The serjeants are a grateful race,

And all their actions show it:
Their purple garments come from Tyre,
Their arguments go to it.

Those were emphatically the days of written sermons, for the most part recurring with the regularity of a repeating decimal. Litera scripta manet; and most congregations had ample opportunity of verifying in their own experience the essential permanence of the written letter. These ancestral discourses, yellow with age and curly from the fingering of many generations of orators, came to be almost as well known as the details of a nursery legend, until at last the hearers grew to resent the slightest verbal alteration in the text. A mingled feeling took possession of their minds. They could not hon

that they have of late years perceptibly | the old and almost forgotten epigram on improved - improved certainly as regards the serjeants-at-law, themselves now welllength. The traditional answer of the nigh extinct: man with eleven children, that he had "better than a dozen," was no doubt misleading. Not so the "better than an hour sermon of the olden time. I remember still my childish horror when our good old rector used to mount the pulpit, and, hooking himself on to the oaken panel by the third finger of his right hand (which, by a strange coincidence, chanced to have a diamond ring upon it), would there remain, tenacious as a crustacean of his position physical and theological, until the hand of the clock in front of the gallery pointed to one. Even then it was by no means certain that he would unhook himself. There might still be the "one word more, my brethren," which gave my childish mind such a terrible idea of the expansiveness of unity. In that dreary waste of theology the only fixed thing was the longitude. For the rest, the rec-estly assert that they loved the sermon; tor's great aim seemed to be always to begin at the beginning, or, if possible, a little before it. It was seldom that he would content himself with anything so far advanced in point of time as the fall of man. He was fonder of chaos, and occasionally took us back behind the creation altogether.

but if they must have it at all, they liked it unmutilated. Familiarity might have bred a something of contempt, but nothing was to be gained by a patchwork effort at disguise. Besides, they felt in a way defrauded of their due. Long prescription had given them an indefeasible right to the sermon, the whole sermon, and nothHis greatest sermon (we had it many ing but the sermon. In those good old times over) was on the text: "They shall conservative days men had no yearning offer young bullocks upon thine altar." for revised versions. Children freely cor. Each word of the text formed a separate rect their nurse if she deviates by a hair's heading. Due force was given to the breadth from the accustomed course of "pronoun," to the "particle of futurity," the adventures of Tom Thumb or Jack to the "verb of oblation," to the "adjec- the Giant-killer; and the older members tive of youth," to the "bovine substan- of a congregation felt inclined to do the tive," to the "preposition" (copiously same with their rector if he ever ventured illustrated from the Latin grammar), and to tamper with his time-honored manufinally to the "sacrificial locality." Did I script. A parenthesis might be pardoned, say "finally "?—I was wrong; it was only especially if founded on some State anni. "lastly." The "finally" came long after-versary; an alteration never. How much wards, and even then left room for "in conclusion" and the "one word more." Another of his great sermons, though not so great as the above, was professedly on Dives and Lazarus. It was really on the purple and fine linen incidentally men- It is true that comical results sometimes tioned in the parable. These excited all followed. There is a well-known story, the worthy rector's sense of scholarship, probably apocryphal, of a South American and he gave an exhaustive disquisition on clergyman, who, even when preaching in both. The only purpureus pannus, or bit England, could seldom keep an earthof color, in it for me was his account (is it quake out of his discourse. It is, however, true or apocryphal? — I know not) of the a fact that a clergyman in Nottinghamdiscovery of the Tyrian dye-a wander-shire, who had been a naval chaplain, ing dog licking a murex upon the seashore and getting its tongue stained therewith to the great astonishment of its master. I wonder the rector did not go on to quote

66

unconscious truth lay in the ignorant grandiloquence of the farmer whom I once heard say to his vicar, "You gave us a very good rotation to-day, sir," meaning presumably "oration"!

electrified his congregation one Sunday
by exclaiming, "When we hear, as we do
now, the waves roaring around us
This roused even the farmers, who fancied

at once that the little river which flows | faculty of composition. Instead of copy-
through the village must have suddenly ing piecemeal, he copies wholesale. Is he,
burst its banks and flooded their meadows. therefore, more of a plagiarist than the
In reality the exciting phrase had slipped other two? Who shall venture to affirm
out unawares; it was only a too slavish it? Let him who would do so first pub.
adherence to the text of a manuscript lish to the world one so-called original
written in widely different circumstances thought of his own. The chances are it
that had led the worthy pastor to make will be found already in print.
this startling announcement.

But we are told: "At least a man can made the ideas of another his own, assimilate them, give them the stamp of his own personality, and issue them, as it were, fresh from his own mint." So he can, and probably spoil them in the process. Why should he feel constrained to do so? Why should he not select the best and leave them as he found them? Is the butter any the better because you change the stamp of the dairy to that of the retail dealer? Surely the only important thing is to see that, however stamped, it be genuine butter and not oleomargarine.

cour

And then, the interchange of manuscripts. At first sight there is much to be said for this. If an interchange of preachers is a good thing, why not the interchange of sermons? Eight ounces of ruled paper will go farther, without necessarily faring worse, than fifteen or sixteen stone of ecclesiastically developed humanity. And is it not a clear waste of force to leave a well-composed sermon to languish in the recesses of a desk, when it might be doing good work in another parish? At the same time it cannot be denied that this interchange of manu- What is really wanted is a little more scripts has its drawbacks. Circumstances courage on the part of the clergy are not identical in different parishes. age to give their people always a first-rate The vicar of a squireless village denounces | article, whether of home or foreign manDives with absolute impunity. But let him lend his scathing discourse to the clerical friend who numbers a millionaire among his people, and the chances are that the friend will find himself arraigned before his bishop. It actually happened in Oxfordshire in the days of Bishop Wilberforce. It is true the clergyman triumphed, but the triumph was not without its humiliation. There could be no personal vindictiveness in a borrowed discourse. But if he disproved the appropriateness, he had to admit the appropriation. Personality or plagiarism -a sorry dilemma for any parson.

Still, after all, it is not very reasonable that there should be such an outcry against borrowed sermons. Where does any one get his ideas from? Unless a whole school of philosophers is in the wrong, we come into the world with minds blank as sheets of white paper. Who but a German ever evolved anything from his inner consciousness? Is not, in fact, all our knowledge borrowed? One man sits down and writes off a discourse almost without reference to books. Is he, therefore, original? Not a bit of it. He has only proved that he possesses a well-stored mind and a retentive memory. Another surrounds himself with commentaries, and painfully pieces together a bit of pulpit mosaic. What memory did for the first, ingenuity does for the second. A third has neither the gift of recollection nor the

66

ufacture. By all means let them say
whence they derive their inspiration. Pru-
dence would dictate this candor, if it were
recommended by no higher motive. To
every church comes sooner or later the
perambulatory pedant, ever on the scent
of plagiarism. One such, coming to a
church in days gone by, visibly discon-
certed the preacher by muttering audibly
at the end of each glowing paragraph the
name of its original composer. South,"
"6 Tillotson,"
," "Barrow," "Hooker," drop-
ping from his lips, revealed to the aston-
ished congregation the sources of their
pastor's eloquence. At last the rector's
patience was exhausted, and he appealed
to the secular arm in the person of the
verger. "Jones, turn that man out!"
"Your own!" murmured the stranger,
still faithful to his principle of giving the
authority for every sentence the rector
uttered.

This was a species of marginal refer-
ence such as no divine could desire; but
some of those old sermons were graced
with marginal notes of their own much on
the principle of the verbal directions in a
music-score. Looking over such an one,
which in its day had been preached before
royalty itself, I came across such pencilled
memoranda in the margin as these: "Drop
voice! "Drop it! Whisper," "Pa-
thetic-shake!" "Louder!"
"Ore ro-
tundo," and so forth. For the rest, a
very tame, long-winded discourse, with

termine?

"Watch and pray," says the text: "Go to sleep," says the sermon.

sentences languidly meandering over | By our parson perplext, say, how shall we dewhole pages, and needing doubtless special management of the voice to convey any meaning at all to the royal listener. Let us hope that these well-modulated prescriptions lent it a little of the life it so sorely needed.

And in the other,

The clue to their meaning I never have found;
But of this I am certain the sermons are

sound.

Nowadays, however, written sermons seem gradually to be falling into something like disrepute, and extemporary discourses are all the rage. Many, alas! Perhaps, on an impartial review of the only too obviously extemporary crea- whole case, the balance of educated opintures of the moment both in their genesis ion will not always be found in favor of the and their effect. It is perhaps hardly an modern extemporaneousness. True, it unmixed advantage that of late years it fascinates the vulgar. To them it savors a has dawned upon the consciousness of little of the supernatural Their own procEnglish ecclesiastics that, after all, there esses of thought are so labored, and their is nothing so very difficult in stringing delivery of opinions is so slow and slipwords together when you are in an erect shod, that the continuous flow of words posture. What some one called "the fac- from a man without a book seems to them ulty of thinking on your hind legs" is a little short of miraculous. In their eyes widely different matter. Loquacity is the to read is human, to extemporize divine. birthright of the many, thought the pre- It matters not that what is read may be a rogative of the few. And as long as this masterpiece, and what is said mere sound is so, have we not a right to shudder at and fury, signifying nothing save the rostrictly extemporaneous discourse, wheth-bust self-possession of the speaker and the er in the pulpit or on the platform? Bishop Wilberforce lived to regard it as a mistake that he had recommended his clergy as a body to acquire the habit of extemporary preaching. He found that such discourses too often come from the heart only, in the sense of not proceeding from the brain. The method of fabricating them is in many cases as strictly mechanical as the knack of making Latin verses. The memory is stored with scraps and tags which are loosely fitted together into sentences by an ingenious process which devolves all mental labor upon the listener. Talk of the fatal facility of octosyllabic - what is that to the fatal facility of the preaching which, unrestrained by manuscript, floods the pews with mere sonorous platitudes ?

verse

fine working condition of his lungs. On the other hand, there have been those who have regarded the use of a written sermon in the pulpit as a matter of positive obligation. Of such sort was the eccentric country gentleman who expressed his astonishment that "any clergyman should venture into the presence of his Maker without a manuscript - a gentleman who must, one fancies, have been a not very remote kinsman of the northern archdeacon who wrote to a rural vicar to reprove him for "approaching his archdeacon on a postcard."

No doubt we must all allow that, other things being equal, the spoken sermon sounds fresher than the written. "Which do you prefer?" asked a clergyman once of a famous statesman. "I prefer," said It is conceivable that a sermon, even a the statesman, "a written sermon delivgood one, is not an essential part of Chris-ered as if it were unwritten." This is an tian worship, and that men may, without ideal seldom attained; it was attained, in being ethnics, prefer Robertson in the a way perhaps, by Bellew; in another way study to Robinson in the pulpit. Can by Chalmers; and, according to some there be no true devoutness unless the dev-authorities, by Melvill. otee be at all times willing either to act Of course sermons are not nowadays so the lotus-eater, "falling asleep in a half long as they used to be. If you want one dream" under the narcotic influence of an hour long, your only hope is to attend the written sermon, or to grow distracted a Bampton Lecture, or to chance on Canas he tries to follow the kaleidoscope that on Liddon at his longest. In the latter the extemporaneous orator twirls mechani- case you will not, however, be fatigued, cally before his mental vision must he but will merely fancy that your watch has be at all times willing, I say, to bear one played you a trick when you consult it at or other of these, or else be reckoned an the end of the discourse. outcast from the fold? May he not plead in excuse for his conduct, in the one case,

In fact, in some quarters we have in these latter days gone to the opposite ex

I have heard, as I did from another BY THE AUTHOR OF
preacher, the conduct of God toward Abra-
ham described as "fulsome," meaning
possibly full of love and graciousness
who shall say? But at least we have ani-
mation and sprightliness. It is surely NEXT morning, Josephine found a cab
worth while to have lived in the latter awaiting her. Cable had paid her bill and
half of the nineteenth century, if only to sent the conveyance for her. He had
have heard, as has been heard in a uni- given instructions to the driver to convey
versity pulpit, a bishop talk of the Al- her along the Okehampton and Launces-
mighty's raison d'être and his freedom ton road beyond the town to a point where,
from arrière pensée. And I have myself at the head of the first hill, stood a frag.
lived to hear St. Peter denounced in the ment of an old stone cross. She had fan-
pulpit by a doctor of divinity as being cied that he would have come with his van
fond of low society, because, on a memo of calves into the cathedral yard, drawn
3104

up before the Clarendon Hotel, and had her box laden on the van there; but Richard Cable had too much delicacy under his roughness of manner to subject her to such a humiliation; she was to leave the Clarendon as she had come to it, in a hired conveyance, and as a lady; only when beyond the town would he receive her box and her on his van.

"Am I to sit there?" she asked. He nodded.

"Then where do you sit?"

He got upon the shaft, as a carter perches himself.

"I do not like to take your place," said Josephine. "You will be very uncomfortable there."

"It is not the first time you have made me uncomfortable. Sit where I have put you. I must be off every few minutes when we come to a hill; then I walk." That was he limped. His thigh was well, but he never could walk with it as formerly. It gave him no pain, and his movements were not ungainly, but there was a decided limp as he walked.

She reached the cross before him, and dismounted. When she opened her purse, the driver objected - he had already received his fare; the man who had ordered him had paid. Josephine had her box placed by the side of the road. A little inn stood near the cross, and the landlady good-naturedly asked her to step in, if she were waiting for the coach. "No He was not in a mood for conversation. charge, miss; you needn't take anything." Josephine could touch him as he sat at "Thank you," said Josephine modestly; her feet on the shaft with his back to her. "you are very kind; but I am not going He did not once look round; he went by the coach. A gentleman-I mean a about his work, driving, walking, attending man who drives a van of calves, is going to the calves, as if he were quite alone. to pick me up.' Nevertheless, he must have thought of her, for when he came to a piece of road newly stoned, he went leisurely, and glanced furtively behind not at her face

"Oh, you mean Dicky Cable. He often goes by our way."

"Yes; I am going on with Mr. Cable." As she spoke, she saw the cob, and Cable limping at its side, ascending the red road cut between banks of red sandstone hung with ferns and overarched with rich limes. "He looks very greatly changed," said Josephine to herself- -"oldened, hardened, and somewhat lame."

Presently he came up. Rain had fallen in the night, and the red mud was splashed about his boots and the wheels of the van. The calves within put their noses between the bars and lowed; they were frightened by the motion of the vehicle; but they were not hungry, for they had been fed by Cable before starting. He scarcely said good-morning to Josephine; it was mumbled, but he touched his hat to her. Then he shouldered her travelling-box and put it on the top of the van. This van consisted of a sort of pen or cage on wheels; the sides and top were constructed like a cage, with bars of wood, and between the bars the air got to the calves, and the calves were visible. There was a seat in front, and the door into the pen was behind it let down so as to form an inclined plane, up and down which the calves could walk, when driven into or out of the cage. How was Josephine to be accommodated in such a contrivance? Was she to go into the cage among the calves, or to be slung under the conveyance between the wheels, or to be perched on the top, as in an omnibus? Richard pointed with his whip to the driver's seat.

to see that the jolting did not hurt her; and when a shower came on, without a word he threw his waterproof coat over her knees. Presently they came to a long ascent. He got down and walked. She also descended, and walked on the other side from him. She wondered whether his silence would continue the whole way, whether he would relax his sternness.

The journey was tedious; the cob travelled slowly, and the stoppages were long, whilst farmers haggled with Richard over the price of the calves. The sale of these latter did not, however, begin till the road left the red sandstone and approached Dartmoor. The yeomen and farmers in proximity to the moor were a thriving race; they could send any number of young cattle to run on the moor at a nominal fee to the moormen that is, to certain fellows who had the privilege to guard the vast waste of rock and down, of mountain and valley, under the Prince of Wales as Duke of Cornwall; for Dartmoor forest is duchy property though situated in Devon, and indeed occupying its heart. To the present day, it is about the borders of the moor that the old yeoman is still to be found, occupying in many cases his ancestral farm, the buildings of which date back three or four hundred years. They consist of a large quadrangle; one side is occupied by the dwelling-house, that looks into the yard, but is divided from it by a small raised garden.