ART. III. THE PRIMARY IMPRESSION OF PREACHING. ONE of the primary objects of all public address, in the nature of the case, is to make a deep and lasting impression on the mind of the hearer. Most of all should the preaching of the Gospel seek and secure such an impression, and in failing to effect it may be said to fail in its essential purpose. Its themes are so sublime and sacred, and the ends it contemplates so momentous and practical, that nothing short of a positive and pronounced influence should attend it. We speak of a certain school in modern art and literature as " Impressionists." First and last, the preacher should be an impressionist, so presenting divine truth to the minds of men that it shall be permanently potent in them and over them, and, under the cooperative agency of the Spirit, transform and govern their characters. No graver and juster charge can be made against the average sermon of the modern Church than that it is devoid of the virtue of impressiveness, leaving the hearer, to all intents and purposes, just where it found him, neither wiser nor better by what he has heard, and least of all awakened and stimulated to the highest ideals and activities of Christian living. "The first question to be asked with regard to an author's style," writes a late American critic, is, "Is it vital? Has it life?" And this is the first question to be asked with regard to the sermon as a written product-Is it vital? Has it life, natural and supernatural, so as to vitalize everyone who hears it? Does it beat and throb with a divine idea and with the sanctified personality of the preacher? A more vital theology and a more vital order of preaching constitute one of the urgent needs of the American Church, and if these exist vital piety will be a necessary product.

I. In noting, more specifically, the possible impressions sought in preaching, it may first of all be stated, negatively, that the primary impression should not be intellectual, should not be of "man's wisdom." A priori, all true preaching must be, to an extent, intellectual, in the sense that it must be intelligent, instructive, the result of careful thinking and study, marked by judgment and good understanding. Through and through it must be characterized by common sense and educated 36-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XIII.

sense. The Bible is the thought of God revealed to men endowed with mental faculty, and must be examined and applied in obedience to such an origin. No argument is in place here as to the need and desirability of an educated ministry. The preacher is presumably a teacher, and, therefore, should not be a novice either in the subject-matter or the art of teaching. He must have wisdom and knowledge, must have his mental powers disciplined and enlarged. Lay preachers have their place and work, but it is not of them that we are now speaking. There are times in the history of the Church when God sees fit to use an ignorant ministry and bless their work, but such agencies are purely exceptional and nowhere represented in Scripture as a normal ministerial order. Far too much has been made of the fact that, as a class, the apostles of the early Church were "unlearned and ignorant men." The days in which they lived and the conditions under which they preached were strictly exceptional, not to speak of the fact that the visible presence of Christ in his divine and gracious personality was an inexpressibly important element in explanation of any spiritual result. In such an age as this least of all, when "the schoolmaster is abroad" as never before, can the ministry afford to be mentally unfurnished. Students and thinkers they must be, knowing the Bible from cover to cover, and knowing as much of all related truth as time and talent will allow. We are living in a day when the clergy, as never before, must command the respect of thinking men; must speak with authority and power; must leave no doubt among the people that, when brains were distributed, they were present and received their due share; and that they have increased their original endowment by individual effort, and propose to keep in line with every progressive mental movement. Hence there should be no busier man than the preacher, making thinking and study his business, and absorbed from head to foot in his great mission. "If God hath no need of our learning," says South, "he can have still less of our ignorance."

Intellectual preaching, however, in the sense in which we are now interpreting it and condemning it, is something different from all this. It is an order of preaching in which the intellectual is made purposely prominent; in which the study is transferred to the pulpit and made conspicuous therein; in which

mental processes as such are magnified above the truth sought by such processes; in which dialectics and logic appear in technical form; in which the sermon is, first of all, scholarly and but incidentally adapted to meet the common needs of the average hearer. In such a method the abstract is preferred to the concrete; the process is professional, even to the verge of pedantry; and profound philosophic discussion marks the manner of the preacher. Intellectual preaching, in this sense, insists on presenting simple truth through scholastic media, through the terms and formulæ of the schools, insomuch that, ere the preacher is aware, the didactic method of the Academy and the Porch becomes the adopted method of the pulpit, and the mind of the ordinary hearer is at the limit of its tension in attempting to follow the complex logic of the teaching. "You must judge for yourselves," said the devoted Doddridge, "but permit me to say, for my own part, I would not for ten thousand worlds be that man who, when God shall ask him at last how he has employed most of his time while he had the care of souls, shall be obliged to reply, 'Lord, I have restored many corrupted passages in the classics and illuminated many which were before obscure; I have cleared up many intricacies in chronology and geography-these are the employments in which my life has been worn out."" In plain English, intellectual preaching, in this sense, is quite above the heads of the people, the preacher forgetting, as is so often done, that the elevation of the pulpit above the level of the audience is not meant to be either mental or homiletic, but purely architectural and material. Of the various false methods of preaching-the platitudinarian, the latitudinarian, and the altitudinarian—the last is the most objectionable, for, as the old Welshman tells us, “We might as well be dumb as not to be understood." Preaching may have range and reach, but must not be out of reach. The Bible in its origin is a supernatural book, but the method in which it is mediated to men must be natural and not beyond the bounds of what Locke has called "human understanding." Moreover, in listening to such a method it is not a little difficult to free ourselves from the idea that there is an intended parade of learning, a kind of mental exhibit to the uninitiated, not altogether devoid of mental pomposity. In such cases abstruse reasoning and a highly technical nomenclature are used,

mere" words to no profit but to the subverting of the hearers." As we listen we exclaim to one who has something to say, as did Falstaff to Pistol, "I pr'ythee now, deliver them like a man of this world." The extent to which in the English language, and especially in the sphere of technical terms, a man may use high-sounding phrases and say nothing is as disheartening as it is common. Able sermons, so called, may be anything but apostolic, and were never less needed than now. The sermon from the hearing of which an audience rises only to say that it was a masterly mental effort is a failure from the biblical point of view, and in the view of those hearers who have come to the house of God for practical ends. The English divine, Dr. Barrow, was a preacher of this order, of whom Charles II remarked that he was most unfair because he exhausted every subject. This he did, and in the process exhausted the hearer, being in favor at the court largely because he never touched the conscience of the king. His method was due in part to the academic habit he had formed as a professor of Greek and of mathematics at Cambridge. It is often said that professors as a class, theological and academic, are unacceptable preachers because too scholastic in their method. The criticism is a just one, and there are good reasons for it; nor should an order of men whose regular work is professional be subject to rigid comment at this point. For a man whose profession is technical teaching to be a generally acceptable preacher demands special talent and special tact and grace, and is a veritable mark of genius. Of the great court preachers of the time of Louis. XIV, Bourdaloue was the most intellectual. Richard Hooker, Bishop Butler, and Archbishop Whately of England were such preachers, and hence succeeded in reaching but a limited number of hearers.

II. We remark, further, that the primary impression of preaching should not be literary-should not be "with enticing words." Here, again, it is in point to state that all preaching is and must be, to an extent, literary, in good taste. It must have what Cardinal Newman has called "a note" of dignity and refinement. In diction, structure, method, and general style the sermon should commend itself to well-bred and wellread men. In this sense it should have in it the evidences of culture, and should address itself acceptably to men of culture,

in so far, at least, as not to offend their sense of propriety by the violation of the accepted principles of literary art. The course of liberal training through which the American clergy as a class are supposed to go is of itself sufficient to insure the essential presence of correctness in language and in the general conduct of the discourser. An illiterate ministry is a contradiction in terms, as much so as an ignorant ministry. Such an order of preachers is indeed at times honored of God in special exigencies and for special ends; yet it is strictly exceptional, is under special providential oversight, and in no sense is a precedent for the imitation of the growing Church. The Bible is a book among books, the thought of God in written form, and, as such, has a literary type of its own-its prose and verse, its history and parable, its semiepic and semidramatic poems. Hence the increasing emphasis now laid on the distinctively literary study of the Bible, not only by way of a destructive criticism on the part of the higher critics, but by way of constructive criticism on the part of devout students of the word. Hence the preacher of the Gospel must be conversant with the Bible on its human side, and in his interpretation of it must be loyal to its literary character.

Literary preaching, however, in the sense now understood and condemned, is a something different from all this—in which the literary element is emphasized as the prominent one, by which the pulpit is transformed into the library, and books and authors are the conspicuous feature of the place and hour. The preacher now assumes the attitude of the well-read man, the man of letters, and wishing to be so understood. In the preparation and presentation of divine truth the imagination is exalted, the poetic instincts of the hearer are addressed, sacred discourse is reduced to one of the fine arts, and frequent citations from authors are made a specialty. Such an order of preaching is æsthetic rather than instructive; in good form for the sake of the form; applying to all the clergy the irony of Emerson as to city pastors, that "they may have piety, but must have taste." Sermons replete with quotations from secular literature invariably lose something of their specific spiritual impression, and this is especially so if the citations be from the more psychological and obscure authors, such as Browning and Carlyle, rather than from such simple and nat