever; and yet, notwithstanding all this, you can hardly sit with patience to hear the tidings of your own salvation: I plead the cause of Heaven, and yet I am scarcely attended to. MASSILLON: Sermon. Public preaching indeed is the gift of the Spirit, working as best seems to his secret will; but discipline is the practic work of preaching directed and applied, as is most requisite, to particular duty without which it were all one to the benefit of souls, as it would be to the cure of bodies, if all the physicians in London should get into the several pulpits of the city, and, assembling all the diseased in every parish, should begin a learned lecture of pleurisies, palsies, lethargies, to which perhaps none then present were inclined; and so, without so much as feeling one pulse, or giving the least order to any skilful apothecary, should dismiss them from time to time, some groaning, some languishing, some expiring, with this only charge, to look well to themselves, and do as they hear. MILTON: Reason of Church Government Urged against Prelacy. Nothing is text but what is spoken of in the Bible, and meant there for person and place: the rest is application, which a discreet man may do well; but 'tis his scripture, not the Holy Ghost's. First in your sermons use your logic, and then your rhetoric: rhetoric without logic is like a tree with leaves and blossoms, but no root. SELDEN: Table-Talk. The extemporizing faculty is never more out of its element than in the pulpit; though even here it is much more excusable in a sermon than in a prayer. SOUTH. Nothing great ought to be ventured on without preparation; but, above all, how sottish is it to engage extempore where the concern is eternity! SOUTH. The most careful endeavours do not always meet with success; and even our blessed Saviour's preaching, who spake as never man spake, was ineffectual to many. STILLINGFLEET. Sermons are not like curious inquiries after new-nothings, but pursuances of old truths. JEREMY TAYLOR. Fuller, our church-historian, having occasion to speak of some famous divine that had lately died, exclaims, "O the painfulness of his preachThe words are a record not of the ing!" pain which he caused to others, but of the pains which he bestowed himself: and I believe, if we had more painful preachers in the old sense of the word, that is, who took pains themselves, we should have fewer painful ones in the modern sense, who cause pain to their hearers. R. C. TRENCH. It is a proper business of a divine to state cases of conscience, and to remonstrate against any growing corruptions in practice, and especially WATERLAND. in principles. Their business is to address all the ranks of mankind, and persuade them to pursue and persevere in virtue with regard to themselves, in justice and goodness with regard to their neighbours, and piety towards God. DR. I. WATTS. It is a fault in a multitude of preachers that they utterly neglect method in their harangues. DR. I. WATTS. Discourses for the pulpit should be cast into a plain method, and the reasons ranged under the words, first, secondly, and thirdly; however they may be now fancied to sound unpolite or unDR. I. WATTS. fashionable. PREDESTINATION. Predestination is destructive to all that is established among men, to all that is most precious to human nature, to the two faculties that denominate us men, understanding and will: for what use can we have of our understandings if we cannot do what we know to be our duty? have we of our wills? And if we act not voluntarily, what exercise HAMMOND. What should make it necessary for him to repent or amend, who, either without respect to any degree of amendment, is supposed to be elected to eternal bliss, or without respect to sin, to be irreversibly reprobated? HAMMOND. This doctrine, by fastening all our actions by a fatal decree at the foot of God's chair, leaves nothing to us but only to obey our fate, to follow the duct of the stars, or necessity of those iron chains which we are born under. HAMMOND. It is rarely that man continues to lay blame on himself; and Jasper hastened to do as many a better person does without a blush for his folly, -viz., shift upon the innocent shoulders of fellow-men, or on the hazy outlines of that clouded form which ancient schools and modern plagiarists call sometimes "Circumstance," sometimes Chance," sometimes "Fate," all the guilt due to his own wilful abuse of irrevocable hours. 66 LORD E. G. E. L. B. LYTTON : What Will He Do With It? book x., ch. i. To charge men with practical consequences which they themselves deny is disingenuous in controversy; it is atrocious in government. The doctrine of predestination, in the opinion of many people, tends to make those who hold it utterly immoral. And certainly it would seem that a man who believes his eternal destiny to be irrevocably fixed is likely to indulge his passions without restraint and to neglect his religious duties. If he is an heir of wrath, his exertions must be unavailing. If he is preordained to eternal life, they must be superfluous. But would it be wise to punish every man who holds the higher doctrines of Calvinism, as if he had actually committed all those crimes which we know some Antinomians to have committed? Assuredly not. The fact notoriously is that there are many Calvinists as moral in their conduct as any Arminian, and many Arminians as loose as any Calvinist. LORD MACAULAY: Civil Disabilities of the Jews, Jan. 1831. We must conclude, therefore, that God decreed nothing absolutely, which he left in the power of free agents, a doctrine which is shown by the whole canon of Scripture. For if those decrees of God which have been referred to above, and such others of the same class as occur perpetually, were to be understood in an absolute sense, without any implied condition, God would contradict himself, and appear inconsistent. It is argued, however, that in such instances not only was the ultimate purpose predestinated, but even the means themselves were predes tinated with a view to it. So, indeed, it is asserted, but not on the authority of Scripture; and the silence of Scrip. ture would alone be a sufficient reason for rejecting the doctrine. But it is also attended by this additional inconvenience, that it would entirely take away from human affairs all liberty of action, all endeavour and desire to do right. For we might argue thus,-If God have at all events decreed my salvation, however I may act, I shall not perish. But God has also decreed as the means of salvation that you should act rightly. I cannot, therefore, but act rightly at some time or other, since God has so decreed,—in | | 583 the mean time I will act as I please: if I never act rightly, it will be seen that I was never predestinated to salvation, and that whatever good I might have done would have been to no purpose. MILTON: Treatise on Christian Doctrine. See Bibl. Sacra, xvi. 557, xvii. 1. Among our other controversies that of Fatum is also crept in, and to tye things to come, and even our own wills to a certain and inevitable necessity,-we are yet upon this argument of time past: "Since God forsees that all things shall so fall out, as doubtless he does, it must then necessarily follow that they must so fall out." To which our masters reply, "that the seeing anything come to pass, as we do, and as God himself does (for all things being present with him, he rather sees, than for-ees) is not to compel an event: that is, we see because things do fall out, but things do not fall out because we see. Events cause knowledge, but knowledge does not cause events. That which we see happen, does happen; but it might have hapned otherwise: and God, in the catalogue of the causes of events which he has in his prescience, has also those which we call accidental and unvoluntary, which depend upon the liberty he has given our free will, and knows that we do amiss because we would do so." MONTAIGNE: Essays, Cotton's 3d ed., ch. lxxxi. Napoleon I. "As much so as the Turks are. I Are you a predestinarian ? asked O'Meara of have been always so. When destiny wills, it must be obeyed." NAPOLEON I. Can a man of sound sense listen for one moment to such a doctrine? Either predestination admits the existence of free will, or it rejects it. If it admits it, what kind of predetermined result can that be which a simple determination, a stop, a word, may alter or modify, ad infinitum? If predestination, on the contrary, rejects the existence of free will, it is quite another question: in that case a child need only be thrown into its cradle as soon as it is born; there is no necessity for bestowing the least care upon it for if it be irrevocably determined that it is to live, it will grow though no food should be given to it. You see that such a doctrine without meaning. The Turks themselves, the cannot be maintained; predestination is a word patrons of predestination, are not convinced of Turkey; and a man residing in a third floor the doctrine, or medicine would not exist in longer way of the stairs; he would immediately. would not take the trouble to go down by the what a string of absurdities that will lead. throw himself out of the window: you see to NAPOLEON I.: Life, etc., by Las Cases, vol. iii. pt. ii. 260. For men to judge of their condition by the decrees of God which are hid from us, and not by His word which is near us and in our hearts,. is as if a man wandering in the wide sea, in a dark night when the heaven is all clouded about, 584 PREDESTINATION.—PREJUDICE.—PRESCIENCE. should yet resolve to steer his course by the stars which he cannot see, but only guess at, and neglect the compass, which is at hand, and would afford him a much better and more certain direction. TILLOTSON. That which contradicts reason cannot be said to stand upon reasonable grounds, and such, undoubtedly, is every proposition which is incompatible with the divine justice or mercy. What then shall I say of predestination? If it was inevitably decreed from all eternity that a determinate part of mankind should be saved, and none beside them, a vast majority of the world were only born to eternal death, without so much as a possibility of avoiding it. How is this consistent with either the divine justice or mercy? Is it merciful to ordain a creature to everlasting misery? Is it just to punish man for sins which he could not but commit? That God should be the author of sin and injustice, which must, I think, be the consequence of maintaining this opinion, is a contradiction to the clearest ideas we have of the divine nature and perfections. JOHN WESLEY: Southey's Life of Wesley, 3d edit., Lond., 1846, i. 33. PREJUDICE. Prejudice and self-sufficiency naturally proceed from inexperience of the world, and ignorance of mankind. ADDISON. They that never peeped beyond the common belief in which their easy understandings were at first indoctrinated, are strongly assured of the truth of their receptions. GLANVILL. Who will be prevailed with to dissolve himself at once of all his old opinions, and pretences to knowledge and learning, and turn himself over stark naked in quest afresh of new notions? LOCKE. A soul clear from prejudice has a marvellous advance towards tranquility and repose. Men that judge and controul their judges, do never duly submit to them. How much more docile and easie to be govern'd, both in the laws of religion and civil polity, are simple and incu rious minds, than those over-vigilant wits that will still be prating of divine and human causes? There is nothing in human invention that carries so great a shew of likelyhood and utility as this. MONTAIGNE: Essays, Cotton's 3d ed., ch. Ixix. In forming a judgment, lay your hearts void of fore-taken opinions; else, whatsoever is done or said will be measured by a wrong rule; like them who have the jaundice, to whom everything appeareth yellow. SIR P. SIDNEY. It will be found a work of no small difficulty to dispossess a vice from that heart where long possession begins to plead prescription. SOUTH. To all intents and purposes, he who will not open his eyes is, for the present, as blind as he that cannot. SOUTH. This word of itself means plainly no more than "a judgment formed beforehand," without There is scarce any folly or vice more epidemical among the sons of men than that ridiculous and hurtful vanity by which the people of each country are apt to prefer themselves to those of every other; and to make their own customs, and manners, and opinions, the stand-affirming anything as to whether that judgment ards of right and wrong, of true and false. The Chinese mandarins were strongly surprised, and almost incredulous, when the Jesuits showed them how small a figure their empire made in the general map of the world. LORD BOLINGBROKE. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek (and they seldom fail), they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature. BURKE: Reflec. on the Rev. in France, 1790. be favourable or unfavourable about whom it is harsh, unfavourable judgments of others before formed. Yet so predominantly do we form knowledge and experience, that a “prejudice,” or judgment before knowledge, and not grounded on evidence, is almost always taken to signify an unfavourable anticipation about one. |