^^tH^" 001 10:5 /^ MODERN PREACHERS BY v/' LEWIS O. BRASTOW, D.D. PROFESSOR OF PRACTICAL THEOLOGY IN YALE UNIVERSITY CINCINNATI : JENNINGS AND GRAHAM NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS Copyright, 1904, Bv THE MaCMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped Published February, 1904. Reprinted July, 1905 ; July, 1910. ■ Noitsaotr ^ttsB J. S. Cashing & Co. — Berwick & Smith (jo. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. In compliance with current copyright law, LBS Archival Products produced this replacement volume on paper that meets the ANSI Standard Z39.48-1984 to replace the irreparably deteriorated original. 1993 _^ TM (00) \ To the Graduates of Yale Divinity School, who have participated with me in the study of the Great Preachers of the Christian Church, and with whom I have passed pleasant, class-room hours that will never be forgotten, f > ' / Dedicate this Volume. | / PREFACE i i The chapters of this volume were originally lectures to divinity students. I have ventured to present themj in revised and expanded form to the general public, because I think that the preachers of whose personalis ties and products I have here attempted a critical esti- mate have, by their skill and force in presenting the truth, won the right to a special hearing. I have been a careful student of the^ for many years, and confess a special personal interest in most of them. Som^ of them are well known. A good deal has been -said about them and they have been widely read. It' may seem, therefore, to be bringing " coals to Newcastle " to discuss them anew. But some of them are not well known. A volume of Schleiermacher's selected and translated sermons was presented a few years ago to the American public. But I venture the surmise that but few, even among preachers, know this great repre- sentative of the German pulpit, either as preacher or as theologian. Newman and Mozley have still a lim- ited circle of readers and admirers, but it might well be enlarged. The "up-to-date" man is not interested in Guthrie or Spurgeon. They have contributed httle or nothing to the thought of the church. But each according to his type was a great preacher, and it would be a mistake to minimize their significance for viii PREFACE the practical life of the church. It is doubtless some- thing of a venture to ask fresh attention to the more widely known and read preachers of our group, who bear most distinctively the modern mark. But I have cherished the hope that by directing attention to the influences that wrought upon all of these preachers, by analyzing their characteristics of personaUty and their homiletic methods and products, by indicating what they represent as preachers, and by setting them somewhat in comparison or contrast, I may have suc- ceeded in a measure in getting them into fresh light, and may have made some additional contribution, how- ever slight, to the knowledge of them. Contemporary with the preachers we are considering there were,' of course, others of great skill and effectiveness who might well have be^n grouped with them. But per- sonal preference is a factor in the selection ; the plan of discussion would not admit of enlargement of the group, and it may at least be claimed that none of their contemporaries surpassed them in their own lines. There are living preachers who are their worthy suc- cessors," but the author does not wish to engage in vivisection. The preachers before us differ widely from each other as representatives of the preaching of the last century. Each in his own way represents some im- portant interest, meets some real want, and is the product of some movement of thought or life, or some combination of movements, measurably manifest in the last century. Some of them are theologically and ecclesiastically reactionary, but not one of them is a complete anachronism, and there is none that fails to PREFACE ix bring an important message for his age and for ours as well. No effort has been made to differentiate them formally by groups, or to classify them according to the schools they may be supposed to represent. But they represent different tendencies and they belong to differ- ent types. Ecclesiastically the first five may be called Broad churchmen, the two following High churchmen, and the last two Low churchmen, using these terms comprehensively. Theologically the first group repre- sent measurably modern catholicity and liberahty, the second church confessionaHsm, and the third an ardent evangelicalism. With respect to points of view or pre- vailing tendencies of homiletic thought and method, they may be called respectively humanistic, dogmatic, and Biblical. But these are only general terms, not exhaustive of either group, and much less of individual peculiarities and tendencies. They represent the di- versities and varieties that characterize the modern pulpit, and, on the other hand, they share much that is common, and all disclose in some measure the influ- ences that are everywhere at work in modern life. We need to get back to the best. The great preacher is a gift from God, and the church and its ministers need incentive from their princes. If I may but suc- ceed in securing from intelligent laymen, theological students, and preachers new interest in the men to whom I have ventured to direct their attention, my object will have been secured and I shall have my reward. CONTENTS CHAPTER I ' FRIEDRICH DANIEL ERNST SCHLEIERMACHER FACE I. Schleiermacher's Spiritual and Intellectual Devel- opment I 1. The early period of Moravian nurture . . , . 3 2. The student period of philosophic Illumination . . 8 3. The period of social and literary culture . . .12 4. The period of pedagogic, ecclesiastical, and political inRueoce 15 II. Schleiermacher's Conception of Religion and Theology 16 1. Religion a fact of spiritual experience . . . .18 2. The content of such experience the basis of theology . 20 3. Such experience discloses itself in the life of the church, and religion allies itself with morality ... 21 III. Schleiermacher's Preaching 22 1. The conception of religion and theology conditions his conception of preaching ...... 24 2. The religion of spiritual experience as related to the subject-matter of preaching ..... 28 3. The object of preaching as conceived by Schleiermacher 23 4. The tone of his preaching ...... 36 5. Its formal aspects 39 6. The type of preachers with which he may be classed . 44 CHAPTER II FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON I. Influences Determinative of his Development . . 50 1. His distinctive English qualities 50 2. The influence of the English home .... 54 xi xii CONTENTS 3. His relation to the Anglican church 4. The influence of philosophical Idealism 5. The influence of modern literature II. Distinctive Qualities in Robertson's Preaching . 1. Its Biblical quality (1) Grasp of the historic sense .... (2) Apprehension of the inner suggestiveness of Bib lical material and grasp of fundamental Biblical principles ....... (3) Use of Biblical material in advocacy of ethical and spirituaf interests .... (4) The textual and expository form and method 2. The intellectual and edifying quality of his preaching 3. His preaching as illustrative of the value of deep and varied religious experience 4. The value of a refined and forceful personality in the preacher ....... 5. Rhetorical qualities in his preaching PAGE 57 62 66 69 69 71 72 76 77 79 84 87 92 CHAPTER III HENRY WARD BEECHER The Representative American Preacher 99 1. Beecher's individualistic quality; his freedom from con- ventionalism; the assertion of the rights of the homiletic personality loi 2. The didactic and persuasive quality . . . -US (i) Intellectual and spiritual productiveness . .119 (2) Thoroughness and grasp of what is fundamental . 122 (3) Intellectual scope . . . . . • 127 (4) Intellectual catholicity 132 3. Transcendent gifts of expression . . . . -13^ (i) The intellectual quality of clarity . . . 137 (2) The ethical qualit}' of naturalness . . . 138 (3) The concrete, illustrative style . . . .139 CONTENTS xiii CHAPTER IV HORACE BUSHNELL PACK L Bushnell's Homiletic Genius 143 His philosophical grasp, his theological insight, his "exi- getical divination," his student impulse, his realistic en- terprise, all made tributary to the interests of preaching . 143 II. Bushnell's Personality as related to his Work as a Preacher iSS 1. The physical personality 155 2. The intellectual adhesiveness and insight . . . • '59 3. The artistic gifts 165 4. The ethical equipment 171 5. The dominance of mystical vision 176 III. Bushnell's Theology as adapted to the Work of Preaching . . ^ 184 Its unscientific character; its concrete and non-technical ^^—-v form; its Christological centre . . . . . , l8s\ CHAPTER V PHILLIPS BROOKS I. The Christian Humanist 195 Influences that furthered the humanistic development . 196 n. The Harmonious Personality 206 Its progressive disclosure. The physical, mental, ethical, spiritual, and artistic equipment 2o8 III. The Hope-bearing Message 217 What is involved in the conception of his message. His message as related to scientific theology. His attitude with respect to the theology of the church. The theo- logical, anthropological, Christological, soteriological, ecclesiological, and eschatological content of his message 217 rv. The Illustrative Homiletic Method .... 236 Analytic skill. Use of analogy and generalization. Infer- ential processes. Appeal to experience. Qualities of literary style 239 PAGE 252 xiv CONTENTS CHAPTER VI JOHN HENRY NEWMAN I. The Anglican Movement What lies behind it, and its relation to Newman's career . 253 II. Newman the Ecclesiastical Dogmatist .... 264 Conditions determinative of his dogmatic development . 266 III. Newman the Preacher 287 The intensity of his religious feeling. His emphasis upon the ethical significance of faith. His insight into the human soul. The apologetic subject-matter of his preaching. The structural freedom of his method. The force and grace of his literary style 288 CHAPTER VII JAMES BOWLING MOZLEY I. The Man and the Theologian. Sketch of his Life and Work 309 II. The Apologetic and Ethical Preacher .... 321 1. The non-dogmatic, the declarative, the non-partisan, and fundamental qualities of his apologetic method . 321 2. The searching analysis of his ethical method. His pre- vailing view of the world and of life. The optimistic note in his Christian pessimism ..... 331 3. The artistic aspects of his preaching .... 344 CHAPTER VIII THOMAS GUTHRIE I. Character and Career 350 II. The Popular Evangelistic Preacher .... 363 1. The physical personality 363 2. Influence of pastoral and philanthropic work upon his preaching ......... 367 3. The material and structural elements in his preaching . 371 4. His dramatic power 377 CONTENTS XV CHAPTER IX CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON PAGB I. The Building of the Puritan Pastoral Evangelist . 383 A sketch of his life and of the processes of his development 383 II. The Preaching of the Puritan Pastoral Evangelist . 395 1. The power of spontaneity and naturalness . . . 396 2. His consciousness of vocation as related to pulpit effectiveness 4°' 3, The positiveness of his message and its influence over men 403 4, The value of his working knowledge of the Bible . . 4°? 5. The effectiveness of his a(//4o;wi«(fw method . .411 6, His power of pathos 4^3 Index fr« • 4^7 { CHAPTER I FRIEDRICH DANIEL ERNST SCHLEIERMACHER SCHLEIERMACHER^S SPIRITUAL AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT It seems almost presumptuous to undertake, within the limits permitted, to investigate so complex a personality as that of Schleiermacher, even from the restricted point of view of the preacher. But when we consider that' he is the representative and the organ of those complex influences that have so powerfully affected the religious life of the modern world, and when we recall his vast significance for the modern evangelical church, the undertaking may be sanctioned, however inadequate its success. And because of the representative character of his preaching, of its influence upon the German pulpit, and of its own intrinsic excellencies, perhaps no better selection from among German preachers, for our study, could have been made. In the realm of rehgion he was the representative man of his century, a man of most capacious susceptibilities and of most comprehensive genius. Perhaps no man of his time was so responsive to those intellectual, aesthetic, religious, ethical, eccle- siastical, and political influences that were at work in 2 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS the ferment of the latter part of the eighteenth and in the first part of the nineteenth century, and which are still evolving their results in the most characteristic ten- dencies and movements of our day. He can hardly be classified. He seems not so much an individual, limited personality as a vast and varied influence. He founded no school, but has influenced all schools. It was this universality and versatility that made him an object of misapprehension. He was himself conscious of it, and lamented its consequences. He was contemporary with most of the great men of Germany who have made them- selves felt upon the modern world. In philosophy, Schelling and Leibnitz preceded him but by a few years, and Hegel was his colleague at the Berlin University. In literature, there were Lessing, Goethe, Herder, Schiller, Novalis, Jean Paul Richter, and the Schlegels, with the youpger of whom he at one time lived in closest personal friendship. He was himself a philosopher of whom Schelling, in commendation of his " Discourses on Reli- gion," in substance said that they were the product of the profoundest philosophical investigation, or else they must have been written under blind inspiration. By a com- petent authority, he has been called " the greatest theo- logian of the Protestant church since the Reformation," and at his death, Neander characterized him as "the man from whom will be dated henceforth a new era in the history of theology." He was a literary humanist, gifted with rare artistic sense, a teacher with rare gifts of exposition and of stimulation, a statesman whose voice was heard in troublous times in the councils of the nation, a church leader of catholic, tolerant spirit and of wide practical initiative, and he has been correctly SPIRITUAL AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT 3 designated by a French writer as the "most eminent Christian preacher in Germany," in his day. His industry was commensurate with his ability. From early years and up to the very last, he was an earnest and diligent student, rising at an early hour in the morning and sitting late into the night, detesting lazi- ness in all men, and especially intolerant of it in him- self, as one of the worst of vices. From this world of thought and of experience he won the most multifarious resources, perhaps, of any man of his time, all of which he assimilated with amazing facility and made tributary to his work. The speculative side of Schleiermacher's development does not concern us, save as it is tributary to its practical aspect. It is with him as a preacher that we have to deal, and in tracing the course of his development, which seems necessary to our purpose, we shall have reference to its bearings on his work as a preacher. In his career there are four distinctly marked periods, in which four classes of influence wrought determinatively upon him. There was the early period of dominating religious influence ; then followed the period of his student life, in which philosophic influences shaped his thinking; then came the literary influences of a still later period ; and finally the influences that originated in the ecclesiastical and political conditions of his age and nation. I. Schleiermacher was nurtured from early years in the school of mystical Moravian piety. He was him- self constitutionally and most delicately responsive to religious influences, a man with a genius for religion, perhaps, beyond any prominent man of his age. 4 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS " Piety," he says in his discourses,^ " was the mother's womb in whose sacred darkness my young life was nourished and was prepared for a world still sealed for it. In it my spirit breathed ere it had yet found its own place in knowledge and experience. It helped me as I began to sift the faith of my fathers and to cleanse thought and feeling from the rubbish of antiquity." His paternal grandfather was a man of religious visions. His father, a man of varied intellectual activities and of multifarious knowledge, at one time a sceptical preacher of the accommodating Kantian school, became an ardent dogmatic devotee of the evangeUcal faith, and of a mys- tical piety after the Moravian type. This early religious influence the son, in one of his letters in later life, ac- knowledged : " The first element that developed itself spontaneously was the religious. I can remember its first movements in me, during a walk with my father. He never allowed me to lose sight of it again, after it had developed itself." His mother was his only earliest teacher, a woman of sound judgment, of loving heart, and of pedagogic tact, who nourished in him a love of knowledge, inculcated the necessity of thoroughness in his intellectual tasks, corrected his youthful conceit of superiority, while she stimulated the sentiment of grati- tude and cherished his earliest rehgious emotion. In this atmosphere of devout and earnest piety he spent the first fifteen years of his life, and was then sent to the Moravian school at Niesky. This school, with its local isolation, its attractive natural environment, its simplicity and unworldliness, and its devout piety, was chosen by the son himself, no less than by his parents, 1 Schleiermacher's " Werke," Vol. I, Die Reden, p. 152. SPIRITUAL AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT 5 as a defence for his soul against the possible corruptions of the more distinctively scientific schools. In the two schools of Niesky and Barby he remained for four years, or until he was nineteen years old ; here the re- ligious influences of his home are intensified, and here, although his intellectual life develops somewhat inde- pendently in association with two of his schoolfellows, his religious character is more deeply rooted, more richly nourished, more fully developed, and here it is permanently fixed. A vast blessing to the world were those schools of Moravian piety. Schleiermacher's let- ters to his parents during this school period indicate the strength of this religious influence upon his imagination and upon his religious feeling and affection ; and it is easy to see that here there was in constant process of development that rare character which was so notable for its intensity and tenderness of affection. All of his correspondence, even to the latest years of his life in Berlin, is a continuous outflowing of a great loving heart. If in early years these affectionate utterances bear the mark of a diction common among the Breth- ren, and which was somewhat stereotyped and over- effusive, it is not the less genuine and real. If, in later life, these utterances are more simple and measured and humanistic, less distinctively religious in the formal sense, and are more specifically the utterances of human friendship and devotion, they indicate, nevertheless, their nurturing source in the early culture of the religious af- fections. The "moved heart," an expression that occurs frequently in his letters as in his sermons, is everywhere regulative for all forms of his activity. It is the emo- tional and affectional qualities that he values supremely, 6 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS not only for himself, but in others. This is the basis for his estimate of friends. " For his intellect alone," he writes, " I love no man. Schiller and Goethe are two mighty intellects, — but I shall never be tempted to love them." It is this that accounts for his love of friendly association with women. " It is through the knowledge of the feminine heart and mind," he says, " that I have learned to know what real human worth is." His letters illustrate most impressively the possi- bilities of religion for the culture of the human heart, and are of great value to any one who will know the primal inspirations of this great character. All through his life, subsequent to his departure from the Moravian school, he was indirectly connected with the Brethren through his , sister, who was a member of the Com- munity, and we are not surprised that he should freely acknowledge their influence. Fifteen years after his separation from them, in 1802, during the period of his most intense intellectual activity as well as of free asso- ciation with men of culture who did not share his spirit, he thus refers to this influence in a letter recalling a visit to his sister ;! " There is no other place which could call forth such lively reminiscences of the entire onward movement of my mind, from its first awakening to a higher life, up to the point which I have at present attained. Here it was that, for the first time, I awoke to the consciousness of a higher world. . . . Here it was that that mystic tendency developed itself which has been of so much importance to me, and has sup- ported me and carried me through all the storms of ^ " Life and Letters of Schleiermacher," translated by Frederica Rowan, Vol. I, p. 283. SPIRITUAL AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT 7 scepticism. Then it was germinating, now it has attained its full development ; and I may say that, after all I have passed through, I have become a Herrnhuter again, only of a higher order." He always cherished and revered the simple, ardent piety of the Herrnhuters, and their worship became his ideal of what all elevat- ing and edifying Christian worship should be. Indeed, their influence is seen in his fundamental conceptions of religion, of theology, and of the church. A Herrnhuter indeed he always was, only of a higher order, — a mys- tic, but more than a mystic. He was a man of too large a personaHty to remain only such, especially in an age like that. / On the intellectual side of his development, as we shall see, he came under the influence of the philo- sophical movements of his time, or rather of move- ments that passed more comprehensively under the name of Illuminism. But his religious culture stood by him. He only sought to strike below these move- ments, and to secure a position that should enable him to comprehend what was true in them, but that should also comprehend much more. On the speculative side he developed as a sceptic. But on the religious side, he was a mystic to the end, and it contributed to his rescue, not only from the old Rationalism that Kant had fought down, but from the new Rationalism of the Illumination itself, of which Kant was one of the chief promoters, against which Schleiermacher subsequently reacted, and ultimately it saved him from other influ- ences of the Illumination. But his immense specu- lative and dialectical ability modified his mystical tendencies, giving us a higher type of mysticism, free 8 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS from the intellectual crudeness which he found so prev- alent in the Moravian church. 2. What called itself the Illumination in Schleier- macher's day was an effort to emancipate the human mind, in different departments of its activity, from the bondage of tradition. In philosophy it was represented by Kant, in literature by Goethe, in pedagogy by Rous- seau, in politics by the French Revolution, which in Germany found no counterpart, but with which many who were animated by the new spirit, Schleiermacher among them, to a degree sympathized ; in theology it was represented, with essential modifications, by Schleier- macher himself. In early life he had disclosed a scepti- cal attitude with respect to alleged historic facts and had passed sleepless nights over the dark problem of eternal punishment. Although profoundly religious, he was always in a high degree intellectually inquisitive and was conscientious in seeking to secure for his faith a solid foundation. While connected with the school at Barby, at the age of nineteen, his speculative difficul- ties reached the crisis point. He challenged the doc- trine of eternal punishment, of the atonement, of the deity of Christ, of the supernatural character of Chris- tianity in general as then taught, and he regarded the arguments of his teachers on moot questions as incon- sequential and inconclusive. He charged that they were silent about objections brought by its critics against the Christianity of tradition, that they endeavored to conceal sceptical opinions from him, and gave him no adequate opportunity to know them or to investigate their valid- ity. This naturally only stimulated him to know the utmost. All this mental activity and independence, SPIRITUAL AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT 9 although lingering still in the realm of scepticism, or rather perhaps because of it, shows his gift for theology and his vocation to it. He lays his mental difficulties before his father and his maternal uncle, a professor at Halle University. He receives judicious counsel from his uncle, but evokes a storm of indignant, yet not the less pathetic, reproach from his dogmatic and pietistic father, and then follows a temporary strain in the rela- tions of parent and son, although happily without per- manent bad results. The correspondence that follows is profoundly interesting, as illustrating the strength of paternal and of fihal affection in the German household. The very extreme of filial devotion is manifest in the son's willingness to leave the whole question of his pro- cedure to the decision of the father and the school authorities. But his intellectual and moral indepen- dence and the strong individuality of his character are seen in the tenacity with which he maintains the right of free inquiry, while a trace of the early dogmatic in- fluence is evident in a certain semi-apologetic attitude toward his father, as though he was doing the father a wrong in thus wounding his feelings, and as if some- how the necessity of changing his opinions involved a personal fault. The upshot of the matter is a break with the school authorities, but with mutual good will and respect. In 1787, therefore, at the age of nineteen, without knowledge of the world, a diminutive, shy, awkward, somewhat unkempt youth, but self-reliant and awake to the vast significance of human life, he is sent to the University of Halle and enters upon a new sphere of intellectual activity. He was fortunate in coming under the influence of his uncle, a man of toler- 10 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS ant spirit and well-balanced judgment, whose shaping hand in Schleiermacher's development is abundantly acknowledged. For two years he led a desultory stu- dent life, foraging widely and gathering only that for which at the time he hungered. What he says of him- self, the year after leaving the university, is also true of his university course : " Although there are certain branches of knowledge for which I have a kind of re- pugnance, there is not one for which I have an exclu- sive predilection. . . . Everything that I do is done with a certain degree of impetuosity. ... I do not, therefore, prosecute any occupation according to a fixed hour or day, but fitfully and during irregular periods." From this it would seem that there was no unity in his work, and no reference to anything beyond the im- mediate present. He had no definite objective point, but followed the impulse that led him to satisfy the immediate hunger of the mind. Semler, the pioneer in Biblical criticism, and Knapp, the dogmatician, are teachers in the university, but there is no evidence that he got much from them. He was awakened, however, to the study of history, he continued his classical studies ; and his uncle and Eberhard, the latter a teacher of philosophy, led him to the study of Kant, and under this influence he laid his foundation in philosophic knowledge. His father, who had a great admiration for the moral earnestness and austerity of Kant, and who had been a student and once a disciple of his, had already recommended the study, and early in his univer- sity course he writes his father as follows, ^ " As for the Kantian philosophy, which you recommend me to 1 " Life and Letters," Vol. I, p. 68. SPIRITUAL AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT il Study, I have always had a very favorable opinion of it, because it brings back the reason from the desert wastes of metaphysics into its true, appropriate sphere." This sphere is, of course, the individual moral consciousness, and here we see the beginnings of the influence of phil- osophic Illuminism upon him. Obliged to leave the university at the end of two years, at the age of twenty- one, he spends the following year, 1790, in the home and under the guidance of his uncle, who also had left the university and had taken a pastorate at Drossen. Here he undertakes to gather up the results of his pre- vious studies and .to unify his knowledge. He reads Kant once more. During the six or seven subsequent years he is an almost constant student of Kant and becomes gradually able clearly to differentiate his own philosophical position. He dips into Aristotle's ethics, into Greek history, and is in preparation for the subse- quent translation of Plato's works, a very laborious task which he began with Friedrich Schlegel, but completed alone. At this time he became a candidate for the ministry and took his examination for licensure. Dur- ing these three formative years, he, in his own indepen- dent way, had passed under the influence of philosophic Illuminism. The three subsequent years he spent in Schlobitten, as tutor in the household of a nobleman, with whose family he always held most friendly and advan- tageous relations, and here opens a new era in his life. Here for the first time he is called to the exercise of his preaching gifts. He adopts the Scottish preacher Blair as his model, striving for his clearness of thought, in com- parison with which he regards his own style as obscure. Cooperating with a clergyman of Berlin, a family rela- 12 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS tive, he subsequently translates a volume of Blair's ser- mons. Resigning his tutorship, he enters the pastorate at Landsberg in 1794, where he remains two years. This closes the period of his tutelage in philosophic Illumin- ism. He is beginning to break away from it, and is soon to come under the influence of another phase of Illuminism. During the next six years we find him in Berlin, and the period of eight years, from 1796 to 1804, six years in Berlin and two in the pastorate at Stolpe, was the most important, as it was the most intense, pe- riod of his intellectual Hfe, supremely significant for his entire future. He has passed through the mystical and the philosophical phases of his development ; we now come to what may be called its artistic phase. 3. At Berhn Schleiermacher was brought into inti- mate relations with the so-called Romantic school in literature, of which Goethe and the Schlegels were prominent representatives. Romanticism, although it involved a break with Illuminism in its return to the past, was yet closely connected with it and may be called a literary or artistic phase of it. It was characterized by great rhetorical enthusiasm, patriotic enterprise, and especially by the diHgent study and semi-poetic interpre- tation of history in the light of modern ideas. Its influ- ence upon Schleiermacher in a social, literary, and in general artistic, way was great. Under its inspiration he enters the field of authorship. During the period of his tutorship we find already the stirring and the culture of new artistic impulses and aspirations. Then for the first time apparently he is brought into relation with refined and cultivated women of the world. With strong, manly traits, there was still much in his constitution that was SPIRITUAL AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT 13 feminine, and he coveted the society and the friend- ship of such women. He understood the heart of woman as few did, and association with this cultivated nobleman's family was fit preparation for his Berlin life of social and literary activity, in which he became prom- inent as member of a club composed of some of the most cultivated men and women of his day. Here in this family Ufe he finds his latent gift for music. Here he begins to cultivate his literary tastes, and they have influence in modifying his philosophic conceptions. And all this began to make itself manifest in his preach- ing. He had carried from the university his native indi- vidualism that had been intensified by the spirit of free inquiry which characterized the Illumination. We find him in sympathy with the French Revolution. In the social circle of the Romanticists in which he moved in Berlin during these six years he finds lax views of family life. It was an age of revolutionary opinion, even with respect to domestic relations, and prudery and devotion to conventional standards were not among the virtues of BerUn social life. Schleiermacher was him- self a man of spotless purity of personal character and life, but under the influence of the free thought of this Romanticist circle and of his own individuahstic and unconventional standards, we find him complicated with respect to domestic questions in ways that he subse- quently did not approve, and which cannot be approved in any age, however revolutionary, by any lover of social order. But they are after all a testimony to the lofty idealism of the man and to the purity of his spirit, even if they show a lack of practical wisdom and of re- spect for the conventionaUties of life. These complica- 14 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS tions, with which it is not important to linger, resulted in his retirement from Berlin for two years to a pastor- ate in Stolpe, an experience of great value to him intel- lectually and spiritually, for they were years of intense study of the great German thinkers, among them Spinoza, Schelling, Jacobi, and Kant, and they were years, too, of great burdens of heart. Through the in- fluence of the Romanticists of Berlin he had been induced to enter upon literary work, and in 1799, after two months of close work at Potsdam, he issued to the . world his famous " Discourses on Religion," perhaps the most important contribution to religion and theology since the Reformation. They were a most starthng dis- closure of a' religious, philosophical, and literary genius hitherto but relatively little known. This is not the place for a discussion of the contents of these discourses, and we are concerned with them at all only as related to his pulpit work. It is enough to say here that the in- fluence of the conceptions here embodied were felt and were manifest in his entire professional career, and that, although measurably modified subsequently, they were on the one side the basis of his theology, and reemerged in expanded form in his system of Christian doctrine and have been vastly significant for the evangelical theology of the last three-quarters of a century, while on the other side they appeared in his " Practical Theology " and have significance not only for German preaching but for other phases of church life and activity. Answering to the " Discourses on Religion," there appeared during the fol- lowing year on the ethical side the " Monologues." These two works, which are a brilhant defence of the religious and of the ethical ideal, are the early flower of his liter- SPIRITUAL AND INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT 15 ary and artistic development. That this development should have found its sphere in the realm of religious and ethical thought is proof of the seriousness of his character. In 1804 he is appointed as professor at Halle University, which marks a new period in his career. 4. At Halle, where he remains for three years, begins his ecclesiastical and political as well as professional activity. He lectures on a surprising variety of sub- jects. Exegesis, Dogmatics, and History, and during a portion of the time he is university preacher. At this time Germany was thrown into confusion by the inva- sion of the armies of Napoleon. Schleiermacher threw himself, with all the enthusiasm of which he was capa- ble, into this struggle, and proved himself to be a most ardent and uncompromising patriot. In his personal fortunes he suffered much ; and when, in 1 807, the univer- sity was closed and its students were dispersed by order of the invader, he retired to Berlin, where he spent the remainder of his life. All his religious, philosophical, theological, classical, and literary preparation fitted him in a most eminent degree for the position he there held during these last and most fruitful years of his public career. Here he was a popular lecturer and teacher at the university which, in 18 10, he aided in establishing. He was an ecclesiastical leader, instrumental in the intro- duction of notable reforms, and particularly in the union of the Lutheran and Reformed branches of the German church. He, with his family, was an important figure in the social life of Berlin. He was a man of affairs, and as a patriot and statesman his counsels were sought by the Prussian government. To the last he was pastor 1 6 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS of Trinity church, where he preached with ever increas- ing power to the cultivated people of this university town, and with utmost pastoral fidelity he instructed his catechistical classes and ordered the practical life of his church to the end. It was here that his scientific and practical theology developed themselves into final form, and here they were given to the world. It now remains to consider Schleiermacher's conception of re- ligion and its bearing upon his practical theology, and more particularly upon his work as a preacher. II SCHLEIERMACHER'S CONCEPTION OF RELIGION AND THEOLOGY Schleiermacher's scientific theology is a development of his conception of religion, and his practical theology is closely related to his scientific theology. He val- ued the science of theology only as related to the life of the church, and the church held a central place in his theology. Theology has no proper source out- side religion, and therefore cannot be divorced from the life of the church. It is the product of reflection upon the content of religious experience. It was his aim to do for theology what he declared Kant had done for the human reason, " to bring it from the desert waste of metaphysics into its true appointed sphere," and not from the realm of metaphysics alone, but from every external source. As Liicke, one of his pupils, says : " He brings it back to the facts of the Christian con- sciousness, as its basis and true object of investigation, CONCEPTION OF RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 17 and in doing this he in fact secures for it an objective grounding, i.e. by showing that it rests on valid facts of Christian faith." A brief statement, therefore, of his conception of religion seems necessary. Religion be- longs to the innermost nature of man. Religion there- fore is natural. On the other hand, it is supernatural, as involving a sense of the Iniinite in the consciousness of the Finite, or a sense of the presence of God in the soul. This conception of religion, as supernatural, of itself disposes of the charge against Schleiermacher, that he was a pantheist. Much of his terminology, in- fluenced by the study of Spinoza and by the rhetorical exuberance of Romanticism, has confessedly a panthe- istic basis. But by recognizing the world-ground or world-spirit as both subject and object, he escapes till abyss of pantheism. Since, then, religion is at once natural and supernatural, there can be no contradiction, for both are parts of one complex whole. Thus what was false in the naturalism of his day on the one side and in its orthodox supernaturalism on the other side is undone at a stroke. This consciousness of the presence of God in the soul, which is represented as a sense of the Infinite in the Finite, is not at all dependent for its validity on anything outside of it, whether above it, or below it, or back of it, however closely it may be con- nected with it. It is not dependent upon the doctrines or beliefs of the church, as the dogmatists would teach ; it is not dependent on any institutional form which re- ligion may take whether of church or of sacrament, as the ecclesiastic would teach ; it is not dependent on state alliance, as the politician holds ; nor upon the nature of thought in its relation to being, as the Hege- 1 8 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS lian teaches ; nor upon the moral consciousness, as Kant teaches ; nor is it to be identified with the aesthetic sense, however closely allied with it, as the cultured ^Romanticists would have it ; nor with that form of mys- ticism that consists in union with God through submis- sion of will. It is deeper still. Various terms are used to designate it. In an explanatory note to the second discourse, on the " Nature of Religion," he justifies this variety of designation on the ground of the rhetorical and descriptive, as distinguished from the scientific, char- acter of the " Discourses." Religion is a consciousness, a consciousness of the Infinite or of the Universe, as, with reference to the audiences to which the " Discourses " were first addressed, he prefers to call it, presupposing ^fcod as the spirit of the Universe. It is a sense of or taste for the Infinite. It is an intuition of the Universe. In the later and maturer form of the " Discourses," however, the prevailing term is "feeling." This con- sciousness, sense, taste, this immediate realization in consciousness of the Infinite, or of the world-spirit, within the soul, takes the form of absolute dependence. The sense of personal freedom belongs to the ethical consciousness, which, according to Schleiermacher, has a relative, and it must be confessed, too great, indepen- dence of the religious consciousness. This sense of absolute dependence, — this only is reHgion. It is the deepmost reality in man. Relatively independent of all else in him, it is still the impelling energy of all man's religious thinking, of all his purest moral convictions, of all noblest sense of the beautiful, and of all deter- minations of the will. Religion, therefore, is the heart of science, art, and morality. But these may exist CONCEPTION OF RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 19 without religion and in relative independence of it. Only in a secondary and derived sense can they ever be called religion, and never at all save as they are pene- trated by the power of the religious sense. Religion has thus a validity of its own, independently of any form our thought may take, even with respect to the being touching whom the sense of dependence is exercised, or with respect to any scheme of doctrine or any institu- tion, or any form of ethics or of art. Although religion is thus a purely subjective product, as being grounded in the constitution of man and express- ing its contents, it nevertheless is evoked and developed under historic conditions. Schleiermacher, therefore, has nothing to do with a merely abstract religion, which is a product of speculation and does not repre- sent the reality of religion. All religions, as historic realities, express, under varying historic conditions, in some degree and in some form, the contents of the religious consciousness. The distinguishing peculiarity of Christianity as religion is that it is evoked and devel- oped by the historic Christ, who brings a new religious spirit into the woridj,^and^^who Jn^^wa^ reli- gious consciousne5,s^,oi„Jtiie^iad;yMu§]^Qhri.s^^ the content jof_Jiis. own ..religious consciousness. If at first Christ appears only as the historic occasion for the development of the individual religious consciousness, he gradually assumes a more positive and creative sig- nificance. He becomes the sourc e and norm___QjLJJie re ligious Ij fe, upon whom the individual Christian is absolutely dependent ; and if at first the significance of what we call religious truth for the development of the religious life seems to be minimized, — and he holds the 20 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS position that religion cannot be evoked by teaching, but must be quickened_and nurtured by feeling and_ imagi- nation, — in the end the value of objective religious truth as found in the Scripture records is more fully recog- nized. It is this inner reahty of religion as an experi- ence of the heart that constitutes its sacredness. It is this that honors the individual soul and life. The rights, the sacred rights, of religious individuality constituted, therefore, one of Schleiermacher's fundamental princi- ples. It is doubtless largely a product of his early reli- gious training and experience, but other influences furthered it. His theory of religion naturally led to an extreme form of individualism, as all forms of mysti- cal subjectivity are likely to do. It has been frequently pointed out that a strict construction of Schleiermacher's theory would leave no place for religion as an asso- ciate life. But this was far enough from his conception. It is true that he isolated the element of feeling in reli- gion from the intellectual and ethical factors that border upon it, but it was only in idea, and it was far from his purpose to divorce the emotional from the mental and ethical elements of the practical religious life. These inner religious experiences, as being dependent upon their common quickening source in Christ and as involv- ing a common living relation with him, must express themselves in associate life. These experiences are the basis of all Christian fellowship, and just this is the foundation of the church. Christianity, therefore, as religion is not only an individual Christian life produc- ing religion, but it is a church producing religion. Thus, while he lays great stress upon the sacredness of the individual soul and upon its rights, both in the " Dis- CONCEPTION OF RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 21 courses " and in the " Monologues," he lays equal stress upon the church, and in his hands the church gains new and vastly increased significance. No theologian of the modern world has put such honor upon religious individuality, and none has put higher honor upon the religious community. With him, in fact, the modern church emerges into new life. It is the significance of the church that determines his definition of theology. It is "the science of the church." It is more than the science of Christianity, for we cannot conceive of Chris- tianity as existing practically in complete independence of the church. The claims for religion which Schleier- macher set forth in his " Discourses on Rehgion to those Cultivated People who are among its Despisers," among whom were some of his own personal friends, was a most startling one and made a tremendous impression, and no wonder, considering the character of the age in which they appeared. And it is an iniiuence that is still felt in the religion and theology of the Christian church. In many ways Schleiermacher modified as he developed. But, as Pfleiderer suggests in his " Develop- ment of Theology in Germany," the " Discourses " contain his starting-point. His future theological devel- opment was along that line, although constantly toward a larger measure of harmony with the theology of the church. His fundamental positions, however, were never materially changed. It is enough to say, just here, that the work he did has profound significance for Christian theology. Christian ethics, and for the practical life of the church, and in many ways especially for Christian preaching. It has detached theology from abstract speculation, and has secured for it an 22 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS independent basis. It has carried out in another direc- tion what Kant initiated, and has laid the foundation for a new type of Christian apologetics. It is the Christian consciousness, reflecting the truth of Chris- tian revelation, that has become normative for Christian theology, and out of this, as already intimated, Schleier- macher's whole theological system developed. It has placed ethics upon a more distinctly Christian founda- tion, and has resulted in a new development of social ethics. It concerns us, however, to consider more spe- cifically the bearing of Schleiermacher's religious and theological conceptions upon the work of preaching. In the light of them we may perhaps see more clearly the influence upon the preaching of our own day. Ill THE PREACHING OF SCHLEIERMACHER All the wealth of Schleiermacher's genius and varied acquisitions and culture were made tributary indirectly, but not the less effectively, to his preaching. He had the artistic as well as the religious and scientific equipment. He displayed rare gifts as a preacher, and attached supreme importance to the preacher's function. From the time of his licensure in 1 790 to the close of his life in 1834 he preached almost continuously, and the preach- ing interest was, in his apprehension, second to none other. While professor at Halle and later at Berlin he regarded preaching as supplemental to the work of teaching, and in both teaching and preaching he had but one aim. His theological lectures and his sermons THE PREACHING OF SCHLEIERMACHER 23 had to a considerable extent the same subject-matter, although presented of course in different form.^ It has beenshown by one of his pupils that the subjects discussed in a scientific manner in his " Glaubenslehre " appear to a very large extent in popular form in his sermons, so that nearly his entire system of Christian theology was interpreted in homiletic form to the people. Dur- ing his public career he published four large volumes of sermons, the first in 1801, the last in 1834, and with the posthumous sermons they number in all ten volumes. They include a great variety of types of sermons. We have the pastoral and ordinary sermon, the occasional, the festal, the confirmation, the baptismal, the funeral, the burial, the confessional, the parenetic sermon, ser- mons on family life of great impressiveness and helpful- ness, sermons on national subjects like the one entitled " A Nation's Duty in the War for Freedom," and the one entitled " Rejoicing before God " preached on the anniversary of the battle of Leipsic, which greatly stirred the hearts of his patriotic hearers. There are two volumes of expository sermons, or homilies, on the Gospel according to Mark. The series also includes a volume of candidate sermons, which disclose the carefulness of his early homiletic method, the freshness of his thought, and the aflfluence of his style. There are perhaps no individual sermons that stand out beyond all others as preeminently great. They are of uniform excellence. But the sermon entitled "The Dying Saviour our Exam- ple " may be named as a singularly edifying Christian sermon, introduced by a homiletic prayer of great sim- plicity and beauty, and the one entitled " The Power of 1 " Reminiscences of Schleiermacher," by Liicke, p. 49. 24 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS Prayer in Relation to Outward Circumstances " is a ser- mon of great elevation and nobility of thought, which it is almost certain suggested Frederick Robertson's ser- mon on Prayer. But let us examine his preaching more specifically. I. It is natural that we should consider first his theory of preaching. He had his theory ; it was a well-defined theory, and he shaped his preaching by it. It is fully discussed in his " Homiletics." ^ Practical theology occu- pied a prominent place in Schleiermacher's thinking. Even as early as his connection with Halle University he lectured upon it, and in his handling it became a new branch of theology. It is that branch which deals with the life of the church. The activities of the church with which it deals are all a testimony, in various lines, of the inner life of the church. Now, homiletics is one of the branches of practical theology, and preaching is one of those activities that bear witness to the reality of the inner life of the Christian community. It is more than a rhetorical product, more than "sacred rhetoric." Homi- letics is the theory of the utterance of the inner life of the church in the form of speech. It is more than the utterance of certain objectively given truths by the church official. It must be assumed to be the expres- sion of what is common to the Christian community, through its leader, who is identified with them, and who only leads them in the utterance of their own sacred religious experiences. We see in this the influence of his own early religious education and experience. But it is also grounded in his well-defined theory of religion and of theology, and this theory of preaching has to a ^ 1 "Die Pract. Theol.," IV Theorie der religiosen Rede, p. 201, THE PREACHING OF SCHLEIERMACHER 25 large extent been the theory that has prevailed in the German churches since Schleiermacher's day. Let us therefore try to understand it. It is the preacher's function to represent Christianity as religion, not as science, religion as incorporated and as manifesting itself in the church, the communion of saints. It is his work to represent, to give expression to {Darstelhmg) the experiences of the common Christian life. This pre- supposes a congregation that shares this common experi- ence in adequate measure with the preacher. Otherwise it would not be representation, would not be expression of what is common, would not be testimony, or it would be fruitless testimony. The congregation is a Christian assembly that meets for Christian worship. Preaching is a part of the service of common worship, all the ele- ments of which are testimony as to the reality of the inner Christian life. This gives preaching a distinc- tively Christian character, and it must have a certain liturgical quality. The congregation cannot be treated as if wholly without religious life and experience, and as if practically in pagan condition. It is true that in the " Discourses " he represents the congregation as com- posed not so much of persons who are religious as of those who are "seeking religion." He had doubtless a special purpose in this representation. But, however that may be, he does not hold to it in his "Homiletics." The preaching with which he deals is distinctively pastoral preaching; evangelistic or mission preaching, which presupposes a different congregation and has for its aim the conversion of men to the Christian life, is a very different product, and the discussion of it does not properly belong to Christian homiletics. This con- 26 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS ception of preaching, which was regulative for his own ministry, accounts in part for his zeal in catechetical instruction, which he regarded as not less important than preaching itself. In this way an instructed Christian congregation was prepared for him. This theory of preaching, defective though it be, has been substantially the prevailing theory in Germany since Schleiermacher's time ; and confessedly it has in part its analogue in the preaching of the apostolic church, whose assemblies were Christian assemblies and whose preaching was of the nature of Christian testimony. Schleiermacher realized his own theory, and its effect upon his preaching will be evident at once. We have here the experimental factor with new emphasis, and it has had its influence upon the modern pulpit. We do not regard that as Christian preaching at all, nor do we tolerate it as such, which con- sists in the retailing of opinions which are purely im- personal, which are based on external authority and have found no appropriation in the innermost experiences of the soul of the preacher. This, of course, is the old evan- gelical idea, the Reformation idea, the Puritan idea, of preaching. But it has come in new form and with new emphasis. Such preaching is likely to assume more for the congregation. We find here, perhaps, in part an explanation of the large amount of pastoral preaching that characterizes the work of the modern pulpit. Preachers do not divide the congregation as their fathers did. There is more confidence in the responsiveness of the congregation and in the quickening and edifying power of the truth presented. And this is in line with the more largely persuasive as contrasted with the dog- matic, argumentative, and one-sidedly intellectual char- acter of preaching. THE PREACHING OF SCHLEIERMACHER 27 But its serious defect will be evident at once. It assumes too much for the congregation. This defect in Schleiermacher's own preaching was pointed out by his own followers, notably by Liicke in his " Reminiscences of Schleiermacher." He trusts too much to the religious consciousness. He assumes that all who are in the congregation are the subjects of the same rehgious experience. He takes too little into account the imper- fect operations of grace in men's souls. In a word, he idealizes the congregation and loses sight of facts. He assumes, as Lucke says, " an average measure of grace and leaves the defective stages for other and simpler and more specific forms of instruction." Hence, as Dr. Sack, a Berlin pastor of Schleiermacher's day and a family relative, asserts, the result was a lack of per- tinence to the wants of his hearers and to their actual state. Hence especially a lack of the practical quality and an excess of sentiment and feeling, in other words, of the parenetic element in his preaching. Hence a certain lack in popular quality. The basis of this defect may be due in large measure to a defective conception of religion itself. Pfieiderer, in his " Development of Theology in Germany, " ^ has shown that by isolating the ethical from the emo- tional in religion, that is by excluding from the concep- tion of religion the consciousness of moral alliance with God, and making it consist wholly in the sense of absolute dependence, Schleiermacher failed to grasp the full content of the conception. Absolute depend- ence suggests primarily causality — creatorship in God. 1 " The Development of Theology in Germany since Kant and its Progress in Great Britain since 1825," p. 105. .28 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS Pfleiderer finds here the influence of Spinoza. God is causal energy. There can be only one kind of religious experience in such relation with God. There is no chance for qualitative, but only for quantitative, dis- tinctions in religious experience. If the concep- tion of religion is complex, it may involve different kinds of religious experience, and these different kinds of religious experience must be met by the preacher. Schleiermacher did not recognize them and therefore made no effort to meet them. The members of his congregation were all on the same plane. It may be possible that erroneous conceptions of the significance of the baptismal estate may in part account for the perpetuation of this conception of preaching in Germany. A baptized congregation is assumed to be a Christian congregation and should be addressed as such. Perhaps this may in part explain the relative ineffectiveness of German preaching. 2. Let us look secondly at the subject-matter of Schleiermacher's preaching. Religion as an experience, even in its Christian form, must be wholly subjective and personal. It is dependent upon nothing external for its origin. It is neither Scripture truth nor Christ himself that originates the soul's religious experiences. Nothing external originates faith, but what is external may regulate it. That is, it may regulate reflection upon one's religious feelings. Nothing that is external to the soul is creative of religion. It is only regulative. As Robertson said about the sacraments, so Schleier- macher would say about objective religious truth, it cannot produce life, but it may support life. In a letter to Jacobi in 1818, Schleiermacher says: "The THE PREACHING OF SCHLEIERMACHER 29 Bible is the original interpretation of the Christian feeling, and for this very reason so firmly established (that we ought not to attempt more than further to understand and develop it. This right of develop- ment, however, I, as a Protestant theologian, will allow no one to defraud me of." The authority of Scripture, therefore, is in its harmony with faith, not in its creative energy with respect to it. It is regulative only in so far as it is in harmony with the preacher's subjective feeling, and, as Liicke suggests, furnishes a touching-point for his reflection. This position, that Biblical revelation is only the external occasion, the condition or exciting agency, not creative cause of faith, seems to imply that the latter is not dependent upon the former. In this he fails to distinguish between faith and the faith content, between the fides qua and the fidis quae. This was a position he could not success- fully hold. He consequently modified it. We find Christ increasingly regarded as the centre of the soul's spiritual life. The Christian soul is absolutely depend- ent on Christ for its faith. Without him the inner life of faith is unattainable. Christ therefore is the supreme lord of the soul. He saw that this position was neces- sary to enable him to distinguish between feeling that is Christian and feeling that may have no Christian character at all. But, after all, while the Christian life is dependent on external agencies, it has an independent reality and validity of its own. As thus relatively inde- pendent, it has at hand a test of value for the Christian life of any objectively given truths or facts of Chris- tianity that maybe brought to it. It even tests for itself the significance of Christ for it. Consequently historic 30 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS Christianity may be treated with a large measure of inde- pendence. The Christian Ufe does not feel itself to be absolutely dependent, especially upon the forms of Chris- tian doctrine, and may treat them with freedom. It is not dependent even upon the forms in which Christianity appears in the New Testament. We may therefore discriminate by the test of Christian experience between what is primary and what is secondary in the Christian books, accepting only what faith regards as primary. Large masses of material found in the New Testament may be excluded from acceptance as having no signifi- cance for the Christian life. Consequently Schleier- macher dealt very freely with the Christian documents. He did not regard himself as beholden to harmonize his teachings fully with the teachings even of the New Testament. Church doctrine he treated almost cava- lierly. The doctrine of the Trinity, as taught by the church, had no significance for him. Thus with the church doctrine of the atonement. He gradually modified in the direction of what is known as the evangelical position, and sought to find basis for a common Christian faith, and his successors and followers carried his modifica- tions still further. But it is evident, as Pfleiderer sug- gests, that we have here a pretty fully developed scheme of subjective theological individualism, on which, strictly applied, it would be difficult to found a church or to develop a theology. It was necessary to his position that he should find in the Old Testament but little value for the distinctively Christian life. Faith is domesticated only in the New Testament and always returns to it as to its native element, and is competent to test and to reject the Old Testament. He did not find the spirit of THE PREACHING OF SCHLEIERMACHER 31 Christianity in Judaism. No part of the Old Testament did he greatly value. He rarely used it in preaching. In the ten volumes of sermons and homilies there are less than twenty passages from the Old Testament used as texts, and those used are in occasional sermons. They are from the historical books, Solomon's Song, Ecclesiastes, Job, Psalms, and the major prophets, and they are the basis, to a considerable extent, of political and patriotic sermons. Singularly, there are more from Solomon's Song than from any other Old Testament / book. His pastoral preaching is always from the New Testament, and in the use of the text he plants himself squarely upon its historic sense. He holds that such texts should never be used as mottoes and should never be twisted by any species of accommodation. On the other hand, his Old Testament texts are always accom- modated, and he justified this on the ground that they must be adjusted to the spirit of the New Testament and must be adapted to the needs of the practical Christian life. Now it is evident enough that a very important position has been won for the church and for the pulpit by Schleiermacher's teachings, despite their extremely subjective and individualistic tendencies. We have learned the testing power of Christian expe- rience with respect to the value for the Christian Hfe of the objectively given content of the Bible, and we accustom ourselves to apply the test with freedom. Christianity has been brought back to Christ. The pul- pit has therefore been brought back to Christianity, and it assigns to the Old Testament its proper place. The doctrine of the Christian consciousness as normative for Christian truth has been lifted into its proper relation 32 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS with Biblical revelation and with church tradition. As a result the pulpit keeps closer to the centre of Christian truth. The preacher is better able to discriminate between the facts and truths of Christianity that appeal to and affect Christian experience, and those that are relatively remote from it. And all this has had an important influence upon Christian apologetics. We have seen that Schleiermacher's conception of religion involved a modification in the conception of the •* supernatural. Religion as belonging to the constitution of the human soul is natural. As having, however, its inspiring source in God who is revealed in Christ, it is supernatural, but as having the human soul for the sphere of its operation, the supernatural itself must have an element of naturalness. To the naturalness of the inner experience answers a corresponding element of naturalness in the objective agency, revelation. Revela- tion as supernatural, therefore, does not involve the breaking down or suspension of the order of nature. They are both parts of one whole ; even miracles have an element of naturalness. It is not my vocation either to criticise or to defend Schleiermacher's supernatural- ism ; I have only to say that it has had a very decisive influence upon the supernaturalism of the entire evan- gelical church of our age. It has become a common- place of the pulpit, and its influence is seen in the emphasis that is put upon the naturalness of religion. The close connection between Schleiermacher's theology and his preaching has already been noted. It was Neander's opinion that his sermons were necessary to an adequate understanding of his theology ; and De Wette, who was an attendant at Schleiermacher's u THE PREACHING OF SCHLEIERMACHER 33 church, discovered from his preaching his own points of agreement with him in theology. Everywhere and always it is the theology of feehng. But as his theology becomes more clearly defined, we see the effect in his sermons. The difference between his lectures and his sermons is mostly one of form. In a letter to a friend in 1805 he says, "I have a lively hope that by means of the connection between my sermons and my lectures I shall be able to bring clearly home to the minds of the students the true relations between speculation and piety ; and from both places alike, from the pulpit and from the professor's chair, I trust I shall be able to enlighten their minds and to warm their hearts." All . the great truths with which Christian theology deals are discussed in his sermons. The centre point of all his pulpit theology, as of his dogmatics, is fellowship with -« Christ. And it may be said that his theological concep- tions are pecuUarly well adapted to pulpit discussion. We can see at once why the subject-matter of his preach- ing is of a theological rather than of a Biblical character. It is his theory of preaching that its subject-matter should consist in reflection upon the content of Christian experience rather than in reflection upon the content of Biblical revelation. 3. The object which Schleiermacher proposed for himself in his preaching, or the use of the material as well as the material to be used, was in harmony with his conception of what Christian preaching should be. As preaching is an expression, not primarily of ideas, opinions, mental judgments, but of the experiences of the heart, its object must be to reproduce, or to develop still further, such experiences in the souls of the hearers. 34 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS The object is not primarily to develop or direct or shape religious thought. Preaching is not teaching primarily. It is not the exposition or interpretation of truth, but the utterance of the experience of the heart. Rehgion is not developed by teaching. Teaching, of course, is necessary and is not ignored, but the aim of preaching is not primarily to instruct. This, in Schleiermacher's opinion, was the fault of the orthodox and rationalistic preaching of his day, against which he strongly reacted. In the introduction to the sermon entitled " The Dying Saviour our Example " he objects to the obtruding of church dogmas relating to the death of Christ into the Good Friday service, and against spending time "in raising questions, in sifting opinions, in instituting dis- cussions, by which minds are not moved for good, — at *the very time when we desire to be most cordially united." And this in general was his attitude toward the doc- trines of the church. Nor was the object of preaching to convert man. Something more than ethical and evan- gelistic impression is demanded. The object of his preaching is edification. His object is so to express the inner realities of the Christian life in forms of Christian thought, by the aid of the imagination and by the impelling energy of Christian feeling, conviction, and affection, that this same Christian life in the souls of his hearers may be furthered and developed. Preach- ing is the testimony of the heart in thoughts that are fitted to convey its treasures of experience. It is not possi- ble to nurture the Christian life by aiming primarily at the understanding, or the conscience, or the will. It must be evoked by stimulating the imagination and nurturing the feelings. Hence he denounces the ortho- THE PREACHING OF SCHLEIERMACHER 35 dox indoctrination and the rationalistic moralizing of the preaching of his day, criticising its externality and unprofitableness. One must preach from within ; our words must be the utterance of the heart. Then they will be natural and effective. Schleiermacher doubtless would not deny that the primary function of the preache^ is that of an interpreter of the truth, or of spiritual realities ; but he would insist that it must be an interpre- . tation of the truth as transmuted into the content of spiritual experience, and not of objective truth as such,^ and it must be primarily an interpretation to the heart or to the religious feelings rather than to the under- standing. And the assumption of this position without doubt involved a relative undervaluation of the objec- tive truth of revelation as such, and of the importance of increase in Christian knowledge as related to Chris- tian edification. This would naturally result in a dimi- nution of the didactic and an increase of the emotional and sentimental element in preaching. This result we discover in German preaching in general as contrasted with English and American preaching, which lays more stress upon the importance of objective Biblical truth. In the preaching of Schleiermacher himself it was not seen nor felt. The great intellectual resources of the man and the wealth of his culture demanded and secured free and full expression in the pulpit as elsewhere, although his preaching might not be characterized as prevailingly intellectual. Schleiermacher' s object, how- ever, did exclude conscious effort to secure determinate and immediate results, and there is a lack of definite ethical and evangelistic purpose. How far the direct influence of Schleiermacher with 36 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS respect to the problem of the proper object of preaching is being felt in the modern pulpit may be uncertain. But it is perfectly evident that edification, not by the direct inculcation of objective truth, but by the inter- pretation of truth as vitalized by ethical and spiritual ^experience, is the prevailing object of the modem preacher. Not to regulate the doctrinal opinions nor *' the ethical behavior of the congregation, but to meet its spiritual needs, is the aim. The processes and agencies of spiritual nurture are honored, and imagination and the emotions, as distinguished from the dialectical faculties, are brought into fuller exercise. Consequently the intellectual character of our preaching has been modified but not lost. 4. As might be expected the tone of Schleiermacher's preaching was emotionally and religiously elevated in a very high degree. It was wealthy in its subject-matter, the product of a capacious, well-stored, well-trained, and highly suggestive mind, holding as in solution for pulpit use all the vast treasures of his learning and disclosing at times, although in wholly simple form harmonious with the work of preaching, the immense dialectical abilities of the man. But it was always exceedingly earnest and affectionate, yet always dignified, and so most nobly persuasive in its character. It bore the mark of the cheerful, hopeful, optimistic, even supremely idealistic, character of the man, and thus disclosed itself in the earnestness of his manner and in the sympathetic tones of his voice. It was always his conscious effort to elevate and ennoble the hearer, and to leave him a little further advanced in the Christian life as the result of his effort. He would never have the sermon end with any- THE PREACHING OF SCHLEIERMACHER 37 thing but a tone of cheerfulness, hopefulness, and encouragement. The sermon must always be tributary to the worship of the congregation. It is an organic part of worship itself. Preaching, prayer, and song are parts of one whole. He would enlist the service of song in the interest of preaching, at one period selecting his own hymns from the liturgical treasures of the church, and having them printed for the use of his con- gregation. He compiled a new hymn-book, and sought to influence the worship of other churches. The Mora- vian service he exalts as a model for all the churches. It was this liturgical influence, the elevated, ideaUstic character of the man, and his theory of what preaching ought to be, that fostered this elevated tone in his work as a preacher. His theology also fostered it. Fellow- ship with Christ received supreme emphasis in all his theological thinking and in his entire religious life, and this imparted a nobility and dignity and tenderness as well to all his preaching. His message came warm and freslv from the fountain of life. It was this elevated, penetrat- ing quality that Humboldt had in mind in writing thus of him : " Of Schleiermacher it may be said, as of the greater number of very distinguished persbns, but in an incomparably higher degree, that their speaking ex- ceeded their writings in power. Those, therefore, who may have read his numerous writings ever so diligently, but who never heard him speak, must nevertheless re- main unacquainted with the most rare power and the most remarkable qualities of the man. His strength lay in the deeply penetrating character of his words. It would be wrong to call it rhetoric, for it was so entirely free from art. It was the persuasive, penetrative, kindling 38 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS effusion of a feeling, which seemed not so much to be enlightened by one of the rarest of intellects, as to move side by side with it in perfect unison." Religious thought that is caught up and penetrated by rehgious feehng and affection, and that undertakes to interpret the significance of the experience of the inner life and to impress its power, will of necessity be an earnest, sympathetic, dignified, emotionally elevated, and enno- bhng utterance. It was his conviction that the content of preaching should never go outside of Christianity as a subjective religious experience, and to interpret in terms of rational thought the inner significance of religious life was his conscious supreme vocation. Hence his objection against making any additions to the content of pulpit thought from outside sources. Doubtless he wrought into his own discourses material that came from the wealth of his own humanistic culture, but it was contrary to his theory and contrary to his conscious purpose. To present Christian thought unmixed with human speculation and to interpret only what is real to Christian experience was his aim. Doubtless his preach- ing was deficient in many respects in what calls itself the evangelical note, and notably so in the evangelistic note. It may have obscured or even neglected Christian truths that are necessary to further Christian piety, for in maintaining the position that piety is normative for truth, he forgot that truth also maybe normative for piety. But it was always a most deeply spiritual and devout utterance, as from the consciousness of fellowship with the Redeemer. It is this " pectoral theology " that has given an earnest, sympathetic, devout, and elevated spiritual tone to the best type of modern preaching. THE PREACHING OF SCHLEIERMACHER 39 Because his own preaching was an outpouring of the heart Schleiermacher found great joy in it. His letters indicate the satisfaction it gave him. He has a "con- stant hankering after the pulpit," even when at work upon the beloved Plato, and his discourses to the students of the university formed, as he says, "no slight addition to my happiness." Elevated in tone and adapted to an educated and cultivated audience as was his preaching, he still sought to reach the common people, and at Berlin he adapted the afternoon service to their needs. It was his opinion that "all sermons and mine more especially are only intended to be heard." Hence he was opposed to the publication of his sermons and only yielded after the earnest solicita- tion of his friends. He was also opposed to written sermons. At first he carefully wrote, but in the interest of greater impressiveness and effectiveness he abandoned the practice, because he found that it hampered -him. He introduced the change by dropping one part of the written product after another, beginning with the con- clusion and ending with the introduction, till nothing was left, and he at last spoke wholly without writing ; and this became tributary, not only to the freedom and the cogency, but to the elevation of his preaching. The sermon that is the free outpouring of the life from within must be elevated and spiritually impressive. t' 5. Looking at the formal aspects of Schleiermacher's preaching, or at the ordering and expression of the thought, we are at once impressed with its organic quality. There is no external manipulation of material, no mechanistic combination of parts. The sermon is not built. It is a simple, free outflow and onflow. It 40 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS is an instrument for the expression of Christian feeling in the form of Christian reflection for the purpose of Christian edification. The chief interest is the subject- matter. The form is subordinate to it, and is so shaped as to bring out the material to the best advantage. The fulness, the wealth, the affluence, the apparent spon- taneity, is apparent at once. The form is simply the natural and easy unfolding, as by organic process of the subject-matter. To secure this, he abandoned the manuscript, as already suggested. This freedom which he sought does not imply that he was at all cateless with respect to his work. In his early ministry he labored to perfect his instrument. At that time he gave his father an account of his sermon preparation. " I cannot," he says, in a letter from Schlobitten, in 1793,^ " commence writing down a sermon, until I have thor- oughly arranged it in my thoughts, even to the smallest details ; for otherwise I run the risk of anticipating some things or of putting them in the wrong place." And he says that the unwritten sermons gave him " much more trouble than any I have ever composed." Then follows a description of his method which is inter- esting : " I first made a very careful disposition of my subject, and then sought various modes of expression for each thought. Next, I took first one part of the discussion, then another and another, and preached it in thought : and then returned again to the first, probably changing the terms in some measure, and then I delivered my sermon bit by bit, several times over, and also com- mitted to memory the entire plan." This habit of care- ful preparation in the early period stood by him all " Life and Letters," Vol. I, p. io6 ff. THE PREACHING OF SCHLEIERMACHER 41 through his ministry. It resulted in great clearness of method. The structural form is more manifest in the early period, and gradually becomes more flexible and free, but it is always the unfolding process. He does not anchor closely to his text, but uses it freely, not, however, in the way of accommodation, save in his use of the Old Testament. He takes the exact thought of the text, or some thought that is easily and naturally suggested by it, and not by some remote process, as the basis of his discussion ; but in the formal sense the thought of the sermon is not closely bound to the text. The introduction is of a general character, and is rarely explanatory. It is not his purpose to unfold the subject in a strictly expository manner. He will rather draw freely from his own resources. Even in his expository discourses, although merging himself fully within the sphere of the writer's thought, and making it his own, as the first and necessary step in his work, he neverthe- less draws abundantly from the wealth of his own inner life, and the thought unfolds itself very freely in line with his own mental processes. The thought, once ap- propriated, expands and takes new form under the vitalizing touch of his own personality. He is thus a most quickening and suggestive expository preacher. The theme of the sermon always comes naturally from the text and is not forced upon it. He discusses but two or three topics, which are a natural partition of the subject, and the topics are generally textual. The theme is definite and frequently stated in propositional form, which calls for definite, and yet admits of free, treatment. "That we should not be the servants, but friends of God ! " " Only he can free who is above all the 42 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS prophets." " The Redeemer is born as the Son of God." "That the joy of the advent of Christ is en- hanced by the consideration that he came to bring a sword." Themes hke these suggest at once the large- ness of the thought discussed and the definiteness with which it is conceived. The topics are frequently stated at the outset, and restated in the discussion. In the development of the sermon we rarely find Scriptural citation. This is in harmony with his conception of the relation of Scripture to the religious life. The sermon material should never come directly, but indirectly, out of the Scriptures as they are spiritually appropriated. He uses his material in a large, free way, but bridges the path from topic to topic by skilful transition, so that, while the sermon has a large, free movement, the continuity of thought is observed and made clear and the whole discourse is held in unity. There is there- fore great variety of method and there is nothing stereo- typed. The rapidity with which the final preparation was made and the influence of the audience upon him in his extemporaneous movement of thought, especially in the later period of life, furthered this freedom of development. The thought of the sermon was with him for several days. But not till Saturday evening did he outUne his material. As to the development, he leaves much to the inspiration of the audience, believing that the material should never be wholly reproduced, but that a good deal should be left to the productive energies in the stimulating process of discussion. In this we are reminded of Henry Ward Beecher. His enthusiasm for preaching was a stimulus to his produc- tiveness. His reserve in private intercourse, especially THE PREACHING OF SCHLEIERMACHER 43 in the presence of strangers, was in striking contrast to the spontaneity and joyfulness with which he poured out the fulness of his soul in the pulpit, and in this he reminds us of Phillips Brooks. The diction of the sermon is always characterized by his reflective habit of mind, but bears the mark of his earnest, sympathetic feeling, and is always dignified and measurably concrete. The style is descriptive, but it is descriptive of the inner world of consciousness, hence it is not abstruse, but reflective in its quality, t The " Discourses on Religion " are more exuberant in their diction than his sermons. The earlier sermons are the more stimulating, the later more contemplative and more edifying. They bear the mark of pastoral experi- ence with the sorrows and sufferings of life. There is nothing obtrusive in his diction ; the sentences are German-like, long and complex, but they are clear and accurate. They demand careful attention, but from the German point of view the style is adapted to its work. The absence of Biblical diction and of Biblical material in general, as already suggested, is notable. Moreover there is but little material from secular life, and but little coloring from his humanistic culture ; but the ser- mon always rings true to the Christian life, and is lifted into a great height by a noble Christian feeling. For his success as a preacher he was to no considerable ex- tent dependent upon his physical personality. He was short of stature, and as to his shoulders slightly de- formed; but he had a broad forehead, firm-set lips, strong Roman nose, a keen eye, and an altogether seri- ous and vigorous countenance and a penetrating voice, and this was doubtless tributary to his impressiveness. 44 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS During his whole public career, he was infirm of bod}^, and, like Robert Hall, often preached in great pain. In preaching he began slowly and deliberately and with complete self-possession and composure, but warmed with his discourse, and then, though always under con- trol, his speech became a torrent. Altogether his preaching illustrates the triumph of the spirit of the preacher. The method was well adapted to the sub- stance, tone, and aim of the sermon, and all were •4 tributary to the spiritual ennobling and enrichment of the hearer. 6. As to the type of Schleiermacher's preaching, it is not altogether easy to classify. In the general sense of the term, he was an intellectual preacher. His dis- courses met the needs of educated and cultured people. But they are not obtrusively intellectual. We are not at first impressed with their intellectual wealth. There is a basis of rich mental culture, but it makes no exhibi- tion of itself. He was a highly emotional preacher, but it was not evangelistic emotion. He was a reflective and not an obtrusively rhetorical preacher. He never permitted the exuberant rhetoric of the " Discourses on Religion " to disclose itself in his sermons. In general he should be characterized as a pastoral preacher. He took personal direction of his parish affairs, notwith- standing his arduous duties as university professor, and his more public duties as a patriotic citizen, con- tinuing to care for his catechetical classes, even up to the close of life. This pastoral spirit he carried into the pulpit. All this is in line with his conception of Christian preaching as the utterance of the content of Christian experience with reference to the edification THE PREACHING OF SCHLEIERMACHER 45 of the congregation. An examination of his sermons will show how largely the great truths of Christianity as related to Christian experience appear in his preach- ing. He is eminently a didactic preacher, in a modified sense, even a doctrinal preacher, for, as already sug- gested, the content of his system of Christian doctrine appears in homiletic form to a large extent in his sermons. But he made no distinction between the doctrinal and ethical aspects of Christian truth. The only distinction is of form. All doctrine is practical and the end of doctrine is life. In this we are reminded of Bushnell and Brooks and Robertson, and of other preachers with the modern spirit. Schleiermacher therefore may be called a pastoral preacher of the higher ethical type. In order to secure a proper analy- sis of the nature of religion, he would isolate it. But of course he never allowed his religion to evaporate in emotion. Emotion was but the inner impulse that in- spired all his varied activities. He says, indeed, that religion is to act with morahty, rather than to produce morality. But practically rehgion is with him the very life of morality. Despite his extremely subjective and individualistic conception of rehgion and its tendency to isolate the religious feeling from other contents of ex- perience, he nevertheless in his scientific work devel- oped Christianity on its ethical side, and especially on the side of social ethics, more fully than it had ever been developed before and made to it the most important contribution of the last century. And with equal fidel- ity in his pulpit teaching he carried out this develop- ment on its practical side, thus realizing his conception of Christianity as the religion of life and not primarily 46 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS of thought. His sermons consist very largely in the, application of Christianity to the practical interests of life, individual or social. He devoted himself largely to the interests of domestic life, and his sermons upon these subjects are of permanent value. As we have seen, he was an enthusiastic patriot, and his patriotic sermons are among his noblest utterances. He exalted Christ as the realization of the ideal of true human life. The sinless completeness of Jesus is central in his Christian apologetics. Christ is presented, not only as 4the one in whose spiritual fellowship we nourish our own spiritual life and so find fellowship with God, but as our ethical ideal in accordance with which our life is to be shaped as well as inspired. This practical quaUty is the more striking when we consider the profoundly reflective, introverted, speculative, as well as poetic, quality of his mind. It is still more striking when we recall the mystical basis of his religion. He was not a practical mystic as Tauler was. Religion does not find its centre in the will, but in feeling. He might easily have been a sentimental and contemplative mystic, and but for his humanistic culture and his serious sense of the ethical significance of human life, he would have been such. It was therefore quite the necessity of his rich, full inner life of feeling to push vigorously over into the domain of thought and then to take the prod- uct of his thought, penetrated by the life of his emotion, out still farther into the world of practical reahty. And he demonstrates that true religious feel- ing cannot be isolated from mental and moral life. The "Monologues" interpret the "Discourses." They disclose his own sense of the might of his moral man- THE PREACHING OF SCHLEIERMACHER 47 hood, which he carefully cultivated and defended as a most sacred possession, and the like of which he would encourage in every human being. These ringing words reveal the strength and the enthusiasm of that manhood. " Yes, my mind shall preserve its vigor in advancing years, never shall spirit and courage forsake me ; what I rejoice, in now, I will rejoice in forever more ; firm shall my will remain, and strong my imagination. Nothing shall deprive me of the magic key which un- locks for me the mysterious portals of the world above ; never shall the fervor of my love be extinguished. I will not behold the dreaded weakness of age ; I vow to despise every calamity which does not affect the objects of my existence, and I swear to preserve myself in eternal young." These are the words of a man whose wealth of religious feeling found its noblest expression in mental and moral life, and it found vent in the pulpit, not only in noble thought, but in the inculcation of a noble moral life. The man who in old age could stand at the grave of his only son, and, while shaken to the foundations by a stroke from which he never wholly recovered, could with calmness commit him to mother earth, and speak strong words of hope to those who mourned with him, proved his own fidelity to a noble ideal of a manly moral life. How far and in what ways the development of the religious life of the modern church has influenced its practical or its ethical or philanthropic life would be a profoundly interesting inquiry. It is doubtless true that modern philanthropy has its distinctively secular aspect, and that it has developed to a considerable extent as a distinctively ethical interest, and independently of the 48 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS church. There is a moral life that has had a very vigorous growth apart from religion, and it may almost be called a characteristic of our time ; but it is question- able, at least, whether it may not ultimately be the prod- uct of the Christian conception of man that has been so fully domesticated in modern life. It is at any rate certain that the revival of religion in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the early part of the nine- teenth, in Germany and in Great Britain, has resulted in a mighty quickening of the moral and philanthropic life of the church and has had wide-reaching results in what is called secular society. The immense vitality of Christianity and its demonstrated power in practical life was one of the most striking phenomena of the last century. It is also certain that all the great leaders in modern German evangelicalism who were influenced by Schleiermacher have been profoundly interested in the problems of practical theology and of Christian ethics, and in the .development at once of the piety and of the practical morality and philanthropy of the churches. The great modern missionary movement is the direct product of the revival of evangelical piety, and all this illustrates the great truth, enunciated and exemplified by Schleiermacher, that religion is the soul of morality. CHAPTER II FREDERICK WILLIAM ROBERTSON In passing from I^riedrich Schleiermacher to Fred- erick Robertson we are at first strongly impressed with their points of contrast. But after all between the two men there are notable points of likeness. In much they are kindred spirits, and they hold the same general point of view in their estimate of religion, of theology, and of the practical significance of the Christian church. They are alike in their spritual insight, their deli cacy of re li- gi ous s usceptibility, their ardent affectionateness, their fer vid e motion, their sturdyindependence, their manly courage, their tolerance, their patrio^sm, their devotion to the practical interests of men, their humanistic culture, and they are both intrenched in the position that " in all niatters^ of ^eternal truth . , the _spul .^ is^ .before the intellect." It will always be an honor to the Anglican church that it was the spiritual home of Frederick Robertson. But it cannot be claimed that he is a dis- tinctive product of the Anglican church. He was the product of a broader world than that in which his church moves. He had nothing of the churchliness that characterizes the typical Anglican preacher, nothing of his conservatism, conventionahsm, and devotion to insti- tutional religion. He was subjective, independent, revo- lutionaryj op,Qn-hearted, and_ fiejy^ He was ^mmensely human, and no ecclesiastical establishment could bind his free, imperial spirit. £ 49 50 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS INFLUENCES DETERMINATIVE OF ROBERTSON'S DEVELOPMENT In point of time, Robertson belongs to the first half of the nineteenth century ; in point of influence, to the last half. He was born in 1816 and died in 1853, at the age of thirty-seven years and six months. His public life covers a period of only thirteen years, during which he was not very widely known, even in his own country. It is since his death that his place as a preacher has been established, and it is hardly too much to say that among the educated classes, throughout the English-speaking I world and throughout Germany as well, his name has I become more widely cherished, and his work more I widely influential, than that of any other English ; preacher of his century. I. In looking at the career of this singularly gifted and impressive preacher, we note at the outset his dis- tinctive English quaHties. Although in remote lineage he may have been Scotch, he had become thoroughly Anglicanized, and he disclosed EngUsh rather than Scottish traits. He was, in fact, every inch an English- man, and he bore the marks of the English culture of the first half of the century. He was, indeed, a man of much finer fibre than the average Englishman, even than the English preacher. His mind was much more speculative, it had a subtler insight, a richer aesthetic sensibility, a much more delicate emotional susceptibility, than most Englishmen possess. But in his basal quali- ties, those qualities that gave solidity and balance to his ROBERTSON'S DEVELOPMENT 51 intellectual and moral character, and in which lay in large measure the secret of his strength, he was a thorough Englishman. He was an idealist of high degree, but to his singularly delicate poetic insight and to his artistic taste there was added the broad, Saxon common sense that reaches its best development in the typical Englishman. He was trained in the re alm o f abstract thought, and was at home in the^jii^h altitudes ofspeculation, at once intuitive and d ialectical in hi s rnentaro£erations, ^ut he had the objective re aJi^m^f the En^is^h^mind. It was this mental bias that led him away from the transcendentalism of his early years, "the rock on which I split." It was this that led him to the study of the physical_ sciences, — chemistry, natu- ral philosophy, geology, and botany, — for "the effect of certainty which they produce on the mind is always a/ healthy feeling." It was this perhaps that inclined him toward the Biblical type of preaching, in which he could deal with religion in its objective, historic form, in which he, shunning tHe^Ftiiice of allegbry,' always grasped the historic sense, and in which, despite his brilliant imagi- nation and skill in detaching the inner suggestiveness of BlBncaTtrunrnie^always'pTOved'^^ fd-^eTaf sane^ a nd~relia br(r'critic. He had a very keen and delicate s ense of the id ealistic or poetic aspects of nature, but he also had a sharp eye forlts^exTernal and local aspects. It was, in part, this English realism that led hi m from Sh elley's " atmo sphere of pr ofligacy " to the wholesome tranquilHty^ojTWords worth andJxj-Shakespeare's "spirit of sunny endeavor," and to his "acquiescence in things as they are — not incompatible'witira cheerful resolve to make them better," which he testifies is "good for 52 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS the mind." It was this 5^ngHsh common sense that led him to take a balanced view of all things and secured him against the one-sidedness of his impulses. No modern preacher has entered more deepjy^than he inr(rffieTiTe~oT*X^hl1'st7"and"his'"spi^ self-sacrificing devotion~'Became almost a passion with him. It might have-become-a superstition and "a supererogatory sort of passion. But he held himself in moral poise, and could say, " I believe the spirit of exceeding self-devo- tion, as a mere romantic instinct, is but folly." He was almost feminine in his emotional susceptibilities and in tHe"tenderness of his sympathy; but "all this was matched bji^a masculine'"strenuousness of will that increased^ in force with the passing years, arrd"'KeT3'"Hmrsteadfast to his'goal. To a shrinking sensibility that was intensified , by the contradictions of life and made morbid by physi- : cal disease, wc : added a virile individuality and Saxon independence of character. He was hiiinble, yet in high measure self-asserting. He respected the opin- [ ions of others, yet in his own opinions he refused to be 1 a partisan. " Save yourself from sectarianism ; pledge yourself to no school," is his counsel to the working- men of Brighton ; " cut your life adrift from all party ; be a slave to no maxims : stand fast, unfettered and ■ free, servants only of the truth." He kept his own ' precept, and in the spirit of this independence he spoke with a courage that is an honor to the manliest race of the modem world. What he declares to be true of the poet is true of himself, who also had the poet's mind and heart. ".Every great poet," he says, " is a double- natured man, with the feminine and manly powers in harmonious union, having the tact and the sympathy ENGLISH TRAITS 53 and the intuition and the tenderness of woman, with the breadth and massiveness of the manly intellect, besides the calm justice which is almost exclusively mascuUne." It was this manly independence of character that gave a mart ial heroism to his too short earthly career. He had the~EngTish ethical mind. Gentlejow^rdjhe^weak and suffering, he ^3a^fierce^Jn_his jppral^ indignation andTemble in his denunciation of cowardly wrong. He had Tio ' weak, ' seiitimefital" ' hoTiioris aboiit" punishment, human or divine. " Once in my Hfe," he says, " I felt a terrible might. I knew and rejoiced to know, as I spoke, that I was inflicting the sentence of a coward and a liar's hell." He hated and denounced all sham and hy pocr isy with the intensity of Carlyle. But he had tHe' reserve of a gentleman, and the patience of a Chris- tian in all_his denunciat.lpjj^ ^ . By the patrons of tradition anoconvention he was regarded as an iconoclast, and it must be acknowledged that in effect, altEouglh not in spirit or method, he was revolutionary in his teaching ; but still he had the Eng- lishman's caution and his conservative habit of mind. He taught freely and boldly, but positively and con- structively. " Let them draw _ th e cpnc lu.^i0a.s».JL^tatfirti truths," he sa ys, and forthi^reason^Ji^^ moTestedirrs]pite"orgi^^ afi^oiC^R^rsonaV^atjfg^." He was democratic in prin- ciple while he was aristocratic in sentiment. "MvL ' '"- . -,i III. .M m i r^vt lii '" n m— i ' tastes," he says, " are witH the'aristocrat, my principles with the mp^b""."" Xhd iri"airthis he is cohscTous"of' felTow- ship with John Milton. He was the recognized friend of the working-men of Brighton, but he neverallied him- self even wifh the Christian socialists. He thought that 54 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS he could not preach to the privileged classes, and at one time he was ready on this account to resign his charge at Cheltenham ; but he felt himself in sympathy with their traditions and strenuously advocated their rights. He was an advocate of revolution with reference to the advancement of the rights of the common people, but he hears with a pang "of the extinction of great names, gray with the hoar of innumerable ages " and laments " the passing of great ancestral estates under the ham- mer of the auctioneer." He was catholic in spirit beyond the measure of the ordinary Englishman, elevat- ing the church above the sect, and humanity above the nation ; but he had the heart of a true EngHsh patriot. His sense of justice and of philanthropy led him to distinguish with respect to the objects for which a nation might fight ; but his chivalrous martial spirit would have led him to die for England for almost any cause, and there were times when he even seemed to covet the honor. He followed the English campaigns of the past with an almost boyish enthusiasm, and described them with singular skill and exactness. The English sense of patriotic duty and patriotic devotion fired him, and he could glory in a nation whose sons " can die at their posts silently, without thinking that forty centuries were looking down upon them." 2. In Robertson's career we are also impressed with the influence of his early English home. The first five years of his life were sperif"m"*a!~"military fortification, the next four amid the Yorkshire hills. Till he was seven years of age his parents were his only teachers. During the following seven years, a portion of which he spent in France, where he mastered the French EARLY ENGLISH HOME 55 language, his father seems to have had a general du-ec- tion of his studies, till, at the age of sixteen, he was sent to Edinburgh. During all these years, parental influ- ence, nature, books, soHtude, were laying the foundations for thoroughly trained and cultivated character. It was then that his habits of study were fixed, and here we trace that accuracy and conscientious devotion to his in- tellectual tasks that marked all his later years. Here, amid these influences, was developed that purity of heart and Hfe that enabled him in later years to say, " I know from personal experience — and I do know — that feel- ings such as these, call them romantic if you will, can keep a man all his youth through, before a higher faith has been called into being, from every species of vicious and low indulgence." Here, in^spUtuder ai^iiis-intel- lectjaaXi^s^'S«--Qr-.-in-.,);bs^GompanioQship .^f , natur^AJieL developed that tendencjr to self-jsolation that always characterized him, and whic h is ^connected with that s^se„piJ.Qjii£Kae.srthatl^^ In a thoughtful and reflective habit of mind, he developed a maturity beyond his years. He is a student of Shake- speare, and even as a boy he wonders at his knowledge of the human heart. In his early companionships he exhibits that chivalrous _tenderness. of affection that made him an Jptense .and,ste94f3.?t.^rleDd. In subse- quent life he recalls his love for one of his schoolmates, and his reference indicates the almost womanly delicacy, and at the same time manly chivalry, of his affection. He familiarized^himself with nature and with all forms or animaLJi fe. and this developed his poetic tendencies. He knew the "power of Engliiir^sceiiery ahd'Tife to calm, if not to purify, the hearts of those whose lives are 56 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS habitually subjected to such influences ; " and he could testify from experience that *' a man's character and mind are moulded for good or evil, far more by the forms of imagination which surround his childhood, than by any subsequent scientific training." It was in early life that he nurtured that " deHcacy and depth of feeling " which he regarded as a necessary prerequisite for the apprehension of poetry, and it was thus that he learned to associate poetry with religion. It is his judg- ment that no man can understand poetry " who has led a slothful Hfe, or who has not at one time or other loved to rise early — no man who in his early walks has not mingled with a love of poetry a deep religious sense ; who has not felt the consecrating effects of early dawn ; or who has not at one time or another in his early days, in a moment of deep enthusiasm, knelt down amid the glories of nature, as the ancient patriarchs knelt, and feeling that none were awake but the Creator and him- self, bowed down to consecrate and to offer up the whole of his life, experiencing also a strange and awful and mysterious feeling, as if a hand invisible were laid •upon his brow, accepting the consecration and sacrifice." It is utterances Uke these that disclose the power of the associations of his youth. Then also was develop ed that soldierly spirit that was so notable a characteristic of the man and of the preacher. He "breathed the atmosphere in which the""Engirsh soldier lives," and he never lost the impressions of those days upon his sus- ceptible and fiery spirit. As is well known, he was in- clined to the military service, and was turned aside from it only by a combination of circumstances to which, in after years, he attached a sort of fatality, and to him ANGLICAN INFLUENCES 57 it illustrated the divine predestination. One is strongly reminded of the critical and sometimes seemingly for- tuitous character of our earthly life by recalling how slight a thing might have committed Robertson to a life in which some at least, if not all, of his choicest gifts might have been buried, or at least greatly obscured, and the modern English pulpit have been robbed of its brightest ornament. No one can fail to see that all the influences above specified were tributary to his power as a preacher, nor can, nor should, one forget that the piety of that early home, a piety that can flourish even in a soldier's life and perhaps nowhere else so well as in the homes of many of the officers of the English army, wrought powerfully upon his fine religious susceptibility. We should not forget that Robertson was nuxtured.inJ;he-.atmosph£xe-of^.an..Evan- gelical piety. In subsequent years he was accustomed fb's£p!irwithseyerit£^t the imrealltyorirurcK of the piety that he found in EvangelicarciTcles. It is not un- likely that he was correctTn this estimate, although some allowance must be made, perhaps, for the overwrought feeling of a theological antagonist, and especially of a man who felt the sting of personal wrong. But what- ever the truth of the matter may be, he could not and w ouldnot d eny,, nor could he ever forget, the reality of tLb-Q~pie^.^oX,,iu^eajdy^:K^^jro"r^^^ . esQape^tiieJnfluencfi.lhroughQut hrnpr"^a<>^ o.^^-^^U^ 3. Robertson's relation to the Anglican church is an interesting and an impdrra:tlT!e'ature irr'Oie"1iistbr5r(of his development. In the broader estimate, as already sug- gested, he was a product of modern life, rather than of the modern church. His culture was characteristically 58 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS humanistic rather than^e^clesiastical^ )^et .in a restricted but important sense he was a product of his church. Each of the schools, the high, low, and broad, into which, fortunately or unfortunately, as one may be in- clined to consider it, the church is divided, and which represent tendencies of thought at work in various forms and degrees in almost all sections of the modern church, _ ,. exerted an influence upon him, and he was at one or an-'^-li ^"^ [J- other time affihated with them. On^the aesthetic, a§/ well as on the devotional, and, perhaps the ghilahTiFriSpic "' side, and to a considerable extent on^he theoretic side (for he held that some of the fundamental tenets of this party were true), he had a bias toward the high church, or what was later called the Ritualistic party. "The lofty, although unhistoric, conceptions of the dignity of the church held by its chief representative men, their elevated conceptions of the sanctities of worship, their reverence for the past, their devoutness and earnestness of character, their devotion to a life of beneficence, and the fact that this party numbered in its ranks many of the most gifted and cultivated minds in the church, like Keble and Newman, had strong attractions for him ; and he seemed atone time, as by his own tastes and poetic inclinations, destined to be numbered with them. Indeed, so near to superficial observation did he seem to come to them, that at one time they were almost tempted to claim him. In fact, not more than five months before his death, he confesses that "with a thoughtful and large-minded high churchman I believe I could sympa- thize more than with any other section of the church." It was his belief " that in all the tenets and practices of the high church body there is an underlying truth." ANGLICAN INFLUENCES 59 While at Oxford University he had come into connection with its most prominent representatives. He must have heard Newman at St. Mary's, and could not have failed to be impressed with his intellectual brilUancy and re- hgious intensity, although he could not accept the " forms of statement " in which they all sought to express their fundamental truths. But when he came to apply /his critical methods and to state the truths they had I formulated, in his own terms, they found that he was far removed from them. In the last period of his career his conceptions of God were modified and enlarged, and he found himself putting the ubiquitous presence of God over against the high churchman's localized deity, and balancing a pantheistic pervasiveness against an anthropomorphic personality. The conceptions of the church and of the sacraments also which prevailed in this party were too narrow for him, and he refused to ally himself with them. Moreover, his sense of reality ^ revolted against their effort " to represent the piety of / the past through the forms of the past, instead of striv- \ ing, like true prophets, to interpret the aspirations of the ' present in forms that truly represent and foster them." On the emotional and affectional and measurably on '^^ '^'^ the practical side of his nature, as well as by early edu- cation.„aBdu,A§sociation, he was allied with the so-called Evangelical branch of the church. Like Newman, he, as we have seen, was nurtured in an Evangelical atmos- phere. During his university course, from 1837 to 1840, although to a certain extent influenced by the Anglican movement, he was still regarded as a low churchman, and there is no evidence that his religious or theologi- cal vie ws^nderwe'nt any^matjeri^ In his first 6o REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS ministry of two years at Winchester, from 1840 to 1842, and during his ministry of the five following years at Cheltenham, he was also regarded as a low churchman. His preaching was for the most part of the pronounced EvangeHcal type, using the term Evangelical in its ecclesiastical sense, although it may be questionable whether it was more EvangeHcal in the proper theologi- cal sense than that of his Brighton ministry, jiis aim was "the saving of souls," as the term was understood arnong the Evangelicals, i.e. the bringing of men to a decision for Christ, the winning of them to a conscious religious life, and to the fellowship of the church. In its austerity, his^ety waaof_a_prpnounced Eva^ type. It was mystical, and in a way transcendental and distinctively ascetic ; but before he left Cheltenham a change in his views had taken place, and he Began to recognize himself as moving in a larger world of thought. The unreality, as he regarded it, of the Evangelical type of piety was apparently one of the influences involved in this change. He detected a certain pietistic cant behind the Evangelical phraseology, and he was con- vinced that it represented a great amount of religious pretentiousness and of unsound ethical character, and his'senisitive- moral, not to say aesthetic and religious, nature vigorously reacted against it. This, however, was only one, and perhaps the most trifling, of the .causes or occasions of his break with the Evangelical school and of his subsequent religious and theological revolution. The criticism to which he was subjected on account q![his^ free utterances in the pulpit, and a certain tone of worldliness and frivoHty which he -detected,^ or thought hedetected, under the pietistic cant of the ANGLICAN INFLUENCES 6l Evangelicals, may have still further intensified his revul- sion of feeling. "And it is not altogether unlikely that, ha^d their piety been more genuine and their type of re- ligious character broader and manlier, he might have continued to be more closely allied with them to the end. ^ On the inteUectual^^s well as ethical, side of his nature, ^^* he was alHed witlTthe broad church school. It is note- worthy that, seemingly, so far as the records of his life testify, he did not know very much about this school and was not in .clQse_ jelatiqn with its leaders. So far as I recall no special mention is made of it as a movement in his biography, but it was already in existence, and was a distinct and most signjficantmove- ment in the church against which Tractarians and Eyan- gdlcals alike reacted. ""in'Iact, it was one of the chief incentives to the Tractarian reaction. It was a relic in modified form of the earlier Oriel school, of which Whately was the leader and with which Arnold, and at one time Newman, was in a sort connected. It was the school of ,CQLeridge.aad4.b,e.9Ares,,ofMauric4an^^^^ ley and Kingsley. It is significant of Robertson's in- dependence that he says almost nothing about this movement. He probably did noj wholly agree with any one of them in their conceptions of Christianity and of tli^hurch. But m their general humanistic tendencies, in their intellectjuarfreedom, J^^ of spirit, and 'their ecdesiasticri"7omprehe he ' was in ^ sympathy with them. In the partisan sense he belonged A/<^ to no particular section *orihe_ch.urclir'"" In a way^ tj'ex. air contributed" to hTm." InTccounting for his develop- "ment, we cannot' fail "to detect their influence ; for with all his manly independence, he was responsive to influ- 62 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS ences from all quarters, not the less from individual friends than from books, that represented a new spirit and suggested a new and better method in theology. He gathered from all, yet he stood alone. He could not be a party man. He formed no alliances in further- ing the schemes of this broad school. He was too sensi- tively individualistic and independent for such alliances. This solitary position, result partly of inward and partly of outward conditions, while it was the necessity and the glory, was yet the sorrow, ol.his Jife. But it was singularly tributary to the persuasiveness and power of his preaching. It contributed to that in- tensity, that reality, that peculiar_gienetrating, experi- mental quality that can come only from independent personal convfction. It was ex perimental preac Hing of the "most pronounced type, the testimony of the soul and message bearing, intensely subjective, yet anchored to a his toric basis in_ the^iffi.^_Christ. There is no note of conventionality about it. It was a new prophetic voice^ in the Anglican church, a voice as in a wilderness of party confusion. It was the utterance of a man who / had fought his way through and out and beyond party lines, who was willing to stand alone and was able to do it, and who spake what he felt in the deepmost soul of him. He spake the things he had seen and heard and felt, and there was consequently a tremendous power in what he said. 4. We have seen that the agencies which wrought in Robertson's general change of religious and ethical ex- perience, and in his change of theological position, are somewhat occult and difficult" to tf^ce. Perhaps they were not fully known even to himself, and therefore PHILOSOPHIC INFLUENCES 63 could not be known to those about hira. This seems to be particularly true of those influences, whatever they may have been, that wrought a change in the philo- sophical basis of his beUefs. All such changes are likely to come gradually, and the process is likely to be obscure. Without doubt, in his case, the transfor- mation^was more gradual and inward and silent than appears at the surface of his life, although the culmina- tion was rapid and seems to have been hmited to the course of a few months, after which he emerged into a new and singularly sudden consciousness of power, and his growth, thence onward, is marvellous. It is evident also that a basis for the change cannot be traced back to his university days. At Oxford he was a careful and accurate student, and became somewhat familiar with Plato and Aristotle. But his student life was somewhat miscellaneous, and, according to his own ac- knowledgment, lacked concentration. He left the uni- versity, apparently, without any thorough grounding in modern philosophic thought ; and his theology, as re- gards its philosophic basis, seems to have been of the traditional sort. It is altogether likely that we might trace the beginnings of his ultimate change to the literature with which he became familiar, and which Hecame the medium for interpreting to him new philo- sophic conceptions. A modification in the ethical char- acter^of his religious experiences was also doubtless a conditioning factor in the intellectual revolution ; but, whatever may have been the genesis of the change, ulti- mate modified philosophical conceptions of Christianity become manifest, and it is altogether unlikely that a man of Robertson's penetration should never have rec- 64 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS ognized this change of philosophic basis and never have given an account of it to himself. It is a well-known fact that a new idealistic and spiritualistic philosophy was becoming current, and thinking men, in a great variety of ways, were becoming subject to it and largely through the new literary spirit of the time. It is inter- esting to note how silently fundamental changes in thought are effected. It was some time after Kant's death that his works were translated into English. It was almost a half-century after Schleiermacher's death before his " Discourses on Religion " were given to the English pubUc, but the results of Kant's philo- sophic criticism and of Schleiermacher's " Discourses " were already manifest in English thought, and Robert- son in England and Bushnell in this country disclosed the traces of this influence. Coleridge's "Aids to Re- flection?' published in 1825, embodied the results of his investigation of German philosophy and became a fruit- ful source of influence. His philosophical idealism, which may be called a combination of the ethical ideal- ism of Kant and the religious idealism of Schleier- macher, directly or indirectly influenced Robertson. From Robertson's published works it becomes evi- dent that he was familiar with some of Coleridge's philosophical positions, especially with his theory of religious knowledge. In his eyer_ recurring declara- tion that religious truth "is felti_„npt xeasqnedj)ut,'' we note the iniTuerice ^'f the" idealistic philosophy. We find also a changeH~donception of the'lmffianence of God in the universe, and especially in humanity and in the individual soul. And here it is not unlikely that we may trace an influence from Carlyle. For it was PHILOSOPHIC INFLUENCES 65 Carlyle's message to the world that religion is the intui- tion of the divine in the universe. Robertson, in one of his letters, criticises Carlyle's tendency to pantheism, or the tendency to find "the divine everywhere and to make little distinction between the amount of divinity which is contained in different forces, provided only that they be Force." " But he is at one with Carlyle in his general conception of religion, and in Robertson we detect the ethical idealism, the hatred of sham, and the respect for hard, honest work that characterized Car- lyle. It is not_un]ikely^ that the influence of Carlyle's literary Romanticism was even more potent with him than the "pTiilosophical ideahsm of_jColeridge. But whateveFwe may conclude as to this matter, it is per- fectly clear that Robertson's change _of_ theological views was connected_with_^hanged_^jpWlo^s^ con- ception^ Tli£j[und amental cha n^^jva&JflJaig^CQQ^P- tion oMjod's relation to the uni verse . With this was connected Wi>^oditolm30l§*^^^ in which the soul comes to a knowledge of God and of (ImnQSySiss, thus securing to him a mor^a^iritual theory of religious'^knowTed.ge. With this wa^ftduded a broadening of his conception of Biblical inspiratio n, as involvin^Jhat , action .pt^Jbodjw^^ by which it becomes able to reccxgnize religious principles of universal validity. With^ ^ew recognition of th e soul in the totality of its powers as^_the_organ_of_j-eH- §i?-yS-JyQ.Q,y^.l?-dge, and with new recognition of the self- evidencing power of CTirisTianity in the experiences of the soul, came a modification in his conception of Jhe validating force of miracles. " 1 hold, he says, "that th'e'^affemprto'resrOiristianity upon miracles, and the 66 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS fulfilments of prophecy, is essentially the vilest rational- ism." With his changed conceptions of God's relation to the world, it is^atural that the incarnation should become central in his ChristologyanH'lsoteribrdffy.'and that his conception of the atonement should have been mqdrfie3r""Ancl"hTs conception of the church and of the sacraments is in line with his fundamental conception of the character of God, of the mission and work of Christ, and of man as the child of God. 5. The influence upon Robertson of modern litera- ture has already been referred to. Especiallyto be "fS^iiTgnized is the influence of the great modern poets, Wordsworth and Tennyson. He possessed the artistic temperament in a high degree, and from an early age was strongly impressed by all the artistic forms in which truth is expressed. Science, and especially physical science, met the needs of his intellectual life. In it he found relief " from the dim religious light of theology, in which one seems to make out the outline of a truth, and the next moment lose it in hopeless mystery and shadows." But truth in artistic forms was his great joy, for these forms '^feed theTieart." He regards poetry and religion as in close alliance because "the laws of both are the -same, and the organ of both intuition, and both satisfy the needs of the heart." Therefore, in his maturer years, he studied theology almost wholly in the forms of literary expression, rather than in its scientific forms. It was Wordsworth, especially, who realized his highest ideal of a poet, and of the man who, as poet, is also the prophet of the soul. As regards his knowledge of Wordsworth, he thinks himself competent to say of him what " should be heard by his fellow-men," because LITERARY INFLUENCES 67 he " has for years studied Wordsworth, and loved him, and year by year felt his appreciation and comprehen- sion of Wordsworth grow, and has during all those years endeavored to make Wordsworth's principles the guiding principles of his own inner life." He finds much theology in his poetry. He especially finds in him the harmonizing of the seeming contradiction between the quasi-pantheistic conception of the divine immanence and the theistic conception of the divine personality. As poet, Wordsworth was pantheistic ; as a Christian, he was theistic. He found the divine every- where ; he also found the divine in specific and determi- nate localities; hence he can be a high churchman, and at the same time can maintain the essential sacredness of all forms of existence. And Robertson, with his genius for comprehension, defends the seeming contradiction as embracing a higher truth. The subjec-, tive and idealistic quality of modern hterature found! response in his own subjective and idealistic tendencies. i He recognizes the truth of Schlegel's distinction between ancient and modern poetry, viz. that " the characteristic of the former is satisfaction, that of the latter aspiration." Therefore, he could even tolerate Byron and Shelley. It is this note of self-consciousness, of struggle, of aspiration for the unattained ideal that found him, and the influence of this poetic expression of human aspira- tion is seen in all his culture, in all his preaching, in all forms of his literary activity, and in his whole life. It expressed what was most real to himself. But in Wordsworth, especially, he found tranquilUty as well^as. quickening of aspiration. Wordsworth's peacefulness calmed his tufEulent soul, and he found relief from the 68 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS Storm and stress of life in this refreshing realm. And for something the same reason he turned to the fresh objective, descriptive mind of Sir Walter, for there " was no morbid spot in that strong, manly heart and nature," and he is " the most healthful restorative of any." In this realm of tranquillity he trained his imagina- tion to work and calmed his turbulent emotions, and all this commerce with poetic forms, whether as stimulus or sedative, heightened the prophetic quality of his preaching. He lived a lonely life. One suspects, and indeed hears, of an unrealized domestic ideal, and he was the victim of such distempers as a highly sensitive, intense, overwrought organization is exposed to. Hence the tremendous earnestness, the almost preternatural intensity, the sometimes depressingly sad and solemn^ impressiveness of his utterance. He threw all the ' great emotions that were stirred within him by the politi- cal and social agitations of his time, by the conflicts 1 of the church, by the opposition to which he was sub- \ ject, by his lonely life, by the kindlings of the imagina- tion and the quickenings of aspiration, in his high poetic world, by sympathy with the " man of sorrows," whose pains had penetrated his soul, into his preaching; and with all the comforts of literary fellowship, all the solace of friendship, all the grace of his Master, it was more than the mortal frame could bear. He saved his life for other generations, but he lost it in saving it. He did not know how well he wrought. He did not know the full import, reach, or measure of his prophetic utter- ance. He did not know how deeply he spoke into the lives of men. Never was man more unconscious of what he was doing for others, for the church, for the DISTINCTIVE QUALITIES IN PREACHING 69 world, ultimately for himself. It was in much a sad history, but most precious for the multitudes of needy men whom he has helped. More fully than any other English preacher of his century has he spoken the true prophetic word for hungry and disquieted human hearts. In our effort to interpret him, we may not for- get his identification of poetry and religion, nor his poetic and religious interpretation of human life. II THE DISTINCTIVE QUALITIES IN ROBERTSON'S PREACHING What is distinctive in his preaching may perhaps be made apparent in an attempt to point out what is most helpful and impressive in it. I . Perhaps the fi rst thin^ that arrests our attention is the distinctivelyfeiblicaij^^^^of his preaching. He illustrates most suggestively the value of Biblical preaching, demonstrates the fruitfulness of Biblical study for homiletic use, furnishes the most attractive model of an effective Biblical method, and has exerted an important influence upon the best Biblical preaching of our day. The foundation was early laid, and it be- came his chosen and only method. At the university " he took special delight in Scriptural and Greek Testa- ment readings." "He Hterally learned by heart the whole of the New Testament, not only in English, but in Greek." " His love for the Holy Bible was exceed- ingly remarkable, and especially for those parts that are full of Christ." His incHnation and his training, 70 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS therefore, both drew him from the first to this type of preaching. At Winchester his preaching was, in the substance of its thought, doctrinal after the Calvinistic type of the EvangeHcals, but it was BibHcal in form. He was a careful student, devoting the morning hour to study, " getting up early and eating almost no breakfast . in order to apply himself to his work. He chiefly at that time devoted himself to the study of Hebrew and Biblical criticism, though he read all sorts of books," " He was no contemptible scholar," and " of general information he had a large store." All this became available in his Biblical expositions. At Cheltenham, his doctrinal beliefs, as we have seen, began to modify, and this somewhat affected the substance, but not the form, of his preaching. The best type of his preaching, '' however, both as to substance and form, is seen in his Brighton ministry. Here his unique skill as an inter- preter.Qf .Biblical truth, and .oL hujmn/.lif e m^the '^ht of J^h atjr utb., reaches its supremacy. In his sermon on the " Illusiveness of Life " he suggests his own concep- . tion of the'preacher's work. " The very essence of it is 1 to justify the ways of God to man — to interpret God." His letters also, profoundly: igteresting hi their simplicity, perspicuity, freshness, and grace of diction, indicate~how th o r 6u gli ly ~tarni! iar his ihind" was" "with^^Bib lical truth . We detect his habits of Biblical study, not only in' his expository discourses upon the books of the Bible, in which he alternated between the Old and New Testa- ments, but in his discourses from isolated texts. He wrought the results of this study into his Sunday- school work, especially into the instruction given his teachers. His catechetical work had a Biblical rather BIBLICAL QUALITY ' 71 than a dogmatical or ecclesiastical quality, and his large confirmation classes attest, not only his pastoral zeal, but his attractiveness as a teacher. He availed himself of the expository method, as a wise homiletic and pastoral deviceT'm'getting difficulFand offensive themes, before his "congregation. A result of this Biblical habit of rnind was that his ordinary preaching always took the textual form. It was very likely the method in which he, itTHirassociations with the Evangelical preachers of the church, had become familiar, but he greatly improved upon the method. No textual preaching of his day, and none since, is comparable with Robertson's in freshness, suggestiveness, and forcefulness. His preaching shows how thoroughly he had grasped the homiletic signifi- cance and value of the Bible, and it demonstrates how fully he understood the importance of historic religion as interpreted^through experience, ior the practical lives of men, notwithstanding his .brilliant speculative and dialectical abilities, and his possibiHties thereby, for the most effective type of topical preaching. Let us now note some of the prominent features of this Biblical quality in his preaching. (i) And first, his grasp of the, histori^^. sense. He must know first of all, and so must Tiis" hearers know, the expUcit thought as it lay in the mind of the Biblical writer. >This historic sense is always present as ground- work. Hence his Scripture passage is always held in its contextual relations. His expository discourses espe- cially, as for example those on the Corinthian letters, the exposition of the last chapter of which closed his earthly ministry, show how well he had mastered the whole situation, how well he understood the historic 72 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS conditions, and how wide-reaching was his grasp of the ^yhole course of thought and how clear his conception of the experiences in Paul's life that furnish a back- ground for these letters. (2) His penetration into the.'inner suggestiveness)of his texts. He gets down under them, sinks himself into them, and throws up into the light what lies hidden there. He combined these two requisites in all success- ful Biblical preaching, viz. definite comprehension of the historic sense, and skill in detaching its inner ethical and spiritual suggestiveness. Defective preaching of the Biblical type has always disclosed a failure in one or the other of these conditions. Robertson's preaching combines duly the historic and the suggestive, the literal and the poetic, truth for the understanding and truth for the imagination, fact for our sense of reality, and principle for our practical guidance. The his- toric, however, appears only as the background and base of his procedure. He had what Rothe, speak- ing of Augustine, calls " exegetical divination," by which he means power of insight into the ethical and spiritual suggestiveness of the Scriptures, and which maylje called as well, indeed more appropriately, homiletic divination. He seizes the inner suggestiveness of his passage as by a kind of inspiration. "He did not," says his biographer, " choose his text in order to bring a doctrine out of it, but he penetrated to its centre and seized the principle it contains. It was the kernel, not the shell, for which he cared." This penetrating and suggestive quality is seen in the Ught he throws upon his texts in the broad processes of his discussion. He cultivated his imagination and his sympathies, and these BIBLICAL QUALITY 73 two qualities were greatly conducive to his suggestiveness as a Biblical preacher. His mind acted spontaneously and intuitively. He was, indeed, as already suggested, strong in dialectic, he was a master in subtle reasoning ; but imaginative insight was his most marked intellectual gift. It was preeminently the gift of the interpreter. The best interpreter in any field of knowledge is the man who combines patient investigation and ratiocinative skill with that sharpness of insight which is often only a happy guess of the imagination. The best interpreter of rehgious truth, and so far forth the best preacher, is the man who combines exegetical analysis with that sharpness of insight which is the gift of a trained imag- ination. Facts or truths are of but little significance or value without abihty to detect their inner meaning. With^Jtrained-imag-inatiqn, Robertson cp^mbined^ trained sympathies. He had a most delicate sense of ethical an3""spiritual realities, because he approached them through his sympathies. It is his ^conviction, very fre- quently expressed, that without the capacity of sympa- thy^piritual truth cannot be interpreted, as it cannot be apprehended. It is especially true that without it the character and life of_\^firisl7caFnot _be^^ stood nor successfully presented. His vivid apprehen- sion of Christ, his delicate sympathy with him, and his skill and persuasiveness in interpreting Christ's char- acter and life illustrate this. " He had," says his biog- rapher, " spent a world of study, of reverent meditation, of adoring contemplation, on the gospel history." To a friend, two years before his death, he gave this counsel, and it suggests the habit of his life. " Receive, imbibe, and then your mind will create. Poets are creators 74 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS because recipients. They open their hearts to Nature, instead of going to her with views of her already made and second-hand; so with Scripture, — patient, quiet, lon^^ revering Ustening tojt; then suggestiyeagii?'"" It is this quality of insight that enables him to grasp the underrunning principles of Biblical revelation. He has great skill in applying these principles. In his hands particular truths acquire new significance by reason of their vital relation to general truths. We discover the inner meaning of the specific truth in the light of the larger truth that is brought to bear upon it. Hejvas confident that in. his preaching he had. got at whatjvas fundamental. He speaks with confidence in one of his letters of having mastered P aul's^ " root thoughts." He sought what was fundamental .in the charaicterjand life of Christ. No modern preacher has been more successful in finding the centre of this char- acter and life or in making the discovery of it the key- note of his preaching. He felt that he had struck bottom. And it can hardly be doubted that his new, clear vision, and his quickened and expanded sense of the significance of Christ for his own and for all human life, was one of the influences that wrought in the change of his theological views. He found that the doctrinal standards of his church did not harmonize with his broadened conceptions of Christianity, and that they did not stand the test of broader Biblical criticism. He was driyen,back the more centrally and- fundamentally to historic Christianity, as he found himself relaxing his hold upon the doctrines of -his church. He found himself forced to look for ^fundamental principles, and when he had found them his pulpit power^was BIBLICAL QUALITY 75 doubled. The contrast, not so much in form as in substance, between his earlier and later preaching, is notable, and has been a matter of frequent comment. He felt at last that his feet were upon the rock, and it is because of this experience that Robertson became the most comprehensive, forceful, and persuasive inter- preter of Christ and of all human life in the light of his person, character, and work in his century. Other preachers have brought human life to the interpreta- tion of Christianity. He would bring Christianity to the interpretation of life. Other men have been stu- dents of humanity, and have found its best experi- ences, even its common experiences, even its experiences of sin and suffering, vindications and verifications of Christian truth. Robertson was indeed a student of life and of men, but he was first of all a student of Christian revelation, a student of ideal humanity as it exists in Christ, and he finds here the realization and the interpretation of all that is truly human. The mes- sage of Phillips Brooks to the world is this : Religion is human, religion is truly natural. Know yourself in your deepest needs ; know the deepmost significance of your own experiences ; know the world in its deep- est principles; get at its deepest meaning; interpret yourself and interpret the world aright, — and then you will know Christ, you will find an echo and a vindica- tion of His revelation to your soul. On the other hand, Robertson's message was. Know the deepest inner meaning of the life of Christ ; know it as containing the root principles of all human life, then you will have the key to your own human experiences, the key to all truly human life. '76 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS ; (3) We are thus brought to consider briefly Robert- son's skill in applying to ethical and spiritual needs the content of Biblical truth. He had far more tharTThe ordinary mental and moral impulse, which every genuine preacher must have, to reach out into the lives of his fellow-men and to apply the truth to their practical necessities. He was a diligent student of his age, and he sought to apply the principles of Christianity to its sgecial^wants. He was strongly moved by the political, I ecclesiastical, scientific, economic, social, and philan- Ithropic questions that were in agitation at the time of his appearance in public life. The democratic spirit that has since made such head in England and has . exerted so powerful an influence in public life was making itself felt in many ways. The conflict in the church, that resulted in Newman's break with it, was at its height when he took orders. Scientific theories were challenging the truth of the doctrines of the church. Carlyle was prodding the sluggish English public and rallying them to action with respect to the problems of poverty. Maurice and Kingsley were engaged in pushing their schemes of Christian social- ism. Robertson was profoundly impressed and in- fluenced by all this. He gained a powerful ascendency over the working-men of Brighton, and he interpreted Christianity to men of wealth with rare skill and balance of judgment. He was a student of social and economic conditions and problems, and applied the truths of Christianity and the spirit of Christian morality to them with great discretion and effectiveness. He was a student of physical science and of Biblical revelation BIBLICAL QUALITY TJ as related to scientific problems, and he brought the results of his studies to his people in expository dis- courses upon the Book of Genesis. He^was. a, student of his church, and he brought his regulative conceptions of^hnstiamty to bear upon the church problems of his time. " He studi^jd^ th^_£ojiUcaL.qi;£StiOAS of his day, sharing in large measure the democratic spirit that was gaining ascendency, and applying the principles of Biblical revelation to those problems of govern- ment that were stirring the minds of men, the con- crete results of which appeared in his expository lectures upon the Books of Samuel. He grasped the fundamental principles of all these problems, bring- ing them into relation with the fundamental prin- ciples of Christianity, and became the most skijful interpreter of Christian morality, as applied to the probleins~^of "associate human life, of any preacher of his day. (4) In the formal as well as material aspects of his preaching, that is, in the organizing of^jtjjg^^^material of the sermon, we find the prevailing / Biblicalyquality. In a word, it is always the textual^m^Qtlis^. In his choice of a text, he prefers more than a single isolated passage. TliFlopical preacher who abandons the text in-his discussion of the theme needs but a single passage. But the textual preacher will not isolate his passage. He will relate its elements in his dis- cussion. Contrast, in this regard, Robertson with Brooks. The Bibhcal quality of Robertson's introduc- tory approach to his discussion is seen in its explana- tory character. 78 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS The object is so to deal with the Biblical material of the text as to clear the way for the discussion. At one time it is a contextual explanation, disclosing the inner connection of thought and holding it in continuity. At another time it is verbal explanation, interpreting the meaning of stress words. Now it is the principle of contrast that is introduced for the purpose of height- ening the significance of the truth in hand. Again the approach is through some hedge of difficulty that must be cleared away before a path can be opened to the dis- cussion. Sometimes our attention is directed to the importance of the truth suggested, and the proper method of treatment is pointed out. But whatever be the method of approach, the text is the point of depar- ture, and the substance of his introductory thought is in some way explanatory. That the sermon has no formulated theme simply indicates that the content of the discussion attaches itself directly to the text, and is not drawn out of or through a theme that is assumed to represent the substance of the text. The topics, drawn in some way, in general directly from the text, but applied liberally in the way of accommodating ap- plication, are stated at the outset, and restated in the process of discussion. They summarize the most im- portant truths of the text. This textual habit prevailed in all periods of his preaching. The entire develop- ment is but an unfolding of the content of the textually suggested topics. It is his chosen process, " from within outward." This was a fundamental homiletic principre.^from which he never varied. Thus he un- folded Biblical truths as an interpreter, and was on principle, therefore, a textual preacher. First, interpret EDIFYING QUALITY 79 the inner significance of the truth that is given, then apply — it: — -T4ws-is"the~'gist"^r his' liomiletic science. The conclusion consists of a vigorous use of the truth discussed with reference to practical results, either the truth as a whole or some deduction from it, or the application of some of the most prominent points of the discussion, generally the last. Thus from text to conclusion we have the Biblical quality. And this illus-/ trates his theory of the preacher's function, namely, that he is an interpreter of the truth of revelation. And so his preaching has a prevailingly objective quality, and, considering his subjective tendencies, it is the more sig- nificant that it should be so objectively real. It shows the dominating power of BibUcal religion ; and that his preaching should be so suggestive to the imagination and so impressive to the feelings demonstrates at once the fruitfulness of the truths of Bibhcal revelation, and the genius of the preacher for making these truths supremely attractive, however unattractive they may have become through commonplace handhng. 2. Robertson's helpfulness as a thoughtful and edify- ing preacher is a natural suggestion from what has already been said. He recognized Christianity as a reUgion that may and must b^'tauglit^ It is something objectively given, not merely" " suljjecti ye^ y felt. It is not only an inner ^ xp^ience T'Hut a ^Ijistoric " faCt.^ It is to be interpreted, therefore, not merely^ as "i'h'expres- sion of pious feeling, but as a content of historic truth. ^ Christianity is life, but it is also light. It is t he he art that appxo£riates_it, but it is t he min d^that mediates _it Hence he would be known first of all as an interpreter. To nou. ih life he would furnish light. Truth is the 8o REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS pabulum of growing manhood. No preacher of his day in the Anglican church was comparable with him in wealth and range of material. There were more dis- tinctively intellectual preachers, perhaps, but they were so much the less real preachers. He was not an intellectual preacher, either as to type or measure, such as Mozley was. He was, indeed, a preacher for the more thoughtful and intellectual class of hearers, but he was not deficient in those qualities that char- acterize the popular preacher in the truest and best sense. His preaching took hold of the heart and con- science, as well as the mind, of his hearers. All of his published sermons disclose the depth and scope of his intellectual Hfe and the wealth of his spiritual life ; but there was probably an emotional and ethical in- tensity about his preaching of which these sermons, impressive as they are, hardly give us an adequate conception. He was not a whit the less practically effective as a preacher, that he was also an excep- tionally thoughtful preacher. He threw all of his fiery intensity into his work, and he profoundly moved his audience. But there was always a solid basis of strong and dignified thought, and his mental poise always mas- tered his emotions and made them the more impressive and effective. He was a man of thorough mental train- ing. From the beginning of his student life he had grap- pled valiantly with his intellectual tasks, and he was not satisfied with vague conceptions of any subject. He had a poetic conception of rehgion and was some- thing of a mystic, but he knew that when the mind is brought into intelUgent commerce with religious truth, it should yield definite and apprehensible res ris. He EDIFYING QUALITY 8 1 was a clear, keen thinker. His power of intellectual dis- crimination and analysis is most notable. He not only mastered the individual sermon, being exceedingly jeal- ous of all intrusions during the sacred hours of prepa- ration, but he mastered the theory of preaching. He had gradually formed a comprehensive conception of the preacher's work and worked in the light of it, but it emerged into a more definite form in the crisis of his life. He put the stamp of his own genius upon it, and carried it into effect most brilHantly in the Brighton ministry. It is evident that he saw from the first that the effectiveness of preaching, for incentive as well as for instruction, will depend upon orderly method. Even in the early years of his ministry, before his intellectual life had reached its full development, he was excep- tionally methodical in the ordering of his thought, and so extraordinarily clear. He was willing even that his method should be stereotyped, so only it proved to be definite and clear. "All public speakers," he says, " know the value of method. Persons not accustomed to it imagine that a speech is learned by heart. Know- ing a little about the matter, I will venture to say if any one attempted that plan either he must have a marvel- lous memory, or else he would break down three times out of five. It simply depends upon correct arrange- ment. The words and sentences are left to the moment, the thoughts methodized beforehand, and the words, if rightly arranged, will place themselves." This utter- ance is biographical. It indicates not only his intellec- tual conscientiousness in the work of preparation, but it suggests the secret, in large measure, of his remark- able success as an extemporaneous preacher. It is the 82 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS discriminating quality of thought that characterizes the sermon from beginning to end. The process of analy- sis and discrimination is one of his most characteristic didactic methods. By the process of exclusion and in- clusion he opens the way to the definitely conceived principles that he will discuss, and the entire movement of thought has a corresponding discriminatingness, dis- tinctness, and clearness, speaking at once to the mind and with scarcely less effectiveness to the emotions. As already suggested, he states his topics distinctly and clearly at the outset, and, for the purpose of aiding the mental processes of the hearer, he^restates^them in the course of the discussion. He handles his subjects with an easy mastery, for the truth comes out of the broad fields of his study and reflection, and has been excogitated along the line of a careful, logical method. The whole discussion has an admirable unity, although no comprehensive theme covering the eimre content of thought may be suggested, and although these sermons as we have them are confessedly fragmentary, they still have such completeness and symmetry as best serve their practical purpose, and the discussion is always intellectually and__spiritually^ suggestive . ..rather than exhaustive. He trained the man, and the individual sermon, "although carefully wrought out, was the product of such training. He had acute analytical power, as well as most extraordinary facility of sta^^"ent, and his imagination and emotions never ran" away with him. He was a student of the dialectical Aristotle, of the philosophical and metaphysicaTTTd wards, as well as of the idealistic Plato, and of the world's great poets, and " their writings," he says, " passed like the iron atoms EDIFYING QUALITY 83 of the blood into my mental constitution." This early and continuous intellectual discipHne was of immense value to him, especially in his later years. When once emancipated from what he regarded as the early limi- tations of his theological thinking, this habit of mind stood by him and helped him through the great intel- lectual and reHgious crisis of his life. He insisted upon the formation of such conceptions of Christianity as could be preached, because they would be free from all incomprehensible vagueness. It is surprising that .any man who carried such physical infirmities as he did should be able to present in extemporaneous form and with such freedom and facility, truth so thoroughly discriminated and so pre- cisely stated. No man could have done it who was not a thoroughly trained man. Robertson demonstrates, therefore, that one may be a thoughtful preacher in the best sense, and yet a popular preacher. Common people, so called, the working-men of Brighton, heard him gladly. He shows how strong an influence it is possible for a Christian preacher to exert upon the people of his time. A preacher of less firm mental fibre, no matter how fervid, could not have done.it. He dealt with living questions. He had a comprehensive grasp of the main facts and features of his subject, and they were presented most effectively in definite, dignified, impressive, often intense, and yet graceful form. He had a high conception of the dignity and sacredness of the pulpit, and he never made use of it for the purpose of pohtical, social, or ecclesiastical propagandism. He interested himself in living social and political subjects, and he made both pulpit and platform a throne of 84 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS power in the discussion of them from the Biblical, or ethical and rehgious point of view. No class mourned for him when he died more sincerely than the hard- handed working-men of Brighton. But he bears witness that the pulpit must keep in line with the intelligence of the age, or it will be shorn of its power. It is the work of the thoughtful, studious preacher that endures. 3. Robertson's career is helpful as suggesting the value for the preacher of deep and varied religious ex- periences. It is true that he had a special gift for feTrgioriT"*H is ethical and spiritual susceptibility reached the measure of genius. But this gift had been cultivated from early years, and his religious life deepened, enlarged, and enriched itself in all varieties of experience. We do not ordinarily think or speak of Robertson as a saint, although the writer has frequently heard young English- men thus designate him. But if we do not regard him as a saint, it is because we have learned to attach an inadequate significance to the term. He was not a faultless man. No saint is ever faultless. But with all his defects, which were temperamental and superficial, he was a modern saint, and this saintship was a moral and religious achievement. It was the conquest of his manly conscience and will. One of the notable things in his religious experience was its vitalizing power in his intellectual life. He laid great stress upon the ex- perience of the power of the truth in the heart, in order that it may become a more real and vital mental posses- sion. And this was a recognized fundamental principle in his preaching. A religious truth was of no special importance as a mere intellectual possession. He must feel its moral and spiritual power. It was not enough EXPERIMENTAL QUALITY 85 to think it out clearly ; he must feel it profoundly, and, holding it as a possession of the heart, it had new sig- nificance for the mind. He found a good deal of religious experience, especially in the Evangelical com- munion, that did not seem to touch the intelligence of men. It lingered in the realm of feeling or sentiment or practical zeal. Such rehgious experience could not produce preachers of Robertson's type. He knew the importance of an experience that dominates the intel- lectual life, and it was the depth and compass of his own experience that stood by him in the tempests of that life. His religious life was varied as well as profound. The story of his mental and moral struggle, and the revolution it wrought in his life, is known to the world, and it may almost be called one of the treasures of the modern church. It is the story of a great triumph. Its lesson is the power of a pure heart, of a good conscience, of a great piety, to steady the soul in the storms of doubt, of the vitalizing power of religion in the mental life, and it is most precious. He seemed to waver between the different schools that touched him, passing from the austere piety of the Evangelicals through the high churchliness of the Tractarians to the liberalism of the broad churchmen, but at bottom he was stable as a rock. During the Evangelical experiences of his early ministry, he led an unworldly, even an ascetic life, yet he was as saintly in the later breadth, as in the earlier limitations of his piety. He fasted often. He prayed long and strivingly. He read religious biography. 'He labored for the conversion of souls. He " was in the reg- ular habit of reading daily, with scrupulous adherence 86 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS to a plan, the works of eminently holy persons, whose tone was not merely uprightness of character and high- mindedness, but communion — a strong sense of personal and even living communion — with God besides." In later years he recalls " how far more peaceful " his mind used to be at that time in connection with this habit of life, and he resumes the habit, but under changed con- ditions. The experience, however, was too narrow for him. In his delicate ethical sensitiveness, he suspected that his moral life did not correspond with nor justify his emotional Hfe. His intellectual struggles brought him into a large place, where his larger mental, ethical, and spiritual wants were more fully met, and where his free nature had broader range. These experiences illus- trate, not only the staying power of piety, as we have seen also in the case of Schleiermacher, and its vitalizing energy in the mind's commerce with truth, but the anchorage ground that is furnished by the moral factor in religious experience. And in all these aspects the experiences of Robertson and Bushnell were similar. It was this variety of his experience also that fitted Robertson to understand and appreciate the truth in conflicting parties and in diverse statements thereof, and thus he became a mediator. No modern preacher has seen more clearly the truth that lingers beneath the forms of error, the good that is hidden under the forms of evil, and the higher unity that embraces all the seeming contradictions of truth. It was this breadth of experience that gave him touch- ing-points with men of different schools, liberated and liberalized his mind and heart, made it possible for him to receive truth from men as diverse in theological opinion PERSONAL QUALITY 87 as Channing and Newman, and that gave him, in the catholicity of his spirit, a most commanding place in the modern pulpit. It may not be appointed to every minister, nor may it be possible or necessary, to pass through such experiences as those of Robertson. But no man who is called to it and is as true to his own in- telligence and conscience and heart as he was, will fail to be greatly enriched by it. 4. Robertson illustrates the power, for the preacher, of a refined and forcefi:|}''personality. He was a man of most 'extraorclinarily quid^'and^delicate sensibilities, and he was so much the more a preacher because of it. For the true preacher is the man who not only sees clearly, but feels strongly. No man can preach witlTeffective- ness who is not emotionally responsive to those to whom he ministers. Few men have" evergiven themselves as he' didrbody and soul, with such utter self-forgetfulness, to the work in hand. A delicate organization, rendered more painfully acute in its sensibilities by disease, made him, in later years, subject to violent revulsions of feel- ing. He had strong antipathies, was not a man of easy good nature, although of a most generous and noble disposition, not a wide liker, and was probably not an altogether easy man to get on with. He was incapable of smallness or of malignity, but there were people whom he intensely disliked, and men who were base he detested with all the intensity of his high-strung and highly trained moral nature. And there was something immensely attractive about this ethical fierceness of the man. But he was a man of broad and tender sympa- thies. He declares, and with utmost truthfulness, that no class of human beings, except possibly the epicureans, 88 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS nor indeed would he exclude them, was ever beyond the reach of his fellow-feeling. He conscientiously cultivated this. It was th~e reahzation of his Christian principles as well as manifestation of his Christian affection. He cultivated his poetic susceptibilities and his heart was softened and tranquillized by it. It made him more intensely human. We have seen his love for the great poets. He was capable of great reverence, and Wordsworth especially filled the longing of his heart for a realized ideal of human greatness and goodness. Tennyson's " In Memoriam " expressed and interpreted for him, as it has for many another of his fellows in the modern ministry, his own deepest experiences and wrought productively in his feeling and imagination. He loved this pleasant world, and, although a sadly burdened man, who often sighed that the end might soon come, rejoiced in it as his transient home. He had a poet's eye for its beauties, and he described them with singular felicity. All this was greatly tributary to his power as a preacher. It quick- ened his insight, cultivated his perception of analogies, gave him increasing skill in illustration, and enriched his literary style, which is notable for its simplicity, clear- ness, dignity, and intensity. It enriched and intensified his sympathies, nurturing a broader and more delicate love for men. It fitted him^ to. receive impressions from them when he stood before them. He was able to see them in their ideal manhood. With all his manly British sense, he had great facility in idealization, and his poetic studies furthered it. He fled from the world into fellowship with his poets and tarried in this high realm as in a sanctuary and a refuge. He forgot men PERSONAL QUALITY 89 in their individual weaknesses and meannesses and sins. By reason of this deUcate susceptibiHty of feehng he was a man of notable weaknesses. He was too sensi- tive for this rude world and became morbidly so. It brought him sometimes to the verge of unmanliness. He longed for a sympathy which he did not get, or thought he did not get, or did not know that he did get, and it was not always easy for him to believe in its reality, even when the demonstration was before him. He was fr ank to a fault and poured out his complaints into the ears of his friends. He coul^jiqt_conceal..what was going on within him, and if he had forced himself to d^it7his^ preaching would have been shorn of half its power. But on the whole it is surprising that we detect no more specifically in his public utterances the struggle of his life. His strong manhood saved him. He never lost himself in his dreams nor in his emotions. His strong mind and valiant heart and sturdy will domi- nated alTliendency to excess of sentiment or of emotion, and all his studies but added fuel to the flame of his devotion to men. His tastes, as we have seen, were aristocratic, but his sympathies democratic, and no one can fail to see and feel that he is in contact with a man of superb manliness. In tellectual indep endence and rnoral courage are the two strong;_tjait_s^jpf Jhjs ma^ and the intensity of his emotional nature but made them the more impressive. He was a born intellectual leader. The Brighton ministry was one of transcen- dent power. He was a free man, at last emancipated from an intellectual thraldom that had crippled his pulpit power. The power of the Christian pulpit is conditioned by its freedom. No man can speak force- 90 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS fully who cannot speak freely. This intellectual cour- age of Robertson's was an immense power. It had a martial quality. He was rash at times, but what soldier in the thick of the fight will not sometimes adventure rash things .-' Practical wisdom is a pastoral virtue. A preacher must know his resources and the conditions of his message. But if any man on earth needs a soldierly courage, it is he. This combination of delicacy and forcefulness, of fine feeling, strong inteUigence, and strenuous will, made him the preacher for many classes of people. The so-called common people felt the power of his sympathy and respected his manly intelligence and sincerity. They saw his large- and tender-heartedness, but felt too that he was a man. Imaginative people were attracted by the semi- poetic glow '61 "his speech. The young were attracted by his earnestness and grace, and the sceptical by their confidence in his ability to sympathize with them, or at least to understand them, in their intellectual perplexi- ties. He illustrates most strikingly the tremendous power in pulpit oratory of a sympathetic heart and a forceful will. Without them one may' be a pulpit teacher of a sort, but not a preacher. All this is connected with what in our day calls itself the magnetic quality in the personality. He was a man of Grecian beauty of face and grace of form, and alto- gether of a singularly attractive physical personality. He was charged with physical nerve force, and he spake with a musical sweetness of voice, with grace and force combined of physical movement, that sent his words like flying arrows, swift and straight, into the quick. He never wrote his sermons. They were carefully studied, PERSONAL QUALITY 91 and came out of the broad fields of his culture and training. They bear the mark of thorough, earnest thought and comprehensive study. They are a testi- mony as to the importance of training the man in habits of clear, broad thinking. He has a strong and compre- hensive grasp upon the main facts and truths of Chris- tianity. He develops his subject in its broad outlines in an altogether quickening, suggestive, and attractive manner. It was one of his homiletical principles to preach suggestively rather TharT" (Togmatically. He wourdHnTOT^reS^Tir'th'e "truth in abstract or dialectical form for the indoctrination of the understanding, but in such way as to secure an emotional interest in it, and it was the more sure to reach the heart of the hearer. His preaching is clearly discriminated thought, con- veyed by the language of feeling and imagination, and it sugge sts mo re than is said. His biographical ser- mons, which are masterpieces of this type of preaching, are eminently of this suggestive order. The sermon on Balaam and on John the Baptist illustrate the quality above mentioned. " The Parable of the Sower," " God's Revelation of Heaven," "Jacob's Wresthng," "The Good Shepherd," " The Irreparable Past," " The Illusive- ness of Life," which are among his most impressive ser- mons, all bear the same mark of breadth, insight, and suggestiveness. The singularly impressive character of his preaching is largely conditioned by its penetrating suggestiveness. This is also connected with its fragmen- tary character and its not infrequent suggestion of inadequacy to the full demands of the subject. But it was his purpose never to treat the subject exhaustively. The truth comes to'iis in glimpses, but they are glimpses 92 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS of great and fruitful truths, and the mind follows the sub- ject discussed because the feelings are enlisted and the imagination stimulated, and thus impel the mind to ac- tion. He carefully prepared the outline, jotting it down on slips of paper, sometimes fully and sometimes mea- grely, not infrequently leaving only salient stress words. But the sermon was always well in hand. He permitted nothing to turn him aside from careful preparation, and he always gave his mind free movement along the line of an orderly logical plan. Thus he went into the pul- pit. He begins with the deliberation of self-mastery, but soon warms with his theme, and launches out uncon- strained upon the broad stream of his thought. His frame would sometimes quiver with the intensity of his emotion, his keen eye seemed to shoot his congregation through, and with most graceful movement, in absolute unconsciousness of himself, he would pour out his treasures upon them ; and in all this' there was no loss of self-possession. His delicate instincts, his refined tastes, his firm mental poise, always rescued him from going to pieces. In this combination of intensity and self-posses- sion he proved himself to be an orator. He speaks deprecatingly, indeed, of oratory as an art. But it is evident that he had carefully cultivated his rare gift of speech, that he had mastered an impressive literary style, and hekjiew its real worth. 5. The rnetoric^ qualities of Robertson's preaching are a helpfmSttniy, and our discussion would be incom- plete without some reference to them. It is true that the sermons in their present form are not the original product. It was probably fuller and more complete than what is left to us. And yet the product as we RHETORICAL QUALITY 93 have it may be assumed to represent adequately his lit- erary style, for the sermons were either written out by him after they were preached, before the tide of the preaching impulse had ebbed, or were revised by his own hand from the notes of friends, or were taken down stenographically. Moreover, the sermons in their pres- ent form bear a common mark, and when compared with his lectures and letters, we discover the same gen- eral literary characteristics, although confessedly the letters are sometimes more accurate in expression than the sermons or lectures. We catch at once the note of reality in all his utterances. He detested all artifice in speech. " I believe I could have become an orator," he says in one of his letters, " had I chosen to take pains. I see what rhetoric does and what it seems to do, and I thoroughly despise it, . . . and yet perhaps I do it injus- tice ; with an unworldly, noble love to give it reality, what might it not do ! '^ 'He certainly did no injustice in this utterance to the stilted, artificial rhetoric that has some- times been introduced into the Christian pulpit, but he did scant justice to the best type of modern pulpit rhet- oric, and least of all did he do justice to his own rhetoric. He not only might have become, he did become, an ora- tor of great effectiveness, although confessedly the orator is lost in the preacher ; and it is perfectly evident that he did "take the pains " with his rhetoric at least, if not with his oratory, such as all effective public speakers have taken, and without which no man can expect to be effective. And it was precisely that " un- worldly noble love " of his that rescued him from all artifice and gave to his speech the ring of reality. His words always express what is true to his thought, feel- 94 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS ing, and conviction. Form as such he did not cultivate. He was careful and conscieirtious in his rhetorical cul- ture, and it is perfectly evident that he had trained himself to use his mother tongue with effectiveness. We hear of skilful debate and of careful literary cul- ture during his university days. But his diction was alive with the energy of his thought and feeling. Hence there is but little in his style as such that arrests atten- tion to itself, and nothing that is odd or obtrusive because self-conscious, as in the style of Carlyle, with which Robertson was familiar, but which he never allowed to influence him in his own method of expres- sion. The notable thing is that there is so little that is noticeable. We..-are impressed with the thought^ and feeling, and not with the form that is their instrument. Form is wholly~subordinate to substance, and the result is that the style is impressive in its general fitness to do its work, rather than in any salient peculiarities. Hence, simpjicity^and^naturalness are its fundamental qualities. It is the moral sincerity and reality of the man that explain this unobtrusiveness of diction. It is in harmony with the best rhetorical and literary culture of our time and is the most appropriate instrument for the work of the pulpit. For this reason Robertson's rhetorical and literary form is worthy of the preacher's study. The n ote of r eflection is also recognizable in his style. It suggests the serious, solid, discriminating thinker, the man who is a searcher for the truth and who lives in fellowship with it. We find here the diction of a man who never obtrudes the result of his philosophic reflection, but who has been trained to deal with what RHETORICAL QUALITY 95 is fundamental. By entering the fibre of his thought " like iron atoms into his blood," the products of his study penetrated his diction. It is a type of speech, level to the apprehension of the average man, but it is the speech of a thinker. Hence the quality of perspi- cuity, of solidity, and of intellectual dignity. Because of this intellectual dignity and strength, it is a balanced style, without an excess of intensity or an overexuber- ance of fancy. The teaching quality is fundamental,^ according to his conception of what the preacher's work should be. It speaks to the mind. It is the speech of a man who has taugHFIiirmind to deal with principles, and his tongue to utter them in clear, definite, forceful, and often graceful speech. The quality of intellectual comprehensiveness is manifest in his style, and discloses his skill in crowding large thoughts into small compass of form. But the quality of intellectual discrimination, definiteness, and accuracy is not the less manifest, and the discriminating quality of his statement is often associated with cogency and felicity of statement. The idealistic quality of his mind is also manifest in his style. Thought is "represented in the diction of the imagination. It is therefore the suggestive style. He illustrates from nature^ art, literature, and from the higher ranges of human experience, and his language is attractive in its semi-poetic glow. He draws_ largely from the tragic aspects of human Uf e, and liis sympathy with^suffenng "and "sorrowing" men, and especially with ■ the Great Sufferer, imparts a tone of seriousness, often of sadness, and not infrequently a tone of most impressive solemnity to his speech. The diction that expresses his moods, whether of the higher inspirations or of the sadder 96 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS sympathies, are most felicitous in their grace of move- ment, as well as most forceful in their intensity, moving at once the conscience and the heart as with great prophetic voice. Perhaps the emotional and ethical intensity of his nature, what may be called the martial quality of the man, is most readily recognized in his style. It is the language of a soul keyed to the highest pitch of intensity. The opening sentences of his discourses are deliberate, reflective, an^discriminating, speaking tranquilly to the mind, and awakening mental interest in the truth in hand. The close of the sermon is sometimes shot through as with a flame of moral and emotional passion that is almost overwhelming. The words are short, the sentences are compact, great thoughts are crowded into small compass, and great emotions explode in short, sharp, abrupt vocal utterances. It is like the short, sharp, double-quick of a soldier. , It is no leisurely movement, for passion sways the soul. The architecture of the sentence is twisted, words involuted, stress words repeated, ictus thrown where impression is sought, order of the sentence wrecked, and fragments regathered in new form. It is the vocabulary and the syntax of con- centrated energy. It is the voice of a prophet who is straitened within himself till his message be given, and his mission be accomplished. We have lingered wholly with the beneficent lessons of Robertson's short and remarkable life, for one finds almost nothing that was not beneficent. But if we were looking for admonition, we might find it in his too subjectiye life. He lived too much in his emotions, and could not emancipate himself from their tyranny. He SUBJECTIVE QUALITY 97 had his own inner world, where he did not always find a comfortable home. He brooded too much upon his own subjective states. It was in much an unhealthy hfe. It lacked a certain steadiness which is the gift of the healthier mind. He was restless and the victim of extreme revulsions. Physical disease, temperament, an overwrought brain, the conditions of life, explain it. If he had not anchored at historic Christianity, he might have been . wrecked. Even as it was, he sometimes laid disproportionate stress upon the subjective experi- ences of the individual in validating the claims of Chris- tianity, and as the measure of all objective religious truth. Hence he wavered : and yet, when we recall the singular impressiveness of his solemn earnestness ; when we remember that those penetrating utterances, those outcries of his restless spirit, were wrung out of the agonies of that wondrous inner life ; when we remember that his great message came out of the struggles of his soul and that these struggles are part of its very sub- stance and form, — we come back to the conviction that just here was the hiding of his power, and we say with ourselves that we would not have this disquieted, pas- sionate soul other than it was. We echo the words that "stand upon the marble at Brighton : " He awakened the holiest feelings in poor and in rich, in ignorant and learned. Therefore is he lamented as their guide and 'v—comforter." CHAPTER III HENRY WARD BEECHER From the most gifted English preacher of his century we readily pass to the most briUiant of American preachers. Robertson and Beecher belong to the same period, came into prominence at the same time, and may be classed as representatives of the same broad school. Beecher was the elder born by nearly three years, but the same year in which Robertson entered upon his short but brilliant career at Brighton Beecher began his longer, more varied and eventful, and not less brilliant, career in Brooklyn. Strikingly divergent in type of genius and of culture, in delicacy of intellectual and aesthetic fibre, and in the processes of their develop- ment, they still share much in common. They were born preachers and intellectual leaders of men. They were men of like independence of spirit, breadth, and intensity of sympathy, and of the same quenchless Anglo-Saxon courage. They belong to the same gen- eral school of religious thought, and they look out upon God's kingdom from the same general point of view. They were both subject to influences that wrought strong intellectual and spiritual revulsions, and they both modified and enlarged their views in the process of their development. They exhibit like humanistic and philanthropic tendencies, are path-breakers in the work of the Christian pulpit, and may be classed as epoch- making men in modern preaching. 98 REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 99 THE REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER Mr. Beecher was a typical American. He came from a Puritan ancestry, and his youth was spent in Puritan communities. It is no small honor to Litchfield County, Connecticut, that it produced and nurtured two such representatives of Puritan Americanism as Henry Ward Beecher and Horace Bushnell. In his prophetic intui- tion, his high aspiration, his vivid imagination, his intense love of freedom and detestation of all forms of tyranny, Beecher was a Puritan idealist. In his practical common sense, his knowledge of human nature as distinguished from his knowledge of individual men, his grasp and free handling of facts, and in his skill in adjusting the high ideals of religion to common life, he was a Puritan reahst. He had the nervous intensity of the typical New Englander. He was an enthusiastic democrat. He inherited in a most extraordinary measure that independence of spirit that gave birth to our popular institutions, and no man of his day did more in all ways to foster that spirit. In him American patriotism found an almost ideal embodiment. In birth, training, culture, as in genius and spirit, he belonged to us wholly, and it has been well said of him that he was "the pride of America." No man in the nation could more ap- propriately, and none more effectively, have spoken for us in England during the War of the Rebellion. ' By the power of his personality and the skill and cogency of his speech he turned the tide of opposition against the Union cause. The hostility of the ruling classes evoked all his patriotic and belligerent instincts, and it is fortunate for us that those courageous utter- lOO REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS ances of his found so ready a response among the manly middle classes of the mother country. From a small spark, the consciousness of vocation to speak for his people burst into a flame that scorched the arrogant, hostile government, and kindled the democratic enthu- siasm of the common people. And this awakened con- sciousness of vocation was an index of his supreme fitness for his task, for which his countrymen will be forever grateful. It was as if all the forces of the loyal nation, with its political idealism, its patriotic devotion, its broad philanthropy, its love of freedom and hatred of tyranny, its prophetic outlook into the future, and its firm grasp of the case in hand, were stirring within him, as the forces of the German people were stirring in the soul of Luther. In that brilliant campaign he stood as the embodiment of the spirit of American freedom and loyalty and nationahty, as Luther, at Worms, as the embodiment of the German Reformation. It was one of the most signal triumphs of oratory in the history of human speech. It was also one of the most signifi- cant exhibitions of the power of a great personality as the unofficial representative of a nation. But we have chiefly to do with Mr. Beecher as a representative American preacher. In larger measure than in any other modem American preacher, there appeared in him always, in his own unique and inimitable manner, many of those qualities that distinguish the preaching of this country. That he has exerted so effective an influence in modifying our preaching is due to the fact that he was so distinctively American in his qualities. It is for this reason that he has contributed more, perhaps, than any other American preacher to the production of a REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER lOI modern type of American preaching. He gave expres- sion to the half-consciousness of the need, and the half- blind groping after, a better homiletic spirit and method. Of Mr. Beecher's place in American citizenship, of his influence in the cause of reform, of his significance in various lines of secular activity, it is not our purpose to speak ; nor is it possible, within permissible limits, to attempt an exhaustive analysis of his singular gifts as a preacher. It remains for us to direct attention to a few of those salient qualities which are in a degree representative, but which appeared in him in his own peculiar manner and measure. I . The strongly individualistic quality of Mr. Beecher's preaching at once arrests attention. In his article on the " History of Preaching," in the second edition of the "Real Encyklopadie,"! Professor Christlieb of Bonn pre- sents the following estimate of Mr. Beecher as a preacher: " He was without question the most highly gifted and versatile of modern American preachers, the Shake- speare of the pulpit of our day. The earlier period of his preaching, however, as of his work for social reform (note especially his self-sacrificing cooperation for the abolition of slavery), as disclosing his full greatness, is to be distinguished from the later period. A sound under- standing, lively imagination, an altogether inexhaustible wealth of genius and wit, religious earnestness, daunt- less courage, fiery patriotism, good will toward all men, ardent self-sacrificing love, responsiveness to all that is human, to politics and ethics, education and religion, art and philosophy, mechanics, agriculture and horticul- ture (so that he once said, 'I study everything except 1 Vol. XVIII, 1888, p. 644. I02 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS theology '), profound knowledge of human nature, and of all classes in human society, great facility of expression, were blended in this preacher in an altogether phenome- nal manner, and contributed to him a many-sidedness so kaleidoscopic and a freshness of treatment so original that he was for a long time the pride of America. Other preachers before and contemporaneous with him were greater theologians, and had prof ounder knowledge of the Scriptures, but no one gathered material for pul- pit discourse from so wide a realm. He spoke upon no subject that he had not studied. But he was wholly averse to systematic theology and could often make it a subject of ridicule. The din of conflict between Old and New School Presbyterianism, that raged about him in his youth, had made theology distasteful to him, and in general all abstract methods of preaching. If he had to touch upon moot questions in theology, he preferred to leave the exact point at issue indeterminate. Christ and love were the centre of all his theology, and in lay- ing stress upon the love of God, His righteousness failed of due recognition. In his exposition he never dealt with dry abstractions, but always penetrated to the full, fresh life. Few could electrify and sway an audience as he could. He moved them to tears, often very copi- ously, as well as to laughter. He could change his voice and delivery from the quiet, gentle, and confiden- tial tone to the most penetrating severity, and then sud- denly he became fiery and his eye flashed and cheek glowed. But when he depicted with moving pathos, for example, the miseries of mankind, so that all were melted to tears, just then would come those jests and witticisms that are almost never lacking in his preaching, by means REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 103 of which not only is the assembly provoked to loud laughter, but even the force of his piercing thrust is at once broken. Under the influence of these witticisms impressions of sin and wrong are soon forgotten. Edi- fication gives place to entertainment ; and, alas, it is pre- cisely this irresistible humor, this lack of reverence in the treatment of sacred things, that draws many to Plym- outh church, while at the same time it must be ac- knowledged that the more serious-minded Americans openly condemn it. Add to this his great dramatic gift, whereby for example he would imitate with singular exactness the movements and speech of a drunkard, or of a blacksmith, or a fisherman, or a backwoodsman, in their various calUngs. But even in addition to such transgressions of the bounds of ecclesiastical dignity, there was the frequent introduction of social, political, educational, and such Uke subjects, which, according to our taste, have too little direct reference to edification, while at the same time he theoretically and practically exalted good will above conscience. On the other hand, it was to have been wished that the element of spiritual experience had been represented less fragmentarily and more richly and edifyingly in his preaching. He did but little pastoral work in his church. For the last fif- teen years of his Hfe, the theology of this anti-Calvinist and theistic evolutionist, probably through the influence of the writings of Herbert Spencer, showed itself to be in essential features unscriptural, as for example in his doctrine of creation and of reconcihation, his Christol- ogy, his views of the specific authority of the Scriptures ; and his reputation and influence decidedly declined. ■ He always preached extemporaneously. Even when he I04 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS brought written notes into the pulpit (as I myself saw him make use of them), his best thoughts seemed to come to him in the course of his address under the inspiring influence of the thousands that gathered about him. " By reason of the introduction of new thoughts, there was often no very close coherence in his discourses. But practical application, as exactly fitted to the Ameri- can character, was never lacking. In wealth of genius doubtless the superior of Spurgeon, moving often, by reason of the peculiarities of his theological culture, his versatility and wide reading, in realms that were foreign to Spurgeon, and by reason of his use of the language of scientific culture more attractive to and more effec- tive with the cultivated classes, Beecher is nevertheless, by reason of those questionable defects and idiosyn- crasies, and at last by reason of the confusion of his theological point of view, greatly inferior to Spurgeon with respect to concentrated and fruitful efforts among his hearers and readers, despite his great services to his country as philanthropist and social reformer." The value of this estimate is not materially diminished by our failure to agree with it at all points. From some of its criticisms Mr. Beecher's countrymen, who knew most of his preaching, would dissent. It may be ques- tioned whether the critic has formed an adequate judg- ment of the weight and permanence of Mr. Beecher's influence as a preacher, patriot, or reformer. Doubtless his personal influence diminished during the last years of his life, but his work is a permanent possession. He was not a close thinker upon theological subjects, but it may be questioned whether the critic's theological REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 105 point of view furnishes an adequate test of Beecher's theological soundness. Those who know Mr. Beecher's work, and can justly estimate its permanent value, will dissent from the critic's judgment of the sensational, dramatic character of his preaching, and will regard it as exaggerated and as conveying an erroneous con- ception of its edifying character. It is a mistake to estimate him as a trivial, sensational preacher. But Professor Christlieb's estimate as a whole is of value. It comes from an independent, outside source. It is the judgment of an exceptionally inteUigent historical student and critic of Christian preaching, and of one who was trained in a very different homiletic school from that in which Mr. Beecher was trained. Particu- larly valuable is the estimate of Mr. Beecher's greatness and uniqueness as a preacher, and of his striking indi- vidualistic qualities. He has been universally regarded as unique among the preachers of his day ; by most he has been estimated as superior in popular effectiveness to all other American preachers of whatever period, and by not a few as the greatest pulpit orator of the Chris- tian church. In the quality and measure of his pulpit power he was unquestionably altogether exceptional. It has been said of him, and perhaps no more perti- nent word was ever said of him, that he was a great original personality, rather than a great original mind.^ He certainly was not a path-breaker into new realms of truth or into new methods of conceiving truth, as Bush- nell was. In the ordinary sense of the term, he was not a student, not a patient investigator or discoverer. The speculative understanding was for him to no con- 1 Rev, H. R. Haweis, Cont. Review, Vol. XIV, 1873. Io6 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS siderable extent the organ of religious knowledge. He had neither the deep intellectual penetration nor the delicate speculative subtlety of Bushnell. He used his imagination, his feeling, his sympathy, as the organ of religious knowledge. His scientific equipment was meagre. He knew but little of the philosophical, his- torical, or critical method in modern theological investi- gation. His prevailing intellectual interests were not so largely theological as were those of Bushnell, not- withstanding Bushnell's affiliation with Beecher in the habit of decrying theological science. He had not the subtle intellectual penetration of Robertson, nor his close mental training, nor his skill as an interpreter. Hence Beecher's influence upon the more thoughtful, cultivated, and better-trained portion of the community has not been equal to that of Bushnell or Robertson. But upon the masses of the American people, upon the laity of the churches in all denominations, it has per- haps been much greater than that of any other Ameri- can, or possibly any other English-speaking, preacher within the last century. And it is precisely the origi- nality and the size of his personality, its freshness, its vitality, its sympathy, its irresistible energy, that ac- counts for this influence. It was a battery charged with psychical and physical impulse and energy that, break- ing through all barriers, found copious discharge accord- ing to its own free method. It was his vocation to deal with the old truths of evangelical Christianity, modified in conception and statement in accordance with the native energy of his large, rich imagination, emotion, and sympathy, in which he disclosed no strikingly origi- nal insight and no scientific grasp. These modifica- REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 10/ tions were in line with a broader and more humanistic view of human life, of the nature of man and of God, of Christ and of the kingdom of redemption, than was prevalent in his early years. But, after all, the truths with which he dealt were at bottom the old truths of evangelical theology. It was largely his unique method of stating the truth, it was his impulsive, extravagant utterance, that often obscured the substantial evangehcal quality of his preaching. It was one-sided and frag- mentary rather than unevangelical, at least during the greater portion of his pubHc career. At the close of life his point of view doubtless materially changed, and the earlier thinking was not adjusted to the later. But, taking his career as a whole, it was his conscious voca- tion to give new accent to the old truths of the redemp- tive love of God in Christ, to clothe the old truths in new, fresh, concrete forms, and to quicken and impress his hearers rather than to indoctrinate them. Not that he failed to be an edifying preacher, not that he was deficient in clearness and cogency as an interpreter of truth, but the energies of his emotion and imagination dominated him, and he was more persuasive than he was convincing. He gave new emphasis, if not signifi- cance, to the old truth of the presence of God in the soul of man, and to the love of God as the unifying principle of the moral character of both God land man. His Christology and soteriology had from an early period the modern note, not as the result of a clear apprehension of the historical and critical method of approach to the study of the person and work of Christ, but as product of his own intense personal religious experiences and of the reaction of his own capacious I08 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS human sympathies against the traditional Christology and soteriology of the church. And while in all this there was but little contribution in the formal or mate- rial sense to the stock of our pulpit theology, in the wondrously blended elements of his complex personal- ity he was a distinct and original product. Freedom from conventionalities, large indulgence for personal peculiarities, unrestricted vent to personal im- pulses, bold assertions of the inalienable rights of the homiletic personality, are the dominant characteristics of his preaching, and he more fully than any other man has been influential in furthering this tendency in the preaching of the country. In him it reached nearly its extreme limit. His freedom is sometimes almost homi- letic lawlessness, approximating the grotesque. There is a lack of delicacy of sentiment, as of a personality too vigorous and virile to be mindful of aesthetic re- quirements, in some of his noblest and most helpful dis- courses. They are marred by expressions that may be tolerated, but barely so, in the heat of extemporaneous speech, and may be carried by the uplifting power of the sermon as a whole, without those violent revulsions of feeling that are fatal to salutary impression ; but which, in fact, check its movement toward the highest altitudes and which in the printed form are inexcusable, and espe- cially so in the treatment of themes that have become exceptionally sacred in Christian experience. Foreign- ers, whose homiletic training had been more formal and conventional than that of this country, and who could not readily enter into the spirit of American license, naturally reproached Mr. Beecher with an almost irre- ligious irreverence. But those who are able to measure REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 109 him by a larger homiletic standard, and who know the preponderance of his influence, understand that, after all these are but surface imperfections. At bottom, there is a strong genuine moral and rehgious earnest- ness, and those who listened to him continuously learned to pass such demonstrations of individuality, as surface incidents that were not chargeable to fundamental de- fects These free manifestations of personal impulse were", in fact, largely inseparable from the sources of his singular power as a preacher, and we easily forget its grotesque features, for it is part of a great benefi- cent force. This individualism was an inheritance. He belonged to a family, each one of which made a distinctive mark upon his or her generation. Each was notable for striking idiosyncrasies. Mr. Beecher was not unaware of the defects that were involved in the idiosyncrasies of his genius, and did not regard himself as wholly responsible for them personally. He recog- nized their source in a temperament which was an in- heritance. In an address of singular interest and power, to the New York and Brooklyn Association of Minis- ters 1 near the close of his career, he refers to his per- sonal peculiarities and to the misapprehensions to which they exposed him as a preacher, in the followmg lan- guage • " I am what I am by the grace of God through my father and mother. I have my own peculiar tempera- ment, I have my own method of preaching, and my method and temperament necessitate errors. I am not worthy to be related in the hundred thousandth degree to those more happy men who never made a mistake m the pulpit. I make a great many. I am impetuous, I " Life of Beecher," by Abbott and Halliday, p. 485- no REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS am intense at times on subjects that deeply move me, I feel as though all the oceans were not strong enough to be the power behind my words, nor all the thunders that were in the heavens, and it is the necessity that such a nature as that should give such intensity at times to parts of doctrine as exaggerates them, when you come to bring them into connection with a more rounded out and balanced view, I know it. I know it as well as you do, I would not do it if I could help it, but there are times when it is not I that is talking, when I am caught up and carried away, so that I know not whether I am in the body or out of the body, when I think things in the pulpit that I never could think of in the study, and when I have feelings that are so far different from any that belong to the lower or normal condition, that I can neither regulate nor understand them. I see things and I hear sounds, and seem, if not in the seventh heaven, yet in such a condition that leads me to under- stand what Paul said, that he heard things that it was not possible for man to utter. I am acting under such a temperament as that, I have got to use it, or not preach at all," It is this emotional exuberance, this passionate intensity, this irrepressible energy of physical and psychical personality, this irresistible impulse of nature, which is the demon of genius, that must be our starting-point in estimating these peculiarities in the conception, exposition, representation, and enforcement of the truth. Now, I venture to affirm that it is pre- cisely this sort of personality, individualistic, unique, transcendent in power though it be, that becomes repre- sentative of the national temperament, of its intensity, force, self-assertion, independence, emancipation from REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER III bondage to tradition and convention and custom. All the forces that have been at work in the development of national character seemed to play through him. It was this impressibility, this quick responsiveness to all that is human, that rendered it impossible for him to keep any question of human interest out of the pulpit, or to discuss it with tranquil deliberation. The conditions of his life also contributed largely to his individualistic qualities. His early home life, em- ployments, free access to the outer world, his own self- preoccupations, all contributed to the awakening of the sense of freedom within him, and all became tributary to his independence of character. He always looked back upon those early years with peculiar interest and knew what they had done for him. In all important matters of family training he was held with a firm hand, but in the minor matters of the household there was a good deal of freedom, and this freedom furnished scope for his individual impulses. He was left to shift for himself largely, and this "gave him early habits of vigor and reliance." Like Bushnell, he knew the early " salutary hmitations." He worked upon the parsonage farm, had but few luxuries, and these occupations and limitations, in his, as in Bushnell's case, fostered that healthy, manly independence that stood by him through life. In constant contact with nature, he entered into sympathy with its wild freedom. He " had a world of things to do," and " he did not come much in contact with the family government." He did not come early to the consciousness of his power. It was wild impulse, rather than intelligent sense of power, that incited him to revolt against the restraints that would check the 112 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS free expression of his personal forces. Later on, as is the case with every man of genius, he became conscious of his gift, and then he freely chose such courses as would secure fullest and freest play to his individuality. His early habit — or lack of habit — of study was con- ducive to the same result. In college he would not be limited by the curriculum, and became a sort of free lance in every sort of intellectual combat. Whatever may have been the ill result as regards closeness of mental training, one fancies that his free range in the college libraries may have furnished, as in the case of PhilHps Brooks, an important stimulus to his slumber- ing mental, aesthetic, and emotional energies. His training in debate in the college societies, his free expression of religious feeling in the college prayer- meetings, his addresses in neighboring towns on religious and other subjects, were all promotive of the same result. Even the defect in his speech, which he was obliged to master by the most painstaking effort, became ultimately tributary to the same end. Those oratorical efforts under difficulties and the thorough training in elocution, then begun and continued through many years, served to awaken the free preaching impulse, which soon developed itself strongly on the didactic, the ethical, the aesthetic, and emotional sides. Such training gave him vent. Self-expression evoked the slumbering orator. The great English preachers of the seventeenth century, particularly Barrow and South, at first in a formal manner which involved unfruitful imitation, but ultimately in the larger material sense, were early tributary to him, awakening his own preach- ing gifts. A close study also of apostolic preaching REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 113 was a source of awakening and guidance. That he was not long shut within the limits of city life in Boston, where in his boyhood his father had moved, but was sent for study into the country he loved so well, was at once a security against his roving impulses and a positive educative influence. That in his college days he came into a new experience of the grace of God and won a new conception of His character, which carried him beyond the Hmitations of a traditional faith, secured for his religious life a more intensely personal character. That in his freedom and native catholicity of spirit he reacted against the polemical theology of his day and'^ against the violence of theological controversy is an index that points the way to his future life. That in the \ divinity school he pursued an independent course, col- lecting what his free spirit could readily assimilate and rejecting the rest, that he came to the knowledge of his own expository powers in the work of teaching the Bible in Sunday-school, — all this had its part in the culture of those qualities that were most distinctive and individual. Moreover, it was quite a necessity that the freedom of the relatively unorganized life of the great West, to which he went while yet a young man, and where the first two years of his ministry were spent, should still further and more rapidly have developed his native gifts. In this early ministry he found him- self. The influences of those pioneer experiences upon his future career can hardly be overestimated. What might have been the result upon his development as a preacher if he had begun his career in staid and con- servative New England one may seriously question. Doubtless the genius of the man, as in Bushnell's case, 114 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS would have triumphed measurably over whatever bar- riers. But he certainly would not have found so congenial a sphere for the expression of his irrepressi- bly free impulses. It is no wonder that men who feel stirring within them the preaching impulse have turned their faces towards the great, free West. Nor are we to forget the troublous times into which he was thrown. Not only did the violence and injustice of theological controversy awaken the love of fair play and zeal for the non-partisan and non-polemical presentation of the gospel, in his catholic mind, but the social and political .agitations of the day stirred an intense hatred of all public wrongs in his patriotic heart. Before he left the West he had already entered the lists as an agitator and reformer, and when, in 1847, he came to Brooklyn he soon found himself plunged into the midst of the con- troversy that was to ultimate in the Civil War and in emancipation. This great national struggle furnished a sphere where he felt himself at home in the exercise of all his powers, and where they were developed to the utmost. It was the great inspiration of his life. Apart from the pulpit, he never could have exerted the power upon the platform he did exert. But on the other hand, the political conflict doubled his pulpit power. Then came the War of the Rebellion, and no one man outside poHtical life stands out more prominently than he in those days of struggle. That great conflict was for him, as for many another Christian minister, a mighty inspiration, and it was a unique foster-school and training-school for powers that else had been half known. All the elements of his life and all its conditions from the first tended to the awakening of a great, free, forceful personality. And REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 115 of the influence he has exerted upon the country at large by the breadth and wealth and strength and impetuosity of this colossal personality, there can be no doubt. 2. In the popular estimate, scant justice has been done Mr. Beecher's distinctive and varied intellectual qualities as a preacher. He was transcendently a per- suasive preacher, and in his power to sway the emo- tions of men the intellectual fibre of his preaching has been measurably lost sight of. But his preaching was the more effectively persuasive that it had a firm didac- tic basis. In Christlieb's article above referred to, he directs attention to the prevailingly didactic character of American preaching in general and refers to three aspects of it, the logical, the philosophical, and the doctrinal. As a student of homiletic literature he has in mind the preaching of a past period. From the early period and on into the first quarter of the nine- teenth century, American preachingwas largely doctrinal in its subject-matter, logical in form, and philosophical in spirit. It has ceased to be doctrinal and logical in the formal sense. Church doctrine no longer constitutes its subject-matter and dialectic is no longer the instrument of defence. But in the broad sense of the term it has never ceased to be philosophical when at its best, and the demand for a reasonable interpretation of religious truth has not ceased, nor has it greatly diminished; it has only been modified. To this modification in the didactic type of American preaching Mr. Beecher, equally with Dr. Bushnell, has been powerfully tributary. His per- sonal religious experiences, not less than the type of his genius, were determinative of his didactic method. A man of intense intellectual activity, he was also nurtured Il6 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS in a most stimulating intellectual atmosphere. His father was a man of robust character and of stimulating niind, the most effective preacher, perhaps, of his day, and could not fail to make a strong impression upon so responsive a mind. The entire intellectual life of the household was most stimulating. One can hardly con- ceive of conditions more favorable to independent, sturdy, varied intellectual development than were found in that home. The life of New England and measur- ably of the new West, settled largely by New England people, was charged with intellectual vitality. It was a time of theological controversy. The conflict between the old and new schools of so-called orthodoxy was at its height, and the Unitarian and Universalist controversies had not yet subsided. This polemic temper, with all its bad results, developed strong mental fibre in the preach- ing of the day. Mr. Beecher inherited and perpetuated much of this intellectual virility. Against the form in which the thought of the sermon was put he strongly reacted. His exuberant emotions and his vivid imagination were intolerant of its dogmatic, polemical, and dialectical quality. His catholicity of spirit and love of brotherly concord reacted against its bad tone and temper. His practical sense reacted against its excessive indoctrination as the supreme homiletic aim. His habits of study, his neglect of doctrinal theology, his devotion to general literature and to rhetoric and oratory, his own intense personal religious experiences, which resulted in a new conception of God and of his Christ, his familiarity with revivals of religion, belief and interest in which, with their emotional intensity and practical aims, he never lost, as well as his own habits REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 117 of extemporaneous preaching from college days, — all this and much more of a practical sort, together with the more direct intellectual influences, which are some- what obscure, had for their result a modification in the character of his preaching and yet a perpetuation of its mental vitality. From the beginning of his ministry, therefore, he ignored the doctrinal type of preaching and became an evangelistic preacher. In an address to the Congregational ministers of London in September, 1886,^ in which he gives a sketch of his ministerial life, he refers to the reaction against the preaching of his earlier days, and the result in turning him to pulpit evangelism. The address is of value as giving us an insight into his early ministerial development. " Seeing this fight," he says, "degenerating oftentimes into the most scandalous enmi- ties, I turned away in absolute disgust from all these things and said. My business shall be to save men and to bring to bear upon them those views that are my comfort, that are the bread of life to me ; and I went out among them, almost entirely cut loose from the ordinary church institutions and agencies, knowing nothing but Christ and him crucified, the Saviour of mankind. Did not the men around me need such a saviour.^ Was there ever such a field as I found .-' Every sympathy of my being was continually solicited for the ignorance, for the rudeness, for the aberrations, for the avarice, for the quarrelsome- ness of the men among whom I was, and I was trying every form and presenting Christ as a medicine to men ; and as I went on and more and more tried to preach Christ, the clouds broke away, and I began to have a distinct system in my own mind." Here is a knowledge 1 " Life of Beecher," by Abbott and Halliday, p. 608. Il8 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS that is the product of religious experience, and that does not come through the processes of the understanding alone. And yet all his previous training in theology and all the activities of his quick, capacious understanding conditioned the value of this experience, and they all bore fruit in his preaching. In all this reaction he did not lose mental fibre. In fact, his preaching constantly increased in intellectual power. The exuberance of his rhetoric tends to obscure the strength and range of his thought. The early period was the evangelistic period. The mid period, covering the years of the antislavery controversy and of the Civil War, was the ethical period, in which he dealt largely with the moral aspects of religion, particularly as related to the duties of associate life, although always from the Christian and even evangelical point of view. He handled ethical subjects in a masterful manner. This country has pro- duced no jpreacher who was his equal in the cogent presentation of political ethics. His study of human nature and of'-human institutions gave him exceptional power in the handling of such subjects. The later period may be called the didactic period, in which he sought to be the teacher as well as inspirer of the people, and to give them the results of his investigation and thinking upon the problems of religion as related to new world-views. But in all these periods there was never a lack of energetic thinking. His appeal to men always had a rational basis. And in all these periods he was influential in leading American preaching away from a dogmatic basis and a semi-scholastic form into a more popular and practically effective method, at the same time conserving its substantial intellectual basis. REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 119 But let us look a little more fully into his intellectual outfit. (i) The quality that makes the most immediate and perhaps the strongest impression is his immense intel- lectual productiveness. It is said that Mr. Lincoln once characterized him as "the most productive mind of ancient or modern times." This may be an over- estimate, but certainly few in this country, if any, have been his equal in this regard. There have been those who struck into deeper depths and whose product was more weighty, those who produced more elaborately and more gracefully and more in accord with the classi- cal standards of rhetoric and oratory. There have been American orators who were in many respects his supe- riors. Webster was more massive in his mental product, more stately in his mental movement, and more elevated and dignified in his rhetoric. Calhoun was more subtle and acute and plausible ; Everett, more scholarly and finished; Clay, more graceful and fascinating in elocu- tion; Prentiss, more habitually impassioned in his elo- quence; Phillips, more incisive and pungent in the oratory of invective, and much more concise and clas- sical in his style. But no one of these men had his vast intellectual productiveness. None produced with such rapidity and intensity and affluence of mental movement, in so many fields of intellectual activity, and with such wealth of imagination and emotion. A ministry of forty years in one parish with ever in- creasing power, nearly to the end, and with surpris- ingly little diminution of popularity in the face of a scandal that would have put most men beyond re- covery, attests, not only his amazing intellectual pro- 120 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS ductiveness, but his power to hold the affections, the confidence, and the allegiance of men ; and the way in which he bore himself during those years of trial, the undiminished freedom of his mental and moral energy, the poise and balance of all his powers, and the con- tinuous unembarrassed devotion of all his productive forces to the welfare of men were evidential of his own consciousness of innocence, and it effected much in disarming his enemies and in holding the confidence of those who would be his friends. His success in other fields, and those widely different from the one in which lay his life vocation, which he loved supremely and to which all his best powers were devoted, also attests his productiveness. On the platform, as a lecturer and especially as a poHtical orator, he was unrivalled. His success in England in quelling the tumults of audiences that had become mobs, and in forcing a hearing by the might of his personality and the Skill of his oratory, was one of the great historic triumphs of human speech, worthy of record for future generations. He lectured successfully on a great variety of subjects. As maga- zine writer and editor, he handled a free and facile and vigorous pen. He made a respectable figure in fiction. He was an authority on many and widely different sub- jects of human interest. In all these lines of activity and in every specific effort he made, there was always the impression of unlimited and unfaiHng resources. The ease of his mental movement, the affluence of his style, the quiet colloquial manner of his address, no less than its passionate explosiveness, the torrent rush, the variety of his themes, the diversity of his methods, the tropical luxuriance of his rhetoric, all attest the wealth REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 12 1 of his resources. No one could hear him talk, now with subdued tranquilHty, and again with the bubbling vivacity as of a brook, without being impressed by it. In his early ministerial life, while doing the work of an editor as well as of a preacher and pastor, he preached daily, "and once through eighteen consecutive months, with- out the exception of a single day." A striking illustra- tion of his productiveness, and of the ready command of his resources, may be seen in two different consecutive speeches made by him in New York, in connection with the meeting of the Evangelical Alhance. He had made a very effective address to one of the assemblies, and passing immediately into the presence of another as- sembly, he, within a few moments, made a second address, as different in substance as if made by another man. The man who can, within so short a period of time, develop two lines of thought so thoroughly diver- gent, has met the supreme test of intellectual productive- ness. This fertility was, of course, the gift of genius. He was a man of singularly quick intuitions. He saw straight and quick into the inner meanings of things. All forms of external reality found ready response, and awakened myriads of echoes within him. He had the " imagination penetrative." His organization was keenly susceptible to impressions from without, — from nature, upon which he looked with a poet's eye ; from art, for which he had a delicate native and trained aptitude; from science, whose materials and principles he made available for religious use ; from literature, whose treasures he had stored, and by which he had enriched himself; from his fellow-men, who nurtured his feelings and affections and sympathies; from the invisible and eternal world, with 122 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS which, through his faith talent, he was always in easy contact, and the vision of which always stirred all that was best within him. With all this responsiveness was associated that power of reaction from within which is the gift of genius ; that creative activity, the activity of the poet or maker, that takes the results of all im- pressions, and organizes them into all varieties of fresh forms ; that plastic inventive power that manipulates all material from without, and converts it from within, into new, fresh, living forms. With all this was associated that impulse to objectify, to communicate, to relate with other living souls the thoughts that burdened the mind, and that ethical impulse to turn all truth and all thought of it into personal, moral property in the interest of char- acter and conduct which is the gift of the true preacher. (2) This productiveness was not superficial and showy. Thoroughness was equally a characteristic of his mental movement. His product was in its main outlines funda- mental. It was his habit to examine the foundations of things, to get at their inner reality and to set forth their relations. He dealt with principles. One who allows his attention to be preoccupied with his intellectual brill- iancy is likely to lose sight of his intellectual thorough- ness. The very brilliancy of his diction, by which he expresses weighty thought in attractive form, obscures its fundamental character to the superficial hearer or reader. But below the rush of his diction, below the concrete illustrative forms of his thought, there was generally solid substance. He had not only intellectual irritability to a surprising degree, and the impulse to utter what was stirred within him, but he had great expository skill. It was a close and harmonious blend- REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 123 ing of the interpreter and the advocate. He studied his subject in its elements. He grasped it in its relations and made it clear and reasonable. He never forgot the object of the sermon and he lived with his audience in the hours of preparation. But he never forgot his subject, knowing that justice to the audience is in part justice to the discussion. This expository tendency was increasingly developed. In the early period he indulged in the descriptive style more fully than in the later period. It was pictorial and dramatic. But it was the use of the descriptive method, to set forth the inner realities of human experience and the occult realities of human life. His lectures to young men were perhaps as effective a series of discourses as he ever preached, and have exerted a wide-reaching influence. They portray, with master hand, the passions and the strug- gles of the human soul. They belong to the first decade of his ministry. His style became less exuberant and his discourses took broader range. He grappled more fundamentally with his subjects. His methods of get- ting his thought before the mind are always prevailingly concrete and illustrative, but the thought itself is funda- mental. His method is analogical rather than logical. He appeals to experience. His thought moves in the realm of life. He illustrates, does not argue; but the truth that lies under his concrete form of exposition is substantial. His skill in analysis is great, particularly his skill in portraying the workings of the human soul; and few preachers have ever reached his mark or measure in expounding the principles that are at work in social and political life. He handles these questions with the consummate art of the orator, but he handles them fun- 124 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS damentally. Estimated superficially, as by their first and surface impressions, nothing will seem less care- fully deliberate and less elaborate than the speeches he delivered to the howling mobs of Englishmen during the Civil War. They were uttered with extreme diffi- culty, amid continuous interruptions, that taxed to the utmost all the powers of the orator, and these difficulties would have vanquished most men. As to their form, they were struck out with great rapidity, but they were the ripe fruit of long years of study of the Constitution, of the political institutions of the country, of the slave system in its economic, political, domestic, and moral aspects ; and they everywhere show a firm grasp of the special subjects discussed and of the general principles that underlie them. They are all interrelated, have unity of plan and progressive movement, reach the climax sought, are all tributary to one great definite object, and are not the less evidential of the grasp of the political and ethical philosopher, than of the skill of the orator. The first speech deals with the growth and develop- ment of the slave power that led as by " irrepressible conflict " to the clash of arms. The second, with these historic facts before the minds of his hearers and readers, takes up the effects of the slave system in degrading labor, and has for its immediate object to convince the working-men of Great Britain, to whom it was addressed, that their interests were with the cause of free labor. The third, with these data in hand, takes up the political aspects of the conflict, and deals with the struggle be- tween the North and the South, for supremacy and for control of all departments of the government, executive, legislative, and judicial The fourth deals with the com- REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 125 mercial, as the second with the industrial, aspects of the subject, i.e. with the relation of the slave system to the commercial classes, and has for its object to show that a nation of capitalists engaged in manufacturing and commerce is preeminently interested, or should be, in the support of free institutions. The fifth is a lucid and skilful exposition of our representative system of government, in which there is a blending of autonomous state with national government: it shows the impossi- bility that the national government should deal success- fully with the slave system as a national question, and that, under existing political conditions, in which it was impossible for the national government to legislate state institutions out of existence, civil war was inevitable. These speeches, popular in form and artistic in oratorical method, are full of sound economic and political science and moral philosophy, and show, on the part of the man whose chief pride and joy it is to be a minister of the gospel, a thorough comprehension of the problems at issue in that great historic struggle. Beecher had trained himself to think, vigorously and independently. He was not a close nor accurate thinker according to the standards of logic, but he was a strong and aggressive thinker. He was trained even in theology. His expres- sions of contempt for theology, his rejection of the the- ology of his day, and his abandonment of all attempts at a systematic presentation of his own theology, are mis- leading if they lead us to infer that he was ignorant of theology. He had examined the chief systems of theol- ogy in his day. He heard these matters discussed at home and in the seminary class-room and was familiar with them. He early cultivated the method of the inter- 126 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS preter, and it became the basis of his persuasive method. His habits of study and of expression, and even his dab- bling in phrenology during his college days, were all in a way tributary to this didactic habit. His interest in Biblical studies during his seminary course and his experience as a Bible-class teacher intensified his didac- tic impulse, and these were the decisive influences that led him to the final choice of the ministry. It was his life habit to deal with substantial truth, interpreted and vindicated in terms of human experience rather than of human speculation, and translated into vivid concrete forms. In the early part of his ministry he was, as has already been suggested, a diligent and enthusiastic stu- dent of the Old English preachers, Howe, Sherlock, Butler, and of our own Edwards, and especially of Barrow and South. He absorbed South and made his method of handling texts and his style his model. The influence of Barrow is also evident. Their diction and structural method were thoroughly impressed upon him. His own homiletic method, although always natural and sufficiently individualistic, always varied, suited to the subject and object of the sermon, and never stereotyped, shows at once the influence of these old homiletic mas- ters and the prevailing habit of his own mind. His own injunction to students, never to preach two sermons alike in treatment on two successive occasions, he obeyed. But if there is one method more characteristic than another, it is the twofold process of exposition and application. His first object is to set forth the truth in hand to the intelligence of his hearers, to set it in its true light, to secure a clear understanding of its ele- ments and relations, and thus to secure an intellectual REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 127 interest in it ; and then he will impress upon the heart and conscience the practical implications of the truths as thus set forth. Despite the popular impression to the contrary, he is therefore a Bibhcal preacher. Not infrequently the entire discourse is at once expository and applicatory and is in the homily form. But more fre- quently it is in topical form, with an expository basis and an inferential application, and reminds us of the English Barrow and of the French Saurin. Thus he gets at the main teaching elements of the truths dis- cussed and at the subordinate truths bound to them and deduced from them. All this is done in a singularly vivid, illustrative, and popular manner, yet bearing evi- dence of a mind that deals with broad principles which in a modified, but true, sense of the term, may be called the philosophic habit of mind. (3) Intellectual range is another notable quality in Beecher's preaching. His mind was capacious and wide-reaching in its movement. He took large views of all subjects, and always wanted a wide field for his discussion. His thoughts ran along broad avenues. Facts, truths, and suggestive impressions poured through the wide gateways of his capacious mind ; and under the touch of his discriminating, analyzing, and constructive intelligence, and the quickening power of his vivid imagination and intense emotion, they arranged them- selves under broad principles. He grasped the broad, generic features of his subject and did not linger with small details of elaboration. By native tendency and by training he was an extemporaneous preacher. In his way he was an enterprising and diligent student. From all sources of knowledge he appropriated omniv- 128 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS orously. Nothing that was human was foreign to him. He exploited every field of human interest and was no mean authority in various and diverse departments of knowledge. He was rapid in his movement and under- took nothing he could not handle with ease. It was the habit of his life to look at all things from the humanistic, rather than from the ecclesiastical, point of view, and in this his influence has been very great. He trained the man, and the preacher was simply the man disclosing himself in all his fulness. To dip into horticulture and agriculture, while preaching daily, was only recreation. By drill in oratory, by practice in addressing pubUc assemblies, and by literary culture, he fitted himself for platform speaking. While discharging the most exact- ing duties of a large parish, he wrote editorials that were felt all over the country, and he was regarded as one of the great journalists of his time. So great was his versatility and fertility and range of thought, and so exacting was he, that his lectures were never quite the same on two successive occasions, but were always re- shaped and made new. He was a slow reader, but a rapid assimilator and producer. Everything was tribu- tary to him. All he saw, heard, felt, read, became pabulum for his preaching. He had the high sense of his calling, the love of man, the ethical purpose to use the truths for the bettering of men or to bring some determinate moral result to pass, the teaching impulse, the eager observation, the comprehensive grasp, the assimilative vitality, the imaginative suggestiveness, the emotional earnestness, the sympathetic responsiveness, and the professional enthusiasm that mark the homiletic mind in its highest range. REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 1 29 No modern preacher has ever foraged so widely and so eagerly for the material of his preaching. He stored during the week, holding his mind in a condition of constant responsiveness and of intense aggressive activ- ity, his imagination always at work, his sympathies kept fresh by contact with human hfe in all varieties of experience, always mindful and wisely careful of his ..physical health ; and on Sunday morning he had only to organize the accumulated mass of material that was seething in his capacious mind, and to let it expand under the vitalizing action of his creative energy. In the method of his pulpit preparation he reminds us of Schleiermacher, with the difference that Schleiermacher's sources of material were found in the realm of theology and of inward experience, while Beecher's were more largely the realm of life. This method of preparation accounts for many of the pecuHarities of his preaching, its wealth of subject-matter, its freedom and largeness of movement, its vivacity, its carelessness with respect to close structural method, and its homely colloquial diction. All his stores were poured out freely from within, the form was always subordinate to the sub- stance, and structure and style were never very important considerations. He was not a supreme master in the artistic handling of his material. His artistic sense was disclosed in his diction, particularly his vocabulary, and in his illustrative material, rather than in the organiza- tion of the material of the sermon. The rhetorical dominated the logical interest. He did not value the highest cumulative effects, and in so far as the highest rhetorical impression is dependent on cumulative force, he often failed to realize it. He apparently sought a I30 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS continuous, rather than a cumulative impression, or rather a series of striking and not altogether closely related impressions. It was a vast accumulation of varied homiletic supplies that was tributary to this quality of range that we are considering. Everything is on a large scale. He will not tie himself down to fine points. There is plenty of delicate shading of thought, but he indulges in no unpopular subtleties. His state- ment is large, often complex and diffuse. It is some- times in the form of a proposition, but more frequently in broad rhetorical form. Sometimes there are two statements of his subject, reminding us of PhiUips Brooks in this regard, whose mind had something the same large, rapid, free-running movement. The second statement is more specific than the first, but both are likely to be discursive and diffuse and sometimes em- brace a whole paragraph. He is not careful to trace the connection between his text and theme, or to justify the use of the text. He has his material, at least in its germinal form, and he wants a text to fit it. He takes what he can get most readily, and is not over nice about it. As he starts out from his text he approaches his subject in a large, free way, always, indeed, in a way that is pertinent, but not artistically skilful. Here at the start, as elsewhere, there is the suggestion of extem- poraneousness about it, not in the substance of thought, but in the methods of relating and expressing thought. If the introduction is explanatory, as it generally is, it does not deal with minute points of exegesis, but in large general statements. It is much less concise than Bushnell's introductory work, but always concrete, and, as with Bushnell, not infrequently put in a paraphrastic REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 131 manner. The outline always has wide range, not so much in the number of main topics as in subordinate thoughts. In his discussion he runs into side issues a good deal. He darts suddenly into side tracks, and returns to the main Une only to dart off again. He turns up in the most unexpected quarters. He brings out the most novel conceits. His lines of mental asso- ciation are manifold and wide-ranging. He has the poet's eye for likenesses. His mind is analogical. He sees things, not under the relation of cause and effect, or of logical contiguity, but of resemblance. He therefore indulges in such expository methods as are pecuUar to a man "of genius. The result of all this is, as regards method, not most helpful for permanent educative re- sults. But it is always vividly and often dramatically impressive. It is a series of impressions, vigorous and stimulating, while at bottom there is substantial and help- ful thought. He is not flashy and superficial, but his mind works with such amazing rapidity and fertility that he must let it run on in its own free way unshackled. He violates approved homiletic principles, and in the matter of homiletic method he is not so helpful as many an inferior preacher. This will do for a man of genius. There is a certain Shakespearean freedom about it all ; it has the merit of directing attention to itself as a unique homiletic type, and there is always enough in the. sermon to overmaster whatever defect. But it is a type that cannot be perpetuated even by a man of great genius, and it would be imbecility itself in the hands of a man of only ordinary power. He had tran- sient aspirations and made sporadic efforts after a better method, for the artistic sense was strong within him. 132 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS and he knew the worth of homiletic as of literary form, but in the rush of Hfe they never came to much. He wrecked everything in the stormy activity of his power- ful mind, in the turbulence of his intractable emotions, and in the strenuousness of his militant life. The extemporaneous method, to which for years he had accustomed himself, of course contributed to wide range in his handling of subjects, and he illustrates signally the demand for freedom of range in this method of presenting the truth. (4) Another quality in Mr. Beecher's mental equip- ment was his intellectual catholicity. That he was tolerant in his feelings was the necessity of his broad humanity, of his Christian estimate of men, of his large and delicate sympathy with all classes of men, of his supreme valuation of the religious significance of truth, of the peculiarities of his own religious expe- rience, and particularly of his religious conflicts. It was impossible that a man of his breadth of sympathy, who especially had learned the difficulty of winning firm foot- ing for his own faith, who knew the assaults of doubt, who had learned to undervalue the formulated doctrinal statements of truth and was intensely hostile to polemi- cal theology, should not hate all intolerance of feeling. But he was tolerant in his intellectual judgments as well as in his sympathies, and this was a necessity of his gen- eral mental attitude toward the truth. It was his habit to recognize what is true in different types of theology and in the tenets of different sects, and he could not be a partisan. He was a very sympathetic and generous interpreter of other men's opinions. He was inclined to find truth under all forms of error, and for the man REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 133 whom he regarded as in error he had only sympathy, pity, and good will. This intellectual tolerance was due also in part to the experimental quality of his own theology, and not to indifference with respect to the truth, nor to undervaluation of correct religious thinking. His theology came from within, out of his own religious life, not as the product of speculative thought ; and he approached all theological questions with a religious spirit and valued all theological truth chiefly with reference to its sig- nificance for the rehgious life. As a mere matter of thought no truth had for him much value. Hence he was the more ready to value what others thought, in so far as it related to their own religious interests, even though he had no intellectual agreement with it. For this reason his own theology was somewhat ill-defined. He held stoutly to what he regarded as the truth and he had a clear conception of it as truth, but he knew that the field of truth is broader than the field of doctrine, that there is more in any truth than can be crowded into a definition ; and he held the truth in the large, held it in solution, and never subjected it to the closest and most critical analysis or particularity of statement. For this reason he found but few theological boundary marks across which it was difficult for him to pass into fellow- ship with men of other sects. He had a good word for all theological and ecclesiastical parties, and found warm friends and admirers among them all. In days of detrac- tion and ill repute he found no more ardent defenders and supporters and admirers than in communions with which he had no ecclesiastical affiliation. His influence in breaking down the spirit of intolerance and of denomi- national exclusiveness has been very great. His own 134 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS theology was a gradual development, and it became more definite in the latter part of his ministry. He valued sound and positive belief, but insisted upon the distinction between belief and faith, and laid chief stress upon those truths that faith appropriates in the interest of charac- ter and conduct. In his theology, using the term in its primary significance, he was a sort of Christian panthe- ist. He accepted the theory of evolution, adjusted it to his theological thinking, and became an intelligent de- fender of it. This theory fell into line with those con- ceptions of God and of His relation to the world which he had held with measurable definiteness for many years. It was because he conceived of God as a living pres- ence and power in the world, carrying on to triumphant issues His purpose of mercy for sinful, suffering men, that he laid such emphasis upon the element of compassion in the divine love. In his doctrine of the Trinity, he was, as was Bushnell, substantially a Sabellian, following Sabellius even in his illustration of the Trinity, from the symbol of the sun, as the source of light and heat, the two elements being manifestations of the one fontal source, as Christ and the Spirit are moral manifesta- tions of the one God. His preaching had a Christo- logical centre. What he knew of God, he knew chiefly through the heart of Christ, and in his soteriology he was a Patripassianist, holding that God was incarnate in a human body as the historic Christ and that God suffered in the sufferings of Christ. In his doctrine of the atonement he held the position of a modified Socinian, agreeing substantially with what calls itself the " moral influence theory," as held by Bushnell in this country, by Robertson and by the broad churchmen of England, and REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 135 by the Ritchlians of Germany. In his anthropology he reacted vigorously against the doctrine of total depravity as it was held and expounded by the traditional Calvin- ism of his early days. In his doctrine of regeneration he was nearer the Arminian than the Calvinistic position. Miracles he accepted as genuine supernatural events, and his adherence to the doctrine of evolution never com- promised his faith in and allegiance to Christianity as a supernatural revelation. In his eschatology he was agnostic, but became increasingly hopeful and indeed confident of the complete final elimination of evil from the moral universe and of the ultimate triumph of the good, and at the close of life seemed to be in substantial accord with those who accept as a positive tenet the final restoration of all men. He abandoned Calvinism in early life, and his influence in this country as well as in England, in the modification and subsequent substan- tial abandonment of Calvinism by the Congregational churches, has been very strong. This freedom from school theology, and this readiness to accept as truth teachings that were allied with those that have been regarded as heterodox and over which the churches have quarrelled, were the product of his catholicity of mind and spirit, and this is one of the sources of his wide influence in all denominations. But with all this freedom, which has generally been regarded as loose theological thinking, it must be acknowledged that, as contrasted with the theological latitudinarianism of our day, he held a substantially evangelical position. And no one can read his sermons without being convinced of it, or at least one cannot fail to be strongly convinced of their evangelical spirit. From the first his preaching, 136 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS which was practical rather than doctrinal, ethically applicatory rather than dogmatically didactic, dealt with what he regarded as Catholic Evangelicalism. The pres- ent generation of preachers, that has come into a pretty well established order of evangelical freedom, can hardly understand the change which the preaching of this coun- try has undergone within the last three-quarters of a century. The average preacher takes his homiletic inheritance as a matter of course, and it is well-nigh impossible for him to estimate adequately the influence of Henry Ward Beecher in the change that has brought the new order. Of course he was not a model for the theological thinker, nor even for the preacher. He was not a well-balanced man. His powers were not coordi- nated as were those of Phillips Brooks. He was so many- sided, so kaleidoscopic, in the combination of his faculties, so subject to inward revulsions and changes of mood, so impulsive and emotional, that a disturbance of balance was inevitable, and his instincts were more trustworthy than his judgments. But in his breadth and catholicity of mind and heart, he has had wide-reaching influence in all the Protestant churches of this country, and is widely known in all the churches of Christendom. With a less catholic mind and spirit he never could have exerted such an influence. In many ways, but espe- cially in the quality of breadth and catholicity, — the present generation of American preachers is the more influential and effective and the next may be still more so, because of the work he has left behind. 3. No adequate estimate of Beecher's power as a preacher will fail to recognize his transcendent gifts of expression. It is his diction that has won for him REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 137 the title, "The Shakespeare of the Modern Pulpit." His nimbleness and fertility of mind, vividness of imagination, and passionate intensity of feeling were all tributary to this linguistic facility. These are the gifts of the artist. But in his case they all found their most natural and characteristic manifestation in speech, rather than in other forms of artistic expression. He was an artist in speech. His diction is a distinct gift, and he cultivated it with ceaseless assiduity. It is nota- ble for its ease and affluence, its wealth and variety. It combines all the qualities of an effective pulpit style. It is at bottom an expository style. There is often, especially in the early period, an Oriental gorgeousness, a tropical luxuriousness, of diction that is likely to draw attention to itself, and in these more salient and obtru- sive characteristics the ordinary hearer or reader is likely to lose sight of its intellectual quaUties. But his con- ceptions are mentally discriminating, and the perspicu- ity of the expression matches the perspicacity of the thought. He is an analyst in thought, and deals with the important and practical considerations suggested by his subject. In his discussion of states of soul, and especially of the moral elements in character, he is sometimes singularly definite and discriminating. It is not a style that has the precision of scientific accu- racy, but of vivid representation. It flashes light into the mind by the vividness of its suggestion. Perspicu- ity is, after all, the notable mental quality of his style. Thought is expressed in colloquial, often homely, diction ^ and in simple, unartistic sentences, so that with all its brilliancy of imagery it is at bottom a plain prose style. The expansiveness of the style discloses the expository 138 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS quality. There is a multiplication of the elements of thought for the purpose of clear interpretation, and a consequent expansiveness, sometimes even to diffuse- ness, that becomes an increasing tendency with him. The style of early years was much more compact than that of later years, therefore more vigorous, although it was never lacking in freedom and facility of movement. The ethical quality of naturalness is another and equally noteworthy quahty. Out of the abundance of his inner life his speech flows copiously, easily, rapidly. There are no artificial twistings of sentences, no pedan- tic straining for effect, no strange, remote, barbarous, unidiomatic vocabulary. It is fundamentally the simple colloquial style. It utters itself with perfect freedom, as of one who knows himself as talking with his hearers. But its most salient quality is its concreteness. The American pulpit has in general been distinguished for its power to grapple with abstract thoiight and at the same time, which is especially true in our own day, to translate it into the language of practical life. The illustrative style of preaching has displaced the argumentative. Of this type of preaching Mr. Beecher was the most strik- ing representative, and in it he was a pioneer. His theology is anthropomorphic. His conceptions of God are derived from human analogies. Of the Absolute of philosophic thought he knew nothing. Apart from His disclosure in humanity, and especially apart from the fact that He is historically revealed in Christ, he does not know God. It was therefore necessary for him, with his vivid imagination and intense emotion, to represent God concretely, under human images. All his discus- sions of the remote and difficult problems of the Invis- REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 139 ible are crowded with human analogies. All subjects are discussed illustratively, all brought out into the sphere of life and experience. But few abstract terms are found in his diction. It is the descriptive vocabu- lary. He deals not with things as they are supposed to be in themselves, not in our abstract notions of them, but as they seem or may be represented in concrete images. His rhetorical figures are largely those of resemblance. Few preachers have ever equalled him in the sense of poetic likeness. It was Shakespearean. He thought in images, and his gift for illustration has perhaps never been surpassed by any preacher of the Christian church. It was as natural and as easy as his breath. Whether in public address or in private con- versation, he would hardly open his lips without an out- flow of most exuberant and felicitous imagery. It was a highly poetic gift. It appears in his preaching, not only in formal illustrations, but in his ordinary vocabu- lary. Formal comparisons are found on almost every page of his sermons, and quite as frequently the more compact and sententious metaphor. Nature, with whose scientific as well as aesthetic aspects, he showed himself familiar, in large measure furnished his images and illus- trations ; but human life also, business life, industrial life, artistic life, and particularly domestic life, furnished abundant material. His vocabulary was large and rich and varied, and came from many sources. In its range and in its suggestiveness, few preachers if any, have ever surpassed him. The most occult realities of the inner life are described in most graphic style, in terms that represent them to the senses. If he spoke of motives that readily disclose themselves, they were described 140 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS as "jutting motives." If he would represent God as a being of power, He becomes the " Arch-thunderer of the Universe." He likes descriptive Latin words and their resonant rhythm, and uses them as freely as the more compact and vigorous Anglo-Saxon words. If he would speak of the foulness of sin, it shall be represented as "feculent vice." If he would describe the selfish greed of man, he must use the worm as his symbol, and we are introduced to the "vermicular human race." Christ, in his sympathy with men, "carries the core of their hearts." Men who are in unsuspecting peril " stand at the edge of unspeaking precipices." Everywhere his thought appears in symbols. The all-devouring activ- ity of his mind leads him into widely different fields, and his creative imagination forages everywhere for the treasures of his vocabulary and for his more formal illustrations. Hence his discourses are always pictorial and often dramatic in high degree. His style has vivac- ity, intensity, rush. He compacts his thought and speech by turning nouns into verbs. Eager boys "enterprise after " all things that lie before them. His lectures to young men are notable for condescension of style, and at the same time there is a rush and a sparkling vivacity in the sentences which we do not find in equal meas- ure in his maturer style, and we are reminded somewhat of Newman's intensity in the marshalling of compact, descriptive clauses. The conclusions of some of these lectures carry a passionate intensity that must have sent shivers through his audiences. He knew the value of literary form, knew that the literary product will not live without it; but in the rush of his life, he sacrificed some qualities that he admired, and in which he might REPRESENTATIVE AMERICAN PREACHER 141 have become complete master ; and while his tendency to expansiveness and diffuseness enhanced his expository power, it diminished the artistic impressiveness of his preaching. And yet it must be said that the style of the latter period, while less intense and more reflective, less artistic and more free and colloquial, never lost its descriptive clearness, and was always rich in figurative suggestiveness. It is precisely this concrete quality that measurably accounts for the colloquial homehness of his diction. His use of homely, often rough, colloquialisms was perhaps more common in his lectures and addresses ; but they were not lacking in his sermons. It is a sensa- tional feature in his preaching that grew upon him, and while it gave a certain pungency and dramatic forceful- ness to his preaching, it also became offensive. But the point to be noted is that it all originated in this ener- getically descriptive quality of his style. If he wishes to characterize the trashy quality of a large amount of the religious literature that is current, he calls it " wishy- washy," the " swill of the house of God," and says it is like the " locusts, the lice, and the frogs of Egypt." Of two descriptive terms, he will always use the stronger. It is not enough to say that criticism is trenchant — it is " sneering." A pronounced infidel is an " acute infidel." The Bible is not severely criticised, it is "riddled." Mission schools are "chickens under the wings of the church." The rich give to the poor their " scraps and mouldy rinds." Impracticable effort is "running the thing into the ground." Any excess is a " gorging of ourselves." This is the emotional intensity and the col- loquial familiarity and rudeness of his descriptive style. In conclusion and in brief summation of what has 142 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS been said, Mr. Beecher, perhaps more fully than any other modern preacher in this country, and if so, surely more than the preacher of any other country, illustrates the preacher's assertion of the rights of personality. Intellectual productiveness, emotional intensity, and aesthetic sensibility are combined in him in an altogether phenomenal manner, and he illustrates the value of training the man in a comprehensive way. Because of this combination, his preaching was of the most animat- ing sort. It stirs all the activities of the soul. It will not fail, even in the printed form, to quicken the aspira- tion to preach effectively, the ambition to reach and influence men. It suggests the value of the study of the human soul and of human life, in order to realize the highest pulpit effectiveness. And beyond the measure of any other modern preacher does he illustrate the power of the illustrative type of preaching. As to many things that are important for the highest and most permanent usefulness in preaching, his value is jelatively little. He has doubtless influenced the lay mind more strongly than it was possible for him to influence the clerical mind as regards the substance of his preaching. His influence upon the platform and through the press has perhaps been nearly as great proportionately as from the pulpit, and everywhere and always it has been tributary to per- sonal rights, to the higher moral and religious ideals of human life, and to the permanent welfare of human society. Taking his brilliant career as a whole, notwith- standing the shadow that rests unjustly, we may believe, upon his declining years, and which will at last, we may surely hope, wholly pass away and no longer darken his name, his influence, it must be acknowledged by all who know the record, has been a most beneficent influence. CHAPTER IV HORACE BUSHNELL I BUSHNELUS HOMILETIC GENIUS Horace Bushnell was preeminently a preacher. His genius for religion, the struggles of his intel- lectual life, his supreme interest in rehgious truth, his way of apprehending it, his impulse to impart it, and his method of presenting it, all fitted him in a notable degree for the work of the pulpit. By this it is not implied, of course, that he was nothing but a preacher. He waS a man of varied gifts, aptitudes, and interests, and it is very likely that he might have been highly successful in any one of many departments of intellectual or practical activity. He certainly had in him the making of a philosopher. Using the term in the popular rather than in the tech- nical sense, it may be said of him that he had a certain philosophic habit of mind, without which no man can ever be a preacher of the highest type. He had the intellectual impulse to grapple with what is fundamental in any subject ; had an easy grasp of principles and an orderly method of expounding them. It is said of him that "he had no unrelated facts." His facts must be related in order to be interpreted. For simply as unin- 143 44 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS terpreted facts they had no significance or value for him. All that came under his observation, whether in nature or in art or in the ordinary events and experi- ences of life, took connection with fundamental and regulative ideas. This tendency to get at the inner relations and the inner significance of things, which was so marked a trait in him, is substantially the philosophic habit of mind, however remote it may be from any special, formal philosophic method. The world to him had meanings that lie far below the surface aspects of things, and their superficial and commonly interpreted significance had but little interest for him. He was not content to linger even with the higher artistic aspects of life. He was gifted with the artistic temperament, but the tendency to get at the rationale of artistic expres- sion led him below the surface of artistic forms. He had, for example, a great love for music. But he was not satisfied to cultivate the mere art. He sought to interpret its inner meaning in terms of thought. He had an eye for the forms of art, notably of architec- ture, of which he was a competent critic. He had, in fact, a rare susceptibility to all artistic forms. But it was the necessity of his mind to get at the sources of artistic impression and to interpret the artistic in terms of the rational. He had a trained sense of the beauty of natural scenery, but the philosophic explanation of its impressiveness had seemingly quite as much interest for him as the aesthetic impression itself. In a word, Bushnell's interest in the world and life was preemi- nently intellectual and philosophical. This habit of mind he took into his investigation and discussion of theological questions, and he always sought to penetrate ■*-■• ■■. ■ HOMILETIC GENIUS 145 to the core of the question in hand and to get at what is fundamental. He had indeed no philosophy of his own in the formal sense of the term, and he never adopted another man's philosophy, but this habit of searching for the rationale of things came from the philosophic impulse, and it was a source of the greater power for him as an interpreter of truth. Yet he ignored and despised, or affected to despise, philosophy in all its formal aspects. He even went so far as to deny the possibility of any mental or metaphysical or moral science. A philosophy of nature is possible, because "nature is a system," but in mind and in morals such system is impossible. His highest estimate of meta- physics was that its first and chief use is to " show that metaphysics are impossible." He seemed never to understand the significance of philosophy for religion, and spent the greater part of his life in battling against all attempts to apply a philosophic method to the inter- pretation of the facts of Christian experience and to the objectively given truths of Christianity. For a mind so enterprising and penetrating and logical, all this seems highly absurd, as it doubtless is. But it should be borne in mind that, after all, what Bushnell was fighting was primarily not philosophic thought or philosophic method as such, but the philosophic system current in his day, which he characterized as " a soulless matter-born phi- losophy of mind." He was cast into the breaking-up period of religious thought. He was too late for the old and too early for the new. Because he had outthought the old philosophy and had not yet discovered the new, he fought the whole thing. He saw that in its material- istic basis and tendency the old philosophy " reduces the 146 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS spiritual and material creation to the same dead level," and " regarding all his actions as the successive products of a systematic mechanism, it sees in man no heaven- ward tendency, no yearning of his nature after God and goodness." It is doubtless true that he did good service in his contribution to the disintegration of the existing scheme of philosophic thought as applied to the inter- pretation of religion ; but he went too far, accepting a somewhat fanciful theory of language that rendered impossible any philosophy of religion, and this unfitted him for any adequate apprehension of religion in its philosophic aspects. But the practical, and for Bushnell himself one might almost say the beneficent, result of all this was that it led him the more determinately to the cultivation of the preacher's habit of mind, and the aggregate result for the world was doubtless more and better than it would have been had he been a more consistent philosophical thinker. Dr. Bushnell was a theologian and has left behind a theology suflficiently distinctive to bear his name. It is a curious turn in the course of events that our theological institutions, as in a sort of defence of the Christian faith, should to-day be expounding the theology of a man who spent his life in antagonizing theology, and who denied that anything like a system of theology is possible. But the fact is that Bushnell had the full outfit of a notable theological interpreter, and might have made a competent theological investigator. He had a robust intelligence, a keen insight into the realities of religion, such as stimulated him to bring that intelligence to bear upon the problems of religion, a great hunger of heart HOMILETIC GENIUS 147 for the invisible, the eternal, the spiritual, a strong grasp of the truths and facts of religion, and a logical faculty that fitted him to relate those truths and facts, and to bring them into a fairly well-ordered whole. He was not a theologian of the type of his teacher, Dr. Na- thaniel W. Taylor, whose method and results he stoutly antagonized ; and his own method, or as some might say defect of method, perhaps incapacitated him for recog- nizing the significance of his teacher in the develop- ment of New England theology, and for assigning to his work its true value. He refused to employ the dialectical faculties with which he was equipped, and rejected a method in which he could easily have become a master. As he denied the possibihty of a philosophy of mind and of morals, so he denied that the experiences of religion could ever be brought within the limits of scientific statement. In this he is for this country a pioneer in movements that developed after he left the stage, "and that have become domesticated in the religious thinking of wide-reaching circles in our own day. But it would be idle to deny that, after his own kind, he was a theo- logian of high degree. His theology was " pectoral," but it was a theology. It was more than a subjective experience incapable of rational interpretation. He was not at all content that his own or any other man's religious life should remain a vague, undefined emotional and ethical experience. It was the necessity of his keen, sturdy New England mind, trained in intellectual gymnastics, to grapple with religion as an intellectual problem. He stoutly maintains that Christianity is not a gift to the intellect, but to the imagination and the heart, and that language is wholly incompetent to f ormu- 148 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS late the content of religious experience into an intellec- tual system. But it is as impossible for him to detach his sturdy mind from the problems of religion as it is his impressible heart from its experiences. In his own way he was a rationahst, and there is a certain naivete in his vigorous onslaught upon theology, since in the very process of his criticism he is bringing out a the- ology of his own. The real object of his assault is not theology as such, but the kind of theology that is cur- rent in his day, and particularly its methods and results. He believed in theology, as every man who does any thinking upon the problems of religion must, and he was not without an orderly and consistent method of developing his own theological thought. But the point is that it was his own, and not other men's, theology that commanded his interest and respect. In the sense of the term that was accepted in his day, he was not a theologian. His method was that of the preacher, and no American preacher within the last century has suc- ceeded in introducing more theology into the pulpit or in discussing theological problems in a more interesting and effective manner than he. The significance and value of Dr. Bushnell for the Christian church is not in the fact that he antagonized theology and denied the rational possibility of it, but in his battling a theology that had a false philosophical basis and a wrong method, and perhaps especially in the fact that he brought to the investigation of theology the spirit and method of the preacher, and therefore brought theology out into the practical lives of men. He had no theology that he could not preach, and he believed in none that could not and should not be translated from the realm HOMILETIC GENIUS 149 of thought into the realm of life. It is here that we see the genius of the preacher. It was the spirit and the method of the Christian prophet, rather than of the Christian dialectician. The mystical has somewhat obscured the dialectical element in Dr. Bushnell. But Dr. Henry van Dyke's characterization of him as " the most logical of mystics and the most mystical of logicians " is strictly correct. He understood thoroughly well the laws of thought, and he was the better preacher on that account. It is true that he could not or would not hold the truth he discussed under the limitations of close formal definition, nor use in its presentation the categories of dialectic, and he was the more a preacher for that very reason. But he had a strongly logical mind; he presented the truth in an orderly, logical manner and carried his hearers by the cogency and cumulative energy of his presentation. In early youth he showed those judicial qualities of mind that won the confidence and respect of his elders. It is said of him that when a youth of sixteen years he showed unusual ability in sifting evidence and in forming correct judg- ments upon important questions, and it was very likely this quality of mind that gave him a bias or inclination to the study of law. It can hardly be doubted that he would have had a distinguished career in the legal pro- fession. He was skilful in debate and early developed the debating habit. His mind was quick, keen, and eager, seizing as by logical instinct upon the strong points of a subject, and the impulse for discussion is a marked characteristic in all his work. His method from the first was eminently logical' and always continued to be. Yet it was the mystical and poetical rather than 150 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS the dialectical quality in him that won the ascendency, and which disclosed itself in various ways in his develop- ment. And here again we see the preacher. He was pro- foundly interested in political questions, and had a sound working knowledge of their theoretic aspects, but always discussed them from the ethical and religious point of view, and he made himself strongly felt as a Christian citizen. He undoubtedly would have made a notable figure in civic life and might have become a statesman of wide-reaching and most beneficent influence. But all his patriotism and all his knowledge of public affairs were made subordinate and tributary to the work of the pulpit. It was the impulse of the preacher that domi- nated the impulse of the patriot and the citizen. He had ready insight into the spiritual significance of Biblical truth, seemed less dependent than most men by reason of this insight upon the science of exegesis for his apprehension of the truth of Biblical revelation, and he had a great deal of skill in a species of compact, sen- tentious, expository, often periphrastic, statement of it. His explanations of Scripture are always in r hetor ical and popular literary form, i But he knew little or noth- ing aboufthe modern science of exegesis and Biblical theology.) His interpretations are highly interesting, suggestive, and helpful, but often fanciful, and lack the support of recognized exegetical canons. . He was master of " exegetical divination," not of exegetical science. In this too, as in the case of Augustine, he was the preacher. In the mod ern ac ceptation of the word, he cannot be called a student or scholar. He did not even read^very widely, and his attainments in profound and connected HOMILETIC GENIUS 151 knowledge of any subject that demands scholarly inves- tigation were meagre. By_patient^ protracted, toilful research he never mastered any subject. He had a great many ideas upon a great variety of subjects, and even upon subjects he had not investigated he could talk interestingly and instructively. By independent reflection he was able to penetrate the depths of a sub- ject, but what others had thought and said upon it he did not knowTnor did he much care. In fact, he was less dependent than most men upon research for the formation of his intellectual judgments. His keen men- tal penetration measurably served him instead, and he was generally worth Ustening to on alrnost any subject on which he might choose to speak. (^ His neglect of what others had done and thought and said, however, was the serious fault of his lifcy His mind was singu- larly, quick and keen and penetrating, but from early years he l acked t he concentration of the student and ^ scholar. Even when he~"uiTder-took" tcr-examine and state the results of others' investigations, he proved to be somewhat untrustworthy, for he was likely to read his own vigorous, creative thoughts into the process. Scholars like Professor Shedd could easily bring him to book and put him to confusion by showing the mis- apprehensions and mistakes of his subjective preposses- sions in attempting to interpret a theological work like Anselm's "Cur Deus Homo?" When brought to the test of scholarly judgment much of his thinking was unre- liable. And'yetirirtrue thatiiis- eager-mind sought commerce with the sources of intellectual training and culture, and in various ways he showed the results of it in a scholarly habit of mind. His scholarship, such as 152 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS it was, showed itself in a trained capacity for vigorous intellectual grasp of the weighty problems of life, rather thaiTtir-stored intellectual acquisitions or in a scientific method of investigation. He bore the result of years of varied mental activity in the fibre of his thinking, and he was one of the most interesting, helpful, and intellectually stimulating thinkers of his time. In this intellectual independence, this creative activity, this lack of scientific method and limitation of scientific acquisi- tions, we see once more the" preacher. Dr. Bushnell was a realist as well as an idealist. He had a strong, manly grasp of things as they are. To a poetic insight and the prophetic vision of a higher invisible world, which was a gift from his Puritan ances- try, and which seems, as is so often the case, to have coine through his mother, or his maternal ancestors, was added that sturdy common sense and that firm grasp Qi.reality that is not less the Puritan gift. It was this, very likely, as in the case of Robertson, that gave him a taste for the natural sciences. Considering his habit of intellectual thoroughness, his tendency to go to the bottom of things, his respect for nature as the realm of causation, and his general respect for the causal relation of things, together with that tenacity of will that led him to the mastery of whatever he undertook, he might have made, one fancies, a respectable figure as a scien- tific student, had he been early turned in that direction. He had a trained eye for topography, and a habit of throwing out imaginary highways and railroad lines and bridges and of throwing up military defences with mathematical accuracy of measurement, and it is not unHkely that he might have had a successful career as HOMILETIC GENIUS 1 53 a civil engineer. There was nothing human seemingly that was foreign to him. He was far-seeing and saga- cious in practical affairs. He was intelligently interested in the pursuits of men's daily lives. He knew some- thing about the markets and the laws of trade, was at home with men in their ordinary business life, could sometimes give them " points " worth considering in their business management, and might himself appar- ently have been a successful man of affairs. But these multifarious gifts were after all subordinate. They heightened his value as a minister and became indirectly tributary to his power as a preacher, but were not his distinguishing gifts. It was his Puritan idealism that dominated his Puritan realism, and this was the fountain of his homiletic genius. It was the prophetic gift, the sympathetic, the emotional, the image-making impulse, that led him into the realm of the invisible and ideal, and it was a gracious providence that led him, under the guidance of his mother's prophetic soul, from all the allurements of a lower order of life, where indeed he might have been successful and useful, into the Chris- tian ministry, where only all his best and most charac- teristic powers found their proper sphere. In saying that Bushnell was preeminently a preacher it is not meant that he was a preeminently popular preacher. There are of course many sorts of pulpit power, and no man's greatness and success as a preacher may be measured by the number that crowd to hear him. Many a pulpit mountebank is able to draw the crowd and to achieve a superficial, ephemeral, and nominal success. Bushnell did not value popularity in the ordinary sense of the term, as Robertson did not. The 154 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS so-cal led cnmrn nn people did not listen to him with such genuine intensity of emotional interest as they listened to Mr. Beecher, and he had nothing of Beecherls-^xipular jpovf^r. But he was in some respects the superiqr^of Mr. Beegher as a preacher, certainly a much more desir- l able and helpful model for most preachers. He had r most of the qualities of a great and impressive inter- j prefer and advocate of religious truth, and no person j of even ordinary intelligence could listen to him with- I out being attracted to him and strongly interested in his sincerity and earnestness, his breadtl]L_oi-h.umanity, his catHoTicity of spilTtThis intellectual incisiveness, his steady,_orderly.. movement, his fresh and vivid con- \^eptions, and the concrete style of his representation. And no person of intellectual inquisitiveness, of love ' of reality, of religious susceptibility, could ever listen to him without strong intellectual interest, and often without deep emotional and ethical and spiritual inter- est and profit. Setting aside Mr. Beecher, whose dis- tinctive qualities of genius have given him a unique position among American preachers, Dr. Bushnell was by far the 4nost weighty and at the same time in many respects the moir_attractiye and suggestive and forceful and helpful preacher of his day. And as a pastoral preacher he has in later days no successor, Phillips Brooks~excepted, who is Bushnell's peer, not in intellectual penetration or grip or strength of men- tal movement, but only in quickening and suggestive power and in practical helpfulness. In estimating Dr. Bushnell as a preacher, and to do this is the sole purpose of this discussion, it is necessary to note more fully his equipment for the work of the HOMILETIC PERSONALITY 1 55 pulpit. Let us therefore undertake to investigate some of tiie sources of his power as a preacher. And if the discussion seems to have been anticipated, it is only in a general way, and may prepare us for a fuller analysis. II BUSHNELUS HOMILETIC PERSONALITY What Bushnell taught, the substance of his message, important as it is for our estimate of the significance of his career, is not the chief source of interest in him as a preacher. No worthy judgment upon his message even is possible, much less upon his significance as a preacher, without a basis in some knowledge of his strong and pro- foundly interesting personality. I. His physical endowments and appointments were only in limited measure tributary to his impressiveness as a preacher. He was of medium stature, without bulk of figure, rather delicate in organization, yet lithe and full of nerve force. In early years he was some- thing of an athlete and nearly to the end of life an enthusiastic pedestrian. In youth he was remarkable for his physical beauty. He had a handsome face and a straight, agile frame. But in later life he had lost the beauty of early years and was thin and bony. His voice had good carrying power, and his vocaliza- tion was easy and natural. But it was notable neither for strength nor richness, especially in later years. It was of medium tone, capable of great reach neither in depth nor height, and at last, owing to physical infirmity, wholly lacking in compass. It was not a sympathetic 156 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS voice, and lacked the power to stir strong, sympathetic emotion, and he was accustomed to use it in a simple, natural manner. He always uttered himself in free, downright, manly fashion, like a man of prevailingly intellectual habit, whose mind is full and must free itself, but rarely pouring itself out in impassioned utterance or attuning itself to the most delicate and tender emotions. It was the organ of his intellectual virility and common sense, rather than of his imagina- tion or sentiment or feeling, and in ordinary use gave no sympathetic expression to his inward fervors. He had studied oratory in college, and Demosthenes was his favorite orator. But he despised elocution, regard- ing it as meaningless "mock oratory," and as he dis- cusses in his commencement oration " Some Defects of Modern Oratory," one can imagine him in his char- acteristic role of critic. He cared for the rhetoric and logic of oratory, but not for its vocal aspects. The result was that he was a natural speaker and so far forth interesting, but lacked the oratorical training that did so much for Mr. Beecher. He carried the conversational type of speech into all forms of utter- ance, and in private intercourse he was one of the most brilliant conversationists of his day, superior even to Mr. Beecher in intellectual incisiveness and rugged energy of speech, but lacking Beecher's passion and pathos and flashing wit. The two men were alike in the simple, natural, conversational basis of their speech, but they parted company when they came to the high altitudes of emotion. Beecher soared, but Bushnell kept the "go afoot" style of vocalization. Bushnell's move- ments in the pulpit were not varied. They were ener- HOMILETIC PERSONALITY 157 getic, even measurably intense. But during most of his life he was chained to his manuscript, and he must stand in one spot. There was not a great amount of gesture, and what there was of it was somewhat angular and ungraceful. But he was vigorous and had what calls itself the " magnetic " quality. His whole frame would at times respond to his mental and emotional intensity, while yet he held himself, as to his feet, to the one spot in which he had planted himself, as if in dogged resist- ance to any conceivable power that would undertake to dislodge him, — a sort of typical posture. There was an air of positiveness, sometimes almost of defiance, which reminds us somewhat of Robertson, in what he said and in the way in which he said it. It was the utterance of self-reliant judgment and strong conviction, and some- times had the appearance of dogmatism and impatience of contradiction, — the speech of an honest debater, who is bent, not only on interpreting, but on advocating, the truth he has espoused, and on vanquishing its adversa- ries, whoever they may be. The manliness and courage of the man were manifest in every tone of his utterance and in his very attitudes and movements. " His preach- ing had," says his biographer, "in his early days a fiery quality, an urgency and wilful force, which in his later style is still felt in the more subdued glow of poetic imagery. There was a nervous insistence about his person and a peculiar emphasizing swing of his right arm from the shoulder which no one who has ever heard him is likely to forget." But with all his ner- vous intensity, his " verve " as the French call it, his poetic heat, he was always well-poised and self-pos- sessed. The strong, steady mind and the sturdy will 158 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS held him in, whatever the stress of emotion. His dress was in harmony with the character of the man. He never dressed his profession. He dressed the man. There was a certain respectable negligence about it, almost a homespun quahty, in which he evidently had a certain satisfaction and pride. He avoided the clerical mark. His dress was like that of an everyday man of affairs, and it proclaimed the man among men. In the later years of life his hair was long and shaggy, always thrown back in a sort of wild disorder, and well adorned a head massive at the top and with a bold, precipitous front. Taken as a whole, the physical personality, the air of it and the dress of it, was sug- gestive of a certain noble freedom and self-reliance, and dignity and self-respect. His manners were wholly unaffected. He was a frank and friendly man, but he had no surplus stock of respect or deference to the opinions of any human being. For mere opinions, as such, especially religious opinions, he had scant re- spect anyway. They have done great mischief in theological controversy, these " gaunt notions, horning and hoofing each other." For his own opinions, indeed, he had a good deal of respect, but he regarded them as intuitions and moral convictions, and so to be cherished on moral grounds. He would with the utmost coolness and naivete contradict you to your face, if he did not agree with you. And yet you would not, could not, feel that you were dealing with a man who was essentially rude, for in the broader sense he was a gentleman in his instincts and sympathies. He was an iconoclast in the realm of manners only because he was an intellectual iconoclast. The one supremely masterful thing about HOMILETIC PERSONALITY 1 59 his physical manhood was the eagle eye. There was a singular fascination about it. It held one as by a spell. When in later years, in stress of work and by reason of failing health, he was driven to occasional extemporaneous preaching, the forces of his physical manhood, although enfeebled by physical disease, were measurably liberated ; and when at his best he made a stronger immediate impression upon his audiences than when chained to his manuscript, although there was no gain in the intellectual value of the sermon, and it is pretty sure that there would have been no permanent gain for his reputation or influence as a preacher, if he had followed the extemporanous method. But it is sure that the unchained eye enhanced the power of his oratory. It is evident, however, that Bushnell's effectiveness as a preacher was much less dependent upon the impressive- ness of his physical personality than that of many of his contemporaries. 2. Bushnell's intellectual gifts, as already suggested, singularly fitted him for the work of the pulpit. Per- haps the most noteworthy characteristic of the mental aspect of his personahty was his intellectual indepen- dence. It was an inheritance, and it was duly cultivated. He recognized the influence in his own character and career of his paternal grandmother, and he admired her freedom of spirit. She had tried the dialectics of Calvinism, and "had been so dreadfully swamped in getting her experience through the five-point subtleties that she nearly went distracted." Following her own independent spirit and relying upon her native sagacity and spiritual insight, she found a way out into the free- dom of Methodism. Bushnell's antipathy to -Calvinism l6o REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS and his heroic faith in the freedom of the human spirit may have been measurably an inheritance. At any rate, he had from early years followed the natural bias of an independent mind and had trained himself to look inward and not to other men for guidance in the forma- tion of his opinions. Here, in the realm of personal reflection, he grappled with august and momentous problems. He knows it as in large part his errand in life " to find, to get a knowledge of and to get full pos- session of " himself. He undesignedly describes him- self as a student of religion and of Ufe in the following words : " Some minds seem, from a very early age, to have a strong adhesiveness to whatever comes in con- tact with them. When a subject enters the thoughts, it is followed for hours, or perhaps days, with patient, laborious meditation. In this way they come to an astonishing maturity without much assistance from books. Now these are the ethereal souls who are so often described as reasoning without reflection and embracing everything great by a constitutional energy. Why, these men study more in their dreams than other men by their midnight lamps." This "strong adhesive- ness" and this habit of "embracing everything great by a constitutional energy," are eminently characteristic of Bushnell, and the terms are most fehcitously descrip- tive of his peculiarities. He thus formed the habit " from a very early age " of following the subject that "enters the thoughts with patient, laborious meditation." In this way he formed his own opinions. Even when these opinions are in line with those of other men and may have become the possession of many, they are still wrought out in his own way and have for him all HOMILETIC PERSONALITY l6l the novelty of a strictly personal possession. He was more inventive than investigative. The self-reliance and grit of his homespun New England ancestors were perpetuated in his own intellectual independence, and, in his admiration for them, he recognizes them as kin- dred spirits. He had no use for any man "who could not stand straight and square upon his foundations, or who wriggled and twisted a body supported on weak, unsteady columns." This independence of spirit ex- posed him to the assaults of scepticism. He formed the debating habit of mind. All problems must be subjected to cross-examination and cross-questioning. But he expected no adequate solution of his difficulties by such cross-questioning. In fact, it was his spiritual intuition that demanded the cross-examination. His distinctive mental quality was insight. It led him to look straight into the heart of truth, rather than to take the long circuit about it. He was no insignificant logician. He reasoned with skill and force. But his characteristic gift was the penetration of the seer rather than the nimbleness of the dialectician. He meant to know realities, rather than to know about them. He saw quickly, as he felt intensely. He saw deeply, too, for the moral and spiritual activities take men into realms that are closed to the mere dialectician. It was this that saved him in periods of intellectual doubt. When the logical faculties failed to bring the solution sought, and when he recognized their inade- quacy to the task, it was this habit of looking directly and steadily at the heart of great questions that gave intensity to his mental activities and relief to his moral and spiritual needs. The sermon on the " Dissolving of I62 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS Doubts " describes his habit of dealing with vexed ques- tions. It is the habit of a man who learns by look- ing. He "hangs up " his questions. He turns "a free glance on them now and then as they hang." He moves freely about them. He looks at them first on this side and then on that, and then by and by, as he turns some corner of thought in his inspection, he finds how quickly and easily they open their secret and let him in. What seemed insoluble clears itself up in a wondrous revela- tion. This is the method of the seer. In it he becomes " more deep-seeing." In days when the preacher is inclined to skirmish about the great facts and truths of religion, rather than to grapple with them vaHantly, it is refreshing to come into contact with such a man and to note the manly directness and vigor and lofty intellectual courage with which he, single-handed,. as if he had a special call from Almighty God to do it, grapples with the profoundest and most august truths and facts of revelation. Whatever one may think of his success in the solution of his problem, or whatever one may think about his method, one must at least admire his spiritual and intellectual valiancy. There is no skirmishing with these problems. No skirmish line is known in his intel- lectual tactics, no polemic fence and attack. He plunges at the objects of his intellectual grapple, as if he has a life and death interest in them. He hovers about them until he is stirred by them. Then he seizes them with firm grip. He looks them through till he sees what should be told, and then he brings in his report with a tone so honest, so real, with such ring of truth about it, that no one will for a moment think of doubting the worth of it all, however much he may HOMILETIC PERSONALITY 163 question the completeness of his vision. It was this habit of immediate grappling with his problem that developed that self-reliant, positive, strenuous, at times seemingly arrogant, but always manly, temper and tone that operated Hke a mental and moral tonic upon the men of his time, making him the impressive and influ- ential man among men that he was, one of the most effective intellectual leaders of his day. And it was precisely this quality that was tributary to his distinc- tive power as a preacher. It yields one of the most distinguishing traits of his preaching, its declarative quality. He was a good deal of an apologist in his way. He knew the arts of the polemist and was even master of the philippic. But it is his prevailing habit to state the truth in a direct, positive manner, to promulgate it rather than to reason about it. He tells what he sees, not what he has excogitated in accordance with dialec- tical processes. He hints at the objects of his thought by the use of analogies largely, rather than elaborately elucidates them in logical order and form. Consequently Dr. Bushnell was never a doctrinal preacher in the sense of that term common in his day. He wa's emi- nently a_dida£Uii_DEe^i:lier. His sermons are freighted with weighty truth. He was much more at home in the discussion of a* weighty subject than any preacher of his day. His preaching had a more solid quality, and aggregated a larger amount of important truth, than that of Beecher or Brooks. All of these preachers were ingenious in homiletic suggestion. They spoke to the imagination and stirred an emotional interest in the truths discussed. But Bushnell has the greater strength. His themes always contain a strong religious truth 1 64 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS which is formally stated. He must always have some- thing large and important to discuss. He therefore takes a theme with a complex of thoughts, which is capable of being thrown into the form of a proposition ; and it generally is thrown into that form, a form fitted to the work of thorough exposition and discussion. This puts the sermon at the very outset upon a strongly didactic basis. He is from the first committed to the work of interpreting and supporting the truth enun- ciated. If we look at the topics used in his discussion, we find them to be preeminently the teaching topics, — topics, that is, that are adapted to the setting forth of the thought relations of the subject, topics that serve to increase knowledge of the subject and perpetuate a strong mental impression. They are didactic phases of the theme, which is complex in character as containing a large group of allied thoughts. And this whole com- plex theme-thought appears in the process of discussion. The theme, however complex, pervades the whole ser- mon, and no one is ever at a loss to know what is in discussion. The progress is orderly and well-marked, and the entire sermon has a noble unity and symmetry. Other parts of the sermon disclose the same didactic character. The introduction is from the outset sugges- tive of the instructive quality of the sermon. It is the explanatory introduction, showing the connection be- tween text and theme and bridging the way from the one to the other. The conclusion is practical in its char- acter, yet it still perpetuates the didactic interest, fur- thering the mental impression already made, giving the subject a new turn, showing the truth from a new angle, and is almost always in the form of inference from HOMILETIC PERSONALITY 165 the subject discussed. The sermon is to a consider- able extent Biblical. He was not an expository preacher as Robertson was. But his preaching always attached itself to BibUcal religion, and he always discusses his Biblical truth in a positive manner corresponding to the declarative method of Biblical revelation. But the point just here is that, although preeminently a didactic preacher, dealing with the sohd substance of Biblical truth, his method of discussion is the practically suggestive method. It is the declaratory, the affirma- tory, the promulging, method that comes home sug- gestively to the experiences of men, adducing those considerations that appeal, not to abstract thought, but to common sense, common conscience, common feeling, and common observation, and that touch the realities of human life. 3. Bushnell's artistic gifts should be noted here, for they were effectively tributary to his work as a preacher. With Puritan robustness there was allied a dehcacy that was not the less Puritan when, as in his case, Puritanism was at its best. His thought fell naturally into the form and took the color that is furnished by the imagi- nation. It is his theory, carried through life from col- lege days, that revelation can be given only through the imagination. At what time, in what ways, or under what specific influences he was led to the position that the human understanding is incompetent to deal suc- cessfully with the problems of religion, and that consequently a theology or a philosophy of rehgion is impossible, but that only such approximation is possible as is furnished by the image-making faculty of the soul, is uncertain. Criticism of the traditional theology not l66 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS only, but of its traditional philosophic basis, had already in this country gained a hearing in his early years ; and perhaps the influence of Coleridge, whom in his college days he found "foggy and unintelligible," but subse- quently "lucid and instructive," may be recognized. One of his Hartford friends says of him, " I have often heard him say that he was more indebted to Coleridge than to any extra-Scriptural author." By what specific influence he was led to adopt the theory of the inade- quacy of language to express and interpret religious truth is also uncertain. Possibly the new historic and literary spirit that had been awakened in the early part of the century had wrought productively upon his artis- tic nature and had realized in him its earliest fruitage, leading him to look upon the Scriptures as a form of religious literature, rather than as a body of doctrine or a "codex of legislation." Of this there are some indi- cations, although they are somewhat obscure. But however it came about, the positiveness of his conviction touching this matter is sure. He was not very consist- ent in his repudiation of theology and denial of its possibilities, as has already been suggested, for he had a theology of his own and was a firm believer in it. Nor did he apply his theory of language very consist- ently, for it is an instrument for setting forth his own theological conceptions, and although it had not scien- tific precision, it had an accuracy of representation that was adequate to the purpose of expressing with singular lucidity often the most occult and difficult theological conceptions. In fact, he played fast and loose with his theory. Failing to recognize a relative permanence of significance in the secondary stage of language, that HOMILETIC PERSONALITY 1 67 has long since passed the early and representative stage of its meaning, he was accustomed, after the manner of Coleridge, to deal with its original and etymological significance, thus involving the discussion in the network of his own fancies and throwing confusion into it. But it must be confessed that, after all, this was tributary to his attractiveness and force as a preacher. This use of the representative faculty not only conditioned his method of conceiving and of interpreting the truth, in- cHning him to the use of the analogical method of inter- pretation, but it colored his diction. In this hes the attractiveness of his style, which has the qualities of descriptive clearness and concentrated strength. It leads him often into fancifulness, but it never fails, even in his most insubstantial imaginings, to hold our interest, even though it may not command our judgment. There was a time when he came to a new literary awakening, which was not altogether unlike his later ethical and spiritual awakening, and in this we may detect the influ- ence of Coleridge. He began, as he tells us, with the plain "go afoot" style of Paley. But after reading Coleridge's " Aids to Reflection " for a whole half-year, he got a new idea of the power of language. It was its power of figurative representation, and as a result he says, " My powers seemed to be more than doubled." Among the distinctive characteristics of modern preach- ing is its temperate use of figurative language. On the one side, we have a reaction from the theological, philo- sophical, and dialectical type of preaching, with its preponderance of abstract thought and prevalence of abstract terminology, in favor of a type of preaching in which feeling and imagination have free play. This l68 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS results in an increase in the use of figurative language. On the other hand, we see a reaction from the exuber- ant use of figurative language that characterized classi- cal rhetoric. Classical oratory appealed largely to the emotions, and the discussion of rhetorical figures was a disproportionately important part of the older treatises on rhetoric. It was the figurative type of language that appealed to emotion and passion. Modern rhetoric deals more with the intellectual aspects of language. It lays stress upon the importance of intellectual con- vincement. It accentuates the didactic element. This results in a temperate use of figurative language. The modern orator uses but relatively few figures of speech, and modern works on rhetoric abridge the discussion of figurative language. Figures of speech that are adapted to the excitation of high-wrought emotion, like apostro- phe, vision, the stately figure of hyperbole, and many of the grammatical figures that were prominent in classical rhetoric and in the oratory of the seventeenth and eigh- teenth centuries, are less frequent. The figures used by the modern orator are largely with reference to making the subject discussed clearer and more forcible. They are largely figures of resemblance, and are verbal rather than grammatical, belonging to vocabulary rather than to syntax. The metaphor, which is tributary to clear- ness and force, is more common than the simile, which is adapted to the more stately, ornate, and elaborate style, like that of Jeremy Taylor. This suggests the prevail- ingly didactic character of modern preaching, and at the same time its freedom from the prosaic dulness of the old dogmatic type of preaching. Dr. Bushnell's style of preaching is an illustration of this in an eminent HOMILETIC PERSONALITY 169 degree. His rhetorical figures are few in number and not very varied. Metaphor and simile — and that the condensed simile, with metonymy — are the chief fig- ures. The figures of passion are rare. There is but little exclamation and exaggeration, and no high-flying apostrophe or vision. His figures are natural. They grow out of the thought, and there is nothing strained or artificial about them. But they are strong and im- pressive. His use of the imagination appears in his vocabulary. It is this that secures color, imparting to his utterance a warmth and semi-poetic glow, suggesting more than is asserted. His vocabulary has not the range and variety of Mr. Beecher's. He has not for- aged so widely in different fields of knowledge for treasure wherewith to enrich his vocabulary. It is, however, the vocabulary of the preacher, which in the nature of the case must be a somewhat limited vocabu- lary. For, however widely the preacher may range in his studies and investigations, — and Dr. Bushnell did not range very widely, — he must put the result of his knowledge and culture into the language of common life, at least into a type of diction that will be readily apprehended by the common people. The result is that the sources of the preacher's vocabulary are likely to be less manifest than those of men in other profes- sions. There is, however, a great difference in preach- ers in this regard. Some disclose the sources of their vocabulary more readily than others. It is one of the characteristics of Dr. Bushnell that he puts the mark of his own personality upon the product of his knowledge more fully than most preachers. He shows, therefore, the results of his training and culture quite as much in 170 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS the facility with which he handles his themes, in his penetration, and grip and range and general strength of mental movement, as in his diction. But there is one noteworthy quality in it that may well receive attention. It is the descriptive vocabulary. It is not ornate, nor highly pictorial. It is soberly descriptive. It represents the objects of thought as they appear to the imagination. It is a descriptive quality pecuUar to himself. His mark is on it. His theological terms are descriptive. He scrupulously avoids all technical theological terms. He seems to have almost a morbid dislike of them. He puts the thought that is behind the term into some word descriptive of it. Regeneration, for example, he described by the term " naturalization." This is a mani- festation of his analogical habit of mind. It sometimes leads him astray. He undertakes, for example, to use the English word "atonement" in its etymological sense of at-one-ment. In thus describing or undertaking to describe the truth of the atonement by the analogy of the original English word, he loses or ignores its real significance as it has appeared in the history of theology. What is true in his use of theological terms is also true of his use of philosophical terms. All such terms are changed into popular descriptive terms. His vocabu- lary indicates famiUarity with nature, art, trade, and in- dustry, and he uses the terms that are brought from these departments with great force and accuracy. His diction is largely the language of energetic movement, that contributes force to his style. He uses the prepo- sition or the adverb in connection with words that sug- gest physical action, in describing the objects of his thought. He has us "shaken out of our prayers." HOMILETIC PERSONALITY I /I Our "crust is broken up." "God turns us about and beats us back." We " stay by our evil mind." The "church slides into the world." Such a style has movement and life. There is an interesting blending of the reflective, the practical, and the poetic in his preach- ing. The thought is that of an original, reflective mind ; the subject, the method, and the aim are practical ; the style is semi-poetic. This yields a blending of elements that are tributary at once to interest and effectiveness. 4. His ethical gifts still more manifestly fitted him for preeminent pulpit effectiveness. His most impres- sive ethical quality, perhaps, was personal will force. He bore the mark of it in his entire personal bearing, his attitudes, movements, gestures, tones of voice, and the glance of his eye. His whole life, from its begin- ning to its end, bore witness to it. He was constitu- tionally independent, self-asserting, and fearless. He belonged to a race from which this ethical forcefulness came to him as an inheritance. It was a strength tem- pered by dehcacy and grace, but it was preeminently a strong race. The same manly courage and tenacity of purpose which he showed in fighting his own doubts showed itself also in facing the contradictions of men in defence of his faith and conviction, in his grapple with the great problems of existence and the great facts and truths of Christian revelation, and in his last long fight with disease and finally with death. As far back as 1837, when he was only thirty-seven years old, he spoke of the threatening disease with which he struggled all through his professional life, as hanging about him and of his fear that it would get a deeper hold of him. It was a manly fight under great burdens, and it 1/2 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS is amazing that under such physical Hmitations he should have accomplished so much. He kept in good cheer, often making light of his burdens and exhibiting an oversensitiveness about his physical weakness even up to the last, refusing sturdily to accept the proffered assistance of others to support his tottering steps. He would "stand on his own legs " to the end. This force of will he threw into his preaching. It was one of the great elements of power in his oratory of which alto- gether too little has been made in men's estimate of him. There was a strong contagion in his downrightness and positiveness. It was an intellectual and moral tonic. He carried men even against their will. He subdued them by the force of his personality ; men rebelled against his teaching and antagonized his influence and shouted an alarm against him, only to find themselves vanquished in the end, it would be difficult to tell just how. They quarrelled with him and tried to suppress him, but they never succeeded in silencing him or in putting him down. Friends were alienated from him and years of distrust and heartburnings followed ; but they yielded their wills at last to the force of his per- sonal manhood, and he won back their hearts, while they may have refused to yield mental assent to his teach- ings. That he held his own, not only in his own denomi- nation, but in his own church, and was not immolated by his enemies, was due quite as much to his masterful handling of himself and of other men in days of detrac- tion and misrepresentation, as to the support of wise and large-minded men to whom all honor is due for defending the freedom of Christian teaching among the Congregational churches of the state of Connecticut. HOMILETIC PERSONALITY 1 73 Bushnell was not understood. His method was new to the men of his time. He was breaking away from the old path and breaking out a new path for the theology and the preaching of New England, and men did* not take kindly to it. His method is now a commonplace, and largely through him a free possession of the Ameri- can pulpit. But the dogmatic and dialectical method held the field in his day, and men who cherish such method as sacred do not understand the poet and mys- tic who invades their precincts. Men of routine and of the estabhshed order, who have no vision, stand in dread of the iconoclast. Men sought to bring Dr. Bushnell to book, but when they laid hands on him, and he grap- pled with them, they felt the muscle of an athlete, and they became shy of trying conclusions with him. He did not prefer to iight. He was not so " strenuous " as to love fighting for his own sake. He shrank from it, in fact. He was much more intent on establishing the truth, as he understood it, than on fighting down error. But he had the fist of a pugilist. He was ready for any man at any reasonable hour and in any rational method of combat, and when pushed to it, he handled weapons that were a terror to his adversaries. Like Robertson, he was a born leader of men. Considering the time into which he was cast, when men of light and leading had become dissatisfied with the traditional defences of religion and had begun to discern from the high sum- mits of their observation the methods of a new day ; considering his own high altitude, standing on his own soUtary peak, with the vision of the new dawn in his face ; considering his own intellectual inquisitiveness, his keen- ness of insight, his literary instincts, his independence 174 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS of spirit and his indomitable courage, — it was impossible that he should not be a theological iconoclast. He did a revolutionary work, and he has had a larger following than even he ever could have dreamed of. His influence has been so strong that to-day he has his innings, and it has been so silent that the men who are now domesti- cated in a new order hardly realize what they owe him. Men who do not accept all of his results, and it is not necessary that any man should do this, accept substan- tially his method and his spirit and know their worth for the pulpit. It is hardly too much to claim that upon the more thoughtful and cultivated and better-trained men especially, as well as the truer and more genuine spirits of the American pulpit, he has had a stronger influence even than Mr. Beecher. The above-named qualities of his personality, the physical, intellectual, artistic, were all dominated and fused and fired by the energies of his masterful will. And it was this combina- tion that yielded one of the most notable qualities of his preaching, namely, its vitality. His preaching is alive all through. There is a vitality in his style that bears the mark even of his physical intensity. It is vital with the movement of vivid imaginative representation and with strong emotion. It is intellectually alive. We feel the presence of a strong, virile mind. The ruling thought of the sermon vitalizes the whole organism. There is no let-up in the tension of mental energy. It is sustained force. The subject is grasped as with the energy of life, and into it is poured a flood of ethical and emotional and spiritual force. Here are the words of a man who means what he says and all he says, and nothing other than what he says, and has felt the power HOMILETIC PERSONALITY 175 of what he says ; else who could say it as he says it, or who feel it as we feel it ? It is singularly real. No second-hand religion or theology here, and no half-con- viction or professional emotion. The organism of the sermon is fresh with life. It is charged with the force of the personality of the preacher. No homiletic hotch- potch here. The style has the vitality of intellectual clarity and accuracy, of ethical, emotional, and spirit- ual force, and of imaginative suggestiveness. This vitality discloses itself in his intellectual productive- ness, notwithstanding his lifelong struggle with physical infirmity. His mind was always at work. Subjects were perpetually crowding in upon him. They were so numerous that they must wait, be put aside, " hung up," for future investigation. He was never hard put for something to say. He knew nothing of the agonies of mental and moral poverty. This same vital quality disclosed itself in the rapidity of his mental movement. His quickest work, he says as far back as 1839, is his best work. Not because it was quickest, but because it was the outcome of a mind intensely active and that took vigorous hold of subjects that came before it, so that the accumulated results of past hours of thought came rapidly to fruitage. It showed itself in his quick, pungent, vivacious answers to questions which, anticipating the modem question-drawer method, were dropped into a box at the door of his church lecture- room and which were sometimes answered impromptu from the desk. It showed itself in his conversation, in his talks at the club, in which he was recognized as facile princeps. It was an event much to be coveted and long to be remembered to hear him pour himself 176 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS out in his fulness when he was at his best. Few men have matched him in the art of pungent colloquy. This vitality, perhaps, gave him a drawing towards the West, where he mistakenly imagined his work might be better appreciated, an impulse which he never wholly lost. And yet New England was his proper sphere. It is altogether doubtful if elsewhere Bushnell would ever have found a basis for the wide-reaching influence he has exerted. The thought of the age was almost, although unconsciously, ready for him, and New Eng- land was the true centre for the exercise of his intel- lectual leadership. 5. It remains to consider the religious element in his personality as related to his power as a preacher. Bush- nell, like Robertson, was gifted with capacious and re- fined religious sensibilities. In either case it reached the measure of religious genius. In either case it was an inheritance. It both cases it was nurtured under the favoring conditions of evangelical piety from early days, and the fruit of it remained to latest years. If Robertson's piety was the more emotional and affec- tional and his early evangelicalism of the more pro- nounced type, Bushnell's was not the less real and enduring. Bushnell early developed a more distinc- tively intellectual and rational type of religious character than Robertson, and it was more distinctively ethical as a form of religious experience. It was, therefore, more closely allied to what called itself in his early days " the religion of nature." The early conditions of his life tended to foster a certain ethical austerity, and the inquisitiveness and independence of his mind tended to the development of the rational element in his religion. HOMILETIC PERSONALITY 1 77 But from the first he was at heart a mystic, and no form of rationalism or of moralism could claim him. Even in childhood he had not only the poet's but the mystic's eye for nature, and he reached out into fellow- ship with it " in a sense of the divine beauty and maj- esty " that allured him. It is interesting to note that it was in the atmosphere of the college that he " was to think himself out of his over-thinking, and discover how far above reason is trust." It was by following the mystical tendency which was native to him that he was led, when a tutor in college, to exclaim : " I am glad I have a heart as well as a head ; my heart wants the Father ; my heart wants the Son ; my heart wants the Holy Ghost — and one just as much as the other." And here was his anchorage ground and the stay of his religious life. He was not inclined to the work of the ministry. He had studied law and was preparing to enter a law office at the West. He had something the same struggle with himself with respect to entering the ministry that Robertson had. With Robertson the diffi- culty was largely a sense of spiritual unfitness and the attractions of a more active life that- appealed to his imagination. With Bushnell it seems to have been the attractions of the legal profession. This was in line with his questioning and debating habit of mind, with his previous studies, and with his interest in pubhc affairs. The, influence of his religious difficulties may also be seen here. In either case it was a letter that decided the question. In the case of Robertson it was a letter from a neighbor. In the case of Bushnell it was a letter from Yale College. Both of these princely men entered the ministry oppressed with a certain sense 1 78 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS of unfitness. It is a very noteworthy fact that many men, who have proved themselves to be, as we say, " born preachers," men who in all ways were fitted for the work of the ministry, men most devoutly conscientious and spiritually minded, and who have exerted a most powerful influence in their day, have had this shrinking sense of unfitness. The instances are numerous. It is noteworthy, too, that in every case — and in these two cases preeminently — they have risen superior to it, and the very shrinking seems to have been a condition of the greater power. Bushnell had something the same struggle with mental difficulties that Robertson had. It came earlier than Robertson's, but they met and van- quished their difficulties in much the same way. They met them on moral and religious, not on speculative, grounds. It was in 1829 that Bushnell came to Yale College as tutor, where he remained for two years. He was a member of the church, had been religiously trained at home, and for four years had lived under the Christian influences of the college, but he came a doubter. He was, as we have seen, constitutionally a questioner. His intense intellectual activity kept him perpetually agitating difficult questions. His religious inclinations, sympathies, and habits brought this activity to bear upon religious questions. His self-rehant nature led him to undertake the clearing up of these difficulties in his own way, and he took but few into his counsels. During his tutorship there was a religious awakening in the college. He was at first unmoved or seemed to be unmoved by it. At last, however, he began to see and feel his responsibility as a teacher, for he had, and knew that he had, a strong influence over his pupils. HOMILETIC PERSONALITY 179 The result was that he invited some of the young men whom he most strongly influenced to his room, and then and there he told them the position he proposed to take. " The result was overwhelming ; " they all broke down together. It was the turn of the tide for him as for them, and it was an hour big with import for the pulpit of New England. Its most commanding religious genius and one of its brightest ornaments had been won. It is a profoundly interesting story. And it might be worth while to pause here and note the value of a strong moral basis for the Christian Hfe. Bushnell was conscious of the processes of his religious develop- ment and he clearly traces the four stages of it.^ The first is the period of natural religion, when he was led " socially and by force of the blind religious instinct of his nature." The second was the period of ethical rehgion, when he "was advanced into the clear moral light of Christ and of God, as related to the principle of rectitude." The third and fourth were the periods of spiritual religion. They are those periods in which Christ was revealed more perfectly and through him the nature and character of God as self-revealing love in sacrifice. At the time above mentioned, Bushnell was evidently emerging from the first into the second stage of his religious development. Here was a man who was held by his conscience. This seemingly was. the chief thing that anchored him, till God in grace could do his larger and better work within him. It was good, strong anchorage ground and God held him to it and by it till with Fatherly grace He could pour fresh light and life into his large, open soul. This ethical element in his 1 " Life and Letters," p. 445. l80 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS religion was always present. It tempered his emotions and had a strong influence upon his thinking and preach- ing. It was this ethical experience of religion largely that fitted him to deal with men who were troubled with intellectual difficulties. He lays down two rules that governed him and should govern every man. First, perfect honesty in the formation of opinions and prin- ciples of action. " It is one thing," he says, " to take a position and use reason to defend it, and another to use reason in selecting a position. In the one case reason obeys the will; in the other, will obeys the reason." Another rule is never to swerve in conduct from honest conviction. " Decide because there are reasons for deciding, and then act because the decision is made." By these rules he governed his whole life. Therefore, the rational and ethical elements in his religion are always present even though they may often appear under highly mystical forms. His sermons have the strong rational and moral ring of a man who is true to the core of life. Another suggestion from the early experience of Bushnell is the value of the religious revival of the right sort in the rescue of men from scepticism. He was not a believer in the revival method for the ordering of church life, and took strong ground against it, although he participated in revival move- ments and some of his most effective extemporaneous addresses were made in connection with them. And his own experiences demonstrate the power of a great religious awakening in a time of intellectual dislodg- ment to save sceptical men. This religious awakening influenced him by taking hold of his moral nature, and the influence is noted by him in an autobiographical HOMILETIC PERSONALITY i8i reference in a sermon preached in Yale College Chapel entitled, " The Dissolving of Doubts." ^ Now, this experience lies back of and is seen in its indirect influ- ence on his preaching. Of course it is not necessary that every man should have just this sort and measure of experience in order to become a helpful preacher, although in Bushnell's case it is questionable whether he would ever have reached his full measure of power without it. But in general it is pertinent to suggest that it will be a dark day for the church, if young men, who find themselves perplexed by the problems of religion and theology and have the manly sincerity to acknowledge their perplexity, are not to be treated with large-minded and large-hearted Christian generosity and tolerance, as Dr. Bushnell was not treated ; a dark day if Christian thoughtfulness and studiousness and moral sincerity are to be discredited in a pulpit that originated in Christian liberty — and can justify its ex- istence only on the basis of an ever enlarging Christian intelligence. It was fifteen years after Bushnell entered the min- istry before the mystical, which is the more distinctively spiritual element in his religious nature and experience, was fully manifested. It was then that he entered upon a higher type of religious life. And it is in connection with this experience that he gained, as he himself tells us, new conceptions of the significance of Christ, and this became the basis of new conceptions of the char- acter of God. From this time on to the end his religious life was constantly deepened and enriched. He lived ever more completely as in the abiding presence of God. 1 " Sermons on Living Subjects," Sermon IV. This was the period when all the wealth of his mystical poetry and poetic mysticism developed. The influence of his religious development is discover- able in the distinctively Christian quality of his preach- ing. It is an interesting and somewhat suggestive fact, that many of those modern preachers, who have been much perplexed in faith, and who perhaps have for a time been distrusted by many of their brethren and permanently distrusted by others, have after all been the men who have preached Christ with unusual power and persuasiveness, and have in reahty been among the most helpful preachers of their time. The man who, like Bushnell, has struggled for his Christian faith, and has won his standing-ground as by the hardest, is likely to cherish it with a peculiar sense of preciousness. Such a man will be content with no by-play in his preaching. He must get back to the great central realities of a living Christianity. We find this in Bushnell's case. He always discusses what is of vital importance to the Christian life, and he always has a distinctively Christian theme. His sermons of the specifically evangelistic type have never been pub- lished ; of his power, therefore, as a preacher to the heart and conscience with reference to immediate and decisive evangelistic results, we have probably no ade- quate impression from those in our possession. The published sermons are of the pastoral sort. Of these, consisting of three, volumes, more than nine-tenths are from New Testament texts, and all of the sermons, even those from Old Testament texts are specifically Christian in substance and tone. They are sermons for edification, speaking to the Christian intelligence of the HOMILETIC PERSONALITY • 183 hearer and reaching the practical life through intelli- gence, but they also bear the trace of a heart strongly- moved by the truths presented. We are told that his utterances at the Lord's Table, and at the services preparatory to it, were utterances of deep Christian feeling and that these were occasions of great up- lifting. It was then that he poured out his whole heart upon his people. His prayers were remarkable for their depth of feeUng, their spiritual power, their freedom and simplicity and directness. He prayed as one who lives in the conscious fellowship of God. The higher world was to him the real world, and he bathed himself in its atmosphere as in his native element. As with every great preacher from Paul, Augustine, and Luther down to the preachers of our own day, it was this mystical element in his religion that was predominant. He was a Christian pantheist and lived in God as in his own proper dwelling-place. The influence of his religious personality is seen in the intense reality of his preaching. Nothing second-hand nor conventional here. No saying of things because it is orthodox or proper or prudent to say them. The utterance is laden with moral and spiritual conviction. The ethical and spiritual life quickened his intellectual life, and inspired all his intellectual activities. It is a rare instance of the effect of profound religious experi- . ence in awakening the mental manhood. The late Pres- ident Porter in his memorial address upon Dr. Bushnell directs attention to the influence of his religious life upon the development of his individuality. It awoke within him a new manhood. He suggests also that it gave great zeal and ardor in his work as a pastor, and fitted him, as 1 84 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS few men were fitted, to meet the mental difficulties of thinking men with respect to the problems of religion in his day. Ill BUSHNELL'S HOMILETIC THEOLOGY It is not in line with the writer's purpose in this chap- ter that he should attempt an interpretation of Bushnell's theology, — much less that he should attempt either a criticism or a defence of it. It is only necessary to con- sider it, as it relates itself to the substance, tone, and method of his preaching. Some things that might and should be considered in this connection, have already been touched upon in the previous discussion, but will perhaps have additional consideration from a somewhat different point of view. That Dr. Bushnell had an adequate scientific concep- tion of the problems of theology will doubtless generally _ be questioned in our day by those who are most compe- tent to speak upon the subject. But that he had pretty definite and positive conceptions of his own about these problems, and especially about the great central themes of Christian theology, which he sacredly cherished, will of course be questioned by no one. He was not careful to put these conceptions into rigid forms of definition, nor had he any faith in the permanent value of theological definition, but he had pretty clear theological con- ceptions that interpreted to him the significance of his religious feelings, convictions, and experiences. His theology lies back of his preaching, and no preacher of his day preached his theology more fully than he. He HOMILETIC THEOLOGY 185 had no theology, and would have none, that he could not preach. As a merely speculative interest it had but little value for him. He even denied that it had any value as a mere product of speculation, save for intellectual gym- nastics. It was, in fact, the work of his life to relate theology to experience. This is perhaps the chief reason why his theology has made such an impression, and why men have been so much interested in it. It is not wholly their interest in the personality of the man, nor in his forceful and suggestive literary style. It is true that we are so strongly interested in the man, and in his cogent and attractive manner of expressing himself, that he easily solicits our interest in what he thinks and says. But it is a more vital and personal interest than that. His thinking interests us because it practically concerns us. It relates itself to our own needs, and to many of our best life experiences. His theology, therefore, may be called homiletic theology, — theology that can be preached because it touches the reaUties of human experience. Dr. Bushnell may have been subjective and measurably unscientific in his think- ing, but that he was a brave, forceful, and useful reli- gious thinker, almost every one in our day will acknowledge. To show that rehgion has significance and value independently of any particular form of intellectual experience of it, and to interpret it not in terms of speculative thought, but in harmony with the facts of ethical and spiritual experience, and to bring the facts of experience that lie below the speculative understanding to the task of verifying the claims of rehgion, and to show that as facts, they are thinkable and reasonable, — this was the work of his life. This, 1 86 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS therefore, must be our starting-point in estimating his theology. Under what combination of influences or by what particular agencies he was led to abandon his early naturalistic and rationalistic basis of thought upon the problems, of religion, and " to think himself out of his overthinking," is not wholly clear. The development of this sceptical attitude toward the intellect as the organ of religious knowledge, was a somewhat occult process. Doubtless we may discover in it his own originality and independence of character. It is evidently connected with his own ethical and spiritual development, by virtue of which he is set in reaction against the dominance of the dogmatic and rationalistic method that overvalues and one-sidedly uses the processes of the speculative understanding in theological investigation. It probably stands connected, too, with those influences of early years, whatever they may have been, that led him to adopt the theory that language, as to its nature and function, is an organ of representative thought, rather than of exact scientific thought, and this is probably connected with the rapid development of the imaginative side of his nature. It should be remembered, however, as already intimated in another connection, that criticism of the then existing theory of religious knowledge had already begun to do its disintegrating work. It was already undermining the philosophical foundations of theology. Ethical and spiritual idealism was gaining ground. Bushnell knew this movement, although he did not know its sources, nor its full import. He saw more clearly, however, than most of the men of his time saw, and probably than any other man in the Christian min- HOMILETIC THEOLOGY 187 istry in this country. He saw but little, yet it meant much. The man of vision, who lives on the mountain top, catches lights that flash from other distant and higher peaks, which the men who linger in the valley below do not catch ; and though it be but a flash, it is light, and it has vast significance for the seer. Bush- nell could not have been altogether ignorant of what was going on without as well as within himself. He was, indeed, an independent thinker, but he was not with- out dependence upon greater thinkers. Men of Hght and leading like Coleridge pointed the way, and he was quick to follow, for it seemed to him the homeward path ; but he followed in a strikingly independent way. He thought that some things which other men had already excogitated, were his own independent product, and they were in a sort. But he had company on his' new path, although he was unconscious of his compan- ionship. In ruling out metaphysics and dialectics from theology, and in finding anchorage in ethical and spirit- ual experience, Bushnell is doubtless a pioneer in this country, and, as has been well shown, anticipates much that has become asomewhat common possession, and that bears the general name of Ritschlianism, which is itself simply a not very remote product of Kant's and Schlei- ermacher's thinking ; for there is nothing here the raw material of which is not furnished by those great think- ers. This conviction, which ultimately came to him as a new discovery, that religion is the basis of all theology and furnishes to reflection all of its materials, and that it is to be interpreted according to its own facts as ethi- cal and spiritual experience and not according to abstract, speculative processes or theories, gives character and 1 88 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS direction to his own theology. In considering the change that passed upon his theology, in which his ethical, religious, and artistic development had so strong an influence, we should not forget the value to him of his earlier rationalistic experiences. As a rationalist and an adherent of the rehgion of nature he had learned two things : he had learned to think and he had learned to doubt, and the lesson was of great value to him in after years. In the processes of his early independent thinking he came to question the church doctrine of the Trinity, and, in connection with this, the traditional conceptions of the person of Christ. It was not the current theology but the current Christology that was first challenged. His conception of God modified as his conception of Christ modified. His theology was in an important sense a product of his Christology. The Christ that had been presented to him did not seem to satisfy either his intellectual or his spiritual or ethical needs. With great intellectual and moral courage he therefore sets about the task of finding a Christ who should satisfy his higher needs, and here the brave thinker, the honest doubter, and the devout believer join hands. He did not save his orthodoxy, but his religious faith was saved by attaching itself to a Christ that met all his spiritual needs, the living Christ who is the complete revealer of God, and in whom alone we can know God. With this new knowledge of Christ there comes, as already sug- gested, a new knowledge of God. God is known to him and interpreted not through speculative thought, as the young rationalist would know and interpret Him, but as He is discovered in Christ and as He becomes inwardly revealed through the sense of kinship with Him which HOMILETIC THEOLOGY 1 89 comes through fellowship with Christ. Thus God be- comes a real, living, pervasive presence, the background of the universe, immanent in all its processes, and dis- closes Himself in immediate knowledge. This is the basis of his conception of the revelation of God. It appears in his " Nature and the Supernatural." Nature and man are parts of one great whole. The supernat- ural is constantly playing into and through the order of the world, and this conditions his conception of the miraculous. God is the ever present reality, and never ceases to work as a supernatural force in the world of nature and of humanity. In the modification of his Christology his soteriology underwent a corresponding modification. A new conception of the person of Christ involves a new conception of the work of Christ. But it also took connection with new conceptions of the character of God and of His revelation to men. The same general conception of the divine character and revelation that appeared in " Nature and the Super- natural " appeared also in his " Vicarious Sacrifice." God in Christ has come into living and abiding relation with humanity, and sacrifice is but the necessary outcome and disclosure of the fact that God is in the human race in the order of redemptive love. This leads him to reject what calls itself the forensic conception of the atone- ment, but not necessarily the truth that is expressed by it, as he himself subsequently practically acknowledged in the supplement to "Vicarious Sacrifice." But su- preme stress is laid upon the moral force of the atone- ment. There is no Christ for us, that avails with God, who is not the Christ within us as a living redemptive force. And the Christ within us avails with God pre- 190 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS cisely because he does God's work within us and brings us into the likeness of God. No one has ever presented Christ more cogently or more attractively as a moral force in the very life of humanity, present there as a power of ever fresh renewal for the human race. And no one has ever grasped the conception of a race re- demption more strongly or exhibited a loftier faith in the " outpopulating power of the Christian stock " in the future processes of human development. In all these theological changes we see the working of the strong, independent mind that is not afraid to challenge tradi- tional beliefs, of the vigorous ethical nature, of the devout and pious heart, and of the mystical imagination. It yields for him a theology which he is sure can be preached and which he is equally sure men need to hear. Bushnell's theology never appears in his preaching in technical form, nor is it here in a formal manner at all, but its substance is here pervasively. And it is this that secures for his preaching a fundamental and com- prehensive character, so that it aggregates a great amount of strong and edifying thinking. He seizes the principles that underlie practical working Christian truth, and presents them in such way as makes them available for life. His preaching discloses his purpose to get theology at work. Hence the mingling of the didactic and the impressional, of the intellectual and the ethical and emotional, of the truth as we are to think it and the truth as we are to live it. It has solid thought and strong feeling and conviction. It deals with living men and with real needs, and not with things remote from common human life. It is full of HOMILETIC THEOLOGY 191 insight, rationality, reality, and persuasiveness. It will live because it contains so much that men need to hear and want to hear when they know their real wants. Bushnell's reaction against abstract and dogmatic theology and against speculative processes in dealing with the phenomena of religion, had for one of its results a higher estimate of religion as a historic real- ity. His views of revelation were modified. God has not revealed Himself in a body of doctrine but as a personal, living, historic presence. Consequently his supreme interest is in the historic Christ. To know Christ is of supreme importance, for to know Him aright is to know God aright. It is no wonder, there- fore, that his Christology was the first thing to be set right. This secures a Christo-centric quaHty to his preaching. It attaches itself to the historic Christ. It is Christological rather than theological. It is theologi- cal only in the sense that the character of God as re- vealed in Christ is a subject that is often brought to our attention. He knows chiefly the God who is re- vealed in Christ, and his- Christology is his theology. There are more discourses in the volume entitled " Ser- mons for the New Life " that have a theological centre than in the other two volumes. But these relate largely to the government and providence of God as seen in the light of Christ, and to the way in which we come to the knowledge of God. " Every Man's Life a Plan of God," "Spiritual Dislodgments," "The Spirit in Man," "The Hunger of the Soul," "The Reason of Faith," "The Capacity of Religion Extirpated by Disuse," are ser- mons that touch upon these questions, and they are among the strongest and most impressive sermons of 192 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS the volume. But most of the sermons in this and all of those in the volume entitled " Christ and His Salva- tion," are distinctively Christological. As being based on historic religion, it follows that his preaching is emi- nently Biblical. His themes are always taken directly from Scriptural sources, sometimes by felicitous pro- cesses of suggestion, but they always have a fresh Scriptural flavor. They contain the raw material of re- ligious thought as it emerges in the fresh forms of the Bibhcal records, and never in the formal doctrines of the church. Citations of individual Scripture passages are not abundant in his discussions. He deals rather with the trend of Biblical teaching, and the Scriptures in their bold outhnes are brought to the support of his dis- cussion. There is never lacking such Biblical defence of the truth in hand, and not infrequently there is a distinct BibHcal topic giving the Biblical contribution to his argument. As having for its chief object the pres- entation of Christ in his living relation with men, his preaching does not to any considerable extent touch upon his external or extra-world relations ; and as inter- preting Christian truth with supreme reference to prac- tical Hfe, it is prevaihngly anthropological and ethical. It is not " the way of salvation " as objectively given in Christ, so much as salvation as a power to subdue man, and as a power, when appropriated by man, to bring him into fellowship with God. It deals with the human soul and has an interesting psychological quality, and it deals with the individual soul, not with the collective life of the church. There are but few sermons that touch the church at all. They deal with the higher ranges of human experience. The ethical quality of HOMILETIC THEOLOGY 193 his preaching, which, by examining the themes of his sermons in all these volumes, especially the last en- titled "Sermons on Living Subjects," will be found to be predominant, is distinguished by the fact that the principles of the ethical Christian life are discussed, and hence that it takes a didactic or expository form. One of the topics of the discussion also deals specifi- cally with the practical moral bearings of the subject, and the conclusion of the sermon rarely fails to use the subject discussed for the reaUzation of practical results. By greatening the significance of the truth discussed, he will all the more effectively impress it upon the moral life of the hearer. And yet the entire sermon, however didactic its character, has an elevated moral tone and aim. It follows from all this tendency to in- terpret the truth to the Christian intelligence of men, and then to apply it to practical edification, that he was preeminently a pastoral, as distinguished from an evan- gelistic, preacher. The class of truths discussed and his manner of discussing them are not in general adapted to the evangelistic aim and method. The motives with which he deals also are motives that centre in religion largely as a present reality. His preaching is for edifi- cation rather than for conversion. The motives urged are rational, ethical, and spiritual and presuppose an already existing Christian mind. And yet there is a tone about his preaching, there is a cogency in his handling of great Christian themes, as is illustrated in the sermon, " Christ Waiting to find Room," that is well adapted to evangelistic impression, and such sermons must strongly have influenced those who did not pro- fess and call themselves Christians. Many of the truths 194 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS discussed touched the very heart of the Gospel, and they must have won the moral and spiritual allegiance of men. But this at least is true, that this sort of preaching which greatens to the mind and enforces upon the heart and conscience the august truths of redemptive rehgion, is the best possible ground-laying work for evangelistic preaching. CHAPTER V PHILLIPS BROOKS I THE CHRISTIAN HUMANIST It is not difficult to fix at the outset upon what is most distinctive in the character of Phillips Brooks. Itjs the breadth and wealth of his humanity. Using the term in a somewhat comprehensive sense, he may be called the great Christian humanist of his generation. He came to the world with a great human soul, and he bent all his energies to the task of interpreting and ennobling human existence. The total impression left by his biography by Professor Allen is that we are here in contact with_the_most_hura^^ from whom nothing that belongs to humanity can ever be foreign ; and this impression heightens and intensifies all previous impressions from whatever source. To account for him, therefore, must be a matter of interest. Genius — and not the less, but even the more manifestly, religious genius — is always the gift of God. We cannot, therefore, reach of course the full secret of this superbly built specimen of New England manhood. But some things are clear, and perhaps the clearest thing, and the most noteworthy, is that he was the consummate flower of nine generations of cultured Puritan stock. We are 195 iq6 representative modern preachers ,^.- ^; ■•It. given to know that on the one side he inherited the Puritan's high sense of the worth of humanity, his large estimate of its possibilities of development, his recogni- tion of the sacredness of the individual soul, and his enthusiastic devotion to its highest welfare. This was the spring of that lofty idealism that passed into an optimism that was unmatched in his generation. On the other side he inherited the Puritan's sturdy common sense, his outlook upon the earthly and temporal inter- ests of men, his aggressive and enterprising devotion to all that belongs to the ordinary relations of life, his love for the concrete and tangible, his aptitude for practical affairs, and his personal reserve and pride of individualism. As we have seen in the case of Beecher and of Bushnell, so in this princely product all that was best in the Puritan stock, in its idealistic and practical aspects, disclosed itself. Without this Puritan " enthusi- asm of humanity " no adequate estimate of this largely and symmetrically moulded man is possible. Such a man could ^ not be compressed within the limits of a narrow provincial ecclesiasticism, nor twisted into line with a narrow institutional Christianity. He belonged to the church catholic. He had a sort of prenatal com- mitment to that theory of the church which recognizes its free self-development from within under the organ- izing agency of the Holy Spirit. Yet he was not a Congregationalist. He was baptized in the Unitarian Church. He may have been influenced by the intel- lectual freedom and the moral earnestness of Unitarian- ism. But he was not a Unitarian. It was the Episcopal Church to which his parents migrated when he was four years old that nurtured his subconscious and later con- THE CHRISTIAN HUMANIST 197 scious life. That this church was his early religious home, and that the mark of its nurture was upon him, will always stand to its honor. Its evangelical piety left an indelible impress upon him, as that of the evan- gelical branch of the Anglican Church upon Newman and Robertson. Let it be confessed that it is matter for devout gratitude that he was nurtured in this evangeli- cal school. Here was one of the sources of that reli- gious love for men that enhanced so greatly his power as a preacher. But it was too narrow a school for him, as it was for Robertson. As by inheritance, as by his bias to intellectual freedom, by the impulse of his large intelligence, which induced him to get behind the his- toric forms into the larger catholic principles that lie behind this school, and by all the preponderating influ- ences that were brought to bear upon him from with- out, he was a Broad churchman. But he was a Broad churchman only in so far as this section of the Epis- copal Church represents the church of idealized and redeemed humanity. And it may be justly claimed that, despite the influences of these two schools, he was not, in the larger estimate, a product of his church. He belonged to a broader world than any branch of it represented. He was not an ecclesiastic. He was / indeed loyal to his church, but he was free from many of its limitations. He ftad but scant respect for an •/ institutional Christianity, that does not recognize the kingdom of God as broader than the church. In a reasonable manner and measure he accepted church authority and found a way of justifying it, but he regarded the dogma of apostolic authority as a fiction. He loved the church because it represented ideal human- 198 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS ity, and he found its strength, not in its alleged apos- tolic order, but in the saintly lives of its members, not in the sanctity of an office but in sanctity of character. Within the liturgical and canonical exactions of his church he exercised his freedom, in this sense of freedom, even rejoicing in these exactions. But a formal, institutional Christianity had no value for him, and he cared but little for the ecclesiastical assembly, having a greater relish for the associations of human friendship than for what seemed to him the pettiness of ecclesiastical debate. He freely affiliated with men who were be- yond his ecclesiastical boundaries. All this because his impulses were humanistic rather than provincial or ecclesiastical, and because the church represented to him the sacredness of humanity. Coming to his student life we find disclosed this same broad, human spirit. It is easy to read too much into the early studies and products of his student-life, but we may find much here that was really distinctive of the man. We find here a student isolated from the boyish sports of fife, but eager for the knowledge of men and things, with a dislike for what is abstract and in the formal sense philosophical, with strong bias for history, biography, and Hterature, with pronounced literary tastes, and disclosing the same affluence, and the same descriptive qualities of style that characterized his maturer years. He belonged to the old Harvard of the humanities. In the preparatory school and in the college, he acquired a good working knowledge of the classics of which he availed himself in subsequent years. He worked rapidly and had time to follow his bent for literary culture. He exercised the freedom of THE CHRISTIAN HUMANIST 199 self-direction, following his own impulses or instincts as he foraged among the college libraries, appropriating with avidity whatever came within his reach, laying the founda- tion for a better appreciation of the literature of his own day by mastering the best products of the literature of the eighteenth century. He always went below the surface of things and tried to get at their inner mean- ing. But he was as averse to metaphysics as Bushnell was, and as ignorant of philosophy in the formal sense of the word. He was, however, not indifferent to nor ignorant of those fundamental philosophical principles that are necessary to the interpretation of life, with which it was the necessity of his mind to grapple, and he absorbed them, as many another thoughtful man has done, from the intellectual atmosphere in which he lived or from the literature with which he became familiar. In later life he was something of a student of Lotze. It is evident that Lotze appealed to his hu- manistic tendencies. We may surmise that what inter- ested him chiefly in his philosophy was the prominence of the ethical and aesthetic elements in it, the stress laid upon value-judgments in dealing with the problems of human existence, and its recognition of personality as belonging in its full significance only to the being of the Absolute. He was especially interested in the lives of great men, Luther, Cromwell, Mohammed. The larger the personality the greater his interest ; this was his point of interest in Carlyle. His ready responsiveness to what is human found illustration in his college career. He is a product of the old Harvard curriculum. All the great masters in the modern pulpit have been products of a curriculum in which the humanities were supreme. 200 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS If the modern curriculum of elective miscellany can turn out a better product for the Christian pulpit, it will doubtless be seen^ and acknowledged in due time. Turning to the influences that ultimately determined his choice of the Christian ministry, we find them some- what obscure. The consciousness of eminent oratori- cal gifts could hardly have been one of them, for in college he gave no promise of being an orator. Perhaps his freedom from a sceptical habit of mind may have been a favorable negative condition for the choice, for he was not a constitutional questioner like Bushnell, Ancestral and personal piety have, of course, their place in the problem. The ministry as a sphere for the ex- pression of the didactic, ethical, and artistic impulse, which was strong within him, is to be considered. But in early years he had a dread of submission to authority, and cherished the impression that the ministry would Hmit the free development of his powers, and this, with the dread of provincialism, caused him to hesitate. And so one fancies that at last the decisive thing was the conviction that after all the ministry furnished the largest and completest sphere for his devotion to the interests of humanity. At any rate, we are assured by his biographer that he saw the mistake of his early estimate, and that he came to the ministry with the conviction that it was the best sphere for the exercise of all his powers ; and he succeeded as but few have done in vindicating this judgment in his own ministry. We find the same characteristic tendencies in his student life in the divinity school. Here he begins to grapple in dead earnest with the great problems of life. He was faithful to the curriculum, although a THE CHRISTIAN HUMANIST 201 critic of it, and seems to have received a strong im- pulse in the direction of intellectual freedom, at the same time continuing subject to the same sort of evan- gelical influence which he had found in his home. But he ranged widely and with amazing eagerness and wealth of result beyond the courses. He led a some- what retired life, and plunged into the heart of a broad student world. As by a sort of divination, or hunger of soul for what he needed, he seized upon what seemed to belong to him. He apparently made no special '■'' mark in technical theology, whether in dogmatics or in exegesis. He was especially interested, however, in ^-^ historic theology. Of the church ^tjiers he was a/ thorough student, and we may trace the mfluence of Origen, and back of him of Philo and of other church Fathers, in the allegorizing habit which characterized his ^ preaching. He always gets behind the historic form of truth and seizes the back-lying principle suggested ; and this habit of looking at truth through the imagina- tion, which was in part at least the result of his study of the Fathers, was made very prominent in his preaching throughout his entire career. But beyond the theological studies he ranged more widely, prob- ably, than any student of his day. He had a gift and ^ a love for the classics. He was especially interested 7 in the classical dramatists, from whom he was learn- ing the Greek interpretation of life, and at the same time he became absorbed in modern English literature. It was in the theological school that he resumed an *^ earlier habit of keeping note-books, in which he gave expression to thoughts which crowded upon him from his reading and study, and which in the form of illus- 202 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS trations, hundreds of them, appeared later in his ser- mons. These notes, whether in the form of literary impressions or of personal thoughts, or of suggestions i from others, are full of salient characteristics, — his catholicity of spirit, his largeness of outlook, his sense of the practical utility of truth, his enthusiasm for life, his reflective habit, his gift for personification. They disclose the results of his historical and literary studies. He is beginning with nature and man, with the earthly and human, not the divine. In all this and in his eager ^ admiration for all that is humanly great and good we , see the humanist. It is the intellectual development ^ that impresses us, and there is almost nothing that in- dicates profound evangelical piety. He seems, indeed, carefully to exclude all such utterances of pious feel- ing as we find in the early letters and writings of Schleiermacher. We behold a large independent na- ture, that is subjecting itself to a great variety of human impressions, that is feeling its way out into human life, and is developing freely from within along lines that disclose his most distinctive impulses. It was in line with his humanistic tendencies that he should love the city more than the country. He had an artist's eye for scenic beauty, and it quickened his poetic impulses ; but he loved more the crowded city streets, where he could feel the rushing tides of human life. He was a born city pastor, and could sympathize with Thomas Guthrie, who criticised the sentiment, " God made the country, but man made the town." Provi- dence, therefore, had in reserve for him a city parish, and it must be regarded as rare good fortune that his first pastoral contact with human life should have been THE CHRISTIAN HUMANIST 203 among the people of the Philadelphia of years ago. Not less fortunate was it that his later, rather than his earlier, ministry was in Boston. Nor is it less a matter for thankfulness that he entered upon his min- istry just before the opening of the Civil War. It was a time of great distress, but of mighty inspirations. Many a minister was lifted above himself by the great- ness of that conflict, and found in it the incentive of all that was most effective in his ministry. It awakened and evoked the greatness of PhiUips Brooks. It chal- lenged all his noblest enthusiasm, all the passion of his patriotism, all his courage, all his freedom, all his philanthropy and humanity ; and he threw himself into the conflict, preaching with a fiery patriotism, like that of Schleiermacher, that mightily stirred the souls of men, bringing to bear on the platform, no less than in the pul- pit, all his vigor of thought, of imagination, of emotion, all his force of will, all the wealth of his most human experiences, stored up for just such use, upon the great questions that were in issue. Here was well laid the foundation for a great career. Later years may have witnessed in many respects more important service for the church and the world, but none were marked by greater intellectual brilliancy or more popular effec- tiveness than those years of the Philadelphia ministry that lie behind the twenty-two years of the greater Boston ministry. It was a proof of his clear discern- ment, as well as in accord with his deepening ethical and religious experiences, and in line with all his best human impulses, that he should have recognized the changed conditions of the ministerial problem when he went to Boston. In Philadelphia he was called to 204 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS \ deal more largely with associate life, and to grapple with great public problems. In Boston, where the problems of religious thought were more exigent, he recognized himself as summoned to deal more specifi- cally with individual life, to become the interpreter of life to the individual soul. And here we see the same large humanity placed at the service of men who are struggling with the contradictions and confusions and doubts of human life. It was in this Boston ministry, a ministry of great power in ennobling men's concep- tions of the world and of life, that he proved himself / -v to be the great pastoral preacher of.hisM&ge. Here it sj was his choice vocation to interpret men to themselves, to tell them things about themselves they did not know, to explain things of which they were only half conscious, to ennoble them in their own eyes, to humble them in /their imperfections and sins, to interpret the humanity \of Christ and the divinity that is possible for man. EVierywhere and always it is the same great soul, clear and broad in its intellectual apprehensions, sturdy in its moral devotions, tender in its human sympathies, that is giving itself, with increasing sense of the fellowship of \God and of His Christ, to the higher interests of men. \ In his intercourse with friends we see increasingly the \ large- and tender-heartedness of the man. His letters have not the moral sobriety of Bushnell's nor the intellectual brilliancy of Robertson's. But in their ardent affectionateness they remind us somewhat of Schleiermacher's. yn all his relations with his friends /we note an increasing hunger of heart for human V, I companionship. It was an increasingly lonely life, and ne lived more and more in the affections of his friends. THE CHRISTIAN HUMANIST 205 One may venture the suggestion, and indeed the biog- raphy leaves the impression, that, while he never felt the vocation to a celibate life, as Newman tells us he did from the age of fifteen years, it may have been the increasing conviction that he was called to be the shep- herd of many souls, and that in this calling he belonged too exclusively to the many, to sanction the venture to limit his affections by domestic life. x In his relations with sister churches beyond the bor-*^ ders of his own communion ; in his interest in the prob- lems of education, of politics, of reform, of philanthropic enterprise ; in his conception of religion, of theology, and of the church and the ministry; in his literary culture ; in the anthropological influences that disclose themselves in his literary style, notably in his genius for rhetorical personification, in which it seems to be a necessity to put a human soul into the objects of his thought, — one finds the trace of the great Christian humanist, the great . human friend, the great human churchman. \His reli- ^^ gion is human, his theology is human, and it becomes the i, better divinity because it embodies what is human in the heart of God. It is this large humanity, touched by the power of Christ, cherished and enriched by fellow- ship with Him, that contains in large measure the secret of his power over men. This gives us our point of view. In furthering our investigation it is necessary to go into a closer analysis of his personality, his theology, and his preaching. We will consider, then, the man, the message, and the method. 206 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS II THE HARMONIOUS PERSONALITY The significance of a harmoniously developed, sym- metrically trained, and religiously consecrated person- ality for the work of the preacher no one has ever discussed more forcibly or persuasively, or perhaps realized and illustrated in experience more effectively, than Phillips Brooks. It is the personal element in his preaching that is largely the secret of its power. Its value is not so much in its contribution to our knowledge of the great truths of rehgion, not so much in the originahty of his thinking or in the weight of his ^thought, as in his personal appropriation of Christian ■truth and in his interpretation and enforcement of it as the vital experience of a great soul. It is the self- revealing, manly sincerity of it, its downrightness and straightoutness, its fervid intensity of conviction, its sympathetic identification with the hearers' needs, its interpretation of what is most human that awakens the slumbering echoes of the soul, its outpouring of the vast wealth of his inner life, — it is this that makes the unfailing impression. In personal intercourse he ex- hibited a Puritan reserve that seemed to warn men back from the sanctuary of his inner life. In the pri- vate records of his growing intellectual life there is but little that is self-revealing save the ferment of an awak- ened mind. But the preaching is always self-revealing. Here we find the whole man. The place where men find God is the place, he thinks, where they should find the preacher too ; and in finding him in the ful- THE HARMONIOUS PERSONALITY 207 ness of his self-disclosure, they may the more readily find God. What most impresses us in his personality is the har- monious blending of all its elements. Professor Allen has reminded us of the profound impression which the \ character of Lincoln made upon him. What was true j in Brooks's estfrnate-ol Lincoln's character was eminently ' true, he thinks, of Brooks himself. It was the fusing of the processes of a great mind with the emotions of a great heart, and the energies of a strong, steadfast will that seemed, as a result, to leave no salient points of greatness. It was as if Brooks found a sort of self- interpretation in Lincoln, We are also reminded of his estimate of the character of Christ, in whom the quali- ties are so blended that no one thing is obtrusively prominent, or rather so prominent is the condescension, which is the negation of all obtrusiveness, that all other elements of greatness are dwarfed in the apprehension of common men. So closely identified are the intel- lectual and ethical with the spiritual elements of His personality, that men do not think of Him as the mas- ter mind that is subduing the intelligence of the proud modem world, or as the master will that is bringing every knee to bow to Him. And one would think it almost a profanation to speak of Christ as the great Plato or the great Alexander of the kingdom of God. He is not so much the world's great religious thinker and organizer as the compassionate, comforting man of sorrows. And yet it is precisely the great intelligence and the strong, steadfast will that give adequate signifi- cance to the consecrated heart. Something the like may be said of the personality of Phillips Brooks himself. 208 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS There is, indeed, a gradual and progressive develop- ment of the elements of his personality. They of course do not all emerge simultaneously into manifesta- tion or blend in unity at the outset. The early period has been regarded as characteristically the period of mental development. The early products of his reflec- tion disclose the bent of his mind. Ethical and spiritual qualities are less prominent. There is no such expres- sion of the moral striving of the soul or of intense religious feehng as we find in the youthful Schleier- macher. He begins with his beloved human world and life, that speak to him with all their wondrous, fascinating suggestiveness, and he will sound their depths, if may be, with the plummet of his intelligence. His mind is going forth in its eager quest to find the meaning of their wondrous realities, and in his search he comes back again, as from the vantage-ground of new experiences, to the, God and Father of his childhood days and to the Christ of his early love and devotion ; and already, before he enters upon his sacred calling, he has come to a fresh sense of the meaning of life, a new recognition of the meaning of Christ for his own life and for all human life. And this awakening to the greatness of Christ as the interpreter of God and the interpreter of all life, and this new conviction that all truth and all life should be made consecrate to Christ, left their impress upon his entire ministry. If in the early period the mental development was prominent, as is generally the case, and in the mid period the ethical, in the comple- tion and crown of his development we have the out- pouring of the great heart, whose tides of emotion have been gathering volume from the first and all through THE HARMONIOUS PERSONALITY 209 the experiences of his life. And so from the first we see the unifying process. The thinker is the man of action, and the shepherd's heart inspires all noblest thought and achievement in his devotion to the welfare of men. The physical equipment was symbol of his soul ; and V^ the rush of his speech was typical of those mental, moral, and spiritual energies that were fused into unity and came forth in a stream of fiery intensity. The physical stature and proportions, towering and sym- metrical; the manly attitude, poise, and bearing, free and unconscious in its grace ; the large, dark eyes, mirth- ful, yet serious, speechf ul of all moods of inner intensity ; the well-set, expressive lips ; the radiant countenance ; the full, strong voice, not well managed, but full of feel- ing and of force, — all this was fit organ for the inner manhood that struggled to put itself forth in advocacy of the truth he had appropriated and assimilated in the love of man and for the uplifting of his life. In mental as in physical stature he was large and well-proportioned, and in mental movement facile and forceful. The quality and measure of his productive- ness bear witness to the wealth of his intellectual life. The notes that represent his mental development at the age of nineteen or twenty are remarkable for their insight, inventiveness, and maturity, and already disclose the man of genius. He had not the intellectual strength of Bushnell, nor the intellectual penetration of Robert- son, nor the subtlety of Newman, nor the analytic skill of Mozley, nor the dogmatic forcefulness of Liddon ; but in intellectual inventiveness and productiveness he was almost the match of Beecher. He was not a close 2IO REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS but a broad thinker, (in technical Biblical knowledge /he had no large equipment, but he was a most ingenious ^and suggestive interpreter. He made but little use of logical processes in his discussion, but he knew the laws of thought and ordered his own harmoniously. He ./ disliked abstract thought, but he had keen insight into the inner relations of religious truth. He had the Puritan common sense that chastened his idealism and tempered the fervors of his emotion.J He managed the -/ affairs of his great parish with discretion, was a wise and effective bishop, and would have been called, had he consented, to leadership in the administration of two great universities. He had the impulse and the gifts of the teacher, and might have held the chair of church history or of Christian ethics. He was not without critical acumen, but he had in preponderance the crea- <^ive imagination of the true preacher, and preferred the iprocesses of mental sug gestion to those of mental J » elaboration. What distinguishes his mental movement, therefore, is the dominance of the imagination, and because of the strength of it he early disclosed his inclination for the literary and poetical, rather than the scientific or philosophical, interpretation of life. His lines of mental movement do not lie in the realm of causality or of contiguity in thought, but rather of con- ■J sanguinity. It was the analogical rather than the logical mind, the mind that looks at things in their resemblances, that readily discerns family likenesses; Following the lines of mental association, occasionally the line of causality or of contiguity of thought, but much more frequently, indeed almost always, the lines of resemblance, he steers for the fundamental fact or THE HARMONIOUS PERSONALITY 211 principle that underlies the various realms of reality or of experience upon which he touches and that holds them all in the unity of a controlUng law. There is a poetic or semi-poetic, as well as a scientific and philo- sophical, use of the imagination. Science and philoso- phy group the materials or the phenomena with which they deal under family likenesses ; they classify them under general laws. Generalization of a legitimate sort in any sphere is in fact, though it may not be in name, a process that corresponds to the method of science and philosophy. Any process that lays hold of the truth in its fundamental principles and wide-reaching family rela- tions may be called in a limited sense a process that has philosophical value. Even in the generalizations of science and philosophy the use of the imagination is necessary, but of course they are based upon critical judg- ment. V^The preacher uses the imagination more fully and ^ freely in laying hold of the fundamental and regulative principles of human life and experience and of the great facts and truths of revelation. This was the method of , Phillips Brooks. Hence he was an interpreter. For ^ what is the interpretation of life or of revelation, but the classification and generalization of facts, truths, or experiences, the gathering of what is individual under some general principle or law .-' The significance of any experience, truth, or fact is known only by its family resemblances. Phillips Brooks's habit of dealing with general rehgious principles was a sort of philosophic process applied to the teaching of religion. His pre-\ vailing didactic method was analogy. If sometimes in the imaginative suggestiveness of his treatment of the sub- ject in discussion he threatens to lead us too far afield 212 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS into the realm of fancy and of sentiment, his strong common sense, his balanced judgment, and his literary sanity are pretty sure to rescue him, and, although his thought may be highly poetical in its remote resem- blances, it is still marked by a certain moral sobriety and manly strength that appeal to the intelligence of the hearer. Hence he may be galled, even in an eminent degree, a didacd c , preach er. In England he was regarded as erhinently such, and he always won a hearing from the educated and cultivated classes. He never debated, never argued his subject, and never appealed to external authority. If he discusses a doc- trine like that of the Trinity, it is not the church form of the doctrine that engages him. It is his purpose rather to detach the fundamental principle that contains the life of the truth, and to show that it meets our human needs and finds vindication in our life experi- ences. His didactic methods are among the most interesting peculiarities of his preaching. Considering the prominence of the imaginative ele- ment in his equipment, there are not wanting those who estimate his artistic qualities as most characteristic. His aesthetic endowment and outfit were certainly notable. But a close analysis of his character will always dis- close a preponderance of the ethical over the aesthetic. In his apprehension and regard, beauty is always sub- ordinate. But he well understood, and he well realized in the harmonious blending of his own faculties, the close alliance of the ethical and aesthetic. His own lofty idealism was at once ethical and aesthetic. It embraced the lofty conception of a moral good and a moral beauty that are blended in inseparable unity. THE HARMONIOUS PERSONALITY 21 3 His conceptions of God, of Christ, of humanity, of the individual soul, are profoundly ethical, but they are strongly aesthetic, for they embody conceptions of supreme beauty. For him the Supreme Being must be the realization of a moral perfection that is absolute moral beauty. His world-view is moral and aesthetic. Good is the source, good is the goal,. and good is the process of all things ; and this supreme good is the divine order and beauty of a universe that is sublimest art. All life, in its ideal reahty, and it was chiefly in its ideal reality that he would behold it, is supremely true, supremely good, and supremely glorious. Therefore he loved life, Hke a Greek, as a thing of beauty. It was the necessity of his nature to live in the higher in- terpretations of life, to idealize the universe, because he believed that at heart the true, the good, and the beauti- ful are one. This artistic quality in his nature disclosed itself in his tendency to personify nature under forms of poetic beauty. He was himself no insignificant poet, and he had the quick artistic sense for all its products. He gave but little heed to form in his own poetic prod- ucts ; but his literary form in the sermon, which he treated as an instrument whose supreme value is in the end to be realized, will, by its affluence, grace, force, and spontaneity, perpetuate his influence. He was a competent critic of architecture, and Trinity church in Boston is in part the witness for his artistic sense. His moral qualities are given in the bent of his nature, but they were fruitfully nurtured by his profound rev- erence for the moral significance of life. For him all life, conscious or unconscious, must have a moral goal, and all existence is known only in its end. Even the 214 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS existence of God has an end beyond itself and is su- premely moral. Will is the centre of the divine, as of all, personality, and the moral end of God's existence is to " fulfil himself " in the revelation of His holy perfec- tions to His rational creation. The moral significance of Christ's existence on earth and in the heavenly world is to complete the realization of the ideal of the divine in man, to disclose what is human in God, and to com- plete the work of restoring kinship between God and man. The end of all human existence is the realization of the ideal of moral completeness. With Goethe he held that the end of life is to live in the realm of the true, the good, and the complete. The material universe itself, as the revelation of God, can have only a moral goal. All its forces are pushing it on to the "far-off divine event," and the event as "divine" can only be the good. It is the glory of God to reveal his father- hood. It is the glory of Christ to reveal the kinship of the divine and the human. It is the glory of man to disclose his sonship with God. It is the glory of the universe to complete itself as the kingdom of God. It was this world and life view that nurtured his moral man- hood and furthered most fruitfully his moral develop- ment. This in large measure accounts for the supreme stress he lays upon personality, and his aversion to all that is merely abstract and impersonal. His world must be aUve with personality, for this only realizes the moral ideal of existence. Hence his reverence for personal freedom. It is the moral glory of man, as of God, that he is free, for only in freedom can he realize the moral ends of his existence ; therefore he guarded most sa- credly his own freedom. That he was accustomed to THE HARMONIOUS PERSONALITY 21$ hedge himself about with a reserve that seemed to warn men against intrusion seemed a half-conscious recogni- tion of the sacred rights of his personality. He reacted most strenuously against the fatalism of degenerate modern life, for it fails to recognize moral freedom as the chief glory of manhood. It is this conception of manhood that accentuates his love of intellectual free- dom, his jealousy of all encroachments of arbitrary authority, and his submission to rational and moral au- thority as the condition of the realization of a larger and truer freedom, and the more complete accomplishment of the moral ends of existence. Tolerance is with him only a recognition of the freedom of the soul in the realization of its moral and intellectual tasks. In order to accomplish the moral ends of his own existence he must be free, and other men within their own spheres must be equally free, hence also his reverence for the truth as a moral good and as tributary to the moral ends of life. Truth is not an end, but an instrument. It has moral worth ; it is tributary to life. Life is the end ; truth is the means for realizing that end. Doctrine has I value only as it builds character and regulates conduct./ To be is the supreme end; to know, a subordinate end.' Hence the speculative intellect can never become an adequate organ of knowledge. Knowledge is a virtue only as it relates itself to the will, hence the increasing emphasis put by him upon the moral factor in men's lives and upon the religion of obedience. Knowledge, sentiment, imagination, feeling, all are subordinate to the obedient will. Not less earnestly, but more wisely, than Newman did he proclaim, and with increasing urgency, that it is the end and the glory of man's 2l6 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS existence to know and to do the will of God. Because of this moral conception of life was he an optimist. The freedom, the spontaneity, the reality, the cheerfulness, joyfulness, exuberant hopefulness, and resistless en- thusiasm of his spirit were only in part the gift of nature. It was his moral optimism that kept him, as it kept Schleiermacher, in perpetual youth. He knew the dark side of life, but, like Emerson, he refused to linger with it. He must find an ideal world behind the dark and sinful realities of life, and so bright was it in his vision that it irradiated the darkness and the sin, and they were lost in the " glory that excelleth." It was this steady uplift of soul that strengthened his will and held him steadfast to his purpose to give himself to the ennobling and enriching of the lives of men. Hence the practical character of his preaching ; truth for the sake of life ; life for the. sake of realizing the supreme moral ends of existence. \The whole substance, the entire tone and dic- tion, of his preaching bear the mark of this optimistic view of life and of his supreme purpose to help men interpret their lives aright, and to realize the final pur- pose of their existence. Behind his ethical optimism was his spiritual idealism ; behind his faith in the good and his devotion to its ends, his faith in God and fellowship with Him ; behind his ethical virtues, his religious virtues ; behind the moral ideal of life, the religious ideal. His world was the world of spirit. God, as the ground of all things, the per- vasive presence in all things, and the goal of all things, is the supreme reality. That vision of soul, that sense of the invisible and eternal, we call faith, was one of his choicest gifts, and it was nourished by all the choicest THE HOPE-BEARING MESSAGE 21/ sources of his culture, and all the great experiences of his Ufe. The faith faculty enlarged, and he lived ever more increasingly "as seeing Him vi^ho is invisible." And the faith that is vision is also the faith that trusts and lives in fellowship with its object. It was this that was the spring of all his choicest sympathies, not his contact with humanity, not the literature that fertiUzes a great human heart, but a sense of moral alliance with God, a sense of identification with Him. The great human heart, turned Godward in the consciousness of oneness with Him, found its message, and made him prophetic in his utterance. Then, as from the fountain of eternal inspiration, it turned itself manward and uttered itself forth with a power of conviction and per- suasion and comfort and inspiration that was unmatched by the preachers of his generation. Ill THE HOPE-BEARING MESSAGE When we speak of a preacher's message, we com- monly have in mind the truth he interprets and advo- cates with such sympathetic earnestness and strength of moral conviction that it seems somehow to suggest that the man has a special call from God to utter it. It presupposes such appropriation and assimilation of the truth by the preacher that it becomes a personal, mental, moral, and spiritual possession. It also pre- supposes such insight into the needs of one's fellow- men, such devotion to their higher welfare, and so strong an inward didactic and ethical impulse, that he is 2l8 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS constrained, as by a sort of divine compulsion, to com- municate the truth to them. This is substantially what we mean when we say that the truth is given as a mes- sage, and that the preacher is summoned as a messenger to proclaim it. And this is what we call the prophetic gift. It does not fully realize all that is contained in the Biblical conception. But this is what we mean by the modern prophet. The prophet is the man who is conscious of an inner constraint so to communicate the truth that it shall be a compelling power in the souls and lives of other men. All religious truth, therefore, that is really preached becomes a message. But it is only the truth that is charged with the energy of per- sonal life, and that aims at the reproduction of itself in the personal life of other men, that, for the preacher, has the character of a message. From this point of view it may be said of no modern preacher more truly or more worthily than of Phillips Brooks, that the truth he brought was a message, and of none may it be said more appropriately than of him that he had the pro- phetic gift. Phillips Brooks did not have much to say about his message, and did not claim the consciousness of a supernatural call to be the messenger of God to men. Such a claim would doubtless have seemed to him pretentious and unreal. To him the divine call was no ghostly and exceptional thing, remote from the genuine experiences of common human life. To him it was the simplest and most natural thing in the world that he should feel constrained to tell men what had become so mighty a force in his own soul. He held that -it is, in fact, the vocation of every man, each in his own way, if he only knew it, to bear witness to the v THE HOPE-BEARING MESSAGE 219 truth that is in him and that not to know this as life's vocation is a deplorable ignorance, and that not to actualize it is a deplorable wrong. All men should feel impelled to communicate the grace they have re- ceived. All men should have a message for their fel- lows. Every man in whose heart is the apostolic message and who has the gift and the grace to give it to others is in apostolic succession. This man of prophetic and apostolic gift and grace handled the truth that was in him as if it were his message ; and this consciousness of a mighty inner constraint to bring the truth to men, as if he were bringing a message, con- tained imphcitly the presupposition that his truth was a gift from God for the sake of his fellow-men, and that he was called to be God's messenger. But there was a good deal of truth held by him that did not appear in his message. He knew more theology than appeared in his preaching. The general public has but little knowledge of his teaching of religion in the class room. One fancies that he may have followed in the class room very nearly the same general method that he followed in the pulpit; and yet he would doubtless recognize the necessity of a more careful exposition of the forms in which the theology of his church was expressed, and of vindicating the truth thus expressed in the court of Christian intelligence. His work in the class room, therefore, may have been in some respects different from his work in the pulpit, for teaching is not preaching. But it is evident enough that the stock of his preaching was conditioned by the form and measure of his own experience of the truth. / For him experience was primarily and practically) the 220 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS r f norm of all truth that may be presented to men in the / form of a message. In the pulpit he therefore inter- \\ preted only what he cduld/ advocate as essential to i religious experience and as regulative of religious life. For preaching must be. a message of moral conviction ,/ and of spiritual sympathy. Hence his preaching dealt \/ with the great practical realities of Christianity. They appeared in a great variety of forms, and with great wealth of illustration ; but they were the ever recurring, simple, fundamental realities of a Christianity that is life. This conception of the preacher's vocation condi- tioned his attitude toward the theology of his church. It was a conviction that took possession of him in the early years of professional study, and constantly strength- ened in the later years of professional life, that it is not the preacher's function to assume on the one side the attitude of the critic, nor on the other side the at- titude of the advocate of the theology of the church. I Apparently the theology of the evangelical school in I which he was educated never had a very strong hold of \ his intellectual hfe^ His own intellectual virihty and independence gradiially reacted against it; and the encouragement he must have received from his large- minded teacher of dogmatics in the divinity course set him forward doubtless still more determinately in the path of intellectual freedom. However this may be, it is clear enough that intellectual independence was a necessity for him. jAnd it is a matter for profound gratitude that the evangelical piety in which he was nurtured outlived the disintegration of the evangelical theology in which he had been educated, and that, as in the cases of Schleiermacher, Robertson, Beecher, and THE HOPE-BEARING MESSAGE 221 Bushnell, it remained to the end. But if he must as- sume an independent attitude toward the theology of his church, he must not become its critic. The attitude of the preacher is first of all the attitude of the interpreter, and then that of the advocate, of such back-lying truths as interpretation finds useful for practical life. It is the preacher's calHng neither to throw doubt upon the theo- logical formularies of the church, nor to defend them as a theological partisan. He was, therefore, neither a > radical iconoclast nor a dogmatic confessionalist. The creeds of the church are not necessarily inerrant, and are not to be accepted as final statements of the theology of the church, nor are they to be set aside as valueless for Christian faith and life. He held stoutly to the Protestant position of the right of the in- dividual soul, and especially of the right of the teacher of religion to validate the truth in experience, and to determine how far the symbols of the church express the truth that is essential to the soul's well-being. But Professor Allen has directed attention to the fact that, notwithstanding his passionate love of intellectual free- dom, he was, in the process of his religious development, increasingly convinced that " sympathy," not " liberty," is the word that most adequately suggests the proper attitude of the Christian preacher, for it " expresses the chord that binds the human race." ^ He knew that the individual Christian consciousness is largely a product of the historic consciousness of the church. If it is pos- sible for the individual soul in its freedom to enlarge the boundaries of the truth it has received from tradition, it is not the less true that the collective consciousness of 1 " Biography," Vol. II, p/486. 222 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS the church lays the foundation for that enlargement. Hence his position that the creeds of the church contain a substantial body of truth, which it is the preacher's caHing, neither on the one hand to challenge or deny, nor on the other hand unconditionally to defend, but rather to interpret, and by thus intelligently and sympa- thetically interpreting, to detach the inner substance of the great truths which contain that message which be- comes tributary to the continuous development of the life of the church. This position, which he seems to have reached with relative independence of others, reminds us of Robertson, and is in general the Broad churchman's position. It has its difficulties. It doubtless results in a certain vagueness of theological definition and even of conception, and it taxes the skill and sometimes the candor of the preacher. But it is difficult to see how otherwise the interests of tradition and of freedom can be conserved, or, in a word, how the collective and the individual Christian consciousness can be harmonized. To interpret the theological views of Phillips Brooks, as they appear in his preaching, is not an altogether easy task. They, of course, do not appear in scientific form and they bear the mark of his exuberant rhetoric. They are characterized by the vagueness and indeter- minateness that are doubtless admissible in a rhetorical and popular presentation of the truth, but which are, nevertheless, sometimes tantalizingly elusive. But the task is not an impossible one, although confessedly the effort may seem inadequate. In stating some of the chief aspects of his message, let us begin with his conception of religion. Rehgion is human. It is the most human thing in man, for it has THE HOPE-BEARING MESSAGE 223 its indestructible source in his spirit, which is the most distinctive characteristic of his manhood. Its incentives are indeed from without, but its substance, its essence, is within. It may be evoked from within ; it cannot be brought from without. It may be stimulated ; it cannot be created. It belongs to man as man, and he is normal, he is truly human, only in so far as he is religious. The irreHgious man is by reason of his irreligion so much the less a man. Nothing therefore is added to the man when he becomes religious. It is no ghostly experience, but as truly human as the most familiar experience of the soul. In it the soul only appropriates its own best ideal, and enters upon the harmonious development of all its powers. This is not new. It is, in fact, one of the commonplaces of the religious intelH- gence of our time. But it is the rediscovery of an anthropology and a theology that are, after all, not so very old. It is a truth that demands constant emphasis, and no modern preacher has more persuasively enforced it or more intelligently interpreted it than Phillips Brooks. He seems to have no definite psychology of religion, and gives no scientific definition of it, nor is it necessary that he should do so, for his representations are worth more than definitions. Rehgion is a talent, a faculty or combination of faculties of the soul, a state of consciousness, an activity, a relation or complex of relations of the soul, but what it is and how to locate it is not always easy. The locality varies. It is now here, now there. It is now this, now that. It is not pri- marily thought, although rehgion cannot be divorced from thought. It is not in the imagination primarily, although the imagination becomes one of its most im- 224 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS portant organs. Sometimes it appears in the conscience, sometimes in the feehngs and affections, and it is never fully at home outside the will. But for the most part religion is not located at all. It is not quite correct to speak of one part of a man's ilature as being religious and another part as unreligious or non-religious. Man is religious in the totality of his nature. There is an intellectual element in religion. We are commanded to " love God with all the mind." He had thorough respect for the intellectual factor in religion and laid much stress upon it. There is an aesthetic element in it which realizes itself in artistic form. Religion is the soul turning in all its functionings toward the personal In- visible and Eternal. And as religion had better not be located within, so it had better not be located without. Of course he would freely acknowledge that determi- nate times and places and persons and events and ex- periences have a specific religious significance. Not, however, because they hold religion as a monopoly, but because they are associated with religion as a specific interest. But the prevailing representation is that, in its true conception, all life is religious. In its true concep- tion the universe is the temple of religion. " Reli- gion," he says, " is nothing in the world but the highest conception of life." All life, all time, place, person, events, experiences, are in their ideal significance religious. The profane, the sinful, is just the failure to realize this significance. Here we have the Broad churchman, and such we may almost say Phillips Brooks was constitutionally. He reacted vigorously against the localizing of religion, and had no sympathy with High Church religious provincialism. Of course he could THE HOPE-BEARING MESSAGE 225 not and would not deny that God can and does reveal Himself at one time, or in one place or person or event or experience more fully than in another. Surely he would not deny that religious experiences may be con- ditioned by local and temporal associations, or that when so conditioned religion becomes specific. But it was religion as a universal interest that dominated his con- ception, and his appeal to men, that they consecrate the whole soul and body with all their powers, and the whole life with all its activities, to God and to His king- dom, was one of great worth and power. But he might well perhaps have qualified his message sometimes, and have recognized more fully the pedagogic significance of religion as a specific interest ; and if he had been, like Robertson, as close and discriminating as he was broad in his thinking, he very likely would have done so. As in his conception the soul in the totality of its pow- ers is religious, so the soul in the totality of its activi- ties becomes the organ of religious knowledge. An^\^ here we have the modern psychologist, and the modern ) advocate of the religion of experience as contrasted'/ with the religion of authority. It is this rich and fruit- ful conception of religion that contributes so mucn to the message which reveals men to themselves and awakens their manhood to its higher possibilities. As being truly human, religion therefore is natural. The unnatural thing is irreligion. He who has not come to the knowledge of himself as religious is abnormal. Even what we call the supernatural element in rehgion is natural, in so far and in as much as it harmonizes with the constitution of the soul. When God comes to awaken the soul and to evoke its latent religious sus- Q 226 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS ceptibilities and capacities he does it no violence. The response of the soul is as natural as the response of nature to light or air, and failure to respond is abnormal. And as being human and natural, religion is simple. The fundamental things are always simple. All the primal activities of the soul are simple, and rehgion belongs to these primal and normal activities. What is more simple, or more human and natural, than love or trust or reverence or obedience .'' These are the primal and the simple activities of the soul, and they contain the elements of religion. Turned Godward and Christ- ward, they are religion. Although rehgion is subjective in its elements, it is not in its development a purely human product. As an endowment, it is human ; as an experience, it is divine. As bedded in our nature, it is God's gift through crea- tion ; as dependent on Him for its incentive and for its full content, it is His gift through grace. We do not first know Him ; He first knows us. In establishing our relations, the initiative is with Him. He first comes to us, He first loves us, and in the language of Dr. Bush- nell, " Loving God is but letting God love us." No Cal- vinist ever more strenuously insisted than he did upon the " priority of God." A purely self-wrought religion is for him a contradiction. At best it would be only a form of ethics. Most urgently does he proclaim the freedom of man and defend the humanness and natural- ness of religion as a truth that ever needs enforcement ; but it is, in fact, the burden of his message that religion is realized as a mutual, conscious relation between God and man only because God has the initiative in its realization. Religion on man's part is a relation of THE HOPE-BEARING MESSAGE 227 conscious dependence on God, but it is realized only because God makes Himself known as a creative and sustaining energy. If religion is realized as a relation of conscious subjection, it is because God makes Him- self known as a moral authority. If it is realized as a relation of moral alliance, it is because God makes Him- self known in loving sympathy as the Father of spirits^ In a word, only because God moves upon the soul in the processes of His self-communication do we ever come to the knowledge of our relation with Him which is the experience of religion. Hence while all men are consti- tutionally religious, they are experimentally such only as they are recipients of the self-reveaUng grace of God. Hence revelation_and^ r eligion a re,jnsep,arable. And as there is no "natural religion" save in the sense that all religion is natural, so there is no "revealed religion " save in the sense that all rehgion is revealed. The dis- tinction therefore between a certain type of religion that may be called " natural " and another type that may be called "revealed" is an unreal distinction. All religion is at once natural and supernatural, natural in endow- mentj supernatural in incentive ; and tlie distinction be- tween religions is in the sort and measure of revelatioi they embody. This revelation of God which is the inspiration of religion is the revelation of His personality, of Himself. Revelation is not truth and religion is not knowledge. Revelation is a divine activity upon the soul that dis- closes the presence of God, and religion is a resulting life. But such a self-communication of God involves the disclosure of truth, and the very idea of God in its Christian form is a product of revelation. Hence the 228 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS preacher deals with a given content of truth. This truth involves conceptions and facts about God. God is not only immediately self-revealed to the individual soul, He also comes mediately to the soul through the religious consciousness of others — through a community consciousness ; and this religious consciousness of the race is a product of divine revelation in all ages. The Bible is a record of this self-revelation of God in other ages to a certain favored section of the race. The high- est form of this revelation is through the historic Christ. The Bible therefore is preeminently the preacher's book. He laid great stress upon the personal factor in preach- ing, but he laid proportionate stress upon the factor of truth which is fixed for us in Scripture. Hence he was himself a Biblical preacher, not in the same way that Robertson was, nor as Bushnell was, but not less than either in the fibre and tone of his preaching. He appeals to the native intelligence of men, but the stock of his preaching is not rationalizing reflection. He appeals to the human conscience, but the appeal is not a rationalistic moralizing. He speaks to the imagination and the sentiments and the emotions of the heart, but the basis of his preaching is not subjective mystical sentiment. He appeals freely to all the faculties of the soul, he throws himself out upon the most ordinary experiences of men in the real world, but he uses experi- ence only to confirm the truth of revelation and above all the revelation of God in Christ. Thus, while life interprets truth, truth interprets life. He highly values and freely uses the Old Testament, finding in its dis- closures of God a fruitful source of knowledge, and in its records of religious experience a source of strong THE HOPE-BEARING MESSAGE 229 incentive ; but he is preeminently a Christian preacher, finding in Christ the divine revelation in ideal form. Authority in religion does not depend on the infallibility of the Bible. The Bible is not authority, but only a record of the source of authority. Authority is found in those compelling truths and facts that find an echo in the moral and religious nature of man, and above all in the mind of Christ or in His full personal mani- festation, and Biblical authority is ultimately the author- ity of Christ. And His authority consists not wholly in the self-evidencing power of His truth, but in the vali- dating power of His complete personality. We know Him for what He is, and then we beheve Him in what He gays. We take His truth, not only because it is self- vindicating, but we take many things on His authority, and trust Him when we cannot see and follow Him where we cannot go alone. Thus experience and reve- lation, or the subjective and objective factors in author- ity, are harmonized. — The God who is revealed in Christ is intensely per- sonal. All the energies of his own intense personality and above all the energies of his own sturdy moral nature impelled him to the recognition of God as a free moral personality. God is not known by reflection. He is already given as a basis for reflection. He is known primarily through that subconscious process by which we transfer our own knowledge of personal will to what we recognize as the ground of all things. It is the necessity of our own consciousness of freedom to ascribe free personality to the world-ground. We thus subconsciously come to know God through ourselves. Tradition and reflection confirm what is already given. 230 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS That God is also revealed in a historic person like Christ greatly intensified and enriched his conception of His personality. This centre of God's personality is will. Will is centralized energy. It is an energy that turns back upon itself. The divine personality is conscious centralized force. But the will of God is also a loving will. Hence it reaches beyond itself. The divine personality is a loving personality. Love is social. It is creative, outreaching, self-revealing, self- giving. God is fatherly in His very nature. He is personal will, but more ; He is a diffusive, a pervasive, all-loving energy of life. In his outreaching fatherly love, He is creative. In the very act of creation, as / even the Buddhist teaches, there is a certain sacrifice of / self-giving. Self-sacrificing love is also the principle of redemption. That word " Father " as applied to the God of love, is no unmeaning term. It suggests that there is something human in God. The divine is the human carried into the infinite of rational and moral perfection. It is this God of fatherly love that comes into personal contact with every human soul. God is immanent as a living, loving presence, not only in all forms of the material universe, but in every soul of His rational and moral creation. The divine centrality and the divine ubiquity, the supreme will, the supreme love, not ourselves, yet nearer to us than ourselves, for "in Him we live and move and have our being," — here we have in its most attractive and persuasive form the modern theistic pantheism. /^ Because of the kinship between God and man an in- / carnation of the diyine in the human is possible, and I the incarnation in Christ is not only a historic fact, but, r THE HOPE-BEARING MESSAGE 23 1 as involving a reconciliation between God and man, and I a permanent moral alliance between them, it is the I great central fact of theology and of history, and con- [_tains the mightiest motive for the Christian life. Of^ the very few theological or ecclesiastical terms used by him, this is of most frequent occurrence, and this indicates its importance in his theological thinking. Of the person of Christ he has no definition. His defini- tions are only representations. His Christology is vague, as all modern Christology is, and perhaps must be. It is the character of Christ with which he for the most part concerns himself, and with His person only as related to His character. In His personaHty He is ideal humanity. What each human being in his own limited measure was made to be, that was Christ in His complete measure. But although truly human, sharing the humanity that is common to us all. He is still uniquely human, and this uniqueness is not appar- ently in the sinless perfection of His humanity alone, but in the fact that it is a divine humanity. He shares the nature of God so far as the nature of God is akin to the nature of man, and thus He unites the humanity of God, so to say, with the humanity of man. But although we have here no well-defined ontological Christ, we have a most exalted conception of His per- son ; and of his supreme reverence for Christ he has left a most vivid impression. For all phases and for all interests of human life, Christ with him has absolute significance and worth. So central is Christ in his thinking, so central according to his apprehension is Christ in the entire record of revelation, so central in all human life, life finds in Him so completely its ex- 232 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS pression and interpretation, that it is quite the necessity that all the experiences of humanity shall somehow fall into relation with him. A passage to which the reader is referred in the sermon entitled " The Conqueror from Edom," ^ one of his most interesting and forcible sermons, will illustrate his conception of the universal- ity of Christ in human thought and life. Since the incarnation is in his thinking the central reality, his soteriology is conditioned by it. The atone- ment, therefore, must be conceived from the point of view of the incarnation. It is not, therefore, a transac- tion between a Christ and a God who stand outside of humanity, but who are revealed in and are identified with humanity, and the efficaciousness of the atone- ment is not in the sufferings of Christ, but in the obe- dience of His holy will. The reconciliation of God and man is not a forensic transaction dealing with ideal rela- tions, but an actual participation of man in the righteous- ness of God, a view with which the church has become familiar, but which, in his early years, as advocated by Bushnell and Robertson, was strange and unwelcome. The church doctrine of the Trinity he did not, at least in the pulpit, criticise or deny, nor yet did he defend it in its formulated aspect as an article of theological belief. He always got back to the vital principle that is bedded in the doctrine, and that has available worth for the Christian life. He was accustomed to find in it an expression of the vast wealth and variety and of the inexhaustible fulness of the divine nature. And as thus presented it became in his hands immeasurably attractive. 1 Vol. I, p. 40. THE HOPE-BEARING MESSAGE 233 Kinship of nature between man and God means that man is the child of God. The New Testament repre- sentation that man becomes the child of God by identi- fication with Christ is based upon the already existing fact that he is such by nature. If he were not God's child by nature, he could never become His child by grace. Christianity does not create, but only declares, the fact, and furnishes the requisite provision for its realization. In coming to Christ we come to ourselves,/^ as in coming to us, Christ " came to his own." Sin on/ its negative side is a failure to realize one's sonship with' God ; on its positive side, it is refusal to accept and actualize the fact. The terms in which he characterizes sin are in general not theological or ecclesiastical, nor are they always in line with BibHcal representations of it ; but they suggest phases of it that are profoundly real- istic and impressive, and set the dark reality in a new aspect. Sin as a delusive self -estimate ; sin as folly inf refusing to be what one was made to be ; sin as a mean-i ness in choosing a lower life than God meant for one ; sin as a wrong done the soul and fellow-men and God, and hence guilt, — all this is most vividly set before men ; and his Lenten discourses, in which he deals with the darkness and degradation of sin, are among his most searching and impressive discourses. With him it is not so much the sovereignty of God as His fatherhood, / and not so much the servantship, as the sonship of man' that gives significance to the dark reality of sin. Re- ^ generation, conversion, sanctification, are the beginning and the completion of the process by which one comes to the recognition of one's self as a child of God, and lives agreeably to the fact. 234 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS The terms in which he describes the church also are not theological or ecclesiastical. It is conceived from the humanistic point of view. The church is idealized humanity. It is God's thought of redeemed humanity, in process of actualization. It is what man as man was meant and made to be, and is to become. The empirical or historic church does not, as in the language of theol- ogy, consist of the elect, or of the regenerate, or of the baptized, but of those who have come to the recognition of the true meaning of their humanity, of those who rec- ognize and accept the ideal of their manhood, and are trying to live out their human lives as the true children of God. Baptism is the symbol and the pledge of the restoration of, and the consecration and the introduction to, a true manhood. The Supper is the symbol and the pledge of the real fellowship of the true children of God. His view of the great future was full of hope and joy. How otherwise could it be, with his lofty idealism, that refused to find the key to the mysterious processes of the moral universe outside the fatherly grace of God .•' He believed in and he lived in the kingdom of redemp- tion. The kingdom of this world had vanished, as it were, from his prophetic vision, and he saw only the kingdom of God. The God who is the source of all things, and who is in all things, is pushing all things onward to the far-off goal of righteousness and peace and joy. This optimistic cheerfulness and hopefulness colored all his estimates of the empirical world. He refused to linger with the dark side of life, counting it a sort of immorality to do so. He looked beyond the perversions and corruptions of men, and beheld them as in process of rectification, in the divine order THE HOPE-BEARING MESSAGE 235 of the kingdom of God. It was surely impossible that so severely ethical a mind as his should have accepted or tolerated the brutahty of modern favored nations in their exploitation of inferior races for the purposes of commercial and political supremacy. One cannot imagine him as sanctioning the iniquitous imperiahsm that boasts of the " manifest destiny " to supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race, that baptizes slaughter and ravage in the name of philanthropy, and calls it the work of " benevolent assimilation." But he beheved that " good will be the final goal of ill," even though it be through the wrath and brutality of man, and that the God of vengeance is still the strong, conquering God of grace. He could not have failed to see that the political party with which he had been allied in the early years of his ministry had already, before the close of that ministry, apostatized from its noble ideals and traditions, and his keen ethical sense must have been outraged by the hypocrisy, and the general moral de- generacy of many of its leaders ; but he never broke with it, and did not ally himself with the movement of political independence that sought reform. He believed in the good which he thought still remained, and looked for reform from within. He was always looking ahead for the good that is to be. The future somehow has in store things that will be different, and things that will be better than the things of the past. He lived as upon the verge of brighter days and of larger glories of the kingdom of God. And this transcendent opti- mism he transferred to the mysterious future. He was committed to no dogma of the future life, and was wise and most serious in all his discussions of eschatological 236 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS questions, but he cherished the hope, and indeed Hved in the joy of it, that redemption will reach to the ultimate limits of the human race, that God will not be baffled in his purpose of universal grace, that He will " make his pile complete," and that all men will come to ultimate righteousness and blessedness. These are some, only a few, of the items of a message of great power and beneficence. They are in substance not new, but they are made new by the genius of the preacher, and speak with new persuasiveness from his lips. They may be of no great scientific value for the reflective life of the church. But they are very simple and they are fundamental; and they are transcendently precious to all such as need in special the voice of hope, as they struggle to live out their human lives in the midst of the contradictions and confusions and bewilderments and burdens of the world ; and they are presented with a rhetorical forcefulness and attractiveness, with a wealth of suggestiveness, with an infinite variety of forms of representation, and with a strength of personal incentive, that is well-nigh matchless in the pulpit of his age. IV THE ILLUSTRATIVE HOMILETIC METHOD In his " Yale Lectures on Preaching," perhaps the most valuable of all recent contributions to homiletic litera- ture, Bishop Brooks has left on record his conception of the nature, the function, and the method of the ser- mon. In theory as in practice the sermon is for him only an instrument, and as such it must accomplish two THE ILLUSTRATIVE HOMILETIC METHOD 237 things : it must interpret and it must persuade ; it must] edify and it must inspire. A characteristic peculiarity, \/ therefore, of his method is the interplay of the exposi- tory and the persuasive elements in his preaching. The first impression upon the hearer or reader will perhaps be that the emotional and impressional, or the rhetorical, element predominates. But a closer inspection shows , j that after all the basis of his preaching is didactic. <- v In determining the class to which any preacher be- longs we must take into consideration the type of reli- gious truth with which he deals, and the way in which he handles it. As regards the substance oL-Bishop Brooks's preaching we readily note two things rflie first is that he deals with a distinctively Christian type>^ of truth, and presents it in its relation to our entire/ life. No part of our complex nature, mental, physical, social, as well as emotional, ethical, and spiritual, is remote from his touch. He did not preach much about V^ Christ in the sense that he did not frequently make the person, character, or life of Christ a definite theme of discussion. But all his preaching has a distinctively v/ Christological centre. His preaching, therefore, is not subjectively rationalistic in its character. What calls itself " natural religion " has no place in it. All that is truly Christian is with him natural. Christ is the true interpreter of nature, and what is truly natural cannot be far remote from what is Christian. But he deals with Christian truth in its broad, generic principles. Isolated truths have no significance for him. He deals \ with it in its wide-reaching relations and traces it in many realms of reality and of experience. These two qualities in his preaching fix in general his place and 238 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS class. He is preeminently an interpreter of Christian truth. The didactic preacher deals with principles; the Christian preacher discusses those principles from the distinctively Christian point of view. But looking a little more closely, we shall see the form which these qualities in his preaching take and . the school of didactic preachers to which he belongs. His teaching is not prevailingly Biblical. He is a topi- '•- '"a l.prsag her, unlike Robertson, never preaching exposi- J torily and rarely textually. Nor is he a doctrinal preacher, for with the formulated doctrines of the church he never , deals. Bishop Brooks did not belong to this relic of a J past generation. He was not an apologetic or polemical J preacher. Nor is his method argumentative. For ab- j stract, formal methods of proof he cares not, and he quotes no authorities. He combats no one and spends no time in contrasting what he believes with what other J people believe. His method is that of proclamation, — ,y the affirmative, declarative method. He reasons much, J but argues little. His mental movement is not logical or dialectical, but intuitional. But his declarative method has often the force of argument, and more than the per- suasiveness of argument, for he appeals to the incon- testible facts of human experience. Nor does his preach- ing take the historical or biographical form. Brooks has nothing of Robertson's analytic skill in the hand- , ling of historical and biographical material. He illus- U trates liberally from such material, but the sermon never takes the historical or biographical form. 4 /'"''^ It hardly need be said that the evangelistic element I is not prominent in his preaching. He is a pastoral, not an evangelistic, preacher. That he deals to a con- THE ILLUSTJIATIVE HOMILETIC METHOD 239 siderable extent with those truths that are adapted to the work of conviction and conversion is evident, and that his preaching left a strong impression upon the feelings and moral convictions is equally clear. But his method of presentation is better adapted to the produc- tion of gradual and permanent results in character and life rather than to the work of immediate conquest. It is the rhetorical and impressional quality of his method that distinguishes him as a didactic preacher. He is a singularly persuasive interpreter of truth. There were more distinctively intellectual preachers than he. Mozley was such, Robertson was such, and so was Bushnell. But neither of them reached his mark in vivacity of thought and attractiveness of diction. There is more that is striking in his preaching than in that of any of his contemporaries. Yet his thought is not the less substantial that it is put in a rhetorically suggestive manner. He affects no profundity, but he strikes quick and often deep into the heart of things. Let us now look at some of his salient qualities as an interpreter and advocate of the truth. In no way can we discover so readily what is distinctive in any preacher as by noting his didactic methods, or the methods by which he gets his thought before his hearers. Analytic skill is prominent in Bishop Brooks's method. The entire sermon is a process of analytic discrimina- ■tion. It generally starts with an analysis of the text by means of which it is brought into relation with the theme. If, as is sometimes the case, the sermon starts with some general reflection upon a particular phase of the subject which is already in the mind of the preacher, it is always harmonized with the text by some process / 240 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS of analysis, and thus the proper point of departure from the text is secured. The discussion is an analytic process by which the inner elements and relations of the subject are made apparent. Not infrequently the entire de- velopment consists in an analysis of those traits and those motives by which human character is disclosed. In such analysis but few preachers excelled him. His humanistic interests and his study of human character and life are constantly manifest. But his preaching is constructive as well as analytic, and the organizing and vitalizing quality of his mind is readily apparent. Noth- ing is left unrelated and in fragments. The process of dissection is tributary to the work of unification. He takes hold of a principle and carries it strongly and steadily through, so that it appears pervasively in every part of the sermon. About the central thought the sermon is wrought into a vital unity, and analysis is only tributary to the process of synthesis. The omni- presence of the theme secures proper significance for all the processes of analysis. "^ His favorite expository method is analogy. The subject of the sermon is generally secured from the text by some analogical process, and it is this analogy that furnishes the starting-point. It is often a remote and poetically suggestive analogy, and therefore quickens the imagination and stimulates curiosity. But although it is a metaphorical analogy and not adapted to the uses of argument, it is still didactic analogy. It throws light upon the truth In hand. It suggests its reasonable- ness, and it becomes a solid basis for discussion. By the aim which he has in view and by the virile method of his discussion, his poetic analogies are taken out of THE ILLUSTRATIVE HOMILETIC METHOD 24 1 the realm of fancifulness. They at once present the truth in a clearer light and render it the more attractive. Closely connected with the analogical basis of the sermon, and as in fact a part of it, is the general v iew of, JtlLe_LubjeiAJthat_is_2resented. As already indicated, he) always deals with a general principle. He gets away as rapidly as possible from what is specific and historic in his text into some genergj^truth that is somehow suggested by it, and that has a common family relation with it. The strongly didactic character of the sermon appears to best advantage here. It passes from what is individual and local and provincial into what is univer- sal. It deals with what has fundamental and generic validity. The general principle makes the individual and particular instance clearer and more real, and what is individual and local finds new significance and value in what reaches so widely beyond it. This generalizing of the thought excites curiosity at the outset. The juxtaposition of somewhat remotely related thoughts, yet not so remotely related as to seem far-fetched and grotesque, stimulates interest and puts the mind upon a search. The hearer listens with eager attention because he will have the matter cleared up. If it is well cleared up, i.e. if the analogy is successfully carried through the different phases or spheres of its apphcation, there is a resulting intellectual satisfaction and a corresponding strength of emotional and ethical impression. A certain weight and impressiveness is given to any truth by being brought under a general law or principle. In the light of the general principle, we see new light in what is specific. The individual fact or truth stands, not in its own light alone, but in the light of the broader 242 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS principle that covers it. There is always a certain lack of weight and impressiveness in the discussion of any truth unrelated to the broader truth that includes it. /'It is this grasp of broad principles that accounts for / Phillips Brooks's success in making the claims of reli- . gion seem rational and natural and real. It is at once / a didactic and a persuasive method. J But the sermon does not linger and is not lost in ,J what is general. The process of the discussion is always — — Ifrom the general to the particular, from the generic to ihe specific. If the sermon were to linger in the realm of the generic, it might indeed be successful teaching, and the preacher might show that he has a philosophi- cal grasp of his subject, but he would fail as a preacher. For it is the function of the preacher to interpret and enforce what is specific by relating it to what lies back ^ of it. It is the blending of the generic and specific that results in getting the whole subject clearly and impres- sively before the hearer. The particular case, as belong- ing to the realm of experience or observation, brings out more clearly and forcibly the general principle, and the general principle makes the particular case the more impressive, as showing that it falls under a comprehen- sive law. Here, too, we recognize the interplay of the didactic and persuasive elements in his preaching. "V^' The deduced or inferential thought is another factor in his didactic method. The deductions are not formal ; the preacher's mind moves with great rapidity from premise to conclusion, from principle to inference or appUcation. It is done in an altogether informal, viva- cious manner, and, in a way, reminds us of Dr. Thomas Guthrie. Some one remarked to Sir William Hamilton THE ILLUSTRATIVE HOMILETIC METHOD 243 that Guthrie's preaching was defective in logical qual- ity, and he answered, " It is the very best sort of logic ; there is but a step between the premise and conclusion." All this has a certain argumentative force, without be- ing in argumentative form. Brooks is constantly mak- ing general statements from which he runs rapidly out into inferences. Some of these deductions are of the broad, general sort. They always come in rhetorical, never in logical, form. They are just such inferences as we are always in a quiet, unconscious way making. We always carry the force of the primary thought into what comes from it. A deduction has the weight of what is behind it. This is the strength of the syllogism. Many of our preachers' deductions are popular, incom- plete syllogisms. Take the following examples from the sermon that may be entitled " Spotted Lives," ^ " When we remember what a source of strength the purest repu- tations in the world have always been, what a stimulus and help, then we have some idea of what the world loses in the fact that almost every reputation becomes so blurred and spotted that it is wholly unfit to be used as a light or a pattern before the man is old enough to give it any positive character or force." That is, we infer the world's loss from early spotted reputations by reminding ourselves of the opposite, i.e. the strength that is contributed to the world by unspotted reputation. From the value of good reputations we infer the world's loss from bad reputations. The sermons are crowded with these inferential thoughts. He deals a good deal in spurious inferences, directing attention to the way men of the world think and talk about the affairs of 1 Vol. I, p. 176. 244 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS life. Take this passage in the same sermon : ^ " You talk about the corruption of political life, that seems to have infected the safest characters, and the answer is : ' Oh, there is nothing strange about it ; no man can go through that trial and not fall. No man can live years in Washington and be wholly pure.' " Here is a syllo- gism, (i) The safest, i.e. the strongest and purest, characters are least likely to fall; (2) but the corrup- tions of political life infect even these safest characters ; (3) consequently no man can go through the trial and not fall. No one can live a pure life in Washington. That is, in the opinion of a certain class of men political corruption is inevitable. This is an example of that " fatahstic habit of mind " which he so strenuously an- tagonized. Note the following r^ (i) Social life can- not be elevated and ennobled ; (2) but one must go into social life ; (3) consequently, he who goes will be con- taminated. That is, we are not to blame for what we cannot escape ; no man can go into the world and es- cape its spots, therefore we are not to blame because /we are spotted. •\J Perhaps his most obvious, most common, and most ^effective method of addressing the intelligence and con- / victions of men is the appeal to e;xperience. It is this appeal that contributes clearness ancHorce to his preach- ing. Sometimes he may assume that what is exceptional in experience is common. He not infrequently assumes that a high grade of experience belongs to ordinary men. In this his ideahstic and optimistic tendencies remind us of Schleiermacher, but on the whole he succeeds in hit- ting upon what most men recognize as something, or like 1 Vol. I, p. 177. ' Ibid., p. 178. THE ILLUSTRATIVE HOMILETIC METHOD 245 unto something, they themselves have thought or felt or observed or done. At any rate, this is the appeal, the appeal to what men know, or should know, the appeal to life. The personal form of appeal is common, and it comes largely in the interrogative form. It is so obvious in all his sermons that it is not necessary to linger with it. It is apparently the leading aim of his preaching to make men's sense of the significance and value of existence more real and more intense, so that they may be lifted into the height of more noble feeling and be impelled to more practically useful living. And in doing this he constantly appeals to what is purest, noblest, ideally best in men. Bushnell will make the truth more real, so shall life become more real. To clear the truth from the unreaUty with which it has become invested is his task. " Brooks will make men's lives more real, more cheerful and useful, hence his immediate appeal to life. Thus shall the truth become more real. Bushnell inter- prets life in the hght of truth. Brooks interprets truth in the light of life, and here largely lies his convincing and persuasive power. In this connection hi s literary styl e may well be con- sidered. It might be shown by careful analysis that the literary quality is admirably adapted to the didactic in- terest of the sermon. But perhaps it is more obviously tributary to the persuasive and impressional interest. His vocabulary is that of a man whose thought moves / in the realm of concrete reality, of a man who has dealt with life rather than with abstractions. There is a marked anthropological suggestiveness about it. It is the diction of a man who has studied human nature and human life. Threeq ualities are p rominent in his liter- ^ y 246 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS r'^lu ary style. Naturalness is one. It is the naturalness of a man whose mind is fertile and full, who utters himself with the simplicity of intellectual abundance and with the vivacity of natural feeling, who likes the colloquial ^^ forms, and who has the freedom of a large vocabulary. (<^y Clearness is an other_quality. It is the clearness of a man whose thought is perspicacious, because it deals so largely with the life of men, with what is familiar to them in experience. What is relatively remote from them in thought is brought near to them by being associated with what they constantly see or feel. It is the perspicacity and the perspicuity of the illustrative preacher. The aphoristic form of the sentence be- comes tributary to this quality, likewise its concreteness. The contrasted thought, and still further the expanded thought, is another element. Iteration is a quality of style tributary at once to clearness and impressiveness. The following sentences remind us of the rushing style of Newman : " I have been powerful ; I have turned the currents, and made the world different ; I have been useful ; I have made the world better ; I have been hon- ored ; I have made men regard and love me."^ The periodic sentence is not common. The loose sentence prevails, and the blending of the two, by breaking up and changing the form of the sentence, becomes tribu- tary to clearness. The occasional long, periodic sen- tence, by its cumulation and climax, is not without its contribution to perspicuity. The colloquial style is clear because familiar; and the connectives that bind the clauses together are tributary to the same result, because they keep the continuity of thought. 1 " Keeping the Faith," Vol. I, p. 58. THE ILLUSTRATIVE HOMILETIC METHOD 247 But_iai:^^is, perhaps, the most striking quality. (^^' Vivacity is an element of force, and the elements of vivacity are many. Variety in the architecture of the sentence is one. The use of the historic present is an- other and is very common. The direct personal address is another. The rhetorical interrogative, the inversion of the sentences, the figurative vocabulary — all these are elements of force. The vocabulary is that of a man who has the most vigorous conceptions of whatever his mind touches, a vigor that seems to spring from his own vivid consciousness of personal force, who, in the fulness of his own conscious life, attributes life to all things, who looks at all things as in vital, organic relations, and who inclines to personify everything. It is this that imparts the lively, pictorial quality to his style. Every- thing is in movement : " Life blooms," " Darkness rolls on toward the light." His, figu rative dictio ji is primarily for the purpose of illustrating his thought, not merely for emotional or aesthetic effects. Therefore he rarely uses the figures of exaggeration that appeal to the emo- tions. His figures fall easily and naturally into line with his thought, and are a product at once of its fulness and of its imaginative vivacity. He never goes out of his way for imagery that will impress us with its novelty. / His most remote and subtle thoughts seek simple, con- crete expression. Mental acts he likes to represent in the language of physical movement, as if in process be- fore our eyes. Personification is, perhaps, his most / striking figure. He^prpjects.the life-of his. own.-^per- / sonality ' outward upon everything, and the objects of his thoughts live like personal beings before us. One fancies that this hypostatizing habit, a product of his 248 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS own imaginative genius, was richly cultivated by the church Fathers. From the whole, then, we may see that in theory, as in practice, the sermon for him as an end to itself, or as a work of art, has but little value. It must have a pre- vailingly ethical rather than artistic significance. The chief question is its fitness to its object. If the man is enriched, the sermon will fairly well take care of itself. He is not an advocate of lawless homiletics, and he was careful and methodical in his own preparation. Clear- ness and definiteness of structural outUne he advocated and fairly well realized in his own preaching. Yet the sermon is of supreme value only for what it can accom- plish ; and a strong didactic and ethical impulse to com- municate the truth with reference to the practical interests of men's lives is the basis of his, as it must be of all first-class, pulpit talent. This regnant purpose, inspired by a great human sympathy and a great longing to help men in the struggle of life, holding in line all his imagi- native activity and concentrating all his mental fulness and productiveness upon one point, left its mark upon his rushing, wealthy, vital, multiform, manly, and often careless, product, and did its work. The very affluence of the sermon attests its instrumental significance. It is opulent in material and never runs dry. It is an over- flow plump up to the end. It seems to say itself. The intellectual and emotional vitality of the preacher is manifest at every turn, yet it is the product of great diligence and of most conscientious effort. He keeps himself full and flowing, and his productiveness is due to most painstaking literary and homiletic training. But something that moves his whole soul he will always have THE ILLUSTRATIVE HOMILETIC METHOD 249 to say, and then it will say itself in a simple, straight, natural way. He apparently selects his theme before his text, at least not infrequently, and in fact advocates this as being likely to yield for the preacher a freer and wider range. In his own case it doubtless proved tribu- tary to a larger productiveness and effectiveness ; but it is not a principle that is universally valid, for many a man's productiveness and effectiveness are dependent on limitation rather than on range. The practical qual- ity of the sermon also, its eminent helpfulness, bears witness to its instrumental significance. One cannot imagine him as engaged in the work of sermon prepara- tion without a strong and definite purpose to help as many of his fellow-men in the struggle of life as he may be able to reach. Of all the objects at which the sermon may well aim, he lays most stress, and the primary stress, upon the immediate negd^ of the congregation. As illustrating his conception of the sermon as an instrument, its unconventional and unstereotyped form is also in evidence. Because it is fountain-full and con- scious of its object, it develops itself freely and naturally and therefore variously. He has a certain general regu- lative method for handling his subject, and it bears his own mark. We have an explanatory textual introduc- tion or general reflections on the theme already in mind, connected with this textual matter, thus setting the text in relation with the theme ; then an analogy caught from the text that furnishes a basis for the discussion. This secures a generalized thought which is the theme. The principle contained in this generalized thought is then taken out into various realms of experience and is par- ticularized. Everywhere in the discussion we have con- 250 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS Crete illustration, and at the close the truth discussed is brought into immediate relation with the personal Christ, who in some way actualizes the truth in hand and fur- nishes the requisite incentive for its realization by the hearer ; and the note of cheer and hope rings clear at the end. This in general is his method. But the flow of the individual sermon is free, and he has no stereotyped form. He advocates unity in the various elements of the sermon and acts upon it. But there is no formal combination. The elements flow into each other, are ' freely and naturally blended, and there is no sermon building, but^^rowth ; and the growth is so natural that "Xjio two sermons are altogether alike in method. Even the somewhat negligent movement of the sermon indi- cates that the form is always wholly subordinate to the substance and aim. This free handling not infrequently results in a certain disharmony. Sometimes it is a struc- tural or a logical, and sometimes it is a literary or rhe- torical, negligence. Sometimes he understates his theme or overstates it. Sometimes he fails to discuss what it contains and should discuss, or he discusses what it does not contain or what is too remotely related to it, and he cares too little for climax in the order of his thought. , Yet these defects from the point of View of technique are "^' all overborne by the vitality and wealth of the sermon. They are logical defects that do not seriously limit the rhetorical effectiveness of the product, or they are lit- erary or rhetorical defects that do not compromise its practical effectiveness. The not infrequent negligence in diction suggests that the preacher is supremely intent upon what he says, and the manner of saying it is a minor consideration, and the very negligence may bring THE ILLUSTRATIVE HOMILETIC METHOD 2$ I him a little nearer the average hearer. Naturalness, clearness, and vivacity of style are not always a pledge of exactness. The style of Bishop Brooks is too rapid, v^ colloquial, and concrete for technical exactness. The popular preacher need not be a very exact preacher. Yet it must be acknowledged that, illustratively and sug- gestively, our preacher succeeds in saying what he means to say and conveys his meaning with accuracy of result, even when his terms fail to stand the critical tests. It v is an unconventional type of diction, colloquial, free, and familiar, nothing pedantic, stiff, or stilted, often homely and always reahstic ; it is honest, idiomatic English, and v the Anglo-Saxon element is abundant. There are some- times awkward phrases, bad combinations in syntax, and sentences that are needlessly pleonastic and redundant. There are not wanting those whom he fails greatly to interest because they regard him as "wordy." Yet a »/ more careful inspection of his thought justifies the exu- berance of his style, and again it must be said that the sermon overrides all defects, and they are lost in its superabundant life and force. And any man who would ^ know better what it is to be a helpful, pastoral preacher, a real preacher, full, simple, earnest, unconventional, the preacher of an imaginative, suggestive, and ethical mind, who cares chiefly to make the truth effective, who is bent upon getting it at work in the minds and hearts of men, who would fuse and fire the truth with the ener- gies of a manly human soul, may well give himself with diligence to Phillips Brooks. CHAPTER VI JOHN HENRY NEWMAN I THE ANGLICAN MOVEMENT It may, on the face of it, seem an anachronism to undertake to find a place among representative modern preachers for a reactionist like John Henry Newman. He was an ecclesiastic who looked upon human life wholly from the restricted churchly point of view, an ascetic in his personal habits, and a celibate by con- scious calling ; a dogmatist, who was fanatically devoted to tradition, authority, and the dogmatic method, and who, aside from his literary impulses, seemed to be wholly bereft of any share in the modern humanistic spirit. But this, after all, is a superficial estimate. The movement he represents has a place among the impor- tant developments of modern life. Many of the pro- ductive influences that were at work during that period lie behind the Oxford movement, were shared by New- man and his chief associates, and his career can be understood only in connection with them. Against many of these influences, political, theological, and ecclesiastical, as they appeared in the liberal school, he was strongly, even violently, reactionary. And it is this reactionary, or negative, aspect that monopolizes superficial attention. But the Oxford movement has a 252 THE ANGLICAN MOVEMENT 253 positive as well as negative aspect, and it is this that furnishes the only adequate explanation of Newman's singular but very interesting career. It is necessary, therefore, at the outset to look at what lies behind this movement and at its relation to Newman's life. In its primary intent the Anglican movement was a positively religious movement. Whatever one may think of its agencies and methods, there can hardly be a doubt as to its object. In his "Apologia pro Vita Sua," ^ Newman claims that it was "a spiritual awaken- ing to spiritual wants," that the leaders were in line with the religious necessities of their age, and that while they were " superior to the age," they were yet "carrying out its higher points." Results in some con- siderable measure vindicate this claim. For there can be no doubt that in many ways the religious life of the Anglican church was elevated by it, and that, false as were many of the principles enunciated, and extrava- gant as were many of the methods pursued, it has had for its result the conservation of important religious, theological, and ecclesiastical interests. The rapidity and extent of the movement indicate that somehow it found response in the conscious religious needs of men, or awakened a sense of need of which they were not conscious. It is claimed for it, and there is no reason for doubting the correctness of the claim, that within four years after the initiative, in 1833, it had spread over all England, and that too despite the fact that " the ' Tracts for the Times ' went straight against the whole course of the church of England for the last three centuries." ^Page 140. 254 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS The unorganized character of the movement is also in evidence. It had no effective leadership in the mod- ern sense of the term. Its supporters were advocates rather than organizers. Newman, the most prominent figure and the dominating force among them, was, ac- cording to his own confession, wholly deficient in organ- izing and administrative ability. He was introvertive and sensitive and shy. " He would have shuddered at the very thought of founding a sect or creating a schism," and " the natural gentleness which shrank from giving pain" and "a dread of the trials which faith itself might have to encounter in the storms of life " may, per- haps, in part account for his lack of initiative. Pusey also, who brought to the movement the prestige of high position and a great name, was a thinker and a scholar rather than a man of action. Whatever may be the final verdict as to the value of Newman's work during those days of agitation, and whatever our estimate of the rationality of his principles and the sanity of his methods, it is not probable that the earnestness and sin- cerity of his piety will be successfully discredited. He may have been fanatical ; he may have from the first lacked balance, as his brother Francis charges ; he may at times have been arrogant, as his mother and sister seemed to think ; he may have been self-deceived, as there is abundant ground to suspect, for with respect to this very question he says, " Who can know himself .'' " He may have been secretive, may have involved himself in seemingly irreconcilable contradictions, and in stress of battle may have sometimes fought wildly ; he may have been ambitious for intellectual and spiritual domina- tion : but that he was dishonest, as Kingsley practically THE ANGLICAN MOVEMENT 255 charged in his famous onslaught upon him, and as his own brother broadly intimates, that his motives were at bottom other than sincerely reUgious, will not be readily credited by any man who has ever felt the power of his passionately earnest soul. To elevate the religious life of the church was manifestly his steadfast aim. To effect this he believed it necessary to restore, what he assumed to be lost, a sense of the sacredness and authority of the church, so that it may become a greater power in men's lives. He had been trained in the evangehcal branch of the church, as was the case with some of his most prominent associates. Whatever may have been the character of the religious teaching and nurture of his home, with respect to which his brother and his brother-in-law Mozley seem to differ, he himself has made it certain, as a matter of record, that his early life was powerfully influenced by the writings of Scott and of Romaine, and others who were numbered among the Evangelicals, men whose earnest piety and whose fame were the pride of that school. It was the " un- worldUness" as well as "intellectual independence" of Scott, to whom he " owed his soul," that attracted him. During the early part of his Oxford career he was num- bered among the Evangehcals, and, according to the testimony of Mr. Gladstone, who was at Oxford with him, the fact was placed to his discredit. Within four years of the beginning of the movement he seems to have been more of an Evangehcal than a High Church- man, although he was already diverging from the Evan- gelicals upon the doctrine of apostolic succession. But of the degeneracy of the Evangelicals at that time there can be but little doubt. Mr. Mozley's account of 256 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS St. Edmund's Hall,^ the headquarters of the Evangelicals during Newman's residence at Oriel College, may be the exaggeration of an opponent, but with all due con- sideration for partisan feeling,' it leaves the impression of intellectual degeneracy and of defective social con- science. They were noted then, as they have been since, for missionary zeal, but the tone of their piety was emotional and sentimental, and had very likely a touch of cant. Their preaching dealt largely with the cross of Christ, and less with his person and character. They laid much stress upon the doctrine of election, upon Christian assurance, and upon the depravity of human nature, and they were intolerant of those who differed from them in opinion. It is not difficult to detect the ground of Whately's contempt for them, and of Robertson's subsequent strong ethical reaction against them, and this may also in part account for Newman's break with them. But high Anglicanism was not in much better condition. Its type of piety was formal and conventional, its preaching was insubstantial, its parochial work was perfunctory. There was abundance of conventional almsgiving, and but little ethical and religious devotion to the welfare of men. To awaken the whole church to a new religious life was without doubt the aim of the Oxford movement of the last cen- tury, not the less really, although in a very different way, than the movement of the preceding century. No powerful movement of the human spirit can be an isolated movement. The Oxford movement had an artis- tic or literary as well as religious significance. Newly awakened religious sentiments were associated with * " Reminiscences," Vol. I, p. 242 ff. THE ANGLICAN MOVEMENT 257 a new movement in the realm of the feelings and of the imagination. The Oxford movement was one of the remote and indirect results of those revolutionary move- ments in thought and life during the previous century that had mightily stirred the souls of men. These move- ments were now finding expression in new literary forms. The world and life had new significance. The reality and the ever abiding, vitalizing presence of God in His world had taken new hold of men's convictions. He was no longer a remote spectator of His world, and the world was no longer a machine. It was charged with new life, and it spoke to men with a new meaning. A side of man's nature had been suppressed and robbed of its rights, and now it had awakened and was exact- ing reprisals. In Germany this literary movement had appeared at the close of the previous century in the form of Roman- ticism. Carlyle was making the British public familiar with some of its chief representatives in the world of letters, — Goethe and Novalis and Jean Paul Richter. They represented the secular aspects of Romanticism. Schleiermacher represented its religious aspects. In England the movement appeared in the early part of the last century. It took the form of a more subjective, more meditative, but also a more passionately earnest type of literature. It was the literature of a new type of subjective experience, as the literature of the former period had been more objective and formal and passion- less and respectable. Byron marks the transition be- tween the two periods. Coleridge and Wordsworth represent it on its secular side, having also strong aflfiliations with the church upon which they made a 258 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS powerful impression. It was through them that the emotions and imaginations of the choicer spirits in the church were stirred. Keble appears as the poet of the "Christian Year," and 'Newman is awakened to a new artistic as well as religious life. Keble and New- man are not disciples of Coleridge and Wordsworth, but apart from them these promoters of the Oxford move- ment can hardly be conceived as existing. Much that lies behind the English Romanticism of this period finds no place in these men. They were narrow and provincial, and lacked the large humanistic spirit that belonged to the men who influenced them. They thrust the new emotions and imaginings that had been awakened within them into archaic realms, and brought out in new forms what was old. What seemed new and modern in the literary work of these men was also old. The symbolic, the quasi-sacramental significance of the material world was an old thought of the church Fathers. It was a master thought with Wordsworth, but it won fresh significance in the hands of Keble and Newman. Butler had appropriated one phase of it from the church Fathers, and it gave a new didactic significance to the principle of analogy. Keble appropriated it from But- ler; and Newman from Keble, as he had interpreted, enlarged, and enriched it in new poetic forms. It stirred the powers of his imagination and led him to interpret, not the world and humanity in terms of new poetic thought, but the old doctrines of the church in new dogmatic forms. Newman's genius in vivifying the past by the power of his imagination was altogether unique. In connection with this quickening of new literary life there came revived interest in the artistic THE ANGLICAN MOVEMENT 259 aspects of worship, the outcome of which is the later ritualistic phase into which the original Oxford move- ment passed, and in which it lost itself. There was also a revival of interest in ecclesiastical architecture and in other products of church art, especially as they had appeared in past ages in Germany. In connection with this quickening of the religious imagination and consequent reaction against the old rationalistic and deistic methods of thought, there came a revival of the historical and critical spirit. In the liberal school represented by Whately, Arnold, Thirl- wall, and Milman, the historic method displaced the dogmatic, and critical investigation was substituted for dogmatic assumptions and traditional apologetics. New- man had been associated with Whately at Oriel and was under his influence. From Whately he learned the art of correct and discriminating thinking. Under this in- fluence Newman, prior to 1827, was drifting in the direc- tion of liberalism. He was inclined to abandon the dogmatic for the historic method and the method of common sense. Liberalism he defines as " a denial of the dogmatic principle." It is a substitution of the historic for the dogmatic method. Newman's definition of liberalism is correct. When, however, later in life he defines liberalism as agnosticism and indifference, and charges it with holding the position that " there is no positive truth in religion and that one creed is as good as another," he becomes reckless. The real difference between his position and that of the hberals, i.e. between the dogmatic and liberal position, with respect to the significance of church doctrine is that, in the one case dogma is the source of rehgion, and in the other it is 260 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS only the product of religious reflection. When he aban- doned liberalism and became a defender of dogmatism he took the position that there can be no reHgion with- out dogma. The historic spirit, however, Newman shared, as did all his associates. There was revived in- terest in the study of the Fathers, and the " Library of the Fathers " is one of the best products of the Angli- can movement. In fact, it may be called preeminently a historic movement. But the difference between the liberal and the reactionary school was that the latter were not willing, thoroughly and consistently, to apply the critical method in historical investigation. The former applied it freely, but only with such success as was possible at that early day. Whately was a logician, but he did not believe in applying the methods of logic to theology. He believed strongly and intelligently in historic criticism, and applied it to his investigation of the teachings of Paul. Arnold applied it in the secular sphere to his investigations of Roman history, and in the spiritual sphere to Old Testament ethics. Milman applied it to Latin Christianity, and Thirlwall to scho- lastic philosophy, and advocated its elimination from the theology of the church. Newman was afraid of it. He used history in support of his dogmatic assumptions, refusing to apply the critical methods to his investiga- tion of historic material. This is the point of divergence between the liberals and the reactionists. The latter came to the Fathers from the dogmatic, not from the critical, point of departure, and they thus sought to bolster their theories of the church and its doctrines. In connection with this historic movement there was developed among the liberals a new conception of the THE ANGLICAN MOVEMENT 261 ethical aspects of Christianity. Whately and Arnold are strong advocates of Christianity as an ethical system. Arnold was led to apply it to political and social prob- lems. It is this ethical conception of Christianity that stands behind his Erastianism, and behind his interest in the social problems of his day. The advancing dem- ocratic spirit, that has since so fully developed in Eng- , land, furthered Arnold's movements. It was Arnold who foresaw that " Labor will meet with reenforcement from the philosopher, philanthropist, and statesman." And Maurice, Kingsley, and Robertson are the successors of Arnold, and of the early liberal school known as Broad churchmen, in the application of the ethical principles of Christianity to social and political con- ditions. Against all this and against the free applica- tion of the methods of historic criticism as they were applied by the Uberals, Newman vigorously reacted. It is sufficiently evident that Newman was afraid of such questions, or, at least, of the results of a free application of the methods of historic criticism. The critical method was destructive of the dogmatic method. His brother Francis charges that Newman was indifferent to all questions of moral reform, and we may well believe it, so far at least as these questions were disassociated with his own conception of the proper ecclesiastical method of dealing with them. In a kind of moral fright, therefore, Newman drew back as from an abyss of sub- jectivism and secularism. He thought he saw that the Evangelicals were playing into the hands of the liberals, and he abandoned them. Liberalism is "the halfway house to atheism." The state authorities are under the influence of the liberals ; they seek to bring the church 262 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS into subordination to the state. Newman supports the autonomy of the church as its only basis of security. Thus he more and more deeply intrenched himself in devotion to the dogmatic method, and the end was Rome. It was impossible that, with the religious, literary, and historical movement, there should not have been asso- ciated a movement of thought still more fundamental. There was, at that time, a process of change in philo- sophical conceptions. Mr. Hutton, in his monograph on " Cardinal Newman," ^ indicates Newman's philo- sophical attitude. He beheved "that the philosophy which (like Locke's in modern times) insisted on what is called evidence that a revelation was divine before reposing any trust in it, was the kind of philosophy which would have undermined all the greatest spiritual movements that the world ever experienced, and extin- guished all noble enthusiasm in the very moment of its birth." These are weighty words, and they seem faith- fully to indicate Newman's philosophical attitude. It is evident that he had already abandoned the empirical philosophy of his day, upon which the defence of Chris- tianity had been based, and that he had felt the need of a more spiritual type of philosophy. The empirical philosophy was behind the deistic conceptions of the universe and the rationalistic methods of defending Christianity. In a very interesting passage in the " Apologia," 2 wherein he quotes the substance of an article published by him in the British Critic of 1839, two years before the appearance of Tract 90, entitled " The State of Religious Parties," he refers to the reh- 1 Page 173. 2 Page 138. THE ANGLICAN MOVEMENT 263 gious, literary, historical, and philosophical influences under which the leaders in the Anglican movement had been working. In referring to the philosophical influ- ences, he speaks of Coleridge in the following striking language : " While history in prose and verse was thus made the instrument of church feelings and opinions, a philosophical basis for the same was laid in England by a very original thinker, who, while he indulged a Uberty of speculation which no Christian can tolerate, and ad- vocated conditions which were often heathen rather than Christian, yet after all instilled a higher philosophy into inquiring minds than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept. In this way he made trial of his age and succeeded in interesting its genius in the cause of cath- olic truth." These words remind us of the divergent methods in which great fundamental truths may be applied. They recall to us the divergent schools of thought into which men who claim to follow Kant and Schleiermacher have separated. It is no more strange that Friedrich Schlegel should have taken the princi- ples of Kant and of Schleiermacher over into the Roman church than that Newman should have carried Coleridge and Wordsworth there. It is evident that Newman knew from personal experience the " all-corroding, all- dissolving scepticism of the intellect in rehgious inqui- ries." He knew the philosophic scepticism that denies the competence of the speculative intellect alone to pro- nounce authoritatively and finally upon the august prob- lems of reUgion and theology. Unfamiliar, probably, with the revolution in the theory of knowledge that the latter part of the previous century had witnessed in Germany, he had followed Coleridge in assuming the 264 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS position that it is the human soul in its moral and spirit- ual activities that becomes the organ of religious knowl- edge, and thus becomes the point of attachment for an objective revelation, and finally the point of attachment for objective church authority. The application which Newman makes of the subjective principle as containing the true doctrine of faith in external church authority is, of course, wholly unsatisfactory and inconsequential. But it is perfectly clear that he has already appropri- ated the subjective principle, and that, up to a certain point, it moves step by step with the philosophy of Christian experience. The process by which, at last, he found a refuge in the church of Rome by yielding to his scepticism with respect to the competence of the specu- lative intellect in the realm of religion, which found no adequate counterweight in the subjective principle of ethical and spiritual experience, may appear farther on. Perhaps enough has been said to indicate that the Oxford movement, although reactionary with respect to the theological and political movements of Newman's age, was nevertheless based on, and supported by, influ- ences and agencies that are distinctively modern. II NEWMAN THE ECCLESIASTICAL DOGMATIST When Newman entered the Roman church he went home. It was a plunge as into his native element. The transition was an " absorption." He enters as with a shout of exultation and triumph. The restlessness and confusion of uncertainty vanish, and his entire sub- THE ECCLESIASTICAL DOGMATIST 265 sequent career indicates that it was a joyful emancipa- tion. Even his literary style discloses the influence of the change. We may wonder that a man of his intel- ligence and culture and training could have made such a surrender of himself. But after all it was not strange. It was the necessity of his position and the legitimate issue of many years of dissatisfaction and unrest. It was not a supernatural call, or a " miraculous admission into the Roman communion " as his superficial brother- in-law grotesquely suggests. There was nothing ghostly about it. Nor, on the other hand, is it necessary to as- sume that he had all along been dishonest. He was indeed, as he tells us, conscious of no doctrinal change when he entered the Roman church ; but this does not mean that there was no change at all save in ecclesi- astical relations. But confessedly the change, whatever it may have been, was not very important. He was, in fact, already substantially upon Romish ground without being fully aware of it. He had tried to believe that the Anglican church was the original, apostolic catholic church held in bondage to the state, which to him rep- resented the unconsecrated kingdom of this world. By the bent of his nature, by all its leading tendencies, and by the influences and circumstances of his life he was in a sort precommitted to the dogmatic position of the Roman church. Newman was a born ecclesiastic, as Brooks was a born humanist. To him, as his brother suggests, "the church was everythmg," as to Brooks humanity behind it was everything, and the church nothing apart from its significance for humanity. Newman looked out upon and estimated Hfe from the ecclesiastical point of view, as Brooks from the human- 266 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS istic point of view. To Newman the world was a wholly- depraved and lost world. To Brooks it was indeed a sinful, but also a redeemed world. Newman looked too exclusively upon its darkness, and found in life only a miscarriage of justice and goodness and truth. Brooks looked through it upon the glory of its ideal reality, and found in it already the kingdom of God. To Newman the world has significance and value only as related to Christianity, organized as the catholic apostolic church, whose mission it is to rescue and dominate the world. To Brooks it has a significance and value of its own for the life that now is as well as for that which is to come, and the church as the organ of Christianity is only the partial, and is des- tined to be the ultimate, complete realization of that which belongs ideally to the world as the kingdom of God. If we look closely into Newman's characteristic tendencies and into the circumstances, influences, and experiences of his life, we shall find the material for the building of the ecclesiastical dogmatist. One may easily suspect that he was, in a sort, sub- consciously committed to Romanism by the dominance of his imagination. He was a man of exceedingly deli- cate aesthetic susceptibilities. He inherited a highly artistic temperament, which as poet and musician he cultivated from early years. He was born into and he lived in the realm of the imagination. The invisible was always to him the real. The " Apologia " is an inter- pretation of the processes by which he was led into the Roman church, and a skilful defence of his integrity and consistency. It is a rare piece of psychological analysis, and has all the interest of a modern psycho- THE ECCLESIASTICAL DOGMATIST 267 logical romance. This early development and domi- nance of the imagination are here made apparent, and Newman seems to recognize it as a subconscious in- fluence determinative of his subsequent career. He was an ideaUst of the most extravagant type. His sense of the invisible was a genius. There are "two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator," he says.^ In this supreme self, and God-consciousness he is early in- clined to a "mistrust of the reality of material phe- nomena." The visible world is at best but a complex of symbols of invisible reaUty. His "imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers and talis- mans." "I thought," he says, "that life might be a dream, or I an angel and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing them- selves from me, and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world." It is apparently easier to beUeve in angels than in men, in God and in soul than in the material world. It was this " childish imagination " that he carried into his rehgion. It intensified his con- viction of the reality of his conversion, "of which," he says, 1! I am still more certain than that I have hands and feet." He finds significance in the fact that at ten years of age he had marked the sign of the cross, and had drawn the Hkeness of a necklace upon his first verse-book. His brother notes as significant his early remoteness from ordinary life, his introverted habit of mind, his fastidiousness, and later on his inclination toward Virgin worship. He notes also the influence of Romanism upon his imagination as seen in some of 1 " Apologia," pp. 54-56- 268 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS his grotesque utterances at St. Mary's during the last days of his connection with the Anglican church. It is to such an imagination that the Roman church with its antiquity, its imposing claims to apostoHcity and divine authority, its treasury of saintly merit, and the artistic splendor of its ritual, powerfully appeals. He confesses that in those years of preparation for his mission, which he had long cherished, — and to such a temperament the consciousness of a mission seems native, — the Roman church with its venerable shrines and noble churches much impressed his imagination and touched his heart. It was this vivid image-mak- ing power that intensified his faith and made real its object, so that he believed, not only with all his heart and conscience and will, but with all the force of his imagination. Such a man may easily lose the balance of his powers, and this explains, perhaps, the lack of poise of which his brother speaks. Such a man may even become a fanatic in his superstitious credulity. For what is superstition or fanaticism in religion but just this one-sidedness and dominance of the imagina- tion that result in loss of balance in the activities of the soul ? What is extra-belief but gratuities of belief imposed upon the mind by the tricks of the imagina- tion .'' So strong was Newman's conviction that feeling and imagination should have free play in the religious life that he became a sort of advocate of fanaticism and superstition. " In one of my first sermons I said, I do not shrink from uttering my firm conviction that it would be a gain to the country, were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce, in its religion than at preisent it shows itself to be." THE ECCLESIASTICAL DOGMATIST 269 These words may be interpreted as a rhetorical license which must be permitted the preacher, but the truth is that Newman would not regard what he advocates as superstition or bigotry at all, but the reasonableness of a dogmatic faith. It v/as perhaps in part his religious imagination that predisposed him to the ascetic hfe. From the first he was inclined to asceticism. He never mingled in the sports of childhood. He was sober and secretive and incHned to solitude. He tells us that at the age of fifteen the impression was borne in upon him that he was called to a celibate life, and that before he was thirty it had become a settled conviction. At Oxford he led an abstemious life. He fasted often and never at any time indulged in luxuries. He was fascinated with the idea that his religious life was to be one of vig- orous self-denial. And what he imposed upon himself, he inculcated upon others. It cannot be denied that for him the Christian ideal was the ascetic ideal. The Christian life is the contradiction of the worldly, self- indulgent life, and it must be exactingly and painfully self-denying. In such self-denial and self-imposed hardship there is merit, and the merit is one of the legitimate motives in the striving for it. It is a privi- lege, winning large rewards, to share the sufferings of Christ. By disobedience to the law of cross-bearing the worldly Christian forfeits the unspeakable privilege of suffering adversity, which profits the soul and hon- ors Christ. Penance is a Christian virtue, and penance is with him the representative term for repentance. Repentance is not simply sorrow for sin and turning from it, but it is the penance that "adds what sin 270 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS deserves." ^ Kingsley misapprehended Newman's doc- trine of the economic method of interpreting truth according to the fitness of the recipient to appreciate it, a principle that is recognized by all writers on Christian ethics, as Newman showed. He misinter- preted his sermon on "Wisdom and Innocence"^ as advo- cating untruthfulness. But he was not mistaken in charg- ing that the discourse on " The Apostolic Christian " ^ advocates the ascetic hfe as the normal Christian life. The more carefully one reads this discourse, the stronger the impression becomes that Newman intended to ex- alt the ascetic life as the only worthy type of Chris- tian life. It is clear enough that this is the life he would have all his hearers adopt as best realizing the Christian ideal. He speaks of the " picture which Scripture gives us of true Christian life," and insists that we must all "attempt to measure our own life by it." And this idea of a " Christian life as set forth in the Scriptures is something very definite." Then he proceeds to describe it as an ascetic life. The monk and the nun are our modern Scriptural Christians. "What are the humble monk and the holy nun and other regulars, as they are called, but Christians after the very pattern given us in Scripture } " " Who but these give up home and friends, wealth and ease, good name and liberty of will, for the kingdom of heaven ? Where shall we find the image of St. Paul or St. Peter or St. John, or of Mary the mother of Mark, or of PhiHp's daughters, but in those who, whether they remain in seclusion or are sent over the earth, have calm faces, 1 "Apologia," p. 59. ^ " Sermons on Subjects of the Day," XX. 8 /did., XIX. THE ECCLESIASTICAL DOGMATIST 2/1 and sweet, plaintive voices, and spare frames, and gentle manners, and hearts weaned from the world, and wills subdued ? " Beautiful, saintly lives no doubt they are. But we have here the realization of the essentially Romish conception of an ascetic separateness from the world as the mark of a normal Christian life. Newman's message of the unworldly life was an important one for his age. He made a strong and salutary impression upon self-indulgent Christians in all communions. But the form in which his message came, its severely ascetic note, robbed it of much of its legiti- mate power. Let it be remembered that the words above quoted were uttered while he was still in the Anglican church, and they contain a premonition of the issue of the conflict in which he had been engaged. Yet he lingered two years longer in the church. The volume containing this discourse was issued after he had re- signed his position at St. Mary's, and while he was still awaiting developments. The discourses all bear directly or indirectly upon questions that were then in agitation, and they all advocate a type of character and of Hfe and a t>'pe of ecclesiasticism that find their fullest exempli- fication in the Roman church. They are an advocacy of the ecclesiastical conception of life, and proclaim his rapid advance toward the Roman communion. Practical religion is living for the life to come, as worldli- ness is living for the present lif e,i — a conception that contains only a half truth. The presence of God is found only in the church ; when God leaves the church, it becomes weak and beggarly like the world.^ Because God is found only in the church, it only is the kingdom 1 Page 8l. * Page 104. 272 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS of God. His conception of the world as an unredeemed world, and as wholly without God, is extravagant and is disheartening. In all these sermons, as in the " Paro- chial and Plain Sermons," not less than in the "Dis- courses to Mixed Congregations," preached after he entered Rome, the prevaihng theme is the ruin of the world, and the church is summoned to rally for the spiritual conquest of the world, and to show that to be a Christian is not an easy thing. He criticises the effort to make religion cheerful. We must take our feast with bitter herbs. Persecution is the note of the church, perhaps the most abiding note of all. Appar- ently, therefore, the only normal condition for the church is that of persecution. There is constant lamentation over " the present state of the Holy Church." In the present distress he advocates " living by rule." ^ His praise of the saints is indiscriminate. It is highly idealistic, and is accompanied with perpetual dispar- agement of everything modern. His illustrations, save in the way of admonition, are never drawn from mod- ern life, but are always scriptural or ecclesiastical. The idea of "sacred habit," is a frequently recurring idea. "If we claim to be the church, let us act like the church, and we shall become the church." By faith- ful devotion to outward church duties, God " will vouch- safe to bless it, and to make it a means of teaching us a deeper reverence and a more constraining love, and will draw us on into the very bosom of catholic sanctity and the very heart of catholic affection, by observances and prayers, which in themselves are little worth, and excite the jeer or the criticism of the worldly and profane." 1 Pages 25, 117, 261, 272. THE ECCLESIASTICAL DOGMATIST 273 Surely in all this we have the utterance of one who has the heart of an ecclesiastic, which is ever drawing nearer to its proper home. Newman's constitutional and habitual conservatism is another note of his essentially ecclesiastical mind. Against all forms of liberalism, political, ecclesiastical, or theological, he was from the first strenuously opposed. If during the early Oriel period, under the influence of Whately, he was inclined to or tolerant of it, it was but a transient phase and had no permanent significance for his life. He was always interested in politics, and " his politics occupy an earlier place in the memory of his pupils than his theology." ^ He has been called " a lord chancellor thrown away." This doubtless with reference to his genius for diplomacy. In his constitu- tional tendencies as well as in his theories he would have been a Tory chancellor. If he had become, as might have happened, tutor to the Prince George of his day, he would have been a Tory tutor and might have figured as the future king's counsellor. Even in boyhood he was the antagonist of democracy and the defender of royalty and despotism, and seemingly on no other ground than that of a sort of fanatically conservative respect for power as such.^ The Oxford movement was as hos- tile to political as to ecclesiastical and theological liberal- ism. Its promoters were all Tories and defenders of hereditary privilege. The democratic spirit was gain- ing ground. It disclosed itself in the aspiration of the unprivileged classes to rise in the world. There was a great quickening of worldly aspiration and ambition. 1 " Reminiscences," Vol. I, pp. 34-36. * " Early History of Cardinal Newman," pp. 6-10. T 274 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS Liberal movements were furthered by this aspiration and at the same time they promoted it. It was against this that the Oxford Tories reacted. Against Arnold especially, with his Erastianism, there was violent oppo- sition. So bitter was Newman that he questioned whether Arnold could be a Christian. Because of the attitude of the Liberals Newman, like the Tory church- men of to-day, was soon convinced that, for its own security, the church should be separated from the state. This habit of mind conditioned his conception of the church. He could conceive of Christianity only as a community organized as a visible apostolic church, in which centres a divine authority, and he could conceive of no religion as possible but the religion of dogma. From the age of fifteen this had been his conception. A religion of feeling and sentiment is a delusion and a snare.^ Accordingly the principles for which he contended were first, the visible apostolic church with its authoritative bishops, its sacraments as channels of grace, and its discipHne of penance, and secondly, the authority and validity of dogma as against the anti- dogmatic principle of liberaHsm. How he defended his attitude toward all forms of liberalism on theoretic grounds we shall see farther on. Just now the point in hand is his conservative habit of mind, that of itself precommitted him to the religion of dogma and to the church which is the supreme embodiment of privilege and authority. A love for intellectual preeminence, not to say domina- tion, is another characteristic of Newman's ecclesiastical mind, which led him ultimately to the proper sphere for 1 " Apologia," pp. 95-96. THE ECCLESIASTICAL DOGMATIST 275 its realization. There is, indeed, no evidence that New- man had a vulgar ambition to make for himself a name as a church agitator and reformer. He certainly had no ambition to develop a sect or organize a party in the church. If that had been his object, his procedure would have been different. And yet it was impossible that a man of his force of personality, of his zeal for what he held to be true, especially of his dogmatic habit of mind, into which so much of personal will entered, should not have had, it may be an unconscious or half- conscious, passion for dominating the minds and con- sciences and wills of others. Indeed he himself acknowledges that he had a strong desire to influence others. " While I was fighting for the AngHcan church in Oxford," he says,^ " I was very glad to make con- verts, and though I never broke away from that rule of my mind (as I may call it) of which I have already spoken, of finding disciples rather than seeking them, yet that I made advances to others in a special way I have no doubt." He acknowledges also the correctness of the charge that he was " fierce " in his methods of agitation, and this suggests at once the passion of the advocate. Newman was not a mere interpreter of the truth. He put strong conviction and force of will into his advocacy. He was not willing to let the truth work its own way in the minds and hearts of others. He put his own will into his faith, and he would press the wills of others into the service of their faith. He was an investigator, but he carried his dogmatic precommittals into his investigations, and became a personal advocate in the very processes of his investigation. He wished 1 " Apologia," p. 247. 2/6 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS to win intellectual and moral ascendency over men. In this he resembles many other great theologians of the church. It is a mark of the theological and ecclesi- astical mind. It is the necessity of the dogmatist to identify his own personality with the truth he advocates. Nor is this altogether a matter for reproach. Any man who is intense in his convictions and strong in his opinions will wish to win the allegiance of others to the truth he cherishes. This passion for intellectual supremacy is inseparable from Newman's conscious- ness of a mission. He returned to England in 1833 with the strong conviction that he had a work to do there. His brother charges that he makes himself and his friend Froude ridiculous, without seeming to know it, in adopting the words of Achilles as his motto : — " Now that I am coming back to battle, You shall see the difference." It was Newman's opinion that every man should make up his mind by the time he is thirty years old what his life work shall be. He had evidently made up his mind what his own task should be. It was easy for him to influence men. He was a man of most fascinat- ing personality. He impressed men by the strength of his sympathy, the earnestness of his convictions, and the force of his will, rather than by the reasonableness of his opinions, or the soundness of his judgments, or the clearness of his insights. He was an exceedingly inter- esting and impressive teacher. As a preacher, he won a hearing by the distinctively religious character of his message, which appeals to the higher needs of men, by the passionate intensity of his advocacy, and by the THE ECCLESIASTICAL DOGMATIST 277 force and grace of his diction, rather than by any skill as an orator. In private intercourse he was at his best, and young men gathered about him as about an oracle. Powerful as was his influence in the pulpit, his most effective work was through the press and in the class room and in the social circle. He was not unconscious of his power, nor did he fail to use it consciously. Why should he not have used it thus .■' No man, especially no man of such power as Newman possessed, can rea- sonably be asked to deny himself the right and the privilege of seeking ascendency over the minds and hearts of men in the advocacy of what he regards as vital to their welfare, provided always that it be done honestly. Whether Newman advocated views that were consistent with his ordination vows as an Anglican clergyman may be questioned. But that he was hon- est in his advocacy and regarded his position as tenable will not be generally questioned in our day. New- man's brother charges him with inordinate ambition and with a loss of moral balance in carrying out his schemes of ambition. It was an unfraternal and un- seemly exhibition that he made of himself, in so doing, and especially in waiting till after Newman's death before he did it. One suspects that when Newman is charged with arrogance and with lack of humility of spirit he is not altogether correctly represented. The dogmatic attitude doubtless always has the seeming of arrogance. Estimated by the highest rational and moral standard it is arrogance, and the high Anglican, both as an Englishman and as a churchman, has vast capacity for such arrogance. But we must estimate Newman as a man from the basis of his personal dis- 2/8 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS position, not from the basis of his dogmatic position and dogmatic method. It is above all discreditable that Francis Newman should draw aside the veil that hides the sanctities of home, and should quote his sister's words of criticism : " John can be most amiable, most generous. He can win warm love from all his friends ; but to become his friend the essential condition is that you see everything along his line, and accept him as your leader." One fancies this to be a correct estimate of Newman. But it suggests the infirmity and the narrowness of the dogmatist and the offensiveness of the dogmatic method, rather than the arrogance of personal ambition. But the point in hand is that it is precisely this passion for intellectual and moral ascen- dency, which belongs to the consciousness of a dog- matic mission, that is the mark of the ecclesiastical mind. But it is Newman's attitude toward religious truth which, more clearly than anything else perhaps, illus- trates the predominance of the ecclesiastical mind. His theory of religious knowledge, of religious certainty, is one of the most subtle and obscure and perplexing problems of his career. It is a psychological phenome- non, which, when once apprehended, throws light upon his procedure, and clearly indicates his precommittal or predestination to the Roman church. There is in it a singular blending of scepticism, of dialectic, of piety, and of credulity. Newman was fundamentally and characteristically a dialectician. He was the most subtle and exhaustive of reasoners. He penetrated deeply into the intricacies of a subject and was sure to discover all its difficulties. Being of a religious turn of mind, it was THE ECCLESIASTICAL DOGMATIST 279 a necessity that he should bring this subtlety to bear upon the problems of religion. He believed in and advocated the use of reason in religion. In his case it served a double use. He used his reason to defend his position. This, perhaps, was the chief impression made upon the minds of those with whom he discussed religious questions. His subtlety and unconscious facility in reading his own ideas into a discussion is seen in his " Development of Christian Doctrine," in which he undertakes to apply the modern doctrine of evolution to the development of the dogmatic system of the Roman church. It is a painful exhibition of a subtle, dialectical mind dealing with what we in our day re- gard as relatively insignificant subjects and insignificant difficulties. But it is also an interesting exhibition of fa- cility in using reason to defend an already won position. It is this tendency which his brother has in mind in characterizing the method of his reasoning. Give him his premises, make any concession to them, and he will bring you to confusion. This is the mental habit of one who uses his reason to defend his position. But Newman also used his dialectic in preparing the way for the selection of his position. He had much to say about the negative and preparative value of logical processes. But their chief value in his apprehension was to show the impossibility of arriving at truth by such processes. As Bushnell thought that the chief use of metaphysics is to demonstrate that metaphysics is impossible, so Newman thought that the chief use of the speculative reason in religious investigation is to demonstrate its futility. It cannot verify or vindicate religious truth. Newman was an intellectual sceptic. 280 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS From the rationalistic point of view he was an agnostic. Reason is of value in furnishing preparative proof. But the chief thing proved is its own incompetency. His ultimate attitude was that there is no halfway house be- tween atheism and Romanism, although he had tried for a long time to find such a refuge in Anglicanism. Much has been said about his sceptical attitude with respect to the problems of religion. Atheists even have claimed him as a sort of ally because he regarded hu- man reason as incompetent to furnish adequate evidence of the existence of God. There is nothing strange in this sceptical attitude. It is, in part, due to the natural workings of his own highly speculative mind, by reason of which it was impossible for him to obscure the diffi- culties that gather about any important problem. The more important the problem, the more difficulties he saw. But it is, in part, also the outcome of the disinte- grating processes to which the theory of knowledge had been subjected by the philosophic criticism of a previ- ous period, the results of which had crept into his think- ing during the early period of his Oxford life. He had familiarized himself with sceptical writers who discussed the problem of religious knowledge. He tells us that when he was fourteen years old, he " read Paine's tracts against the Old Testament, and found pleasure in think- ing of the objections which were contained in them." He, at the same time, read Hume's essay on the mira- cles and he was familiar with Gibbon. His brother-in- law, Mozley, tells us that he had sceptical books about him during the Oxford campaign, although he kept them carefully locked up and concealed from his pupils. He had early adopted Bishop Butler's principle that THE ECCLESIASTICAL DOGMATIST 28 1 "probability is the guide of life." He gives an interest- ing statement of the matter in the "Apologia." The most that the logical understanding can do for us in in- vestigating the problems of religion is to give us prob- abihty. In a profoundly interesting and illuminating account of his own intellectual processes, he speaks of " the all-corroding, all-dissolving scepticism of the intel- lect in religious inquiries." It can never land us in the realm of truth. Normal reason, indeed, would reach the truth ; but the reason of man, outside the church, the unredeemed reason, is fallen and depraved. And he boldly declares that " every article of the Christian creed, whether as held by Catholics or Protestants, is beset with intellectual difficulties, and it is a simple fact that for myself I cannot answer those difficulties." He cites as examples the doctrine of the Trinity and of Transubstantiation.i Of the latter he says, " It is diffi- cult, impossible to imagine, I grant ; but how is it diffi- cult to believe ? " One may believe what one may not even imagine ! Not even the doctrine of the divine existence can stand before the corroding processes of the intellect. In vain do we rely upon anything that is human for assurance ; reason, education, even Scripture itself, cannot stand before the onset. The only power that is "adapted to be a working instrument in the course of human affairs for smiting hard and throwing back, the immense energy of the aggressive intellect," is a power " possessed of infallibility in religious teach- ing." Thus the intellect gives us no certainty. But Newman was a man of religious necessities, and it is the impulse of piety to find some basis of assurance. Where, 1 Pages 232, 265-291. 282 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS then, shall it be found ? It is not necessary to enter upon a thorough analysis of Newman's theory of knowl- edge. It is set forth with full elaboration in his " Gram- mar of Assent " and is briefly touched upon in the " Apologia." What is the basis of certainty in religion ? We have some standing-ground in ethical and religious experience. The testimony of the Christian conscience and heart has value. In the discourse entitled "Grounds for steadfastness in our Religious Profes- sion," 1 he speaks of the self-evidencing power of reli- gion, and declares that no traditional religion avails without its personal appropriation in experience ; and he finds no contradiction between this position and the position that religion is dogma and comes to us with the note of external authority. In the "Apologia" he writes : " If I looked into a mirror and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me when I look into this living, busy world and see no reflection of its Creator. This is to me one of the great difficulties of this absolute primary truth to which I have referred just now." Then he adds, " Were it not for this voice speaking so clearly in my conscience and my heart, I should be an atheist." ^ The speculative intellect cannot find God, but He reveals Himself in the human heart and conscience. Here apparently we have the validating power of religious experience. We might infer that the moral and reli- gious nature are an adequate organ of religious knowl- edge. But this is by no means his position. This would presuppose faith in the subjective principle that ^ " Sermons on Subjects of the Day," XXIII. 2 " Apologia," pp. 264-269. THE ECCLESIASTICAL DOGMATIST 283 would ally him with Luther and with Protestants. We must, therefore, look farther. As the reason gives us no absolute certainty, so neither does the heart nor con- science. There is no basis of certainty in any form of mere subjective experience. The mind must be com- pelled to make a venture by the pressure of the will. Belief is a venture of the mind under the dominance of the will. It is not secured and certainty is not won till the will is surrendered. We " will to believe." And here appears the application of Butler's theory of prob- abiHty as interpreted by Keble. It was this notion of the living power of faith, this resolution to believe where the evidence furnished is only probable evidence, that he got from Keble, as he himself tells us. But it is not to the experiences of the heart and conscience, not to the persuasions of our moral and religious nature, that we are to will to surrender. We will to submit to an external authority which speaks to us as with the voice of God. This is not an irrational surrender, with- out a basis of evidence. We are predisposed to believe by the experiences of our inner life. But we need more than this. The church comes to us with its claims of authority. We examine these claims in the Hght of such evidences, external and internal, as are furnished us, and we find them in harmony with the needs of our own souls and lives. This does not give us certainty. It is only probable evidence ; but we yield because the persuasions of the heart and conscience, together with this external evidence, are stronger than our intellectual uncertainty. Having willed to believe, we reach assur- ance. We can thus believe even when all the ordinary experiences of life are opposed to our belief, and such 284 REPRESENTATIVE MODERxN PREACHERS belief is a moral obligation. In the problems of reli- gion, therefore, private judgment must be surrendered. The right of private judgment may indeed be exercised in forming our estimate of the results of religion in the lives of bodies of men, but this is a very different thing from exercising such judgment in determining the valid- ity of Christian doctrines. ^ It was because he could not find in the Anglican church all the notes of an objectively authoritative church, viz. apostolicity, catholicity, and autonomy, that he wavered so long. This is the explanation of his uncertainty and of the seeming contradictoriness of his position. The Anglican church may be apos- tolic, but it is not catholic, and in subordination to the state can never be autonomous. Upon the authority of such a church he could not rest. He must find a church upon which he can rest with absolute certainty. The charge of moral timidity in all this process, as well as the charge of mental suicide and of moral confusion and contradiction, has some basis. His career presents the singular spectacle of an extreme of intellectual scepticism that was offset by an extreme of religious credulity. Contrast Luther's bold appeal to the attest- ing power of the moral and religious consciousness and to the witness of the spirit in the heart. Luther com- plained that the Roman church robbed the Christian of his assurance, and he boldly appealed from the church to Christian experience. Newman finds no basis of cer- tainty in any form of subjective experience, rational, ethical, or spiritual, nor in the voice of the Spirit within the individual soul. But he finds it in a church whose 1 " Sermons on Subjects of the Day," XXIII, p. 359. THE ECCLESIASTICAL DOGMATIST 285 preposterous claims have been refuted by historic criti- cism, and which, if ever vahdated at all, must be vali- dated by a reason whose processes we are taught by Newman at the very outset to distrust. It was this attitude toward the problems of religion that naturally led him toward the Roman church. The outward circumstances of Newman's life and the personal influences brought to bear upon him were also tributary to the ultimate result. It is as if all things were in combination to work out the one predestined issue. Influences seemingly the most contradictory wrought toward the same end. Those who agreed with him stimulated and encouraged him, and those who were hostile to him only intrenched him the more firmly in his position. The Evangehcalism in which he had been nurtured, instead of drawing him farther from the goal, seems almost to have started him toward it. His committal to the reUgion of dogma at the age of fifteen was clearly the outcome of the prevailing con- ception of Christianity as a system of doctrine. He never thoroughly grasped the conception of Christian- ity as primarily a disclosure of personality, and as only secondarily a revelation of truth. Nor had he formed the true conception of dogma. With the EvangeHcals of his day, dogma had come to mean the product of the reflective Hfe of the church in successive generations. But with him dogma was the apostolic deposit of truth, passed on to following generations and forever fixed. It was not the product of church reflection upon the truths and facts of Christianity, but something given from the first by tradition. And it was largely through the influence of writings put into his hands at Oxford 286 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS by those, some of them Evangelicals, who wished to lay- new emphasis upon the apostolicity of the Anglican church, but whose purpose was far remote from the ultimate result, that he was led to incorporate the notion of apostolic tradition in his conception of dogma. Having accepted the apostolic authority of tradition, he of course came to accept as final authority the dogmas of tradition. Whatever the intent of his teachers, they seem always fatuitously to be furnishing fuel to his fanatical zeal for tradition ; and there is a certain grim humor in his references in the "Apologia" to the influ- ence of books that were put into his hands by men who would have led him away from Rome, but who were in fact instrumental in furnishing incentive toward it. His earliest and lifelong conception of the world as the kingdom of evil, set off in contrast with the king- dom of God, came from Calvinistic and Puritan Evan- gelicalism. The sharp distinction between the sacred and the secular, the saint and the sinner, heaven and hell, mercy and wrath, is essentially Calvinistic; and these conceptions are closely allied with conceptions that prevail in the Roman church. He himself notes the points of likeness, and intimates that this phase of Calvinistic Evangelicalism had precommitted him to the Romish conception of the world. Even Law's " Serious Call," which has influenced so many lives in the cause of Evangelical piety, seems to have predisposed him to the Romish conception of the perpetual conflict between God and the world. His personal companionships also had a like effect. The earliest and strongest influence is that of Keble. That of Froude, however, is scarce less decisive, and one may venture to suggest that it THE PREACHER 287 must always remain a matter for surprise, not to say of discredit, that a man of Newman's caliber should have been influenced so strongly by so slight and crude and irrational a person as Hurrell Froude. Thus by the force of surrounding influences he is gradually set toward his goal. The catholicity of the Anglican church is surrendered and all hope of its au- tonomy, while he still holds to its apostolicity. Then its apostolicity is placed in doubt, and he holds as a last refuge to its note of sanctity. Then at last, when all the notes of a true church seem to have vanished and in 1843 he resigns St. Mary's, he shows that he is already substantially on Romish ground. Thence on- ward we hear only of the Catholic church, and in the " Sermons on Subjects of the Day," his church is the regal church, which is itself the kingdom of God. The Christian church is a perpetuation of the Jewish church as a temporal not less than as a spiritual power, repre- senting all the regal functions of Christ. There is but one branch of the Christian church that can rightly claim this, and therefore only one that can be the true church, and that is the church at whose portals he stands. And when during the two remaining years he had written his " Development of Christian Doctrine," which he laid down unfinished, there was but a short step through the open door. Ill NEWMAN THE PREACHER Newman's loss of position and of prestige in the Anglican church did not result in a loss of personal 288 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS influence. The English people did not forget him, and he never lost his hold of them. They discredited his theology and lost confidence in his judgment, but they never lost interest in the man. He antagonized their opinions, he cut across their most cherished convictions, he rebuked them for their worldliness, he exposed their inconsistencies and satirized their frivolities, but he always retained a certain ascendency over their imagina- tions and their hearts. Few modern Englishmen have won a securer place in the interest of their countrymen. It is not altogether easy to explain. Doubtless they always found the Englishman in him still, and he at- tracted them by the magic of his English style. But there is something behind all this. It is an interesting tribute to the force and grace of his personality. That personality has an irresistible fascination. Its energies disclose themselves in all his writings, but most of all, perhaps, in his sermons. Behind the sermon is the man, and in the reading there is always an indefinable im- pression of something more, which the product only intimates. What is said is the product of a well-stored mind and of a richly nurtured and severely trained character. It is a keen, subtle, incisive, capacious mind, with stores of theological learning and vast emotional susceptibilities and passions, and the ease, the fulness, the acuteness, and the suggestiveness of the treatment intimate that but a small part is said of what might be said. The thought of the sermons is thrown out in a free and affluent manner, and, if we except the univer- sity and the occasional sermons, there is no very elabo- rate discussion. Newman's career illustrates, not only the influence of a powerful institution upon a richly THE PREACHER 289 endowed nature, but the influence of that nature itself upon the entire personality, upon its products, and upon its activities in the leadership of men. One may get a fair impression of some men's preaching without knowing much about the men. This is the case with preachers like Spurgeon and Guthrie, whose homiletic qualities are somewhat obtrusive. But in the case of Newman, as in that of Augustine and that of most dogmatic and apologetic preachers, we must know the man. And one of the points of interest in Newman's preaching is the interest it excites to know more about the preacher. The " Parochial and Plain Sermons," preached during the fifteen years of his incumbency of St. Mary's, the sermons of his young manhood, includ- ing some of the very earliest, have perhaps been most widely read by the English people. Their interest lies largely in their disclosure of the struggles of his own inner life. The " Sermons on Subjects of the Day " disclose more care in the preparation and are of special interest as disclosing his nearness to the church of Rome, The " Occasional Sermons " are more thought- ful and elaborate, and the " University Sermons " are characterized by great subtlety of thought and thorough- ness and fulness of discussion. But the " Discourses to Mixed Congregations " disclose a spontaneity and free- dom of movement and a power of eloquence that are not found in any of his earlier sermons. They were delivered soon after entering the Roman church and, as Mr. Gladstone suggested, indicate that he felt him- self "unmuzzled." There is a passionate intensity of emotion and a rushing movement of style in these dis- courses that are not found to so large an extent in other 290 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS sermons, and they disclose the fact that he is beginning to cultivate his style more carefully than it was possible for him during the days of controversy. And yet there are but few discourses, if any, that stand out in such solitary greatness as some of the sermons of Robertson, or of Bushnell, or of Brooks. We really do not know much about Newman's preaching by reading here and there a sermon, we must read them widely and in the light of his career. These sermons are still read by all classes of Englishmen and in all parts of Great Britain. And by Romanists, high Anglicans, Broad churchmen. Evangelicals, and Dissenters alike they are regarded almost as classics. There is hardly any exaggeration, from the cultivated Enghshman's point of view, in a re- mark of Mr. Hutton, I think it was, of the Londo7i Spectator, in the Contemporary Review a few years ago, to the effect that if he were condemned to solitude in some remote part of the earth and had choice of the authors that might beguile him in his isolation, he would select Shakespeare's plays and Newman's sermons. But it is not the technique of the sermon that com- mands men's attention and interest. It is the man and the intensity of his message. This is why in the read- ing the first impression is inadequate, and why the ser- mons increase in interest by frequent reading. It was in part perhaps, because Newman recognized the off- hand, unconventional, unartistic character of his early sermons, and because he had no time to perfect their literary form, that for a long time he refused to have them published. But the fact that they were prepared with distinct reference to the spiritual needs of his con- gregation was a still more weighty consideration. It THE PREACHER 29I seemed like parading before the public the secrets of domestic life. But let us see if we can discover some of the chief points of value in Newman's preaching. Perhaps its most striking quality is its elevated and intense religious tone. Newman was intensely hostile to the worldliness of his time. There is therefore a certain unearthly note about his preaching. He was a most skilful and powerful advocate of religion as be- longing to the realm of the invisible and eternal. As we have seen, a most vivid sense of invisible realities was the mark of his rehgious genius, and he set forth their glories with all the vividness of his imagination, all the passion of his emotion, and all the skill of his dialectic. The reality, the priority, the commanding and compelling authority, and the unchanging glory of the invisible and eternal may almost be called the stock of his message. And perhaps no modern preacher has equalled him in the cogency with which these realities are presented to men. To be their advocate was his conscious calUng. In " The Parting of Friends," ^ which contains his last words to the Anglican church, when he left St. Mary's, he discloses the conscious recognition of the worth of his message. The sermon closes as fol- lows : " And O my brethren, O kind and affectionate hearts, O loving friends, should you know any one whose lot it has been, by writing or by word of mouth, in some degree to help you thus to act; if he has ever told you what you knew about yourselves, or what you did not know; has read to you your wants or feelings, and com- forted you by the very reading ; has made you feel that ^ " Sermons on Subjects of the Day," XXVI. 292 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS there was a higher life than this daily one, and a brighter world than that you see ; or encouraged you, or sobered you, or opened a way to the inquiring, or soothed the perplexed ; if what he has said or done has ever made you take interest in him, and feel well inclined toward him ; remember such a one in time to come, though you hear him not, and pray for him that in all things he may know God's will and at all times he may be ready to ful- fil it." The pathos and delicacy of these words are not more impressive than the ardent affectionateness of the man that is disclosed by them, and they give us an in- sight into the secret of his personal influence. They reveal, too, the consciousness that he knew the souls of men, that he could interpret them to themselves, making clearer what is already known, bringing to light what is not known, encouraging the faint-hearted, sobering the frivolous, opening a path to the hesitating, and comfort- ing the perplexed. And what he thought himself to be, he was, and such was his work. But the specific point in hand just here is his delicately expressed conviction that he had made men see and feel " that there is a higher life than the earthly one, and a brighter world than the one men see." And it was because they are native to the human soul that he found men. To the method of this message of " a higher life " and " a brighter world " we may object ; it is the extreme method of the ecclesiastic and the dogmatist. It is in some respects a gloomy message. Its picture of human life outside the church is exaggerated and distorted. Religion, as representing the realm of the invisible and eternal and as the supreme interest, must be isolated from life. It must also be embodied in a visible catholic THE PREACHER 293 church, and it must be brought to men by that church with the notes of divine authority. It is the calHng of the church to represent the invisible realm of redemptive grace in outward, visible form. God is in the church, and in the church alone, as the invisible, ever abiding, redemptive presence, and that church is the holy, apos- tolic catholic church, which is identical with the king- dom of God. Protestantism belongs to the uncovenanted and unconsecrated kingdom of this world, that stands over against the holy catholic church. What Protestant- ism, and what the philanthropic agencies of the world are doing for the advancement of the kingdom of God, which is wider than any church or all churches com- bined, he does not see. It is a lost and depraved world, under the curse of God as the kingdom of evil, a "vain, unprofitable, overbearing world." Worldliness is living for the life that now is, and religion is hving for the life to come, which is the life invisible and eternal. The world exists for visible and temporal ends, the church for invisible and eternal ends. But the contrast be- tween the church and the world is not merely the con- trast between the invisible and eternal and the visible and perishable, which is in fact a false contrast, but it is a contrast between the holy and the unholy. Sanctity belongs to the church alone. Unsanctity belongs to the world. The worldling has not only lost all good, but all vision of the good, all vision of the invisible and eternal. He cannot see or know the things of God. Things of temporal interest he may know. He may know justice, but faith, hope, love, he cannot know. If he comes to know them, it is not simply by the awakening of what is already within him and native to him, but by the infu- 294 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS sion of supernatural grace from without. Hence all right of private judgment in matters of religion is lost. The church must be separated from the world and set over against it. It must win the world by conquest. This form of representation doubtless holds very im- portant truth, and its presentation by Newman is singu- larly effective. This conception of a mighty, conquering church, that has put the nations under its feet and is subduing the world to God, produces a certain sense of awe, and this message from Newman's lips was a mighty message. It is the specific message of the later years, but it is substantially the message of his life. But it is a gloomy and disheartening picture which the world pre- sents. It is a world without God, save as it is the dwell- ing-place of a holy catholic church. But with all its limitations of conception and repre- sentation, it was still a great message, and it reached the souls of men. Newman had a false conception of saint- liness and of separation from the world. Robertson, as unworldly a man as Newman, had a much more rational and healthy conception of the unworldly life. And yet Newman was a genuine saint. He was a man of pro- found religious convictions, of powerful religious emo- tions, of quick sense of spiritual realities, and of a consecrated spirit. Submission to the will of God in the crucifixion of earthly affections is a theme on which he likes to dwell. Such a man must speak with power, if he has any vocation to speak at all. He took no secular or semi-secular subjects into the pulpit, but dealt wholly with spiritual themes. He was not a ghostly man. He had a genuine interest in human life and dealt with things that are real. But the tone is un- THE PREACHER 295 earthly. In an age when men are so almost wholly absorbed in things that are visible and temporal, when the lusts of the flesh and the lusts of the eye and the vainglory of life are dominating their souls, it is a great blessing to the church and to the world that so great a voice should be heard, telling them of better things. The church needs to be reminded that there is a differ- ence between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world, between the saint and the sinner, between the church and the world, between him who serves God and him who serves Him not, between grace and nature, between the regenerate and the unregenerate man, be- tween the sacred and the secular, between the good and the bad, and between heaven and hell. It should indeed be a discriminating message, but better the exaggerated form than no message at all. Newman's unearthly voice has been heard in the Anglican church, and but for him its preaching would be far less effective. As we read Newman, we think of Robertson, and hear an echo in new form of the same unworldly spirit. Remote as their points of view are, Newman reminds us not a little of Schleiermacher, in the emphasis that is laid upon the invisible and eternal realities of religion, and upon the sharp distinction between the religious and the worldly spirit. It was Schleiermacher's voice that rallied the church to the recognition of the inner realities of reli- gion. It is Newman's voice that holds our attention to the consciousness of the church as the organ of the invisible and eternal. The ethical significance of faith for the Christian life is another point of value in Newman's preaching, closely allied with the preceding. To show that it is natural to 296 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS believe, that it is better to be credulous even than to be doubtful, that it is a v^^rong done our manhood not to believe, to vindicate the reasonableness of faith, to justify its claims, and to magnify its pov^^er, was one of his leading aims. He v^as doubtless mistaken in his conception of the object of faith, but this did not fatally vitiate his conception of the reality and povi^er of faith. Substitute for the church the proper object of faith, and Newman's teaching is what we need to-day. He lays much stress upon the naturalness of faith. We are con- stitutionally predisposed to believe. It is the normal habit of mind, and the sceptical habit is abnormal. Better believe too much than too Httle. Doubt is not only a weakness, but a sin, for in doubt one refuses to follow the higher impulses of his nature. It is a re- freshing thing to come into contact with a man who discredits the sceptical attitude of mind in an age that inclines to glory in it as if it were the mark of a supe- rior order of intelligence. Newman constantly presses upon our attention the fact that the truths of religion are not revealed primarily to the reason of man, but to faith. Faith is truly natural, as being an inclination to commit ourselves to what is external to ourselves, as object of trust, and yet in its religious aspect it is the gift of God. For without divine help the soul does not commit itself to invisible spiritual realities. " The argu- ments for religion do not compel any one to beHeve, just as arguments for good conduct do not compel any one to obey. Obedience is a consequence of willing to obey, and faith is the consequence of willing to believe. We may see what is right, whether in matters of faith or obedience, of ourselves, but we cannot will what is THE PREACHER 297 right without the grace of God." ^ This is Newman's contribution to the doctrine of faith. Faith is an ethical act. It is wilHng to believe. It is the soul's self-sur- render to what has the right to claim its allegiance. It requires no act of will to accept mathematical demon- strations. But to accept the august claims of religion does require an act of will. This surely has a modern note. That Newman swung away from the rational- ism that assumes the competency of the speculative intellect, to deal successfully with the problems of re- ligion, indicates that he was in Hne with a better and a more Christian type of thinking than had been cur- rent. That he vindicates the self-committal of the soul to its higher intuitions and convictions and impulses and instincts and longings and strivings shows that, so far forth, he was in line with the modern experimental school, the school that believes in the validating power of Christian experience in vindicating the claims of re- ligion. It is this validating power that he claims for religious experience.^ But this for him is not enough. He adds the objective authority of the church. Neither rational nor religious experience alone is sufficient for faith. It must have a dogmatic basis. It must rest upon the divine authority of the church. But, after all, this dogmatic note of faith does not fatally vitiate the main point of his teaching with respect to the ethical significance of faith. For faith is still the soul's willing- ness to commit itself to its higher spiritual experiences, which are evoked by the church, and to which the church, as the voice of God, summons it. 1 " Discourses to Mixed Congregations," IX, X, XI. 2 " Sermons on Subjects of the Day," XXIII. 298 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS The intensity of its emotional and spiritual fervor is an element of great interest and impressiveness in Newman's preaching. All of his writings, particularly those of a popular and controversial character, and above all his sermons, leave the impression that there is behind them a man not only of strong convictions and of resolute moral purpose, but of ardent affectionateness and of tender sympathies. The " Apologia," with all its polemic severity and biting sarcasm, supports this impression. Whatever he holds to be true he holds with constitutional energy and advocates with passionate eagerness. Traditionalist and dogmatist of an extreme type though he was, he stoutly maintained the necessity of an ethical and spiritual appropriation of the truth. " He who has the truth within him, though he cannot evolve it out of his heart in shape and proportion for another's inspection, is blessed beyond all comparison above him who has much to say and says what is true, but says it not from himself, but by rote, and could say quite as well just the reverse, did it so happen that he mistook it for truth." ^ The sermons furnish abundant evidence that he proclaimed the truth " from himself " and not "by rote." The preaching of the period in which he was connected with the Anglican church bears witness to the passionate earnestness with which he tried to make the truth of his position perfectly real to himself, although he might not be perfectly sure of his ground. And his subsequent career indicates the sin- cerity of his convictions and a certain apostolic earnest- ness to convince others of the truth that has evidently become a great power in his own soul. With all his in- 1 " Sermons on Subjects of the Day," XXIII, p. 345. THE PREACHER 299 tellectual subtlety and reserve and caution, he was a man of intense and tender feelings. His brother, it is true, regarded him as " lacking in humility and tenderness," and even as "contemptuous and self-conceited." It is a singularly unfraternal judgment, but the basis of it is perhaps not difficult to discover. Newman was a dogmatician, and such a man, as already suggested, may be harsh and severe and seemingly arrogant in his enforcement of what he holds for truth. We find some- thing of this in his sermons. But this is not the pre- vailing note. He loved what he held for truth, but he did not cease to love men. There was the heart of a man behind the conscience and the will of the ecclesias- tical dogmatist, and at times it burst forth as in a sort of wail of passionate human sympathy. This quality in him largely accounts for the interest the English people have continued to take in him. His appeal to Anglican friends to remember him in time to come, if anything he had said or done had ever made them take an interest in him, was not in vain. No one can read his strong exclamatory utterances, full of pathos and fiery zeal, full of apostrophe and appeal, without recognizing the intensity of his nature, his attachment to his friends, and his love for his church. There is something par- ticularly interesting and impressive in his utterances of passionate adoration, not only for our Lord, but for His Mother. They suggest, what Robertson felt and recog- nized, the power of the humanly sympathetic element in the religion of the Roman church. It is a human heart that brings the heart of God near to us, and what wonder that the Mother of our Lord has mightily moved the imaginations and feelings of men, especially of men 300 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS who, like Newman, have found themselves in reaction against the technicalities of an abstract religion, and who have felt the " all-corroding power of intellectual scepticism." Such a recoil is not unnatural. It was this early recoil of the emotional, sympathetic, and imagina- tive element in Newman's nature from the coldness of Protestantism that accounts for his early inclination to adore the " holy Mother," and for the attractiveness which the humanity of the religion of the Roman church had for him. Newman's preaching has interest and value in the evidence it furnishes of his insight into the human soul. It is said of him that he did not know men. This is the testimony of his brother-in-law in the " Oxford Reminis- cences." The meaning of this is evident. He did not know men on the lower side of their nature, had no handling of practical affairs, could not adjust himself to men's weaknesses and perversities, had no tact for practical leadership and no skill in organizing the politi- cal elements of the Oxford movement. But this in- volves no lack of insight into the hearts of men. It suggests, perhaps, the deeper insight. In this gift of insight he surpasses all the men of his time. In a church whose leaders are obliged to study and to know the human heart, whose casuistic subtleties are often our admiration, a church that is in many respects match- less in its guidance of men, Newman was at once at home, and stood at the front as a shepherd of souls. He was a matchless priest. His intellectual subtlety, his skill in psychological analysis, his insight into human motives, his vivid imagination, his sympathetic earnestness, his study of himself in the broodings of an THE PREACHER 301 introverted life, his isolation and loneliness, his study of the records of human passion and conflict in the history of the church, his knowledge of dramatic Hterature, all fitted him to interpret the human soul, and to become its shepherd. To tell men what they knew about them- selves, but to make the knowledge clearer and more significant ; to tell them what they did not know and did not imagine, and to surprise and confound them in the telling; to read their wants and feelings, and to comfort them in the very reading — this was his choice gift, and he knew it when he made, and not in vain, his final ap- peal for remembrance by his honest, true-hearted Eng- lish countrymen. It was precisely this knowledge of the hearts of men that made him the attractive teacher that he was, and brought the young men of Oxford, as well as the commonest of the common people, to St. Mary's, and has left its traces in those sermons that he poured out with such wealth of thought and feehng for fifteen years and that will remain a literary attraction for other generations. If we look at Newman's preaching from the point of view of its subject-matter, tone, and method, we shall find much that is of interest and value. He may be classed as an apologetic preacher. All of his sermons bear the mark of the apologist. We are never left in doubt about his doctrinal opinions. They are constantly emerging, although never in technical form, and they are never defended by elaborate argument. Even the ser- mons that have a definitely ethical and evangehstic char- acter have a doctrinal basis and an apologetic interest. The doctrinal and the practical are in his view identical, for there can be no sound practical Christian Hfe that 302 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS is not grounded in the truths of Christianity as inter- preted by the church. It is with considerable effort that we get at the theology of some preachers. In our day there is but little to get at. But we have no such difficulty with Newman's preaching. We readily gather all the essential features of his theology, as we do of Schleiermacher's, from his sermons. He is content with no vague statements of truth that is held in solu- tion as mystical sentiment and feeling. He will have the right conception, and he proposes to lodge it in the mind of the hearer. Sometimes the doctrinal references are incidental. A few passages stricken out would leave a sermon that would prove edifying to any congregation. The depth and compass of his religious life rendered it impossible that he should fail to deal largely with truth that is common to the entire Christian church. But we readily discover not only the doctrinal but the ecclesias- tical interest. There is consequently considerable range and variety in the subject-matter of the discourses, and they are applied to a great variety of religious interests. They are not commonplace themes. If they are famil- iar, they are discussed with such freshness and individ- uality of method that they have the interest of novelty. Each subject is discussed in a free and unconventional manner, and in a way appropriate to the end he would realize. There is therefore nothing stereotyped or repeti- tious, no traversing of ground previously gone over in some other form. Each sermon has a fresh interest of its own, and we find the old freshness lingering about it still, whenever we go back to it. He is faithful to his own teaching that the preacher should always have a proposition before his mind, and that he should speak THE PREACHER 303 definitely to the proposition, although it may not be thrown into definite form, nor be defended by elabo- rate formal argument. He is quite sure to find the difficulties of the subject and to answer objections. He will secure the greater cogency for his argument by giving his assumed antagonist every possible advan- tage by a careful statement of his position. Having given him this advantage by putting his position in its most favorable light, he proceeds with his undermining process. His reasoning is acute, but often fanciful and inconclusive. It is after the dogmatic method. He has his premise already in hand, and his conclusion is con- tained in it. It is the deductive process. Give him his premise, and it will be difficult to meet his argument. The reasoning process is free and facile and in the popular manner of a man of prevailingly rhetorical instincts. His Scriptural citations are copious, and are a prominent feature in his development. Citations from secular sources are excluded. Ecclesiastical citations are often colored by his prepossessions, and Scrip- tural citations are not, and are not intended to be, exegetically exact. From the critical point of view, they are sometimes grotesque. But in their rhetorical or poetic, as distinguished from their didactic, quaUty they are highly interesting and impressive. He was apparently entirely ignorant of the modern science of exegesis, and would probably have regarded it as a hindrance. Doubtless he regards his citations as throw- ing light upon his discussion, but they do it, if at all, suggestively and by an allegorizing accommodation. The freedom, not to say abandon, with which he uses his texts, the unexpected themes he deduces from them, 304 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS are rather shocking to the critical homiletic mind, and the whole discussion hangs as loosely about the theme as the theme about the text. • But the rhetorical impres- sion is always vivid. The preaching of the Roman church is strong in its imaginative elements. It is stirring preaching, and has, according to its kind, an evangelistic note. In this, as in other respects, New- man was from the first a Romanist in his homiletic genius. His sermons are shaped with reference to impression. Their very dogmatism has an element of power. Preaching with a strong, positive dogmatic basis, if handled with rhetorical skill, is always force- ful. The most powerful preaching of the church has been of this sort. Witness Chrysostom, Augustine, the Cappadocians, and the classical French preachers. It is not in harmony with the tastes of our time. But it is pertinent to suggest, that, although the dogmatic method will not avail, it would not injure the preach- ing of our day if it had under it a more consistent and a better-defined theology. Preaching that holds its the- ology in solution, that never pushes it into definite con- ception and formal statement, will lack grip and force. The structural quality of Newman's preaching bears the same general mark of freedom. He does not re- spect the standard methods of homiletic order. The rhetorical rather than the logical interest dominates him in the ordering of his thought. He early chose the un- conventional style and never changed it materially. He preached, moreover, to congregations composed largely of educated people, who exacted but little upon his method. His mental productiveness, the fulness of his material, the energetic grip of the subject upon his THE PREACHER 305 mind, the intensity with which it moved his feelings, and the rush of his style naturally resulted in riding down all questions of architectural outline as a sort of hindrance to the onflow of the sermon, and he satisfied himself with a progressive movement that had no defi- nitely marked outline as best serving his purpose. Three things impress us. First, the directness of the address. He gets to work promptly, drives straight at his mark, and closes with direct appeal. From begin- ning to end a definite apologetic and ethical interest is manifest. The fulness and the free flow of the thought is another feature. No loose verbiage, no padding, no hard pressure upon the homiletic pump. All is free and aflSuent, — keen thinking and straight but facile speaking. And then there is the progressive move- ment of the thought. It is not closely articulated, nor definitely outUned, but it moves rapidly onward to its goal. He has mastered his thought and he holds it freely in its relations. In the university sermons, which of all his discourses are the most elaborate, he marks the progress of his thought by numbered divisions. They are not homiletic divisions, marking the main steps of the development, but numbered paragraphs, marking transitions of thought. Within these num- bered paragraphs we may sometimes, but not always, easily trace the outline of the sermon from introduc- tion to conclusion. In most of his discourses there is no careful paragraphing and but little formal division. The " Discourses to Mixed Congregations " are without texts, and they show that without texts the preacher is likely to allow himself the wider freedom in the move- ment of his thought. The sermon entitled " God's Will 306 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS the End of Life," impressive in the quality of its thought, also furnishes a good illustration of his free structural method and of his affluent rhetorical style. The closing appeal to Christ is impressive in its pathos and in its emotional fervor. The delineation of the worldly life and especially the passage relating to the damnation of Catholics is vividly graphic. The title is only indirectly the subject of the sermon, but suggests the background of the entire discussion. Newman is best known to the general public as a master of English style, and the attractiveness of his preaching is largely conditioned by its diction. It is a simple style, sometimes even colloquially direct and familiar, bringing high things down into the experi- ences of common life. Yet it is elevated and dignified, and never descends below the proprieties of the august subjects discussed. It is clear and exact, speaking di- rectly to the mind and conveying thought with discrimi- nation. This discriminating quality, indeed, is very notable, and secures for us most delicate shadings of thought and results in a free expansion of style. The emotional and affectional quality of his utterance secures for it a certain pathos that is a marked quality in his style. We are never offended when he addresses us as his "dearest children," but are rather attracted by it. His apostrophe to Christ at the close of the sermon entitled "The Mental Sufferings of Our Lord in His Passion " is characterized by great delicacy of feeling, and illustrates the passionate intensity of his nature. Note the pathos and deUcacy of his last utterance from the pulpit of St. Mary's to his Anglican friends. Note the not infrequent appeals to the Mother of our Lord. THE PREACHER 307 The gracefulness of his style is generally regarded as its most characteristic quality. Matching the purity of sentiment and feeling and the refined taste that mark the whole tone of the sermon, is the elegance of his vocabulary, the skilful placing of words and marshal- ling of clauses, securing for his sentences a rhythmic flow. His skilful delineations, whether of the external experiences of life or of mental or psychical states, are always an element of grace in his diction. But the energy, what we may call the momentum, the rushing movement of his style, is still more notable. This mo- mentum is a quality of great intensity. Note the rapid, sketchy description of the gay and active scenes of human life in the sermon to which I have already re- ferred, "God's Will the End of Life." "The ways are thronged, carriage-way and pavement ; multitudes are hurrying to and fro, each on his own errand,"^ etc. Note his description of Christ's earthly life.^ Read his description of Dives.^ Recall his description of the Catholic who would imitate the worldhng, and read the pathetic appeal in the conclusion of the sermon. The intensity of the style is its impressive feature. The rush of the sentences is also an element of grace. For his effectiveness as a preacher Newman was not at all dependent upon the appointments of the orator. There was a slight stoop in his shoulders as he stood in the pulpit, and he never disclosed his full height. He read his sermon without action in the reading, but it was not without the animation of earnestness. His eye was clear and penetrating, and his voice was ^ " Discourse to Mixed Congregations," pp. 105-106. 2 Ibid., pp. 109-II0. * Ibid., pp. 1 1 2-1 14. 3o8 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS musical, and this compensated for other defects. His dress was that of the Oxford clergyman of his day, which was sufficiently distinctive but not extreme. He read the ordinary service rapidly, but in the Sunday wor- ship he was more deliberate ; and his brother charges that the service of worship was of so much importance in his estimate that he undervalued the sermon. If the ser- mons left us are a proof of this, it was an undervaluation for which the world will never seriously reproach him. Mr. Gladstone has left on record his impression of Newman as a preacher in the following words : " There was not very much change in the inflection of the voice ; action there was none. His sermons were read, and his eyes were always bent on his book ; and all that, you will say, is against efficacy in preaching. Yes, but you must take the man as a whole, and there was a stamp and a seal upon him ; there was a solemn sweetness and music in the tone ; there was a completeness in the figure, taken together with the tone and with the man- ner, which made even his delivery, such as I have described it, and though exclusively from written ser- mons, singularly attractive." ^ In brief summation, then, let it be said that for subtlety and delicacy of thought, for skilful dialectic, for exposi- tory grace, for seriousness of tone, for such persuasive- ness of inculcation as is conditioned by strong conviction and intense feeling, and for all the elements of an effec- tive style of public address, but especially for freedom, flexibility, and momentum, Newman's^ sermons are a valuable study for serious-minded men of any sect or of any age. 1 See Hutton's " Cardinal Newman," p. 87. CHAPTER VII JAMES BOWLING MOZLEY I THE MAN AND THE THEOLOGIAN Among the Oxford men who were brought into con- nection with Newman, and who participated in the theological and ecclesiastical discussions of the Oxford controversy, there was no abler nor more independent, honest, or judicious thinker than Canon Mozley. In his own day he was more widely known as a theologian than as a preacher. With all his intellectual sugges- tiveness and extraordinary moral impressiveness, he was not a particularly acceptable preacher, even to an Oxford audience, by which the gifts of oratory were not and are not held in very high esteem. Yet there are elements of intellectual and moral power in his published sermons, elements that seem almost to be more effective in the printed than they were in the oral form, that, after their kind, have not been surpassed by anything in homiletic literature that has been given to the public during the last half-century. They lack the intensity and literary grace of Newman's sermons, and are some- what heavy and slow in movement ; but they are intel- lectually stronger and, from the ethical point of view, more impressive than any that ever came from Newman's 309 3IO REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS pen. Of these sermons, the London Spectator has said that "the reading of them would be enough to change the whole character and life of a man." It is certainly an extraordinary experience for a preacher, and an extraordinary test of him, that his sermons must be known through the press before his value as a preacher can be adequately estimated. This is the test to which Mozley has been subjected, and it suggests somewhat significantly the possibilities of loss to the world if the manuscript were to be banished from the pulpit. Unlike Newman, whose intellectual vivacity and emotional fervor and force and grace of literary style fitted him after his fashion for the mastery of assemblies, Mozley reached only a limited circle of hearers. But, like Newman, he has reached and influenced a wide circle of readers. No intelligent and cultivated man who becomes familiar with these virile discourses will, I venture to say, fail to receive a strong moral and mental impression from them ; and no preacher, espe- cially, who would acquaint himself with the best that has been spoken in the modern pulpit, or who would study intelligently the elements of moral power in modern preaching and would avail himself of the strongest moral incentive, will willingly fail to acquaint himself with them. Mozley was born in 1813 and was Newman's junior by twelve years. We are told that as a boy he disclosed, in a marked degree, just those qualities for which he was subsequently distinguished. He was strongly indi- vidualistic, high-spirited, and, according to his brother of the " Oxford Reminiscences," who might well have told us more about him and less about himself, quick- THE MAN AND THE THEOLOGIAN 311 tempered. This strong individuality and high spirit he disclosed during the Oxford controversy in his resist- ance of Newman's influence and in the gradual forma- tion of his own independent opinions, but he curbed his temper and secured the mastery of himself, accounting as a dishonor in himself and disliking in others any loss of it. Like Newman, he was of a reflective turn, taking no interest in the games of his school, finding " think- ing his diversion." He was shy and sensitive and easily impressed. Anything that was striking or characteristic always arrested his attention and became a basis for reflection, and, as we shall see later on, the disclosure of this impressibility became one of his most interesting homiletic peculiarities. It is this impressibihty of the man that accounts in large measure for Newman's strong early influence over him, an influence, indeed, which it could not have been easy for any one, even the most independent, to resist. In his maturer years he speaks somewhat depreciatingly of this influence of Newman upon his literary style. Whatever may have been Newman's influence upon his opinions, there is no evidence that he recognized it as an important or per- manent factor in his life ; and whatever may have been true of his style, it is perfectly evident that it was but a transient influence, and it is equally evident that he formed his opinions independently of Newman's domi- nation. It is not difflcult to see how a man so slow in his development and who struggled as he did with the barriers of language should have been by contrast strongly impressed by Newman's facility and brilliancy of literary expression, and the very recognition of the influence discloses his exacting independence of pur- 312 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS pose. In one of his sermons, entitled " The Educating Power of Strong Impressions," ^ there is a very interest- ing discussion of the educative influence of one mind over another. It is not impossible that he may have had in mind Newman's influence over others, himself included. At any rate, in reading his words, one natu- rally thinks of his own experiences in connection with Newman. The point he makes is that although subjec- tion to such an influence makes a child of a man, yet it is necessary to the development of his manhood. One " may be so much under the influence of an extraor- dinary and superior being, that it may prevent him, for the time, from finding out his own power." Yet all this may be necessary to one's personal development. " It is only the common truth, and a very familiar truth, of education." Such an one is all the while "collecting the maturity and vigor of a man." This was eminently true of Mozley. It was a wonderfully stimulating at- mosphere in which he was placed, and the large and long result was seen in the virility of his intellectual and moral manhood. He was of a controversial turn of mind, and very early disclosed his readiness for discus- sion or debate. It was the product, not only of a comba- tive temperament, but of his intellectual inquisitiveness, his positiveness of conviction, and interest in and devo- tion to the truth. One can easily conceive of him as exhibiting in private discussion the mental pugnacity and tenacity of the typical Englishman, but it is interest- ing to observe that, although, like Canon Liddon, he seems to have an antagonist in mind and is always de- fending some cherished interest, there is yet in his public 1 " Occasional and Parochial Sermons," XXI. THE MAN AND THE THEOLOGIAN 313 discussions and in many of his theological essays an al- most entire absence of the polemic temper and method. He gripped his subjects by the roots and his mental movement was strong. It was necessary for him to get at the bottom of things. He always struck for the centre. He must master his subject. This was his life habit. He was, therefore, relatively slow in his move- ment and developed somewhat late into the maturity of his powers. One can easily imagine the powerful influ- ence Dr. Arnold would have had for so slow but respon- sive a nature. It is certain that Mozley always had the highest admiration for Arnold, Broad churchman though Arnold was. But he failed to enter Rugby as a student because Arnold had fixed the age limit for entrance at fifteen, which young Mozley had already passed. It is interesting to conjecture what Arnold at that time of intense intellectual activity might have done with such strong timber. It is conceivable that Newman might have found him a formidable antagonist. But as for Mozley, he seems always to have regarded his rejection at Rugby as special good fortune, since he made better head in his studies alone and thus developed his own individuaUty to better advantage. His brother expresses the opinion that Arnold's exacting standard might have embarrassed one of his slow habit of mind, and that the two men were too much ahke in their intellectual inde- pendence and fiery and pugnacious temper to get on together. Whatever may be the truth of this, it is clear enough that the two following years of private study were fruitful years. In 1830, three years before Newman began the Angli- can agitation, and three years after he had taken St. 314 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS Mary's, at the age of seventeen, Mozley entered Oriel College, where Newman had a tutorship and his brother a fellowship, and where the Anglican movement found its centre. His brother's influence, his own thoughtful- ness and modesty, the delicacy, the deference, and eager inquisitiveness with which he listened to the vigorous discussions that were going on about him, and at the same time the independence and positiveness of his own opinions, secured for him at once a favorable introduc- tion to the society and friendship of the older Oriel magnates. He was cordially welcomed by Newman, Pusey, and Keble, the latter having associations with Oriel, and he soon entered into the discussion of ques- tions that were already stirring Oxford students. Some of the then important questions were the apostolicity and catholicity of the AngHcan church, the claims of the Roman church, baptismal regeneration, the real presence, and the relation of the church and state, questions all of which were subsequently discussed in " Tracts for the Times." On account of Mozley's in- terest in these questions he did not reach so high a rank in his college studies proper as he otherwise might have done. He graduated in 1834, the year following the formal opening of the Oxford controversy. It was a year of immense intellectual activity and of intense feel- ing. The new apostles vied with each other in the voluminousness of their publications in the form of tracts, sermons, and essays, and in the enthusiasm of their active propagandism. Although but twenty-one years of age, Mozley was already a participant in these agitations. At that time there was no proper provision at Oxford for the training of men for the ministry. It THE MAN AND THE THEOLOGIAN 315 was the Oxford method, and always has been too largely, to train individual men under tutors without the stimulus of associate life. The patrons of the new movement saw the need of a theological school. Ac- cordingly Newman and Pusey rented a house near Christ Church and fitted it up as a sort of family school, where graduates might board and associate themselves in theological study. Mozley became one of the student inmates of this school and remained there two years under the tutorship of these two men, Pusey, however, bearing the chief burden of the teaching ; and when, at the end of the two years, the school was given up, Pusey took the students to his own home. Mozley remained with Pusey till 1840, when he was appointed to a fellow- ship in Magdalen College. For six years he had been associated with Oriel men, who were the prime movers in the controversy. He had been in the very storm centre of the movement, in a way allied with it through his High Church sympathies, although apparently not closely allied with it or in complete sympathy with it. His election to Magdalen terminated his immediate relation with the agitators. During all these years he had been developing an independent position, and he at l^t dropped away from them, his writings disclosing at the end a break with them. During those student days, a year after his graduation from Oriel, he secured the prize for an essay on "The Influence of the Ancient Oracles on PubUc Morals and Life," which is pro- nounced by his brother a remarkable production for a man of his age. He held the Magdalen fellowship for sixteen years, or until the year 1856. In the year 1838, at the age of twenty-five, he was ordained as deacon 3l6 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS and six years later was ordained as priest. During ali. these years, from the time of his entrance upon his theo- logical studies, he was not only associated with the rep- resentatives of the High Church branch of the Anglican communion, but was a contributor to the British Critic, which Newman had edited for two years, and which was, in a sort, the organ of the Oxford movement. When in 1845 the break came and Newman went over to the Roman church, Mozley stood by Anglicanism and was in a sort associated with the men who initiated the ritualistic movement which followed the break-up under Newman. But while affiliated with them, he was recognized as occupying an independent position. He gradually became alienated from this party and ulti- mately occupied almost as independent a position, as a theological thinker, as Robertson, although of course a very different position. At the time of the disruption, the British Critic ceased to exist, and Mozley started the Christian Remembrancer, to which he was one of the most weighty contributors for the next ten years, or until 1856, when he left Oxford. In this periodical appeared some of his most interesting and able essays, notably the article in which he made a vigorous onset upon Martin Luther, and his exceedingly able essay on the Book of Job. On leaving Oxford he took charge of the parish of Old Shoreham, in Sussex County, near Brighton. It is interesting to think of Mozley as so near the scene of Robertson's brilliant ministry, and to recall that while Robertson, who had died three years before the entrance upon this Old Shoreham ministry, was becoming widely known through the English press as the greatest of THE MAN AND THE THEOLOGIAN 317 English preachers, this quiet man was discharging the duties of a parish minister near at hand and was con- tinuing those studies which should become tributary to his reputation as the ablest theological thinker in the Anglican church. Here at Old Shoreham most of the sermons contained in the volume entitled " Occasional and Parochial Sermons " were preached. The volume was published in 1879, the year after his death, and without the revising touches of his own hand, which, in the case of some of them, may account for a certain lack of literary finish. Most of them bear evidence of having been prepared in the course of ordinary parish work and are of a practical and helpful character. By Mr. Gladstone's recommendation he was, in 1869, appointed Canon of Worcester, and in 1871 was made " Regius Professor of Divinity " at Oxford, the position that had been filled by Dr. Hampden, whose appoint- ment had been so strenuously opposed by Newman and his party. At the same time he was appointed Canon of Christ Church and select preacher to the university, holding still his living at Old Shoreham. The pub- lication, in 1858, not long after going to Old Shoreham, of his essay on the " Augustinian Doctrine of Predesti- nation," in which he disclosed the increasing indepen- dence of his theological position, widened the breach between him and the high Anglicans. His article, sub- sequently, on the baptismal controversy had a like result. In 1865 he gave the Bampton Lectures on "Miracles," in which he commits himself to the position that Chris- tianity cannot be successfully defended and vindicated apart from the external evidence of miracles. It is an able presentation of the old argument, but contains noth- 3l8 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS ing that is new and is not by any means conclusive. The published result of his work as professor of divinity from 1 87 1 to 1876 appears only in his university sermons, issued in 1876, the last sermon in the volume being the last he ever preached, and in the volume entitled " Rul- ing Ideas in Early Ages," compiled from his lectures to students in divinity, mostly Oxford tutors, a work which, although superseded by a more advanced stage of thought, is still of great value for the breadth and origi- nality and clearness and force of its treatment of some of the difficult problems of Old Testament ethics. Canon Mozley was one of the ablest and best-trained theologians in the Anglican church. As an original and forceful thinker, it is doubtful if any man of his day was his superior. All of his theological writings, and his sermons not the less, bear the mark of a man who is accustomed to get at the roots of things, and who by years of patient, manly effort has attained to master- ship in his thinking. We may not accept altogether the point of view from which he looks at Christianity. We may not accept all of his estimates of its proper defences. We may not agree with all of his fundamental positions, or with all of his methods and conclusions. But of the virility of his thinking, and in general of its sanity and of his power of lucid and cogent statement, there can be no question. He has been compared with Bishop Butler, with whom in his equipment he has much in common, of whom he was a thorough student, mastering, as Newman did, Butler's doctrine of prob- ability, and using it in his discussions in a very effec- tive way, although in a way quite different from Newman. In the strength, thoroughness, and steadiness THE MAN AND THE THEOLOGIAN 319 of his mental grasp he is like Butler, but in literary accomplishments he bears the mark of the better modern culture, and is greatly Butler's superior. In the early years of his student life, when under Newman's in- fluence, especially his literary influence, his style was much more rhetorical than in later years. But as Newman's influence in this and other respects declined, his style acquired that mental sobriety and solidity, and that increasing lucidity and forcefulness, which so strongly characterize it as an expository style. He had noth- ing of Newman's brilHancy, productiveness, and facility in turning off work. He was slow, but he was strong in the movement of his thought. He felt his way into the interior of his subject, and he needed time. He went at his work deliberately and with mental poise, and with the tenacity of a true Enghshman. He felt within him the movings of power, and with self-reliant, steadfast purpose to make it felt he bided his time. He was not anxious for intellectual domination, as New- man apparently was. He had less of the passion of the advocate. He was willing to let the truth do its own work, when once he had interpreted it and laid bare its moral demands. But he had a passion for mastering intellectual obstacles. He hked to clear away difficulties that gather about an important problem. He loved the truth because it is truth. He liked indeed the agitation of conflict and Uked to carry his point. But he coveted still more the joy of communication and the feeling of strength that comes from conscious mental and moral alliance with the truth. Difficulties only stimulated his purpose. It is said of him that in his early student days he struggled with defective power of expression. He 320 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS had a hesitating manner of speaking. There was a struggle of mind with the intractable barrier of language ; and he himself expressed gratification that he had failed to enter Rugby, where Dr. Arnold's exacting standard of classical expression would have kept him at a dis- advantage. His thought was larger than his vocabulary. His mental activity was ahead of his linguistic. It is said of him that "no man ever started with a less prom- ising outfit of fluency and facility of language, or of the power of readily disentangling and ordering his thought." The issue left no trace of this behind. No one would imagine such a struggle. His speech bears no such scars of battle. He was bent upon the realiza- tion of clear, comprehensive, orderly thought, and he was exacting with himself. He was intent upon getting at the heart of all subjects investigated, and this slow- ness in clearing up a subject and his deliberation and fastidiousness with respect to his diction embarrassed him. But it also rallied him, and it evoked all that was in him. The result was a mastery of thought and an exactness and clearness and strength of speech that are more than an offset for the difficulties he encountered ; and one can hardly fail to see that this patient, self- poised mental habit saved him from one-sidedness and kept the balance of his judgment and made him the safer guide. We see here the immense value of thorough mental training. If Mozley had produced with greater facility, it might have proved, as in the case of Newman it did prove, not a "fatal," but an unfriendly facility. It was here upon this inner battle-ground that he won his mental and moral victories, and the rest followed in due order. Perhaps no preacher of his day showed what THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER 321 would seem to the ordinary hearer or reader an easier handling of the main thought of the discourse. II THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER What can a man hke Canon Mozley, a lifelong stu- dent, a trained theologian, associating chiefly with scholars, a university teacher and preacher and an Oxford man at that, living largely in the realm of ab- stract thought, and during most of his life remote from the people, — what can such a man do for the untrained hearer or reader ? What especially can he do for men who must preach to the uninstructed and untrained so- called common people? Let us see. In discussing some of the salient qualities of Mozley's preaching its helpfulness will perhaps appear. I. The apologetic note will be recognized at once, even by the most uninstructed reader. It is true that the interest of the advocate is not particularly apparent. It is the ethical rather than the apologetic interest that seems to predominate. But in the background there always lurks the defender of the truth. To him Chris- tianity is truth that has been placed as a sacred deposit in the hands of the church, and it is the preacher's voca- tion to defend it against attack and to combat the oppos- ing error. His attitude was therefore the necessity of his conception of Christianity and of the church, and this must always be the High churchman's position. Mozley's writings are in general of the apologetic sort. His bent was in that Une, his training followed his bent. 322 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS his circumstances largely conditioned his training, and his interest in the work of defence shows how strong was the incentive. But his method somewhat obscured the apologetic aim of the sermon, and this is precisely the stress-point of value in it. He always selects some im- portant truth or principle for interpretation, defence, and application. To interpret it to the intelligence of his hearers and to carry it home to their moral sense is his aim. But his method is his own, and it is an interesting study. This method is in general the non-dogmatic method. It would not be correct to classify him as a dogmatic preacher in the full formal sense of that term. He is not a defender of the teachings of the church, as in a former period Tillotson, South, and Barrow were. He had not the aggressive dogmatic impulse that Newman had, nor does he illustrate the dogmatic temper or method as Liddon does. He has no dogmatic or even doctrinal sermons in the formal technical sense. It is his custom rather to take an important truth, — and he has no interest in truths that are not of fundamental importance, — it may be a truth of natural rehgion, but more commonly a distinctively Christian truth, without any reference to its definition or formulation by church authority, and without reference to its relation to any other formulated truth ; and he proceeds to expound it by itself, looking into its inner elements, and especially its psychical and ethical elements. It is evident that to him as a preacher the moral evidences for the truth were practically supreme, and that the moral value of the truth was its supreme value. This is an interesting fact, especially when we recall his essentially High Church THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER 323 dogmatic attitude with respect to the truth. For a High churchman must be a believer in the dogmatic principle, and must react against the liberalism that denies this principle and lays supreme stress upon the subjective principle. As a theologian, trained in the dogmatic school, he held to the importance for the church of the objective evidences, and of church authority in the de- fence of Christianity. He is a stalwart defender of the evidential value of prophecy and miracle in Christian apologetics. He held, as a High churchman, positive opinions with respect to the apostolic authority of the church in fixing dogma. But the notable thing is that we find almost nothing of all this in his sermons. It is not at all the dogmatic method of Newman or even of Liddon. Holding stoutly to the objective defences of truth, he still in his preaching dealt mostly with the subjective, and the moral evidences, as already inti- mated, most deeply interested him. In this he carried beyond Butler himself his defence of religion, as belong- ing to the moral constitution of man, and it is not the authority of the church that validates the truth, but the witness of the human soul and especially of the moral nature to its reality and power. This shows that Moz- ley, with his largeness of vision, his responsiveness to strong impressions, and especially with his strong ethi- cal sense, was more completely under modern influences than he may have realized, and that, as a rehgious teacher, he had a clear conception of the needs of the men of his time. The significance of this will become the more apparent if we look somewhat into his method of treatment in the two volumes of sermons. We might assume at the outset that in the parochial sermons. 324 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS which were preached to an ordinary worshipping con- gregation, he would follow the non-dogmatic method, and make but little appeal to the authority of the church, but would try to adapt his teachings to the simple, prac- tical needs of his hearers. And such we find to be the case. But if we examine the university sermons, preached to audiences of the highest intelligence and culture, whose allegiance to the authority of the church it would be of supreme importance to hold, as Newman plainly saw, we find the same non-dogmatic method. These sermons deal with truths of primal importance, and the discussion is always strong and convincing. A casual glance at the titles will disclose the fact that they are mostly ethical sermons, but in every case we have an ethical defence of some strong truth. In his discussion of the Roman Council of 1870, that confirmed the papal syllabus of the previous year, we might expect a doctrinal sermon, exposing the errors of Romanism as contained in the action of the council. But instead we have a strongly moral argument against the right of the church, as a spiritual body, to coerce the conscience. It is a defence from the moral point of view of the Protestant doctrine of the right of private judgment against which Newman and his associates so vigorously contended. In his sermon on the " Pharisees," we have not so much a presentation of the Scripture representations concerning them, as we are led to expect, or a doctrinal argument against their errors, as a psy- chological and ethical analysis of the Pharisaic type of character. In the sermon on " Eternal Life " we have, on the one hand, a criticism of the ethics of Compte, and on THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER 325 the other, a discussion of the value of probable evidence, as related to the problems of religion, and not an argu- ment for immortality at all, save in an indirect and inci- dental way. In his " Reversal of Human Judgment," the most masterful of all his discourses, we have no discussion of the doctrine of the final judgment, but rather an analysis of the various sources of error in the moral judgments of men which may well furnish ground for ultimate reversal. In his discussion of the " Work of the Spirit" he deals not with the church doctrine, nor even with the Biblical doctrine, but wholly with subjective considerations, in which he shows that a spiritual religion must have its seat in the affections, rather than in the conscience, because it has its source in the Spirit of God. In his discourse on the " Atone- ment " we have no doctrinal discussion, but a single ethical phase of the atonement which he regards as central and characteristic ; and having discussed this, he leaves the subject to make its own moral impression. In the " Ascension," instead of discussing the fact or its doctrinal import, he presents but a single inferential suggestion from it, viz. the influence of the thought of the enthroning of the divine Man upon the soul's rever- ence and upon the conduct of life. All this indicates that it was his chosen method to present the practical applica- tory aspects of the subjects discussed. As by native bent and by fixed habit, he always looked upon the ethical aspects of doctrine. And in this we have a great ad- vance upon the apologetic preaching of the Anglican church. Another distinctive mark of value is the affirmative or declarative method of presentation. Of elaborate formal 326 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS argument there is none. For the negative method of fighting up truth by fighting down error, he had no inclination. From a man of his pugnacious temper, we might expect the theological polemic and occasion- ally the philippic. But the method is not only non- dogmatic, but non-polemical. The nearest approach to a polemical sermon in the university discourses is the one on the Roman council. It combats the Vatican's claim to the right to use force in matters of conscience. The opportunity might seem a tempting one to a man of Mozley's dialectical ability to enter upon an elabo- rate and crushing argument in refutation of that claim. The time was favorable. There was a great stir in the ecclesiastical and political world over the publication of the syllabus and the subsequent decree of the council. In Great Britain there was special interest in the bear- ing of the decree upon the problem of civil allegiance, which stirred Mr. Gladstone to enter the lists against the Vatican. It would seem to have been the favor- able moment to strike an effective blow against the Roman church in defence of the rights of conscience, and Mozley was the man to do it. But we have noth- ing of this sort. Throughout the sermon he shows more interest in establishing the positive principle suggested by his text, John xviii. 36, " My kingdom is not of this world," than in combating the error that had been enunciated by the Roman council. Mozley had learned the wiser method. One thinks of Robertson's positive method of dealing with contested questions. There may be no ground for surmising that Mozley may have felt Robertson's influence in this regard, and yet it is possi- ble. It is at all events not improbable that both men THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER 327 may have learned the lesson of method from the same sources. One surmises that they both brought a salu- tary lesson from the Anglican controversy of other years. At any rate one finds a modern note of great value in this straightforward, positive, clear, and cogent method of stating the truth, and in this appeal to the hearers' moral sense. There were two qualities in Mozley that would natu- rally lead him away from the polemical method. One was the tolerance of his spirit, and the non-partisan character of his thinking. It has been the misfortune of the church that its apologetic preaching has been too largely polemical. We have historic illustration of the weakness of the method. The partisan preaching of Robert South is an example. Such men seem to care quite as much to tear down the work of their opponents, whom they come to regard as personal enemies, and to cripple their influence, as to establish the truth and to bring men under its power. This is the curse of the partisan divisions of the church. When doctrinal errors are associated with moral evils, especially pubHc and social evils, the polemic may be necessary, as seems to have been the case in the time of Augustine. In our day such preaching would be impossible. But in an earlier age it seemed necessary to combat moral corrup- tions that were associated with doctrinal errors. Luther's preaching was largely polemical. But it was not simply false doctrine that awakened his wrath, but the associate corruptions of moral life. In our own day, however, errors of thought are not so closely aUied with moral corruption, and the best tendencies of the age are hos- tile to the polemical spirit and method. Much of our 328 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS modern tolerance may indeed be indifference to the truth. The agnostic spirit may promote such indiffer- ence. The man who despairs of arriving at positive truth will dislike polemics for the reason that, in his opinion, one side of a question may have as much truth in it as the other. There is a good deal of this sort of agnostic tolerance in our day. It is true that there are always men who like polemics, for in the average man the par- tisan spirit, whether ecclesiastical or political, is strong. But right-minded men in our day see that the partisan spirit in defending the truth is unprofitable, and they turn away from it. It is questionable whether any man's religious opinions, merely as such, should be the object of polemical attack in the pulpit. It was partly because Mozley would not be a partisan that he rejected the polemical method and dealt positively and declara- tively with the truth. Moreover, he was a fundamental thinker, and for this reason also he was more intent upon expounding truth than upon attacking error. Polemical preaching is likely to be shallow. It fails to reach fundamental truth. In concentrating attention upon error, it fails to detect the truth that lies behind it, and that must be known in order that in the light of it error may be adequately dis- closed. The man who is bent upon making out his case against an opponent is pretty sure to lose sight of a good deal that it is important for him to see. By failing, therefore, to get at what is fundamental, the polemist becomes superficial. But the man who is confident that he has got down to hard bottom and treads on soHd ground, who knows that he has a steady grip upon what is fundamental, is less likely to indulge in the polemical THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER 329 spirit. There is a staying and steadying power in such confidence. We see this in Mozley, as we saw it in Robertson. They were both high-spirited, constitution- ally controversial and combative. But with their inde- pendence and non-partisanship there were associated supreme devotion to fundamental principles and su- preme love for the truth for its own sake. Mozley was a masterly expounder but a poor pleader. He was strong in the teaching impulse, but weak in personal ambition to dominate men's opinions. He is, therefore, supremely intent upon a clear and thorough handling of his subject, and is willing to let it work its own way. Hence the non- rhetorical and non-oratorical quality of his preaching. The most effective pulpit orator must, of course, be something of an advocate. It is not enough for him to expound the truth, and leave it without moral enforce- ment to make its own impression. He must persuade as well as convince. He must use the truth as an in- strument for strong incentive. The sermon must be shaped with reference to this end. Unity, progress, cumulative force, are necessary for strong impression. The address is more than an essay. Emotional energy and imaginative representation must have free play, and drive the truth home, that it may secure determi- nate results. The sermon is an instrument for moral impression, not merely a method of expressing opinion. He is the true preacher who recognizes this. He who fails in this can be at best only a pulpit teacher. Moz- ley was precisely such a teacher. He was defective in the preaching impulse, as Newman was not and as Lid- don was not. Hence defect in the structural and rhe- torical quality of the sermon. The sermon is notable 330 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS for its mental fulness. The preacher has mastered his thought from beginning to end. There is almost a sur- plus of thought. The first words are weighty, the last equally so, and the body is full. The sermon is just a chance for the preacher to say out what in its fulness is in him to say ; and he talks straight on, not leaving many boundary marks, running from introduction to theme and from theme to discussion and on to conclu- sion without a very well-defined trail. It is a steady pull straight through, and when he has said out all he wants to say, he simply stops. In the whole process there is little or no kindhng of emotion or excitation of imagination, and no effort at cumulative effects. Nor does he, as he moves on, seem anxious about making apphcation of the truth, much less about gathering applicatory reflections at the end. He lets the sermon apply itself. Whatever there may be in the way of conclusion is of the inferential sort that perpetuates the mental or didactic impression of the sermon. In a word, the sermon is not a rhetorical instrument. For the in- tellectual hearer or reader there cannot fail to be a tre- mendous impressiveness in that strong, steady mental movement, in that searching psychological analysis, and that ethical vigor of the man. This is singularly true of that most masterful sermon, "The Reversal of Human Judgment." As preached it must have made a .strong impression on thoughtful and serious minds. But in the reading, as one pauses and reflects upon it, one fancies that the impression may be quite as strong. It is not, however, the work of cogent inculcation, but of masterly exposition, of searching psychological and ethi- cal analysis. It is the work of a great pulpit teacher, THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER 331 and in the positive, declarative method of it, Mozley is eminently helpful, and he shows how best to attain suc- cess in this method, viz. by cherishing a supreme love for the truth, by getting a thorough grasp of it, and by refusing to use it as a partisan instrument. To any preacher who is feeling his way after an effective apolo- getic method, the freedom, strength, steadiness, stateli- ness, and positiveness of Mozley's mental movement will prove to be a valuable study. His sermons let us inside great truths. They enlarge the scope of our vision. They support a high ideal of apologetic preach- ing. They suggest the importance of grappling with the highest truths of rehgion and of keeping petty themes out of the pulpit. 2. The ethical quality in Canon Mozley's preaching and its great value in this regard have already been suggested. We are now ready somewhat more fully to consider it. The above-quoted remark from the London Spectator, touching the moral impressiveness of his sermons, indicates the ethical character of his preaching by suggesting its strongest possible ethical result. The truth supported is taken into the realm of the moral nature, and is there vindicated. He rallies the consciences of his hearers to its support, and so in turn the truth as discussed becomes the more effective instrument in educating and training the conscience. A glance at the titles of the sermons will suggest the prevailingly ethical character of the subjects discussed, and only a slight investigation of them will disclose their prevailingly ethical aim and method. They are all adapted to the production of a strong moral impres- sion and illustrate the fact that weighty rehgious truth 332 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS is necessary to profound moral conviction. They illus- trate the value for impressive ethical preaching of a habit of going to the roots of things, and of a habit of thorough reflection. They illustrate especially the value of a habit of moral analysis. Mozley was always a stu- dent of character and a student of institutions. He studied men while he studied theology. In fact, he studied theology in studying men. He was a close observer and a keen analyst of human nature. He studied the practical workings of principles and motives in human life. He studied his own soul. He watched the working of the moral nature. He was a student of the drama. In all this lies the secret of his power as an ethical teacher, and it made him exceptionally valu- able as an adviser and counsellor and comforter. In the Roman church he would have become an illustrious father confessor. A careful analysis of the elements of moral power in his sermons would be a profitable task for any student of preaching. It would disclose how great truths, like the atonement, providence, the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, the new birth, may be treated ethically and with most effective practical results, and how the more ordinary class of ethical subjects may be made, not only impressive, but interesting, by directing attention to ethical processes and results that are not at first obvious, and by holding them in relation with what is fundamental in the constitution of human nature. Canon Mozley is on the whole one of the most forcible ethical pulpit teachers the modern church has furnished. His power Hes largely in his singularly subtle but clear analysis of the workings of moral forces and principles. There is something remorselessly searching and, although THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER 333 not repellent, most formidable in his tranquil handling of the moral forces and processes of the human soul. There are many methods of handling the ethical sermon. The analysis of motives, the tracing of moral processes, the delineation of the effects of truth upon moral char- acter, and the unescapableness of moral consequences are among the most obvious elements in Mozley's ethi- cal preaching. He lays hold of the energies that are bedded in our moral constitution and brings them to light. He shows men the workings of their easily besetting sins. He shows them how they cheat them- selves, for example, by using opportunity as an invita- tion or a permission to sin, rather than as a summons to resistance. He shows us the value of sacred habit, and how it may be formed. He lays stress upon the ethical element in faith. There are but three or four character sketches in the two volumes, but they all deal with the motives and principles of action that are illus- trated by the characters presented. The process of moral neglect is described with lucid tranquillity, and the fatal necessity of growing worse by simply letting one's self alone, as illustrated in habits like those of avarice and vindictiveness, is set forth in most master- ful manner. His two most powerful sermons are per- haps " Our Duty to Equals " and the " Reversal of Human Judgment." In the first we have a very forci- ble setting forth of the moral difficulties in treating our equals as we should. He examines the comparative ease with which we exercise kindness toward inferiors, and contrasts it with the difficulty we find in dealing justly with those who are at our own level in life. The compassionate attitude toward our fellow-men involves 334 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS a protected state of mind, for there is a sort of relief in charity. But justice toward an equal tests severely the moral fibre. This leads to a discussion of the two con- trasted conceptions of life, as on the one side that of a mission, and as on the other side that of a probation. I know of nothing more forcible than this discussion. It contains the gist of all that may be said upon the individualistic and altruistic conceptions of life, and the discussion is a wholesome tonic for men who in our day are wildly and irrationally advocating altruism, and are undermining the rights of individual manhood. But the •' Reversal of Human Judgment," which Dr. WiUiam M. Taylor has called the greatest sermon of modern times, and which the president of one of our New England colleges has told us he reads once a year for the moral tonic it has for him, illustrates in its high- est reach of power Mozley's ethical method. It must have occurred to every thoughtful person that there may come sometime a great change in our estimate of men. The Scriptures encourage this suspicion. They speak of a great deception, of great errors in human judgment. The reason for this deception is the work- ing of a pure religion upon a corrupt nature. A great show is the result, a counterfeit religion. There are manifold sources of error in our estimates of men, that account for our mistakes of judgment, and these mis- takes must some day be rectified. This is the introduc- tion to the discourse. Then follows a discussion of the sources of these misjudgments in a very acute analysis of the workings of selfish motive, e.g. in the political leader, in the theological partisan, in the philanthropist even, in the gifted man of genius, in the favorite of THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER 335 earthly fortune. Christianity calls for the exercise of the primary motives of action, and accepts no substitute. But in all these spheres of life we find men substituting the secondary for the primary motives, and deluding themselves with the notion that Christianity may accept this as a proper basis for estimating men. All this must ultimately be rectified. This discussion is the most cogent setting forth of the delusive workings of the human imagination and heart that has been given in sermon form to the public in our age. The minister or the politician who needs a salutary admonition against the delusive snare of theological or political partisanship will find his corrective here. The discus- sion of the selfish use of gifts of the imagination and of the selfishly exaggerated conceptions of a mission in the world, that fail to recognize the solemn fact of per- sonal moral probation, is particularly impressive and profitable. Lest the picture of life here presented should seem too dark, the conclusion directs attention to the blending of the sagacious and hopeful view of life as presented by Christianity, and is a most just and helpful conclusion. In all this, as elsewhere, he lets the truth do its own work. He is not urgent to enforce it, and he need not be. He lays bare the workings of the human soul, and especially of the moral nature, and lets us make our own application. There are three phases of the discussion : first, it takes note of the severe judgment power of Christianity and the deceptiveness of the human heart, as related to it ; secondly, we have an analysis of the way in which Christianity operates upon the selfish heart in general; and thirdly, illustrations of this selfishness in different 336 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS spheres, with a conclusion that touches upon the blend- ing of realism and idealism in Christianity. And we find here three important elements in ethical preaching. We have first a Biblical element. There is need of a Biblical conception in connection with an ethical subject of such importance as this, for it deals with the future, which, if known at all, must be known through Bibhcal revelation only. It is just this Biblical revelation, how- ever, that confirms our own suspicions with respect to the future. The psychological analysis of the effect on selfish human nature of the claims of a pure religion is the second important element ; and finally, we have an illustrative element, showing in different realms of human experience the workings of the soul in relation to the claims of Christianity. The sermon is an exam- ple especially of the analytical and illustrative method of dealing with ethical subjects. There is demand for more of this searching, morally impressive preaching, that lays bare the effects of Christianity as a holy reli- gion in furnishing occasion for the development of the deceitfulness of the human heart in the substitution of secondary for primary motives, thus exposing the de- lusions of sin, that warns of moral danger, and that lays upon men a burdening sense of moral obligation which will permit no rest till they find it in the obedience of righteousness. In such preaching Canon Mozley may be of great service as exemplar and guide. Mozley's view of the world and of life has an im- portant bearing upon the tone and character of his ethical preaching, and demands a moment's attention. He took life seriously. A mind so reflective and so impressible could not fail to do so. Existence is a sol- THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER 337 emn reality. Life has for him a tragic aspect, and he makes the pathos of it felt by the force of his represen- tation. He finds himself in a world of conflict. He has been taught to fear and distrust it. There is a great conflict between the church and the world, and perpet- ual dread of hostile aggressions, that cripple the life of the church and stain its purity, is perhaps an inheritance from the Anglican controversy and very likely bears the mark of Newman's influence. That the world, as we know it, is hostile to the religious life was one of the cardinal teachings of the Anghcan revival. Mozley, therefore, did not share the optimistic view of the world and of life which so strongly characterizes the religion of our day. Sin is the dark reality that hovers ever in the background of life and thrusts itself out at every turn. He has, indeed, no extreme views of human de- pravity, and he is kindly and tolerant in his personal judgments. His conception of the world as a lost world is not so gloomy, and often seemingly contemptuous, as Newman's. He never deals in eschatological terrors. But his world is a sinful and lost world. It is a world of temptations. It is full of delusions and snares, and men should be on guard. We are not to assume that what the world presents to our inclinations is innocent, just because it is in harmony with our inclinations. That we belong to the world does not mean that we are so wholly a normal part of it that it may be regarded by us as a legitimate sphere for self-indulgence. The solicitations of the world may be temptations to be re- sisted rather than opportunities to be embraced. We are here to resist the world and put it under our feet. Life is a moral conflict, and the drifting life is not a 338 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS moral life. For the man who treats his soul as if it were not held in the grasp of inexorable law ; for the man who is all the while growing worse and does not know it, simply because he lets himself alone ; for the fatahsf who undertakes to eliminate the guilt of sin by calling it the necessary product of the forces of his own nature ; for the " midway man," who dallies with temp- tation, neither on the one hand yielding completely to it, nor on the other wholly resisting its solicitations ; for the man who lives in the delusions of sin, and perverts an august and solemn existence into a scene of folly ; for any man who in any way treats sin lightly, — Canon Mozley has a most serious message. Life confessedly, as it comes to us through his representation, is not so great an inspiration and joy as it might be. We miss the note of triumph. It is a scene of danger. It can- not be a world of surpassing joy to any man who does not know the remedial grace of God. The choicer joys of Ufe are the joys of grace. And all this is to him the BibHcal view of Hfe. Doubtless it is the earlier Bib- lical view, and it is a view that is true to many of the facts of the Ufe of the present age, and the men of our time are in sore need of the faithful presentation of this truth. The church cannot afford to be deluded with the semblance of godhness. Christianity comes with a tone of distrust. It looks upon the world with a certain air of suspicion. The Bible is a sagacious book, and does not too freely trust the world. It is not easily deceived, and it is a matter of great value that we have a vast repository of truth that is not subject to illusions. It challenges the world. It questions its right to rule. It sets it at naught. In the last conflict it sets it at THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER 339 complete defiance and puts it beneath its feet The Bible IS not hostile to God's world, but to man's, to the world as It finds it in its sins and delusions. And this he thmks, is our Lord's view of the world. His pure religion comes into contact with the corrupt, deceitful heart of man, with its hidden selfishness and pride, and a great process of deception begins. The semblance of religion takes the place of its reality. Christ foresaw all this, and warned His disciples against it, and it was this that saddened His life. Of worldly success He would have none. It was to Him a delusion and a snare He resisted its solicitations as a Satanic temptation. He lived in the shadow of His cross. Every hour of prom- ised worldly success was but a preintimation of His last hour of mortal suffering and of earthly defeat. As He was here to fight this world, so are we. It is a heroic life, yet solemn and tragic in its processes and results. In all this we may miss the note of triumph. It is rather too gloomy a world for our bright day, and men are Hkely to turn away from it. Our preacher does not seem to live, as the modern preacher wishes to live, in the kingdom of redemption, and does not seem to be- hold the world as evermore God's world, struggling on- ward to the goal of sinlessness and completeness. The victorious Christ is not put into the forefront of the rep- resentation, as we might wish. The positive and pro- ductive energies of redemption, as they centre in the ever abiding presence of the Spirit of the Eternal, are not brought to our attention as they well might be. The point of view of natural religion, as distinguished from the Christian point of view, is too often apparent. It is the philosophical view of life, such as we find in 340 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS Bishop Butler, and with both the evangelical note of redemption and the note of personal conquest in Christ, although everywhere presupposed, are less conspicuous in their representation than might be wished. But for the man who needs to be warned, to know himself, to distrust himself, to stand on guard, or to walk warily, or to fight vahantly, Mozley is a messenger from God. The very reading of his searching words should, indeed, with ministries of grace, be "enough to change the whole life of a man." But his world is more than a sinful world. It is an inadequate world. The life that now is, as such and in and for itself alone, has for him but little significance and value. It iinds its worth in its relation to the life beyond. His point of view is not the eternal Hfe with its present and future as two phases bound indissolubly together, each with its own essential and relatively inde- pendent value. The present and the future stand in too strong contrast. Only from its relation to the future does the present life find value. The present, indeed, may have a relative value. But it is the future alone that has absolute worth. Hence he dwells upon the transitoriness of life, upon its inequalities, its inadequa- cies, its delusions and follies. The future life alone is the real life, and the present life is preparation for it. With all of Robertson's strength of conviction, but not with his intensity of emotion or poetic stateliness of diction, does Mozley set forth the transitoriness of an earthly life, its emptiness and unreaHty, when it is cut from its connection with the life eternal. The hectic flush of the passing glory of the world we do not see. The pathos of a pageant scene that passes before our THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER 341 eyes we have not. But with solemn step he treads amid life's inadequacies, and with steady hand he points us to a higher world. His prevailing conception of life is that of a probation. It is set over against the concep- tion of life as a mission. He would not minimize the value of life as opportunity for noble philanthropic achievement. But he is distrustful of some phases of modern altruism, as involving an inadequate representa- tion of life, for it too often loses sight of that conception of life that regards it as a sphere for the training of personal character, and for this reason he sets the pro- bation over in contrast with the mission of life. It is easy to make a great show of life. Men magnify suc- cess and minimize the discipline of life. Life becomes a stage and they lose a sense of reality. They act a part and imagine themselves as still living in the realm of reality. Here, then, we find in a strongly sociahstic age a sturdy individualist. An institutional religion. High churchman though he is, has for him no perma- nent value, and just as little a secularistic religion that knows of a mission but of no probation. Personal char- acter is the supreme interest. Without it the world is not saved. According to Froebel what is individual in man is the divine element within him. Mozley advances upon this and makes individuality the product of God's grace. To develop unto perfection what is most indi- vidual and distinctive in man is the work of God's Spirit, and this, not less than the unification of men in the body of Christ, is the end of existence. No man knows him- self, no man comes to himself, no man is himself, till he is born again. It is the highest mark of the divine in man, that he should be himself, and no man is him- 342 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS self who is not his higher, his ideal, his religious self. Such being Mozley's conception of life, it is natural that, with his moral sensitiveness, he should stand in a sort of awe of it. It is natural, too, that the sentiment of awe, or that the quality of reverence, should be a more marked quality in his rehgious character than affectionateness or dehcacy of religious emotion. He had not the genius for ardent religious devotion. He was critical rather than enthusiastic. He was, in fact, suspicious of enthusiasm, as he was of all forms of sec- tarian religion, as involving unhmited possibilities of delusion and of delusive selfishness. The attitude of fear is for him the normal Christian attitude. Dread of the august realities of the moral universe is more Christian than that overweening confidence that may be the product of high-mindedness and pride. But it would be a great mistake not to recognize the more hopeful view of life that modifies what in our day would be called, and has been called. Canon Mozley's pessimism. He fully recognizes the optimistic element in Christianity, and finds a place for it in his own view of the world. He was a Christian realist, but he was also a Christian ideaUst. He held the ecclesiastical point of view in his outlook upon life, but he was also humanistic in his tendencies. He knew the world as under the dominion of sin, but he knew it as a world redeemed. Between the spirit of the world and the spirit of true religion, and between the world as under the dominion of sin and the church as the organ of God's kingdom, there is an irreconcilable antagonism. But there is no principle of dualism in his conception of the world. Nature is from God's hand and nature is good. Man THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER 343 has never lost the divine image nor the world its sacred- ness. All forms of natural life have a good of their own, and outside the church there is an independent moral life. A man is not a sinner merely as being sub- ject to the impulses of nature, he is such rather because he fails to rise to the realm of the spirit. Sin is the miss- ing of the mark of the higher spiritual manhood. Sin is not natural, but is the misuse of nature. The prob- lem of rehgion is not to crush nature, but to regulate it. Moderation contains the principle of virtue. "Virtue turns vice being misapplied." Worldly occupations are God's ordinances, and fidelity to the little duties of life is better than aspiration for showy gifts. There are people who are in some proper sense born religious. So fully and so early are they under the guidance of the Spirit of God, that the boundary Hne between the natural and the spiritual man is Obliterated. In a nobly eloquent passage in "The Reversal of Human Judg- ment," he recognizes the possibility of stored treasures of good, even in those in v/hom we might not expect it, that may be disclosed at the last day. There are great surprises even here and now. The last are often found to be first in latent good, and the first prove to be last. The thief on the cross is a surprise. Remember the discipline of life among the poor and the sorrowing. Think of the agencies in a soldier's life that lift the soul beyond itself. A foundation of goodness is laid in lowly places, and the world sees it not. Some rich fruit of all this will emerge in the future life. Single acts of virtue often " spring from minds in which there is not the habit of virtue." " Sudden leaps in virtue show an unseen spring in a man, which are able to compass in a 344 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS moment the growth of years." ^ The nation as such has a moral life of its own. War is one of a nation's rights, and Christianity, in recognizing the state as one of the divine polities, whose essential sacredness has not been lost by sin, recognizes also as one of its rights the right of war. In a sermon on " War," which is on the whole rather unsatisfactory, he criticises the ecclesiastical view of the nation in accordance with which patriotism is re- garded as one of the " sentiments of nature which grace has obliterated." Christianity adopts nature in all its phases, poetry, art, philosophy, and will not crush it. Nature furnishes " the material which religion is to pene- trate." He is severe upon the attitude of suspicion and of passionate hostility toward the unconsecrated king- dom of this world, as if all good had vanished from it, which is manifested by the representatives of the Roman church.2 In all this it is evident that Newman had left no unhealthy influence upon his thinking, and that his high Anglicanism had not left him the victim of a ghostly and unnatural type of religiousness. With all his high ecclesiasticism he was simple and real in his conception of religion. 3. With respect to the formal or artistic aspects of Canon Mozley's preaching there is nothing that demands special consideration, and there is but very little here that is of value. The artistic sense was not a prominent gift ; and he attached but little value to homiletic form. It is the substance of his thought that deeply interests us, the fibre of the sermon rather than its form. The thought is thrown out in a seemingly easy, natural way, 1 "The Reversal of Human JuHgrnent," "University Sermons," p. 95. * "Roman Council," " University Sermons," pp. 14-15. THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER 345 suggesting no conscious effort, although the seeming spontaneity is doubtless the conquest of years of hard work. So full is he of the subject in its largeness and productiveness that he launches at the outset into a group of interesting prehminary thoughts that set us at once in relation with his discussion, and when he comes to the close he leaves the impression that there is enough more to say, and that he has not half ex- hausted the resources of the subject. The thought of the conclusion, too, is as large and full and as suggestive of intellectual resource as the rest of the sermon. The discriminating quality of thought is notable. It is the work of a trained thinker. There are no crude state- ments here. All is well-considered, well-related thought. In subtleties he is not over nice. There is no elaborate following out of distinctions into regions too remote, but the thought is presented in its larger and more saUent outlines. This closely observing and discriminat- ing quaHty is associated with a characteristic that is quite distinctive and of which I have already spoken, viz. his intellectual impressibility. Anything that is striking, anything that is unique or distinctive in the thought of a text or in any phase of the subject in hand, readily impresses him, and he is sure to direct attention to it. This is done especially in the introduction to the sermon, and there are, in fact, but few sermons in the two volumes that fail to arrest our attention to these surprises of thought. Some perplexing question is in- troduced, and the sermon proceeds to clear it up. We start with some impressive scene Hke a kneeling, silent congregation in the presence of an invisible object, and, of course, the whole sermon has from the outset the 346 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS advantage of this first impression. Something surpris- ing in the relation of Christianity to human hfe is brought to our attention, and he makes it his task to clear up the perplexity. For example, the strange and startling fact that Christianity recognizes the right of war. In order to make the strangeness of this recogni- tion as impressive as possible, he presents a somewhat extreme statement of what it involves, and then he pro- ceeds to discuss the basis of the recognition. He pitches upon what is perplexing or searching or repul- sive in his text, proceeds to expound it, and makes it the key-note of the entire sermon, or rests the entire dis- cussion upon it. The text he chooses is a searching text ; it is an eye that has through all the Christian generations been looking out calmly and reproachfully upon the church and held it in judgment! The thought of the text causes us to shrink back as in a sort of dread, and we are told why this is so. It is surprising that a being so unworldly as Christ, so apparently ab- sorbed in the visions of heavenly reality, should have exhibited an habitual, cheerful love of nature. The highest spiritual life, therefore, is not ghostly and un- natural. If he quotes as his text the resolve of " The Preacher " to test folly as well as wisdom by experiment, he cannot withhold surprise that any sane man should give himself to folly as well as to wisdom, as if any experiment were needed to determine that folly cannot be matched against wisdom as an object of investigation and experiment. It is this peculiarity in Canon Mozley that contributes to his preaching the element of sugges- tiveness. There is always something new and fresh. The thought-grip of the subject appears in the main THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER 347 body of the sermon in his free method of handhng. The movement knows but little homiletic restraint. The path is clear to him, and the journey is onward, but he leaves but few mile-stones to mark progress. He has a large, interesting, impressive thought in his mind, and it has been thoroughly and discriminatingly excogitated ; but he plunges rapidly into the midst of his discussion and runs easily across the boundary line of introduc- tion and discussion without marking the transition. The very fulness and freedom of his handling seem to mislead him into a lack of distinctness and definiteness of outline, and sometimes into lack of discrimination in the conception of his theme. The thought is large and full and does not rigidly define itself. The great ser- mon to which reference has so frequently been made fails in a certain definiteness of outUne, and in a close previous analysis of the theme. The general subject is doubtless suggested by the title. There is to be a final reversal of human judgment. But, as is not infre- quently the case, the general subject is not the exact theme. The main thought discussed is the perversion to which Christianity is subjected by the exercise of wrong motive, particularly by the substitution of the lower for the higher motives in the lives of men. Christianity demands the highest and purest motives, and condemns men for displacing them. The sequel of this displace- ment of what is primary by what is secondary will be an ultimate reversal of the judgments of men. Men accept the lower standard, but Christianity will accept only the highest, and will judge men accordingly. There can be no doubt as to the main thought of the sermon. But the theme and the discussion are not 348 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS identical and are practically at cross-purposes. The dis- cussion turns upon the grounds of perverted Christianity, the substitution of lower for higher motives. The theme covers the single thought of the issue of such perver- sion in a divine reversal. In the formal or technical aspect, his preaching would have been better if his introductions had run less undistinguishably into the discussion, if the theme had been more closely defined, if the parts of the discussion had been more carefully differentiated, and if the conclu- sion had been more distinct. The sermon does not lack unity of thought, but it lacks proportion and order in discussion, and, as with Newman's sermons, there is often lack of cumulative force. But his preaching has great expository power. In his handling of effective methods of clear and forcible thought-interpretation he is masterly. He lacked, however, the training of the rhetorician and the orator. For a high Anglican, whose vocation it was to preach to an Oxford audience, this will do. But any preacher, even though he preach to audiences that care more for substance than for form, would be more effective if he were to throw his mate- rial into the form appropriate to an oratorical address. The reflective, discriminating, and at the same time affluent quality of the thought of the sermon discloses itself in the quality of the style. As in the preaching of Robertson, the style is entirely subordinate to the thought. It changed in the process of his development. It became more simple and clear and exact. He aimed to state what he had to say in a direct and straight- forward manner, to crowd back all exuberance of imag- ination, and all surplus feeling, so that they should THE APOLOGETIC AND ETHICAL PREACHER 349 have no undue influence upon his utterance. If these rhetorical quahties had found freer expression, he might have become a more effective preacher ; but his diction as a teacher could hardly have been stronger or clearer or more readily apprehensible. It is a style that speaks prevailingly to the mind by its strength and transpar- ency, and becomes a fit instrument for impressing the moral nature. And it must be acknowledged that no homiletic or rhetorical defect seems to Hmit the power of these sermons for the reader, and, after all, this must be the basis of our estimate. In the clear- ness of his expository method, in the convincingness with which he sets forth the great truths of religion, and in the ethical cogency of his inculcation, he is one of the most princely pulpit teachers of his day. CHAPTER VIII THOMAS GUTHRIE From the intellectual point of view, Guthrie can hardly be called a typical Scottish preacher. He lacked the theological learning and training and the intellec- tual strength and discrimination that we usually asso- ciate with the Scottish pulpit. He belongs to the school of Chalmers, but he represents it on the artistic and practical rather than on the intellectual side. And it is as representing the Scottish pulpit in its modified Calvinism, its abandonment of the doctrinal and argu- mentative method of presenting Christianity, its evan- gelical devotion, its adaptation to the practical needs of men, especially its evangelical spirit and philanthropic enterprise, and above all its popular effectiveness, that he has been chosen for our consideration. For in his popular rhetorical qualities he far surpassed all the Scottish preachers of his day. I GUTHRIE'S CHARACTER AND CAREER Thomas Guthrie belonged to an old Scottish family, whose ancestors were numbered among the Covenanters. It was always with him a matter of honest pride, which was highly commendable, that he could trace his lineage 350 CHARACTER AND CAREER 35 I to men of such heroic faith, and particularly that one of them had given his life as a martyr to the cause of the Covenanters. It is likely that his own brave and manly life of devotion to the rights of conscience and to the relief and elevation of the poor and ignorant, and of struggle against physical disease, found abundant inspi- ration in the consciousness that he was in some sort the heir to such Christian heroism. Unlike many distin- guished Scottish preachers, he was not, as he says of himself, " a child of the manse." The Scottish preachers have for the most part come from humble homes, and in early years have known the struggles of adversity. Guthrie knew but little of such early struggles, and his entire career, although one of hard work, bore the marks of a well-used prosperity. His father was a well-to-do merchant-magistrate, and loyal son of the kirk, in the little town of Brechin, on the eastern border of Scotland, near Montrose, where, in 1803, the son was born, one of a family of twelve children. His mother was a woman who evidently had in an eminent degree the character- istic Scottish virtue of independence and tenacity of purpose, which she disclosed in regulation fashion by withdrawing from the Established church, and by join- ing one of the Secession communities, because, as she claimed, the spiritual pabulum she received in the kirk did not further " the welfare of her soul," thus leaving her husband behind and taking with her the eldest son and a daughter. This lack of spiritual pabulum, of which the mother complains, suggests the dominance, in the Established church at that time, of the " Moder- ate " party, with its unfruitful moralizings and literary respectabilities, and it indicates at the same time her 352 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS own dominating evangelical sympathies. This inde- pendence of character and evangelical zeal, that put such supreme emphasis upon the interests of the soul as led the mother to break with her church, reappeared in the son, who, while loyal to the kirk and unwilling to break with it, was more loyal still to the rights of the individual soul and to " the crown rights of Christ," which in subsequent years he disclosed in his antago- nism to the aggressions of the state authorities in the sphere of church life. This quiet country town was his home for twenty-one years, including the years of his university life. In the household life Old Testament stories and Bunyan's " Pilgrim's Progress " early stimulated his imagination, and fostered those realistic qualities of mind and those gifts for concrete representation that were so character- istic of his preaching. He himself refers to the early influence of the Book of Proverbs upon the thrift of Scottish character. Brechin was not far from the shore of the German Ocean, and the sights and sounds of the sea must have impressed his youthful imagination, for they appear largely as illustrative material in his preach- ing. He became very familiar, too, with the natural scenery of the country, and with those objects of human interest and enterprise and industry that left their im- press upon his enthusiastic and practical Scottish mind. At what the Memoir characterizes " the preposterously early age of twelve years " he entered the University of Edinburgh, and graduated at the age of sixteen. His physical personality was charged like a battery with vitality. He was intense in his enthusiasm, cheerful and kindly in disposition, and his rolHcking joviality lin- CHARACTER AND CAREER 353 gercd with him through all the storms of life, and alle- viated such hardness of lot as he was called to endure, as was the case with his larger-moulded friend and con- temporary, Norman McLeod. This Hmitless exuber- ance, which suggests the Frenchman rather than the Scotchman, was one of the elements of his effectiveness as a pulpit orator. Even when at last the pitcher was broken at the fountain, this fulness of hfe was never wholly exhausted. At the university he made but little head in any one branch of learning. It is said, however, that his reading was wide and that it was tributary to his general culture. It is certain that the literature with which he familiarized himself, beginning with the robust and healthy Sir Walter Scott, was of a high order, and that it was a determinative influence for his whole life. But scholarship in the academic sense of the term he had not. The movements of modern life had begun to influence the prominent Scottish preach- ers of the Evangehcal school. Indeed, it was one of the peculiarities of this school that, in reacting against the benumbing influence of Moderatism, they not only sought to quicken the spiritual life of the churches, but to make a more broadly practical appHcation of Chris- tianity. This was the meaning of Chalmers's church extension movement, and while Chalmers was, in his scientific theology, a man of the eighteenth century, in his practical theology, or in his practical conception and appHcation of Christianity, he belonged to the nine- teenth. He was a political economist and a practical mathematician, and availed himself of his knowledge of these subjects in his ministerial work; and his commer- cial and astronomical discourses indicate his interest in 2 A 354 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS relating the truths of Christianity to commerce and science. In all these respects we may perhaps see the influence of Chalmers upon Guthrie. But his own native tendencies led him in the same direction. His interest in objective realities and, in general, his non-speculative and practical tendencies gave him a bias toward the physical sciences. He took extra courses in chemistry and natural philosophy when at the university. The influences that committed him to the work of the ministry are not evident. Very likely the choice was de- termined largely by the influence of his home. But, how- ever this may be, his entrance upon theological studies, at the close of the academic course, seems to have been a foregone conclusion. He was not distinguished as a theological student at the Divinity Hall of the university, although his gift for facile rhetorical expression and his forcefulness and attractiveness as a speaker, in which gifts he carefully trained himself, must have given prom- ise of his future eminence as a preacher and platform orator. He accepted the modified type of Calvinism that was current among the Evangelicals of his day, of which Chalmers was the representative, and his preach- ing presupposes it rather than defends it. He never fully appropriated the historical and experimental method of approaching Christianity. For him Christianity is an objective revelation of divine truth which is vindicated by external evidences, which the human reason is incom- petent to criticise, although it is competent to defend it, especially in the use of experimental proofs ; and of this conception of Christianity he remained to the end an advocate. It is true that he became in his way some- thing of a BibHcal student, and illustrated the improve- CHARACTER AND CAREER 355 ment in Biblical exposition and application that was common in the Evangelical preaching of his day. He expounded the Scriptures with much vivacity and applied them in a suggestive and interesting manner. But his work always lacked a critical basis. As in the academic, so in the divinity courses, he continued to manifest special aptitude for the physical sciences, and it was very likely through these scientific interests in part that he subsequently came into close friendly relations with Hugh Miller. In general literature he continued to read somewhat widely, and its influence upon his hter- ary tastes and style appeared more fully later on. It was not till near the close of the most active period of his life that he became fully conscious of his gift for rhetorical expression. His scientific knowledge and his literary culture, in connection with his habits of close ob- servation of nature, and his famiHarity with practical hfe, served him well in furnishing illustrative material for the pulpit during all the subsequent years. On account of his pronounced Evangehcal views and his independent adherence to them, involving a somewhat antagonistic attitude toward the Moderate party that had control of the patronage of the Established church, he was, for five years after his graduation in theology and his licensure, unable to secure a church. But he held conscientiously and tenaciously to his position, and bided his time. It was a very unwise procedure, as the issue proved, for the party in power thus to intensify Guthrie's antagonism. Meantime he pursued a course that was exceedingly profitable to his future ministry; and one may almost felicitate the churches of Scotland that the short-sighted policy of the latitudinarian respectabilities of the Estab- 356 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS lishment was preparing a more vigorous and effective antagonist of its corrupt system of patronage and of in- trusion into the spiritual independence of the church than otherwise might have been possible. He returned for a few months to the university, and continued his studies in chemistry and natural history. The year following, 1826, he spent several months in Paris at the Sorbonne in the same Une of study, at the same time attending medical lectures and the medical clinic, and all the while enlarging in a general way by close obser- vation his knowledge of the world of men, in whose affairs he was always chiefly interested. Finding upon his return that his way to the pulpit was still blocked, he entered a banking house, where he continued for three years, holding the responsible position of bank manager. At last, through the friendly intervention of an influential member of the British Parliament, he was appointed to the parish of Arbirlot, not far to the south from his home. He was now twenty-seven years old, a man of multifarious aptitudes, of varied experiences, of increasing maturity and enlarging power. Here at once the results of his manifold interests, his comprehensive training, and his practical aggressiveness began to dis- close themselves. He gave himself first of all to the task of refreshing and developing the religious life of his church. He resuscitated the moribund church prayer-meeting and the catechetical class ; he estab- lished cottage prayer-meetings, which brought the dif- ferent sections of the parish into closer contact; he started Sabbath-schools and founded a parish library, all of which were kept under his immediate supervision ; he threw himself into the general life of the community, CHARACTER AND CAREER 357 carrying his religion beyond the parish into the secular life of the people ; he was a vigorous advocate of temperance, and was soon instrumental in clearing the town of the two saloons that had thrived there ; and he established a bank for the poor, whose affairs he personally managed. Of his experience in practical life he says, in his autobi- ography : " In point of fact it was not the least valuable part of my training and education, I became conversant with mercantile and agricultural affairs, and men who both in country and town afterward became my people did not respect me the less when they found their min- ister was something else than a ' fine bodie ' who knew no more about the affairs and hopes and disappoint- ments and trials of men engaged in the business of the world than any old wife or ' the man in the moon.' My people at Arbirlot were all the better for the knowledge of business I had acquired at the bank, as I had not been long there when I established a savings-bank in that country parish, getting two or three of the principal farmers to be trustees along with myself. I was entire manager, giving out money only on Saturday evenings, the regular time for its transactions, and that only on a weekly or fortnightly notice, but receiving it in the shape of a shilling, the lowest deposit, at any time and any day, Sunday of course excepted." The career of Guthrie, as well as that of Chalmers and of Norman McLeod, with their demonstrated ability to manage men and to handle the complex administrative interests of a parish, illus- trates the value for the minister of business training. It was during this Arbirlot ministry of seven years that Guthrie laid the foundation for his future success in all lines of ministerial activity, and it demonstrates that the 358 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS man who is successful in small things will be called to greater things. He made careful preparation for the pulpit. He discharged with scrupulous fidelity the little duties of a parish pastor, recognizing, as every high- minded, right-hearted Christian minister should and will, the great value to his ministry of the " cure of souls," thus elevating the religious life of his church, while he threw himself with undiminished enthusiasm into the broader spheres of church extension and of ecclesiastical and moral reform. The patronage question, in which he was subse- quently to have a most prominent part, was already before the churches, when, in 1830, he took this coun- try parish. The conflict began in earnest, however, four years later. He had studied it from the outset, and his position had already been taken with the " High Flyers," as the Evangelicals were called. The primary question in this conflict was whether the church as a spiritual body had an inalienable and indefeasible moral right to restrict the patron in his legal right to nominate ministerial candidates to the churches. It subsequently involved the larger and allied question, whether the state had the right to obtrude itself upon a church by forcing an undesirable candidate upon it. The question, therefore, was whether the state had a right to under- take the management of affairs that belong to the church as a spiritual body. The Moderate party, then in the ascendant, in general claimed this right of obtrusion for the state. The Evangelicals, under the lead of Chalmers and Guthrie, denied the right and opposed the claim. Guthrie's position, which he defended with much skill and force, was that the church as a spiritual CHARACTER AND CAREER 359 society, whose supreme head is Christ, whose office- bearer holds his credentials from Christ, and whose charter is the Bible, had the right to manage its own affairs so far as they relate to its spiritual interests. The patron has no right to appoint candidates without the free and full consent of the church. Guthrie was a loyal son of the Established church, and was not dis- posed to break with it. Accordingly, when the ques- tion of dissolving the relation between the church and the state, in the so-called " voluntary " controversy which preceded the " anti-patronage " controversy, he espoused the cause of the Establishment. This posi- tion he was, of course, subsequently obliged to abandon, but he always remained a believer theoretically in a state church. This question of the perpetuation of the state church, which was involved in the "voluntary'' controversy, had already brought Guthrie during his early ministry into prominence. Dr. Chalmers had already entered upon his " church extension " movement. His object was to make the Established church more effective. He would abolish the old collegiate system, in accordance with which the ecclesiastical community was divided into large parishes, and each parish placed under the supervision of two associate pastors. Chal- mers would multiply the number of parishes and churches, and thus increase the centres of moral and spiritual power and make them more effective, placing each parish in charge of one pastor and holding him responsible for effective leadership. He would have the parish work organized with such care that all the members of the parish, rich and poor alike, should be brought under the influence of the church. It was an 36o REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS ecclesiastical movement for the purpose of increasing the number of churches, and of strengthening the Evangelical party ; it was a philanthropic movement for the purpose of reaching the unchurched classes ; and it was above all a religious movement for the purpose of strengthening and enriching the spiritual life of the whole church. Guthrie had already arrested the attention of Dr. Chalmers, His effectiveness as a pulpit and platform orator, his pastoral zeal, his executive enterprise, his evangelistic skill and enthusiasm, his devotion to the cause of evangelical Christianity, and his interest in the questions that were in agitation had already brought him into prominence, and had won the high esteem of the great leader. It was natural, therefore, that he should be wanted in Edinburgh. A highly successful country pastor, and sincerely attached to his simple country parish, he nevertheless had all the appoint- ments, and he cherished a distinct admiration for the role of the popular city pastor. He had a certain fondness for the natural scenery of the country, but he loved the life of the city more, and had no sympathy with the sentiment of Cowper, that " God made the country, but man made the town." His philanthropic instincts especially inclined him toward the city parish, where he might reach the unchurched masses. He was wanted at Old Gray Friars in Edinburgh, and he accepted a call there with the understanding that a church should be built for him as soon as possible, over which he should be placed in sole charge, and where he might attempt to put in operation Chalmers's parochial system, and work out the problem of parish evangeliza- tion. The church known as St. John's was accord- CHARACTER AND CAREER 361 ingly built for him ; and after a three years' ministry at Gray Friars on the collegiate basis, he entered upon his more distinctively philanthropic career in the poorest quarter of Edinburgh. The city was well supplied with able preachers, and it was the home of many illustrious men who had made a name for themselves in literature, in science, and in the various professions. Drs. Candlish, Cunningham, and Charles Brown occupied prominent positions in the pulpit and in church leadership. Dr. Chalmers was at the university, at the height of his popularity and power. Lord Jeffrey, the leader in Htera- ture, was there, and Lord Cockburn, the leader at the bar ; and it was no slight task for any man to win the ear of the cultivated classes, and at the same time to minister successfully to the poor and degraded people of the parish. But this was what Guthrie did. His ministry of twenty-seven years, from 1837 to 1864, was marked by a popularity that was undiminished and that surpassed that of any man in Scotland. Under the most stimulating influences he developed rapidly his peculiar gifts as a pulpit and platform orator, and as a philanthropist and ecclesiastical leader. It was during the first six years of his ministry at St. John's that the disruption of the Established church took place. In that movement he was, doubtless, Chalmers of course excepted, the most popular and effective leader. His ability as a platform orator brought him into great prominence in furthering the organization of the Free churches, and particularly in raising funds to provide homes for the ministers of these churches. So impor- tant was his influence in pastoral, parochial, philan- thropic, and educational work, in connection with his 362 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS work as a preacher, that reference must be made to it in another connection. The demands of his position upon him led him con- stantly and ever more completely into a type of pulpit speech of which he was easily the most eminent repre- sentative of his day in Great Britain. With ever in- creasing zeal and devotion he gave himself to his tasks, and with ever increasing influence, publishing, as he was able to find time, the results of his work in sermons, pamphlets, and monographs of a philanthropic sort, like his "Pleas for the Ragged Schools," which is, perhaps, his most striking and permanently valuable literary prod- uct ; and in 1864 he was obliged to lay down his burden, for the heart could no longer bear the strain. He be- came editor of the Sunday Magazine, to which he him- self contributed copiously till his death, nine years later, in 1873. The published results of his work appear in sixteen volumes, which for their substance of thought are of no permanent value, and for their literary quali- ties might not find response in the tastes of our time, but have a certain attractiveness in their vivacity of style, and many of them are worth knowing because they embody the results of his work as a philanthropist. It is in this aspect that his claim upon our attention is preeminent. Guthrie's significance for the modern pul- pit is in his popular interpretation of Christianity, and in his practical application of it to the needs of the poor and unfortunate. A POPULAR EVANGELISTIC PREACHER 363 II GUTHRIE AS A POPULAR EVANGELISTIC PREACHER We cannot rely upon Guthrie's published products for an adequate conception of his influence as a preacher. The impressions he made were vivid, but they were not educative and are not suggestive of permanence. His preaching should be considered in connection with his life work. Let us, therefore, look at the man, the pas- tor, and the philanthropist, then at the material, struc- ture, and rhetorical form of the sermon, and in the light of the whole we shall perhaps be the better able to estimate his significance as a preacher. I. The personality of the man was marked. He had the full physical equipment of an impressive pulpit ora- tor. He was a tall, broad-shouldered Scotchman, with a dark complexion, black hair in early years, touched into an iron-gray as years advanced, deep-set gray eyes, long, prominent nose, and thin, mobile lips. Thus he is described. So far as impressive oratory is conditioned by physical gifts, these are among the desirable appoint- ments. It is said of him that he had " an abundance of easy and powerful, because natural, gesture, a quickly and strongly impressive countenance, which age ren- dered finer, as well as more comely, ... a powerful, clear, and musical voice, the intonations of which were varied and appropriate, managed with an actor's skill, though there was not the least appearance of art." Lord Cockburn says of him that " he was passionate without vehemence. His language and accent were very Scotch, but nothing can be less vulgar, and his gesture 364 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS is the most graceful I have ever seen in any public speaker. Everything he does glows with a frank, gal- lant warm-heartedness often rendered more delightful by a boyish simplicity of air and style." This boyish frankness, freedom, intensity, and joviaHty always lin- gered with him, although he rigidly excluded all un- seemly exhibitions of it in the pulpit. But taking this temperament into the pulpit and giving it proper range, he had the greater power as a preacher. No gloomy view of life ever darkened his message or shadowed his influence. He was a man of Scotch sense. He had, indeed, a poetic fancy of a sort, not of the highest order, a little garish, a trifle strained and remote in its uses, but vivid and striking, and doubtless it was one of his chief elements of power. But he was preeminently Scotch in his practical understanding, a man of sound judgment, of executive force, who knew men and had a most vigorous and boundlessly tactful handling of them. In the realm of objective reality he had ex- traordinary clearness of discrimination and never blun- dered in his dealing with facts. He lacked intellectual subtlety, and in the speculative realm was not discrim- inating or profound. He dealt with the surface and commonplace aspects of things. He reflects much, moralizes much, upon life ; but his reflections are some- what too obvious and sometimes almost platitudinous. He touches his moralizings into attractiveness by his vivid fancy, and his good sense never deserts him. Under all his pulpit pyrotechnics there is a vein of shrewd common sense which proves him the typical Scotchman. He could not to any very considerable extent instruct, and he had nothing particularly new to A POPULAR EVANGELISTIC PREACHER 365 say. He glorified the familiar and never took hold of the depths of truth. The deeper places of the human spirit he could not reach, save as now and then he flashed his way into them by his sympathies and by his pathos ; but he could paint what lies at the surface of life and could make it attractive and worthy of eager attention. The Scotchman is essentially a realist. His philoso- phy is that of common sense, and he discloses it in his literature, in his theology, and in his preaching, as in all else. Guthrie had the realistic habit of his countrymen. He was a man of genuine and generous sympathies, which disclosed themselves in his domestic life, which was one of rare affection and devotion, in his social in- tercourse, his pastoral care of souls, his philanthropic endeavors, and in his preaching. He was an ideal city pastor. He loved the rush and excitement and human passion of city life, and he was peculiarly fitted to mingle in its scenes of sin and sorrow as the bishop of souls. He had not the aesthetic endowment of Nor- man McLeod. He " loved the garish scene." It fur- nished images for his rushing rhetoric. This discloses his leading quality. He was a man of action, not of reflection ; a man of " tasks," not of " visions." Because he was a man of genuine sympathies, he loved the good opinion and the good will of his fellows. He was too sensible a man to be unmanned by flattery. He was too genuine a man and too sound a Calvinist to regard himself as entitled to human adulation. But he had a good deal of that guileless amour propre that char- acterizes some of his countrymen, and is naturally fos- tered by the high esteem in which the Scottish minister 366 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS is held by the people. He had a very decided respect for men of rank, and a very innocent relish of their per- sonal friendship, which he was just a little inclined to advertise. He once said of himself that he was half inclined to beUeve that he was cut out for a nobleman. If he had been gifted with more of Carlyle's stalwart Scotch individualism, he would have despised all this. But after all, this guileless self-love was the reflex of his love for his fellow-men, and he even turned it to the advantage of his ministry, as the late Dr. Joseph Parker did in a more obtrusive manner and on a more exten- sive scale, and it became a condition of the greater effec- tiveness in his dealing with men. With all his reverence for rank he had a genuine love for all classes of men, and was in an eminent degree the friend of the poor. He was a man in earnest, and such a man can never lose himself in the idolatries of the people. This moral earnestness he exhibited in the pulpit, as elsewhere. It is interesting to read of the " hush of expectation on the upturned faces of the people as, entering from a side door, the preacher is seen pressing with eager steps through the crowd who fill the passage from the vestry to the pulpit," and of the " swing of the broad shoulders, the face bent forward, the look of earnestness on the flushed countenance, all telling of a man who feels that he has come forth on an important errand and is straitened till it be accomplished." This combination of physical, emotional, moral, and religious intensity, this capacity to be wrought upon in all the elements of his manhood, measurably by the power of the truth in his own heart, more largely, perhaps, by the images of truth that sprang from his exuberant fancy and by the human A POPULAR EVANGELlST.v, .._^CHER 367 beings of all classes that hung upon his lips, — this, in large measure, lets us into the secret of his influence over men. It is a living man. It is the subtle, occult, pene- trating force of a vivacious, joyful, friendly, sympathetic human personality, alive all through. 2. The influence of Guthrie's pastoral and philan- thropic activity upon his pulpit work must also be taken into account. As we have seen, Guthrie was a man of extraordinary pastoral effectiveness, of general adminis- trative ability, of philanthropic activity and ecclesiastical enterprise, and here lie the most permanent results of his work. The Free church movement was especially indebted to him. St. John's church, which, under his leadership, was among the first to commit itself to the Free church movement, was designed for the poor and was located in one of the poorest quarters of the city, near which he fixed his own residence. In his congre- gation there were, indeed, some of the most intelligent and cultivated people of Edinburgh, whom he greatly interested" and strongly influenced. And it was a fortu- nate thing for him as a preacher that he was obliged to meet such people in his congregation. But his audience was composed largely of plain people, and even of the very poor, and he did not fail to preach to them accord- ing to the measure of their intelligence. He had begun his ministry with the effort to reach the common people, and he went to Edinburgh because he could do a larger work among them. His early style of preaching was plain and homely, entirely lacking in the descriptive quality which subsequently characterized it, and the thought was somewhat familiar in its conscientious Scotch orthodoxy. But he found himself in his efforts 368 REPRjL_ IVE MODERN PREACHERS to reach the common people. It is not an uncommon thing for preachers to find themselves in this free, un- conventional, illustrative style of speech, and no better school for the culture of it could be found than the cate- chetical class where Guthrie found it. It was his persist- ent purpose to do his best under all conditions, and in this Guthrie's example and influence have been very salutary. But the point in hand is that his preaching was pas- toral in its character and that it was directly influenced and wholly conditioned by the manifest needs of his congregation. He learned from the members of his con- gregation, as he visited them in the parish, what most impressed them in his preaching, and made careful note of it. His experience in mercantile hfe has already been spoken of, and its influence upon his parish work. But it had also an indirect influence upon his pulpit work. His pastoral type of preaching took largely the evan- gelistic form, and he is a worthy example of the effec- tive pastoral evangelist. He always sought to make an impression upon the conscience and heart to win men's allegiance to Christ, and to strengthen them in it. So strong in intent was the emotional interest and so strong in result the emotional impression, that the intellectual and even ethical interest were sometimes sacrificed to it. A substantial, permanent moral result he certainly had sincerely at heart ; but so intent was he upon an imme- diate and vivid impression, that he must sometimes have failed of the desired effect, if indeed he did not sometimes lose sight of it. This is the defect of what we call sensational preaching, even of the better type. There is a disproportionate impression upon the imag- A POPULAR EVANGELISTIC PREACHER 369 '• ' ination and the emotions. With respect to simplicity, directness, and deep, strong, moral purpose, the preach- ing of Guthrie does not impress us as that of Spurgeon does, and it may be questioned whether the results of his preaching were not meagre, as compared with those of Mr. Spurgeon's preaching, useful as he was in his evangelistic work. As an orator, capable of producing powerful, immediate impressions, Spurgeon is not his equal. But Guthrie plays with his rhetoric. In general the aim of the two men is the same. It is to present the gospel in such way that it will strike home at once. But the methods are very different and the results dif- ferent. Spurgeon deals more largely with truth in im- mediate Biblical form. It is indeed colored by the crass literalism of the school in which he was trained. But the matter and the style are Biblical and the single aim is always manifest. Guthrie was, in his way, a Bib- lical preacher, as most Scottish preachers are, but his Biblical material is strongly colored by his rhetoric, and^^^"^ the thought often seems subordinate to the flamboyanfj^-.' style in which it appears. Guthrie is one of those preachers who is sure to draw the fire of the critic. And yet he was an effective evangelistic preacher. But the point in hand here is that his work was con- :ik ditioned by what he recognized as the needs of his hearers. The volume entitled " The City, its Sins and Sorrows " is one of the treasured results of his personal contact with suffering human life, necessitated by his work as the pastor of the poor. The three monographs in which he makes a plea for the ragged schools which he was instrumental in establishing in Edinburgh, that have been gathered into one volume, are another 2B 370 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS product in literary form of his experiences with the lower classes in city life. These volumes disclose in a notable manner his power of pathos, in which the London Times declared him to be peerless among British preachers. This contact with the lower phases of life deepened his human sympathies and intensified his sense of the need of reaching the hearts of men through their imagina- tions. His life as a churchman also and the demands upon him for platform oratory, in which he exceeded all other Scottish preachers of his day, became tributary to his pulpit work. He was in fact essentially a platform orator, who carried the method of the platform into the pulpit. His work as a philanthropist led him in the same general direction. All became tributary to his effectiveness as a preacher. The cause of the poor, of temperance, of education, of missions, of needy minis- ters, of church extension, of ecclesiastical freedom, — all the great interests of mankind, no one of which was for- eign to him, and to all of which, as he came into connec- tion with them, he devoted himself with untiring zeal, found in him a most effective pulpit advocate. He was a faithful and trusted pastor, earnestly devoted to the "cure of souls," according to the best approved Scottish custom ; a wise church leader, especially trusted during the last fifteen years of his pastoral Ufe for his increas- ing breadth of vision, largeness of spirit, and practical tact ; but always in an eminent degree the friend of the poor and suffering, wherever they were to be found, gathering the inspirations of his pathos from the scenes of distress with which he was constantly familiar. That any true preacher should fail to see that the persuasive power of the pulpit is dependent upon pastoral Ufe in A POPULAR EVANGELISTIC PREACHER 371 the cure of souls and in philanthropic devotion to the suffering, and that any one should be wiHing to surren- der such a condition of power over the human soul, is amazing. To isolate the pulpit from the parish and from the larger world of needy human life, to withdraw from the struggling world into selfish isolation, or to de- vote one's self to philanthropy merely as a big administra- tive enterprise at a safe distance from suffering individual life, is to " cut the nerve " of pulpit power. The man who does this deserves to fail, as he will fail, and the church that tolerates it should perish. He is the best preacher in our day who is most famihar with human life. There never was a time in the history of the Christian pulpit when there was such a demand for close contact with human life as now. It was the strength and the glory of the Evangelical movement in Scotland, of which Guthrie was in some sort the most effective representative, that it took Christianity away from the realm of abstract thought and of literary dilet- tantism into the depths of human life. Thomas Guthrie and Norman McLeod kept the fountains of human feel- ing constantly astir, and won much of that power to move men that was peculiar to them from familiar intercourse with the needy world. 3. The material and structural elements of Guthrie's preaching must enter into our estimate of it. In the material but not in the formal sense of the term he was a Bibhcal preacher. Biblical themes always fur- nish the basis of his discussion. Biblical topics entered to a considerable extent into the process of development. Biblical characters and incidents were largely used as illustrative material, citations of individual Biblical pas- 3/2 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS sages were not infrequent, and a Biblical tone pervaded the whole. But he was a topical rather than a textual or expository preacher. In interpreting the Scriptures he always selects the main topics of his passage for discussion, and instead of subjecting them to critical analysis and unfolding the thought of the writer, he seizes upon their practical aspects for the purpose of moral inculcation and incentive. He finds in the literary form of the passage a stimulus for his own imagination, and the entire discourse addresses itself to the fancy and the feeling of the hearer rather than to his power of reflection. The aim is to stimulate to moral action rather than to edify by enrichment of Christian knowl- edge. His method is the method of accommodation, and shows no results of modern Biblical scholarship. But Biblical discourses like those found in " The Gospel in Ezekiel," " Christ and the Inheritance of the Saints," and " The Parables " are full of valuable practical sug- gestions, are strong in moral incentive and brilliantly vivacious in rhetorical form. The substance of the sermon, however, is definitely influenced by his theologi- cal point of view, as will naturally be the case with any man who has any theology which he regards as worth while. Guthrie was not a theologian, yet he had his theology, and it lies in the background in all of his Biblical preaching. He holds, although in a moderate and reasonable way, the dogmatic point of view, from which it seems impossible for all Scottish preachers who have not been trained in modern methods of think- ing to emancipate themselves. His preaching was wholesomely, and it must be acknowledged on the whole reasonably, evangelical, but it was such according to the A POPULAR EVANGELISTIC PREACHER 373 type of a moderate Scotch Calvinism. It is a type of theology with which the Scottish people are familiar and which they Uke to hear. They call it the simple gospel, however remote in fact it may be from "the simplicity that is in Christ," because they have been educated in it and because it has a familiar sound. Guthrie was a man of noble, cathohc spirit, a man, in fact, ahead of his time in tolerance and high-minded- ness. But he was not the man to break with tradi- tional Scottish theology. He had neither the equipment nor the disposition for it. It is his philanthropy, rather than his theology, although the latter is of a suffi- ciently moderate type, that shows the trace of the modern humanistic spirit and culture. There is no evi- dence that the point of view held or the opinions pro- pounded by Thomas Erskine or McLeod Campbell ever touched him or had much meaning for him. He is not the man to part company with his hearers in any event, and he is, moreover, manifestly persuaded that Calvinism strikes the original note of the gospel. There is but little that is fresh in the substance of his thought. It is essentially commonplace. It is the fresh illustra- tion of the truth, not fresh conception of it, that con- stitutes the attractiveness of his preaching. Good work this, indeed, for any man — this work of making familiar truth interesting by the freshness of the form in which it is presented, and the only work, very likely, in which most men may expect to succeed. But it is not the most vital or quickening or spiritually helpful preach- ing. There certainly are religious points of view that bring God nearer to us, and that make Christianity more real and more reasonable, but they belong to a 374 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS realm with which Dr. Guthrie was not familiar. Not in- frequently he overpresses Scripture terms in the interest of his Calvinistic theology, wresting them only to get what he has put into them. To enforce the doctrine of total depravity he makes Paul teach that the " carnal mind" is nothing but "enmity against God," enmity is the very element of man's unregenerate life, — as love is the element of God's life. Defect in the spirit of obedience is fully developed enmity. In the same way he presses Scripture terms to make them teach the doctrine of a substitutionary atonement. His repre- sentations of future punishment are highly dramatic, and Scripture terms here, too, are overpressed in the interest of a sensational effectiveness. His world is always in moral peril, and he finds in the moral situa- tion material for his dramatic representation. Human life, as redeemed in Christ, seems to have no such effect upon his imagination as do its tragic perils. Yet he treats most attractively and persuasively the love of God and the universality of the atonement, and in this he shows that at heart he had broken with the tradi- tional Calvinism of his countrymen. It is this that draws upon his noblest sympathies and is the spring of his noblest pathos. The doctrines of grace are the centre of his teaching, and even under their defective forms of representation he succeeds in showing the heart of God in most winsome ways, and man's work- ing relations with redemption are presented in the truly Evangelical spirit. He was a most dihgent worker, although not a thorough student nor a reflective thinker, and his attainments were only in the line of general culture and knowledge. There is a lack of solid sub- A POPULAR EVANGELISTIC PREACHER 375 stance in his preaching. There is more heat than light. His mind is objective and realistic. He dwells upon external relations and fails to enter deeply into the inner Hfe. One suspects that he never reached the full measure of his intellectual power. He had seemingly the possibiHty of manly strength, but he did not de- velop it. His influence upon his fellow-men, however, was great, and in his ecclesiastical and philanthropic activities he has left a permanent impression upon his age and country. But he has left nothing behind as a pulpit teacher that will be of permanent value. As regards the technique of the sermon, it is to a considerable extent emancipated from homiletic re- straints. It is off-hand and dashing in its freedom and moves rapidly. It makes a vivid impression, sometimes a series of comparatively unrelated impressions. The introduction is always striking, and approaches the sub- ject from afar. The very first sentence is enigmatical in its apparent unrelatedness. The remote is always interesting in so far as it stirs the mind into inquisitive- ness and puts it upon the search for what is to follow. The principle of gradual approach, therefore, along lines of somewhat remotely related thought is a valuable one. But a remoteness that is far-fetched overworks the principle. There is a certain externality, almost a suggestion of artificiality, in the relations of Guthrie's thought. There is a lack of organic quality in the development of the sermon, and the very diction some- times has a metallic ring. Artificial combinations of things remote, which suggest strained effort after strik- ing effects, are not uncommon. From the text, " The tree is known by its fruit," he has a sermon entitled 376 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS "The True Test," and this is the introduction: "If there shall be no more salvation out of Christ on the day of judgment than was found on that day when the avenging waters pursued the shrieking crowd to the tops of the highest hills and washed off the last living man from the last dry spot of land, how important for us to know whether we are in Christ, united to Him, not in name and by profession only, but in deed and in truth ! To try this we have a plain and infallible test in these words of our Lord, ' The tree is known by its fruit.' On this I remark, (i) It is possible to ascertain our real state and character," etc. This certainly is far-fetched and inharmonious. The dramatic reference to the Del- uge is out of harmonious relation with the character of the text and with the thought of the sermon. But it is in line with his dramatic instincts. He has a prevail- ingly tragic conception of life, and likes to deal with its tragic aspects. In the sermon above referred to his thought is fetched from a distance, and is brought into inharmonious relations, in order to start with something that is striking. There is a certain rhetorical dash about this dramatic quality in which the sermons abound. There are elements of attractiveness and of power in it. If we had listened to the man, we should doubtless have been strongly impressed, despite defects of method, for it is the man that carries the sermon. But to the criti- cal reader there is a suggestion of artificiality about it. The sermon does not unfold itself from within, hence the thoughts seem to lie in a sort of external juxtaposi- tion, rather than in close, inner organic relation. It is suggestive of patchwork. We think of the homiletic carpenter. In his avoidance of all homiletic formality. A POPULAR EVANGELISTIC PREACHER 377 he makes his text intimate his subject by frequent repe- tition. He is not definite in his conception or statement of his theme, and he sometimes discusses the wrong theme. The development of the sermon is often con- fused and inconsequential, and he discusses topics that are not covered by his theme and have no organic rela- tion with the sermon. In all this there is abundant homiletic freedom and an easy affectation of triumph over homiletic restraint. But it is not highly success- ful. The brilliant rhetoric of the sermon indeed carries it, but the sermon would have carried itself, and would have carried the critical hearer, and especially the criti- cal reader, more effectively under better restraints of well-approved method. The sermon, most conscien- tiously wrought out indeed, was prepared for immediate effect, and seemingly more attention was given to rhe- torical form than to substance of thought or to method of development. 4. We are led thus to consider Guthrie's graphic style as perhaps the chief source of his pulpit power. It reminds us of the style of French preachers with whom he must have been at one time familiar. It was seemingly impossible for Guthrie to say anything in a plain, non-rhetorical manner. Even a French Parisian could complain of his lack of colloquial simplicity, of a certain "dress parade" quality, and of thought so objec- tive as to fail to reach the inner life. He studied those objects, scenes, and events that would furnish pictorial and dramatic material for his style, — the ever moving sea with its shipping, the city streets, the country land- scape, the family, the home, the mother, the absent ones, royalty, the poor, the toiler, the battlefield. Everything 378 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS was tributary to his illustrative style. From his accu- rate descriptions of the sea some one inferred that he must have been a sailor in early life. He had studied representations of it. In fact, he overdid the study. He gives too much attention to his illustrations. He overillustrates. His illustrations are gathered from a great variety of sources. They are heaped together and add nothing to the interpretation of the thought. They represent the thought in various forms, but weaken rather than strengthen the impression. " In preaching," he says, "mind the three Ps," — prove, paint, persuade. Speak to the mind, to the imagina- tion, and to the heart and will. He did scant justice to the first. His strength was with the second. His painting was doubtless intended to be tributary to the work of proving and persuading. But the imagination received stronger impressions than the understanding, and, one suspects, stronger impressions than the will. He was certainly not a successful pulpit teacher. He meant to be a successful advocate and persuader, and doubtless he was. But he was above all a painter, and he knew himself as such. What another might do with the brush or the chisel he knew that he could do with the pen. He found that it is the picto- rial style that vividly impresses the average hearer, and he resolved to cultivate it. In early years he gave no indication of what subsequently proved to be his distin- guishing gift. His style, we are told, was " absolutely unadorned, stiff, and even formal." His first sermon was read from manuscript, but he resolved to abandon it thenceforth, and he adhered faithfully to his resolve. It was his opinion that " he who reads, instead of deliv- A POPULAR EVANGELISTIC PREACHER 379 ering, his sermon, looking his hearer fairly in the face, throws away a great advantage." It was a wise resolve! He preached memoriter. In order to succeed in this he was accustomed to strike out all that could not easily be remembered. It would embarrass him in his work of committing, and it would not, he thought, readily impress the hearer. Hence also his habit of vocalizing as he wrote, and of committing in silence. He never allowed himself to vocalize while committing. It would unfavorably affect the subsequent delivery of the ser- mon. One fancies that this habit influenced his style. The objects of thought, as they appear in his illustra- tions, are placed in external juxtaposition. In describ- ing, for example, the process of physical decay he takes the different parts of the human body in order, so that he may the more easily remember his description, — the hair, the face, the arm, the lower hmbs, then the body as a whole ; and then in order follows a description of the failure of the powers of the soul. The same thing appears in his description of the changes of nature. He follows the order of the seasons, — spring with its songs of birds, summer with its flowers, autumn with its fruits and grains. So in his description of changes at the old birthplace. Here are new faces in the school, on the farm, in the pulpit, in the pews. So in his sketch of the changes which an atom of matter under- goes. This atom is detached from the rock by the frost, goes into the stream, the stream takes it into the val- ley, the stream subsides and leaves it on the bank, it goes then into a blade of grass, the grass dies and gives it to the flower, the moor-cock crops it (note the poetic moor-cock), the eagle catches the moor-cock and gets 380 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS possession of our atom, the eagle dies and gives it to the pasture-land, the lamb now gets hold of it, some human being gets hold of it as he eats the lamb, and now at last it becomes the possession of some " hand that wields a sceptre, or the locks that lend grace to beauty, or the tongue that guides the counsels of a nation or proclaims salvation." Then he makes a move on the heavenly bodies. They change. The planets are now here, now there ; now in the east and now in the west. They travel regularly in order that his thought may travel with them. And this whole line of move- ment, descriptive of change, ends in the pole star. This is the only steady thing in the entire description, and this is only a seeming of steadiness. Now, what the pole star is only in seeming, that is God in reality. And so, after this whirling introductory dance, we have at last reached our theme. All this is doubtless an aid to the memory, but it is overdone. The style, also, is diffuse and repetitious. There is a lack of concentrated vigor. The substance of the sermon is rather thin, and the thought does not get ahead. There is, moreover, a certain artificial glitter of decoration. The illustrations are largely from the gayer scenes of nature and of life, or from whatever is most obtrusive or familiar. They sometimes suggest observation with conscious reference to the work of illustration, and they seem thrust on from without, rather than naturally sug- gested in the process of development. He compares, for example, the appearance of sameness in the midst of nature's changes to the spinning of a top which keeps it from falling. For this reason, that is, by rea- son of the far-fetched and artificial character of the illus- A POPULAR EVANGELISTIC PREACHER 38 1 trations, his preaching lacks in beauty of organic life. There is too much external decoration. That canon of artistic taste, and of ethical judgment as well, that the details of a picture should all be selected with reference to the central theme and that illustration should not be so obtrusive that we lose sight of the thought illustrated, was violated by Dr. Guthrie. The central thought is sometimes obscured rather than illuminated, and the central impression weakened rather than strengthened, and so the sermon loses in real power. The impression may be vivid, but it is not matched by mental and moral strength. It is true that men of learning and culture, as well as rank, hstened to him with delight. Hugh Miller was a regular attendant at his church ; Lord Jef- frey had a sitting there ; Sir William Hamilton regarded him as the best preacher he ever heard, and, when re- minded that he was deficient in logic, replied, " He has the best sort of logic, there is but a step between his premise and his conclusion." This surely is valuable testimony as to his impressiveness as a preacher, and his power to hold the interest of intelligent men, and we can readily accept the judgment of the greatest of English journals that he was the greatest pulpit ora- tor in Great Britain and the greatest master of pathos among English-speaking peoples. And we can see the source and sort of impression. It was his great dra- matic power, and it illustrates the unquestionable fact that those who are bearing the great responsibilities of life, who are struggling with its barriers and are crushed by its burdens, need to be stirred and aroused and so strengthened by the Christian preacher. The pictorial •and dramatic preacher will always have a hearing, and 382 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS from widely different classes. Just here was Guthrie's helpfulness. He illustrates the defects, but also the vir- tues, of such preaching. Many incidents are recorded illustrating his power over his audiences. Men were literally swept from their seats as with a whirlwind of dramatic power. They so far forgot themselves that they would turn and shout their enthusiastic admiration to the congregation. Preachers like Chrysostom and Beecher often spoke to audiences that applauded them. But Guthrie's dramatizing brought them to their feet, and liberated their vocal organs. Behind all this dra- matic intensity, however, there was a serious purpose. There was a wise head and a manly heart there, and to bring the gospel of redemption to needy men in direct and vivid appeal was the preacher's aim. It is idle to undertake, after all, to apply the tests of cool intellectual criticism to such preaching. The dra- matic gift is a great gift. It covers a multitude of de- fects. In fact, the problem of all preaching is how to muster the resources of positive power sufficiently to overbear or to neutralize the defects. Defects there must be, but the power that can move men and can bring them into allegiance to the Master of life can afford to carry them. Guthrie will be remembered for his power to move the souls of men, and his defects will all be lost in the unquestionable excellency of his work as preacher and philanthropist. To every man his work. If a man can dramatize in the pulpit, and any man may well covet to do it, let him assiduously but wisely culti- vate his gift, for it may be made worthy of the end for which men preach, and worthy of the truth that should be preached with persuasive power to needy men. CHAPTER IX CHARLES HADDON SPURGEON Mr. Spurgeon was a characteristic product of Eng- lish dissent. It is true that in his dogmatic provincial- ism, his exegetical crudeness, and his intolerance of the modern spirit and method, which he never understood, he was not at all up to the level of the best type of nonconforming preaching. But in many of its strongest and most effective qualities, he was a true child of Puri- tan dissent. In his independence of spirit, his manly boldness, his sturdy common sense, his keen insight into ordinary human nature, his love of Biblical truth, his tact in catching and his ingenuity in expounding its salient, practical features, his concrete habit of mind and his skill in illustration, in his rhetorical realism and oratorical directness and forcefulness, he was preemi- nent among its modern representatives. Let us turn, then, first of all to the story of his public life and then to his preaching. THE BUILDING OF THE PURITAN PASTORAL EVANGELIST The career of Spurgeon has for us all the interest of a problem that awakens curiosity and challenges explanation. He was doubtless the most impressive 383 384 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS and permanently successful evangelistic preacher of his age. With relatively meagre preparatory general educa- tion, and with no technical training of the schools, he was able, before he was twenty-one years of age, to win and hold an audience of from eight to ten thousand people in the city of London. For long periods of time in succession he was able to preach every day in the week, and continued for almost forty years to minister to the same ever enlarging congregation with apparently unabated interest and effectiveness, despite his physical infirmities and his parochial and extra-paro- chial administrative work. Such a man is hardly less than a homiletic prodigy. No man who is interested in effective evangelistic preaching should willingly fail to know something about so successful and useful a preacher, and no minister can well afford to ignore him or to refuse to avail himself of the incentive which a study of the man and of his work may secure. In race descent Mr. Spurgeon was a Dutchman, by adoption an Englishman, in religious education and training a Quaker and Puritan combined, and he dis- closed many of the characteristics of all these sources. His remote progenitors were refugees in the period of persecution from the Netherlands, who fled to Essex County, England, where he was born in 1834. In his physical personality he bears the mark of the Dutchman. He was of only medium height, but stocky and robust, with a countenance unexpressive in repose, but forceful in action. His resemblance to Macaulay has often been noted. One of his ancestors was a Quaker. And here we have the sturdy independence, the dogged tenacity, and somewhat rude common sense of the Dutchman, BUILDING OF THE EVANGELIST 385 with something of the unworldliness, the brooding mys- ticism, the subjective piety, and the uncompromising individualism of the Quaker, put into the hands of Enghsh Puritanism for training. It was good soil to cultivate, and the husbandry, according to its kind, was good. That it fell into Puritan hands was thoroughly appropriate. Puritan culture developed all this inborn independence of spirit, common sense. Christian realism and idealism combined, capacity for the invisible, sense of the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit,— this unworld- Imess, outspokenness, and straightforwardness. His grandfather was a Congregational minister with a Cal- vinistic nurture and a corresponding theology. He was pastor of one church for fifty-three years, and was able to bear the remarkable testimony that he had never suffered an hour's unhappiness in his personal or profes- sional relations with that church, — a testimony not only to his own personal character and intellectual pro- ductiveness which his grandson shared, but to the loy- alty of an English Congregational church, which in all the changes of modern life has never been wholly lost. With this sturdy man, who believed that Calvin- ism was the original gospel, who believed propor- tionately in the reality of a personal devil, and who, like Luther, had many a tussle with him, the grandson spent much of his time in early years. In a like atmos- phere of religious reahsm he was nurtured in his father's house, and, whatever its limitations, there can be no doubt of the strength and value of this influence for his subse- quent career as a preacher. His father, although a lay- man and a business man, officiated as pastor of a Congregational church. In this Dutch-Enghsh, Puritan 386 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS home, he was subject to a very positive religious regime, and attained very early to an unusual degree of moral and religious maturity. In undertaking to account for the interest he awakened in all classes of people, for the stir he made in the public mind whenever his presence was announced, and for his wide-reaching influence, it should be first of all remembered that he was a man of distinctive religious genius. With all his shrewd com- mon sense, which served him so well, he belonged primarily to the realm of the invisible. He was a heavenly minded man, done up in rather rough, Dutch- Puritan style, and the prophecy of his coming religious usefulness had gone before him. The world is ready to listen to such a man, for the capacity for the ideal and invisible has never been lost from human nature, and it only awaits its embodiment in human form. Like most men of reUgious genius he was early inchned to isola- tion, loved his books and pictures it is said, was odd and individuaUstic, and had a strong sense of vocation. He became familiar with Bunyan, Baxter, and the English Bible, had a retentive memory, and stored what he read. A sort of premonition of his vocation was disclosed at the age ©f twelve, when he was accustomed to exercise his natural oratorical gifts in preaching to his brothers, sisters, and companions. This habit of gi'vang vent to his thoughts and feelings, in connection with his read- ing of religious books, must have stirred the homiletic impulse within him. It contributed perhaps to that freedom and naturalness which subsequently character- ized his preaching, and, awakening a sense of the minis- terial calling, may have disclosed itself in his early assumption of the right to rebuke even his elders, when BUILDING OF THE EVANGELIST 387 they seemed to him to be on the wrong track. His self-reliance and pluck, his hatred of all shams and shows and pretences and all forms of tyranny, and his intense love of freedom were an early disclosure. This inde- pendence, which passed into an amiable opinionatedness and self-will, was seen when, at the age of sixteen, after much pious meditation and, according to his measure, study, he became convinced that his inherited views of Christian baptism were erroneous, and he united with the Baptist church. This same independence he disclosed in a most re- markable, and, it must be said, irrational manner, in declining his father's offer of aid in securing for him a college education. Till he was fifteen years old he at- tended school and, it is said, did his school tasks well. He was then appointed usher, or assistant teacher, in a private school at Newmarket, near Cambridge, where he continued for a year. The appointment to such a posi- tion near scholastic Cambridge, and the successful doing of his work, would indicate that he had acquired a fair preparatory education, and it would seem that he might have entered the College of the Nonconformists at Step- ney, now Regent Park College, to which, during this year, his father for several hours one day strenuously, but in vain, urged him. There was a touch of fanati- cism and superstition upon him. Like many men of untrained religious genius, he was subject to strong in- ward impressions, which objectified themselves, and he saw visions and heard voices. One day he had an ap- pointment, at his father's instigation, with a college teacher to talk over the question of his entering college. By some miscarriage they failed to meet. This he con- 388 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS strued as clearly providential, and then he seemed to hear a voice that said to him, of course in Scripture lan- guage that was familiar to him : " Seekest thou great things for thyself ? Seek them not " (Jer. xlv. 5). And this decided the question. It was the divine will that he should not be a college man. This illustrates his susceptibility to impressions from Scripture. He gets from it what the impression of the moment suggests, and this, without reference to the original, historic meaning of the passage, he interprets as divine guidance, even in regard to a vital question involving his whole future career. Of this same college question he says later on, " I have all along had an aversion to college." And later still, " I am more and more glad that I never went to college." This discloses a singular narrowness of vision. It is not sane. But in the light of his career it can hardly be called discreditable. From this it should not be inferred that he undervalued knowledge and in- tellectual training, that he lacked studious habits, that he undertook to substitute intuition or subjective im- pulse for knowledge won by hard work, or that he was an advocate of an unlearned ministry, which is indepen- dently endued with " Holy Ghost power." He under- valued the college curriculum, but he always counselled his students to study hard, to win all the knowledge and to get all the training possible, and what he advocated he practised. He distrusted the college as too closely affiUated with the movements of modern thought and life which might undermine the faith once delivered to / the Puritan saints. His early reading, as we have seen, was religious. He gave himself to the Puritan writers, and perhaps no man of his day had a better knowledge BUILDING OF THE EVANGELIST 389 of them. His " Treasury of David " attests his labori- ous, conscientious, loving study of them. Pointing a visitor one day to the works of Puritan theologians and preachers, with which the shelves of his library were loaded, he said, " I have preached them all." They had indeed all become tributary to his extraordinary homi- letic suggestiveness. But with other and various species of Uterature he also increasingly familiarized himself. He was an intelligent but rapid and omnivorous reader. With works on geography, history, biography, poetry, and general popular literature he was at home. With all his devoutness, unworldliness, and single-hearted re- ligious earnestness, he was no ascetic. For the sake of his influence he preached and practised "total absti- nence," but he smoked his cigar "to the glory of God." He seems to have inherited the gift of humor. He had the fun and frolic of his family and race, as well as their common sense and business thrift and enterprise. In striking contrast with the austerities of his Calvin- istic theology is his jolly humor and his racy mother wit. He always saw the humorous side of things, was an admirable story-teller, a great punster, was loaded with proverbs, and was himself a maker of wise sayings that resembled proverbs. A volume of pithy sayings might be extracted from his works, that would be as notable in their way as Mr. Beecher's. His jovial disposition and his racy humor disclose themselves in his lectures to the students of his " Pastor's College," and they are not inharmonious with the seriousness of the subjects discussed. These lectures have not infrequently a touch of coarseness, of " cock-sureness " and bumptiousness, that is unpleasant, and their judgments are often super- 390 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS ficial ; but they are well worth reading, not only for their pungent, striking, illustrative method of putting things, but for their sturdy common sense and their reaUty. During the year when he was usher at Newmarket, after having united with the Baptist church and before he was sixteen years old, he began to preach. Children and adults in the rural districts about Cambridge, gath- ered in schoolhouses, constituted his first audiences. His success was such that, at the age of seventeen, he was chosen pastor of a small Baptist church at Waterbeach, not far from Cambridge. During this pastorate of al- most two years the membership of his church doubled, every monthly communion service witnessing accessions to it. At that time the New Park Street Baptist church of London, an old church with an interesting history and a succession of able and learned men as pastors, was in search of a minister. His general reputation, rapidly won, for success in pulpit and pastorate, and particularly a Sunday-school address delivered by him at Cambridge, resulted in drawing the attention of the officers of this church to him, and in January of 1854, before he was yet twenty years old, he became its pastor. It was in a depleted condition numerically and financially, and seemed a forlorn hope. But the audi- torium was soon crowded, and hundreds who had de- serted the church returned. He preached almost daily, and he was in demand elsewhere in and about London, especially in connection with philanthropic and mission- ary movements. His sermons were always Biblical, but were such under close Calvinistic limitations, not to say fetters. He spoke in a free, simple, pithy, colloquial manner, as was always his wont, and the unconventional BUILDING OF THE EVANGELIST 391 Straightforwardness and reality of his speech were tell- ing. His early structural method he subsequently char- acterized as one of "glorious confusion." It is not clear that the old Puritan preachers were doing much for him at this time, else he would have known the inglorious- ness of such homiletic confusion. But he had the good sense to correct it, although his method always suggests the homiletic knack. " Now," he says, " I have a shelf in my head for everything, and whatever I read or hear, I know where to stow it away for use at the proper time." This idea of a " shelf " for his knowledge is not badly descriptive. It is perhaps more accurate than he realized. It suggests a storehouse, a well-arranged magazine of information. It was an orderly but some- what external and formal method. The sermon lacks organic development. Thoughts are taken down as from a shelf and placed in juxtaposition. It is the work of a fertile but untrained mind. His sermons in the early years are full of illustrations wrought up from his reading in a somewhat formal and pedantic manner. But he constantly developed in intellectual sobriety. / His preaching was always concrete and illustrative, but increasingly weighty in substance and fruitful in sug- gestion. He observed the thought, appropriated the method, as he caught the style, of the old Puritan preachers. In fact, it was the English Bible and the old Puritan writers and preachers, brought into contact with a fertile and ingeniously suggestive mind, that shaped his preaching. From the first year of his Lon- don ministry his sermons were pubHshed, have been gathered into nearly forty volumes, have gone wherever the English language is spoken, and many have been 392 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS translated into foreign tongues. Crude in thought and rough instruments of power they are, and will not live. But in their earnestness, their reality, their pith and pungency, they are doing well their short-lived work. Accomplished German writers on homiletics speak in high praise of them. The Christian world has rarely witnessed such an instance of homiletic productiveness. During the first enlargement of his church building in 1854, when he was only twenty years old, he preached in Exeter Hall and was the sensation of the hour. This may seem to illustrate what the Netherlanders, Spur- geon's ancestors, regarded as the volatile character of the English people in Queen Elizabeth's age, a quality that is not commonly attributed to them. But it more conclusively illustrates the genuine power of the young preacher. His church building was many times en- larged, till the Tabernacle stood as the monument of his genius as a preacher, and the church that had grown to large proportions was in all ways one of the most pros- perous in England. Here for a long succession of years, not only the common people, but people of education and intelligence and culture, were among his interested and profited listeners. Prominent preachers of the Anglican church regarded him as the greatest of all the preachers of nonconformity. Mr. Gladstone knew good preaching, and he had a high estimate of Mr. Spurgeon, being seen not infrequently as an interested listener at the Tabernacle. John Ruskin knew good English, and he highly estimated him as a master of idiomatic English style, and for several years he held a sitting in his church. American preachers, like the late Professor Park, himself a great preacher, but of a very BUILDING OF THE EVANGELIST 393 different school, listened to him with great admiration and profound emotion. He visited Scotland many times and the enthusiasm awakened by his preaching is said to have more than matched the enthusiasm with which their own Chalmers had stirred the sober-minded Scotch. Even from conservative and highly respectable Oxford came the testimony that there were " few of the immense audiences that were privileged to listen to him that were not astonished and delighted at the wonderful power and ability with which he was so highly gifted." These campaigns of oratorical conquest inclined him at one time to the folly of abandoning his church and of entering upon the career of a professional itinerant evangelist, from which he was saved by the great wisdom of his people in securing for him an audience room commen- surate with his needs. Everything seemed tributary to his success as a preacher, — not less the sneers, in his early ministry, of the so-called cultivated classes and the opposition of ecclesiastical enemies, than the favor ,of the common people and the laudation of friends, — till at last his hold upon the English people of ail classes and ecclesiastical connections became thoroughly fixed, so that he was taken as a matter of course, and became a recognized moral and religious force to be reckoned with by all intelligent people. The world knows the story of his career, and it knows fairly well the agencies, processes, and personal quali- ties by which he won the confidence even of those who at first sneered at him, and by which his influence was constantly enlarged, ' His success was not an accident, nor a mistake. It was not simply the sincerity of his faith in what he preached, and the strength of his con- 394 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS viction, not his religious devotion, his genuine good nature, his mother wit, his tact in dealing with men, his fertility of suggestion, his productive imagination, his great power of acquisition and retention, his pathos and humor. We must also consider his great tenacity of purpose in grappling with hard work. Few men have combined his genius for preaching and for administra- tion. And his career illustrates significantly the value of pulpit power in the administration of large parochial and philanthropic enterprises. Other preachers have had the full measure of his power in reaching large masses of the people from the pulpit, but few have ever had anything like his early success, and but few his measure of success in multiplying the sources of benefi- cent influence in the work of philanthropy. And as he multiplied the agencies of personal power, he himself also developed in weight and sobriety of thought, meas- urably outgrew the defects of his early training, and counter-worked by his practical common sense the crude- ness of his theology. His sympathies also constantly enlarged, notwithstanding his limited theological horizon, and his style, always picturesquely illustrative, increased in dignity and strength. He contributed nothing to the - thought of the church. But as the watcher and winner „. of souls he has touched powerfully the life of the church. He will live, not in the theology he preached, but in the lives he has lifted and in the institutions he has founded and fostered. THE PURITAN PASTORAL EVANGELIST 395 II THE PREACHING OF THE PURITAN PASTORAL EVANGELIST Mr. Spurgeon was distinctively an evangelistic preacher. And it is as the representative of the popular effectiveness of this school of preachers that he has been selected for our consideration. His pastoral preaching indeed aims to instruct and edify in Christian knowledge and virtue, but, on the whole, it is better adapted to the work of stirring men to evangehstic and philanthropic effort. He speaks, indeed, in a way to the mind, for he is one of the clearest of preachers. But what he says passes straight and swift through the mind into feehng, conviction, and action, and it is his aim so to present the truth as to win faith in and allegiance to Christ. He was somewhat polemical in his preaching, especially in the early period. But there is no perma- nently valuable apologetic quality about it. He deals with the doctrines of grace according to the Calvinistic type, but they are adjusted to evangelistic impression, and he is in no adequate sense a doctrinal preacher. One would find himself misled if he were to rely upon him for a reasonable and discriminating statement of the most important Christian doctrines, and if he were of an independent, critical mind, he would be seriously disap- pointed. His statements of doctrine make more im- pression upon the imagination than upon the critical judgment. He handles a great amount of Biblical truth and in a very effective way. But in the largest and best sense he is not an expository preacher as Robertson is. 396 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS . He deals with Scripture in such way that it catches the fancy, stirs an emotional interest, and doubtless secures ' practical results, but he conveys to the mind no clear and connected knowledge of Biblical truth. He deals with the ethical aspects of truth, and lays its moral demands forcefully upon the conscience, but he gives the critical hearer no adequate conception of the basis of moral obligation, no adequate Christian conception of the nature of moral law, no adequate vision of the highest good, no adequately discriminated statement as to what is distinctive in Christian duty, nor does he deal very largely with the different forms or spheres of Christian virtue. Like all evangelistic preachers, he deals mostly with the cardinal doctrines of grace and with the cardinal Christian virtues of faith and love ; but those virtues that grow out of this soil in multitudinous Christian forms, as conditioned by the various relations of life, and are realized in the development of Christian character, he rarely touches. He cannot be called, therefore, in any adequate sense, an ethical preacher. He deals abundantly with Bibhcal biography and history, but it is all in the evangelistic interest and according to the evangelistic method. But his power as an evange- '' listic preacher cannot be doubted. Premising, then, that Spurgeon must be estimated as such, and will stand the test of no other estimate, let us look at a few of the more prominent elements of his power, Which may be helpful, noting incidentally such defects as may prove admonitory. , I. Beginning with what is most exterior, but with what /has also a vital root, Mr, Spurgeon demonstrates the ■ power of naturalness in the work of the preacher. It is THE PURITAN PASTORAL EVANGELIST 397 the prevailing opinion among Englishmen that his suc- cess was in no small measure due to the perfect simplicity, reality, straightforward directness, and unconventionality of his pulpit method. All this is contrasted with the conventional type of preaching that prevails in the Es- tablished church. This, of course, is only one phase of the question, and there is much that hes behind it and gives accent to it, but it is an important consideration. Preaching tends to become conventional, and the new man with a genius for preaching is needed to lead the way in a more spontaneous and natural method. Spur- geon is just such a man. But, although distinctly a man' of homiletic genius, he is also a product of methods that prevail in the Free churches of England, and which are in strong contrast with those that prevail in the Estab- lished church. Anglican preaching, especially at the time ' when Mr. Spurgeon appeared, was of such sort as to render the success of such a man easily possible. There is not much evangelistic preaching in the proper sense in the Anglican church, which in influence overshadows all other churches. Its preaching is ecclesiastical and lacks freshness and vitality. In Spurgeon's early days it lacked in rhetorical and oratorical power of a genuine sort, and was dull, monotonous, and conven- tional. If in the evangelical branch the preacher han- dled the truth with more power of emotion and senti- ment, this seemingly had degenerated largely into feeble sentimentality. In the Free churches men have learned their art by practising it in a simple, straightforward manner. In this way the talent for evangelistic preaching is culti- vated in a most notable manner. The Establishment 398 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS does not produce this type of preachers to any consid- erable extent. Men cannot preach before they take orders, and Spurgeon had been preaching for several years before the age at which the AngHcan churchman is permitted to take orders. Robertson belonged to the Establishment, but he was more than an Anghcan prod- uct, and his power was not that of the evangelistic preacher. But for the Anglican church, such a man as Spurgeon would be an impossibility. Prophetic gifts, even when developed within the Hmits of its own ecclesi- asticism, as in revolutionary periods has been the case, have been discredited. The career of the Wesleys and of Whitefield are proof. Doubtless there is better soil and atmosphere for these gifts than formerly. But in Spurgeon's early days they were unproductive. It is the freedom of the dissenting churches that makes Mr. Spurgeon possible. Here men begin early and find themselves by grappling vigorously with the obstacles of their calling. In the case of the commonplace man, the result is, doubtless, often bad enough. Mediocrity and cant have free range. But in the case of a man of great native homiletic gifts, the result could not fail to be the development of great preaching power. With better training Mr. Spurgeon might have been bettered as a preacher. But the training independently of the actual work of preaching never could have accomplished the desired result. At the time Mr. Spurgeon appeared, there were a few conspicuous preachers in the Free churches, but the average of excellence was not high. It was, on the whole, easier for a man of mark to secure a place of eminence in these churches than it would have been later on, or than it would have been in this coun- THE PURITAN PASTORAL EVANGELIST 399 try. Accordingly the success of Mr. Spurgeon, with his supremely evangelistic spirit, especially with his fresh gifts of speech, is the more easily explained. Possibly he might not have secured in this country, that has pro- duced such a preacher as Henry Ward Beecher, so emi- nent a position. But be that as it may, he had the right environment, he had an easy field, and the requisite en- dowments, and the gifts of grace that are essential to the great evangeHstic preacher. Such a man was needed, and he was sent as a leader in this type of preaching in which his influence has been great and wide-reaching. As already intimated, unlike some great preachers of this school, he was not much indebted to his physi- cal equipment. It was not, like that of Guthrie, a com- manding presence. He was neither tall, nor comely, nor particularly graceful. In facial expression he was somewhat dull and unattractive. He was thick set, and there was about him a suggestion of physical grossness. He bore an expression of unfailing good nature, but the countenance was not suggestive of eminent intellectual or spiritual qualities. His dress was unprofessional, ap- propriate to the character, the tastes, and environment of the man. He had a hearty and wholesome con- tempt of ministerial pomposity and of ecclesiastical millinery. His movements were not wholly graceful, like those of Guthrie. His voice, however, was exceed- ingly clear and distinct, had great compass, and was capable of expressing great varieties of feehng. It expressed the qualities of tenderness, severity, stateli- ness, and strength with great effectiveness. It had hardly the richness of Beecher's voice, or the clarion quaUty of Whitefield's, as it is reported to us. With 400 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS the exception of the voice, there was in Spurgeon very little that was impressive. Naturalness, however, spon- taneous freedom, and simple straightforwardness were very marked. He was easy and self-possessed, and there was about him an air of moral sobriety and seriousness. He had no pulpit mannerisms. He stood erect, or, when reaching after his audience, bent over the desk in a wholly natural and not altogether ungraceful man- ner, and there was no appearance of conscious effort. He stood there in perfect simplicity and talked in a free, familiar, conversational manner, as if he were in- tent upon taking his audience into his confidence. It has been suggested that his preaching in this regard must have resembled that of our Lord. And there is ground for the suggestion, for the one word used by the evangelists in characterization of the preaching of Christ is the word "talk." He spoke to the people as one talking in a simple, colloquial manner, without ora- torical effort. Even in his oratorical flights, Spurgeon never lost his naturalness. There was nothing of the intensity and businesslike aggressiveness of Mr. Moody. One questions for the moment whether the very limita- tions of his learning and the meagreness of his intel- lectual training may not have been tributary to this quality of naturalness. One is even puzzled transiently with the question whether in such bliss of ignorance, in which simplicity and spontaneity and freedom reign supreme, it were not " folly to be wise." Did not Mr. Spurgeon know himself better than any of his friends knew him, when he resolved not to go to college and chose to learn what he might only in his own con- scious calling as a preacher .'' But after all such THE PURITAN PASTORAL EVANGELIST 40 1 doubts lose sight of the fact that Mr. Spurgeon was a man of extraordinary native preaching gifts, and that these gifts simply triumphed measurably over his de- fects of education and culture. If genius can thus triumph over defects, it certainly can triumph over the supposed tendency of a larger knowledge and closer training to repress the native forces, or to "freeze the genial currents of the soul." If he was powerful in what we may regard as his relative ignorance and un- discipline, he would have been far more powerful in the right sort with better instruments at his command, and his influence might have been much more permanent. Education of the right sort can never hamper genius. Its natural and legitimate result should be to emanci- pate it from its limitations and deterrents. But one of the great lessons which Spurgeon's success as a preacher teaches is that nothing should be permitted to repress the freedom of the preacher. A Hterary or theological or homiletical training that should hamper a man, or in any sort or measure check the free expression of his ener- gies, would be a curse. The problem for every preacher is how to train himself effectively in lines in which he can work most freely. Spurgeon thoroughly solved that problem in his early life. It does not take a man of homiletic genius like him very long to find out what he can do best and how best he can do it. Spurgeon attempted to do only what he could do naturally and with freedom. A man without his gifts may be longer in getting at the secret of his strength. But it will at last be discovered or the man will work as a slave. 2. Spurgeon's consciousness of vocation is an element ,' of power in his evangelistic preaching that may well be 402 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS noted. He always disclosed and frequently asserted, especially in his early ministry, the consciousness of a divine call to do just the work he was doing. The failure of his ministry, in so far as he found failure in it, and in that of other men, he attributed to a lack or loss of assurance that God was behind them and was work- ing through them. " I am as much called," he says, " to preach the gospel as Paul was," and who can doubt it ? In presenting the claims of the gospel, in appealing ; to men to accept the service of Christ, it surely is of unspeakable value to the preacher to feel that he has been called and sent to do that work, to feel that a message has been committed to him, and that in proclaiming it he is indeed an ambassador of God. It must increase a man's power tenfold. All great evangelists have felt this. Mr. Spurgeon's approach to his fellow-men was that of a man who was conscious of moral authority and power, and for this reason his speech was masterful. Note his lofty treatment of men whom he regards as in rebellion against God. In one of his early sermons ^ he speaks of the invitation to the tomb of the risen Lord as being given to Christian disciples only. Then he utters a word of admonition in most confident and authoritative fashion to all profane souls, to the sordid, the carnal, and the frivolous, and bids them away from the tomb. It is all done in such rhetorical fashion as not to offend seriously, but in the very venture there is clear trace of the consciousness of authority to deal with sinners as an ambassador of God. It must be acknowledged that it is done in a very impressive manner. In speaking to this class he always i"The Tomb of Jesus," " Spurgeon the Modern Whitefield," No. XL THE PURITAN PASTORAL EVANGELIST 403 manifests the same boldness and faithfulness. He talks straight at men and is not afraid to probe their consciences. To those who leave their own congrega- tions to hear him as the latest sensation, he utters the boldest and severest rebuke. There was great power in this clear, direct, bold appeal. Of course the man who does this successfully must have the ear of the people, and must understand his ground. But surely there will be no very successful evangelistic preaching which is not in the right way and at the right time direct, searching, bold, and uncompromising, striking at the centre and deahng with sin as it should be dealt AVith. 3. As involved in the consciousness of vocation, the positiveness of Spurgeon's preaching is another element of power in his evangelism. Needed everywhere in our day in active Christian life, a positive faith is supremely necessary in the pulpit, and above all in suc- cessful evangelistic preaching. Spurgeon's positiveness disclosed itself in various ways, but preeminently in his apparent absolute freedom from theological doubt. To doubt the truth of the Roman Catholic faith, New- man regarded as a sin. Not the less sinful would Spur- geon regard any doubt of the truth of Calvinism. Is it not found in God's Book .'' And who shall doubt what God has said without sinning .'' He apparently had not the slightest doubt that Calvinism was identical with Christianity. He had not thoroughly mastered the Cal- vinistic system, and never apprehended its difficulties. But he knew its prominent features. He took hold of individual truths that appear in Calvinistic dress, and he made practical use of them, in doing which he was con- 404 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS fessedly skilful and forceful. He believed with all his might. Sometimes, indeed, his positiveness lapses into discourtesy and even into a species of amiable impudence. He undertook sometimes to demolish unbelief in sledge- hammer fashion, as if it might be put down by the force of his personal will. He criticised his ministerial breth- ren who were many of them his peers in piety, and his superiors in learning and in intellectual discrimination. He wasted a good deal of energy in his early days in undertaking to set the minisj:erial world right. In later years, however, he saw his error, and became more courteous and more catholic in his spirit. He thoroughly dishked Arminianism and pitied Arminians. He was perfectly sure, and he was perfectly honest in his conviction, that what he called the " Down Grade Movement" was due to the abandonment by the churches of the Calvinistic doctrines of grace. Scepticism with respect to the old doctrine of a substitutionary atone- ment, the inerrancy of the Scriptures, future eternal punishment, and other doctrines, was surely the result of abandoning the positive teachings of the church creeds, even with respect to less important matters. All this had resulted, he was convinced, in a great decline in the spiritual life of the church. He accordingly with- drew from the Baptist Union and organized a new con- ference, whose basis was to be allegiance to the doctrines of grace as interpreted by Calvinism, the doctrine of immersion, and the mission of the ministry to win souls. 'He was extreme in his theological positions. He denied that there was any adequate power in Christian experi- ence to test the truth, and adhered to the doctrine of an infallible Bible. Man once had the power to discover THE PURITAN PASTORAL EVANGELIST 405 the truth ; but he believed, as Newman did, that it had been lost, and now we must all rest upon the external Word of God. The doctrine of eternal punishment must be accepted, despite its difficulties, because it is found m the Bible. His conception of prayer was substan- tially that m it we go to God for what we need and want, expecting that we shall always get it. It is go- ing to the bank with a check, which God will honor promptly. There is, therefore, no need of loafing about the bank. Present your check, get what it calls for and leave. He held extreme and unreasonable views of divme mtervention in the support of the philanthropic institutions which he had established. There are two ways and only two - there can be no third that is suc- cessful. One is the method of implicit rehance upon God ; the other is reliance upon men. There is no mid- dle course. To rely partly upon God and partly upon men is always unsuccessful. He sometimes attacked errors of which he knew but little, but with all the assur- ance of infallibility. All this was a weakness which he partially recognized in later years. But. after all, it was the defect of a strong quality. The positiveness and the strength of the faith behind was a condition of power It is better to be intelligently positive, positive in knowl- edge and yet in charity, positive in a few things and not chensh the foible of omniscience. But infinitely better be positive even in ignorance and mistake than double- mmded and vacillating. No pulpit can be a place of power unless there be strong positive faith and convic- tion there. If Spurgeon's positiveness leads him some- times to magnify himself, if there is a certain naivete in his occasional references to himself in the pulpit, it is 406 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS only a part of the strength of his individuahty, and he made this innocent self-consciousness tributary to his power as a preacher. For people are interested in what centres in so notable a personality. His positiveness and force of individuality, which was somewhat rude by reason of his defective training and culture, led him sometimes almost into irreverence. Some of his prayers in the early part of his ministry were well-nigh shock- ing. He doubtless intended to shock the commonplace respectability of the formal religionists about him. His familiarity with the quaint old Puritan divines encour- aged him in this, for he at first followed what is bad as well as what is good in them. He was sometimes as rude and sensational as Rowland Hill, with the difference that he lived in the latter half of the nineteenth rather than of the eighteenth century. He was an inveterate punster arid carried the punning habit into the pulpit, which may have been tolerable, if at all, only in view of his manifestly sincere desire to reach and benefit his fellow-men, and in view of his youth and immaturity and consequent failure to take fully into account the dig- nity that is demanded of the Christian preacher. It may seem unfair to dwell upon these early defects. But the sole object in so doing is to indicate that they are a manifestation in rude form of the positiveness, the individuality, and the force of his character, to accen- tuate the fact that the success of his career was despite rather than because of these defects, and that the mani- fest earnestness and sincerity of the man carried them. These faults he measurably overcame in his later min- istry. And it must be acknowledged that the courage, the directness, the plainness, with which he sought to THE PURITAN PASTORAL EVANGELIST 407 impress the claims of the gospel upon men, his power- ful denunciations of sin, his faithful warnings against its ruin, his complete emancipation from the fear of man, his refusal to be brought into bondage to any man or class of men, the prophetic freedom with which he pro- claimed all that his convictions cherished as true — it must be acknowledged that all this is most admirable, and that it is in large measure the secret of his influence over men. 4. The value for effective evangelistic preaching of a working knowledge of the Bible is copiously illustrated by Mr. Spurgeon. It cannot be said that he had any- thing more than a superficial knowledge of it as a liter- ary product. Of Biblical criticism he knew nothing adequately, and he was an unreliable expositor. In fact, he was not in any proper sense an expository preacher. He never dealt with the Bible in such way as to convey to the mind, as Robertson did, a clear and connected knowledge of Biblical truth. He uses the Bible in such way as will catch the fancy, stir the emo- tions, and secure practical results. Incentive and edifi- cation, as he would understand it, was his aim. He had much skill in getting Biblical truth into working use. His exegesis is often grotesque. But he is ingenious in his use of BibHcal material. He illustrates the value of a generous use of the imagination in deducing fruit- ful thought from the Scriptures. He was master of the old Puritan method of Biblical suggestion. It is a relic of, but an improvement upon, the old allegorical method. He develops his subject textually for the most part, and the evangelistic aim is apparent throughout. As an illustration, take his treatment of John iii. 16. It is the 408 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS Biblical and evangelistic method of getting his thought before his hearers. " I want to make you see how great that love is by five different particulars." And this is the textual outline of the sermon whose title and theme are "The Immeasurable Love": i. By observing first the gift (" He gave ") ; a. what, b. how, c. when. 2. The plan of salvation (" whosoever believeth, etc."); a. mental assent to the doctrine of substitution, b. personal acceptance of it, c. personal trust in a personal Saviour as such substitute. 3. Those for whom this salvation is provided ("whosoever beheveth "). 4. Deliverance, the negative result (" shall not perish "). 5. The posi- tive result (" shall have eternal life"). One will hardly fail to see what a great variety of truths are embraced within the limits of the one com- plex truth of the text, and one must also be impressed with the possibiHties of the textual method of preaching. But the critical hearer or reader will note the difference between the BibUcal suggestiveness of practical use and the theology that is imported from without into it, as illustrated by his attempt to expound the doctrine of faith and of the atonement. " Faith is a firm and cor- dial assent to the truth that God did send his Son . . . to stand in the room and stead of guilty men ... so that he bore the punishment due to our transgressions." It is not only a mental assent to the truth of substitu- tion, but a " personal acceptance " of it. It is primarily mental acceptance of a certain truth. Elsewhere, how- ever, he seems to have in mind the fact rather than the truth of the atonement. Still, as he conceives it, the atonement is the fact of substitution. By personal transgression one appropriates Adam's sin and makes THE PURITAN PASTORAL EVANGELIST 409 it his own. By faith, as above conceived, one appro- priates Christ's righteousness and his atonement and f makes them his own. Punished for appropriating the sin of another, saved by appropriating the righteousness and the satisfaction of another. All this is an importa- tion of technical theology into a simple textual develop- ment, and the success of the sermon is not at all dependent upon the conceptions involved. The confu- sion of thought, too, is not the result of simple Biblical exposition, but of a theological importation. The appro- priation of a truth is confounded with personal accept- ance of a fact. And the appropriation of Christ's righteousness is confounded with the appropriation of his atonement. Stress is laid upon mental assent, which is not a Biblical conception. This, also, is a theological importation. Now, all this for purposes of correct theological think- ing is not valuable. For discriminating and sceptical minds it might be positively mischievous. But to the undiscriminating mind he succeeds in conveying, even by his confused and contradictory imported theological form, an important working truth, and the critical but friendly mind will read behind his form of statement an inner truth of salvation. And so it is in general with his preaching. The success of the sermon does not depend on the hearer's acceptance of the preacher's theological statements, which are imported from his Calvinistic creed. There is always a residuum of practical working truth, — truth that enters through the lower doorways of the soul and touches the heart with- out informing the mind. His felicitous use of the text is an interesting feature of his Biblical preaching. The 410 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS text is kept constantly before the mind. He has the skill of the old Puritan preachers in repeating his text, or parts of it, in a great variety of connections throughout the sermon, so as to keep it constantly before the mind, bringing it into relation with a great variety of thoughts, thus throwing new light upon it, or securing new sig- nificance for it, and making it the more impressive. It thus speaks for itself in many relations and becomes the more cogent rhetorically. One notes readily, also, that his mind is completely saturated with Biblical diction. And this gives a certain elevation to his style, with all its rugged homeliness. Biblical expressions are found on almost every page, and it is hardly worth while to linger with citations from them. But they impart, not only an element of dignity to his style, as well as clear- ness and simplicity, but of beauty as well, and often the touch of pathos. The choicest elements of beauty in his style, and for so plain a preacher they are not in- frequent, are the product of his familiarity with Biblical diction. His rhetoric has been nurtured from these sources, and by Christian hymns, and especially by the old Puritan writers. They impart a graceful, rhythmic movement to his sentences. They will be found in abundance in the sermon above referred to. Thus Biblical diction contributes not only to the plain and homely qualities of his style, especially to the Saxon element in his vocabulary, but to its rhythmic grace. And one fancies that his use of figurative language, in which the metaphor, apostrophe, and interrogation abound and which contribute to the qualities of style above mentioned, was the result, to a considerable ex- tent, of his familiarity with the language of the Bible. THE PURITAN PASTORAL EVANGELIST 411 5. Mr. Spurgeon illustrates the effectiveness of a skilful use of the ad hominem method in the handling of evangelistic truth. He appeals with a good deal' of tact to men's common observations and experiences, to their feelings, prepossessions, and interests, and to that quick perception of analogies which seems to be the gift of the popular mind. The use of striking contrast is one of the features of this ad hominem method of appeal. To endeavor to greaten the truth to the ap- prehension and in the estimate of the hearer by contrast is one of the favorite methods of evangelistic, as it is of apologetic, preachers. Mr. Moody was facile in his use of it, and in it we seem to see Spurgeon's influence. It was a favorite method of the Puritan preachers, from whom it was caught and domesticated, but modified, by Mr. Spurgeon; It is a characteristic method of many popular textual preachers like the late Dr. Joseph Parker. It was a familiar device of the Rev. William Jay, and in him it is an echo of the old Puritan voice. The Welsh preachers have a knack at it. It is easily overdone, and demands judicious handling. In fact, it is easily brought into contempt. Its suggestions may easily be specious and even false, for it is not an appeal to the higher intelligence or to the critical judgments, but to the faulty experiences, to the hasty imaginings, even to the preju- dices and emotional, and perhaps selfish, interests of men. Christian apologetics has often used this principle of contrast in a speciously ad hominem manner. It may be used, indeed, in a perfectly legitimate and very effec- tive manner; but if based on false assumptions, it be- comes shallow and irrational and inconclusive. The contrast, for example, between the assumed ignorance 412 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS and weakness of the apostles and disciples of Christ and the greatness of their achievements has often been used for the purpose of heightening our impression of the supernatural power of Christianity, and often very inconclusively. Robert Hall finds an argument for the supernatural character of the atonement in the assumed fact that it is out of all relation with ordinary human experience. The contrast between Christianity and the religions of nature, for the purpose of magnifying the former, is sometimes used inconclusively. All this has been over- worked, and we are finding a better method. The contrast between God's methods and man's methods, between what God does and what we should be likely to do, between God's estimates and human estimates, is an expository method in very common use in the pulpit. We find it in Mr. Spurgeon's sermon on "The Im- measurable Love." These are the contrasts: The gift was God's Son. We have no such son to give. No man could save his own life by giving up his own son, but God saves us by giving up His Son's life. He gave His Son to exile and hardship, not as we might do in sending our children into missionary life to end it gloriously. When God gave is contrasted with our giving. He gave from eternity, hence is constantly giving. Not as we give — suddenly and spasmodically. The value of this method judiciously and skilfully used is evident. Its defects, too, are obvious. The example just cited from Spurgeon is in general unobjectionable and is fairly effective, although not very weighty. But we sometimes find examples that are objectionable because shallow and specious. For instance, his argument for the per- THE PURITAN PASTORAL EVANGELIST 413 severance of saints in the sermon above cited. "Who- soever believeth shall not perish ; " well, the penitent has believed, and so become a Christian. He " shall not perish." Therefore he will not go back. If he should cease to be a believer, he would perish. But it is said that he shall not perish. Since this is so, it is clear that he will continue to believe. Again, the be- liever is a member of Christ. Christ cannot lose one of his own members. You cannot drown me by keep- ing my foot under water. You must get my head under. Thus Christ, the head, must be destroyed before the believer can perish. This is clever, but specious. It is not argument, but ad captandum appeal. But it must be acknowledged that he often handles this method with much mental and moral sobriety, and with great force and persuasiveness. He exalts com- mon sense with great success in the affairs of religion, summoning men to the use of the same faculties in rehgion that they use in everyday life. He not only interests but he instructs men by presenting what is familiar to them, by illustrating what is obscure in the use of what is common and well known. He heightens the significance of the truth by showing it, not only in its resemblances, but in its contrasts. 6. The power of pathos in the proclamation of the gospel is well illustrated by Mr. Spurgeon. He was not the master of pathos perhaps to the extent that Dr. Thomas Guthrie was. After hearing him preach, Guthrie expressed the opinion that Spurgeon was defi- cient in pathos. But this must be regarded as an in- adequate estimate. He did not affect pathos in his preaching to the extent that Guthrie did. He espe- 414 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS daily did not lay such stress upon it, and it may be questioned if his use of it be not much more simple and spontaneous. He drew to a considerable extent from pathetic texts, and even in his handling of ordinary texts he can readily find the pathos that lies in their suggestiveness, thus disclosing the power of Biblical truths to evoke pathetic expression. His knowledge of the familiar scenes of common life, of what lies near- est the average human heart, his famiharity with scenes of suffering and sorrow and sin, which cultivated a nat- urally tender heart, all this, in connection with his lack of training in abstract thought and facility in concrete expression, favored the culture of pathos and inclined him to seek for and to make use of the material of pathos, which is so abundant in the Scriptures. A heart that is truly human, that loves what touches the nature that is common to us all and makes us kin, that knows the sin and shares the sorrows of men, that has felt the love of Christ, that is familiar with Biblical literature and with the poetry of the church and with the lives of God's saints, — these are for the preacher some of the sources of pathos. He who would be an effective evangehstic preacher will get far out and far down into real life, far into the sins and sufferings of men, will know the human heart, and above all the heart of Christ as disclosed in His life of condescension and sacrifice. Some of Spurgeon's early sermons are especially in- teresting, not only in their homiletic ingenuity, but in their pathos. The sermon on the tomb of Jesus, above referred to, from the text, " Come, see the place where the Lord lay," may furnish an example. The resurrec- THE PURITAN PASTORAL EVANGELIST 415 tion of Christ would not naturally suggest the possi- bilities of pathetic treatment. But in the case before us it appears abundantly. Pathos mingled with a cer- tain dramatic forcefulness abounds here. It is the textual development and is as follows : The invitation : "Come." Reasons why we should heed the invitation and come to Jesus' tomb. The reasons are naturally suggested by the scenes themselves which the tomb of the crucified furnishes. The attention arrested; "See the place where the Lord lay." If we come, what shall we see ? We shall see this and that, all sketched with true feeling and with true pathetic suggestion. Emotion excited : With what feelings should we come and what should we learn ? All this is a very simple and natural use of association for the purpose of in- teresting our feelings and moving our affections and awakening the soul's devotion to Christ. There are some rather crude things here which belong to the early period of his ministry. But the sermon is a sug- gestive and helpful one, and there is a store of comfort in it for the heart of the simple believer. Of Spurgeon's great value to the cause of Christianity and to the Christian church and to the cause of general philanthropy there can be no doubt, and especially of his value as an inspiration and in many respects even as a model for any man who would know how to preach evangelistically, and who would covet the wisdom and the grace and the unspeakable joy and priceless reward of him who wins the allegiance of men to Jesus Christ. It is preaching that strongly takes hold of the human heart, conscience, and will. If one will subordinate his 4l6 REPRESENTATIVE MODERN PREACHERS critical faculties, and permit himself to be borne along on the current of the preacher's earnest feeling and con- secrated purpose, and will hold himself in responsive attitude toward him, he will be strongly interested and impressed by it. No well-educated and well-trained man is likely to be misled by Mr. Spurgeon's defects, and it is precisely such a man that will derive most profit from him, because it will be a judicious appropria- tion of his merits. Any preacher who will analyze his product, and get at its sources of power, who will let him- self be instructed and quickened by it, who will take the best of it, in the inspiration and in the method of it, and pass it over into his own line of work, using it in such way as is agreeable with his own personal peculiarities, will not fail to become a successful evangelistic preacher, a result greatly to be desired in the interest of an effec- tive Christian pulpit in our day. Modern critical habits are not likely to permit any educated man to indulge in an extravagant homiletic use of Scripture. And for any man who is in danger of a too formal and critical and unsuggestive pulpit use of Scripture, Mr. Spurgeon may be very helpful. INDEX Allen, Prof. A. V. G., " Life and Let- ters of Phillips Brooks," 195; cited, 207, 221. Anselm, Archbishop, Bushnell on "Cur Deus Homo," 151. Apologia, Newman's, cited, 253, 262, 263, 266, 267, 274, 275, 281, 282, 286, 298. Arbirlot, parish of, Guthrie's first pas- torate, 356, 357. Aristotle, Robertson student of, 63. Aristotle's Ethics, Schleiermacher stu- dent of, II. Arnold, Dr. Thomas, 61, 259, 260 ; broad churchman, 261 ; Newman's oppo- sition to, 274; exacting classical standard, 313, 320. Augustine, St., 150, 304; polemical preaching of, 327. Barby, Moravian school at, 5, 8. Barrow, Dr. Isaac, Beecher a student of, 112, 126; an apologetic preacher, 322. Beecher, Rev. Henry Ward, compared with Schleiermacher, 42, 129; with Robertson, 98, 106; with Spurgeon, 104, 399 ; with Luther, 100 ; with Newman, 140; with Bushnell, 105, 106, III, 115, 130; with Brooks, 112, 130 ; a typical American, 99, 100, 106 ; representative American preacher, 100, loi ; individualistic quality in preaching, 101-115; address before New York and Brooklyn Association, 109,110; student of English preach- ers, 112, 126; intellectual qualities of productiveness, thoroughness, range, and catholicity, 115-136; compared with other American orators, 119; 2 E theological beliefs, 134-135; gifts of expression, "the Shakespeare of the pulpit," 136-142. Berlin, Schleiermacher's connection with, 12, 13, 14, 15, 22, 39. Berlin University, Hegel colleague of Schleiermacher at, 2 ; when and by whom established, 15. Blair, Rev. Hugh, studied and trans- lated by Schleiermacher, 11. Book of Genesis, Robertson's lectures on, 77. Books of Samuel, Robertson's lectures on, 77. Brechin, birthplace of Guthrie, 351, 352. Brighton ministry, Robertson's, 60, 70, 76, 88. Brighton, working-men of, 53, 76, 84. British Critic, Newman's editorship of, 316; Mozley's contribution to, 316. Brooks, Bishop Phillips, compared with Beecher, 196, 209 ; with Bush- nell, 196, 199, 204, 209, 226, 228, 232, 239. 24s; with Emerson, 216; with Guthrie, 202, 243; with Liddon, 209; with Lincoln, 207; with Mozley, 209, 239; with Newman, 197, 205, 209, 246; with Robertson, 197, 204, 209, 216, 222, 225, 228, 232, 238, 239; with Schleiermacher, 203, 204, 216; sermons cited, 243, 244, 246, 247; Puritan ancestry and ecclesi- astical influences, 195-196 ; broad churchman, 197-198 ; college life, interest in literature and history, 198- -199; interest in the lives of great men, Mohammed, Luther, Crom- well, and Carlyle, Harvard humani- ties, choice of ministry, 200 ; Divinity 417 4i8 INDEX School, study of literature, classical dramatists, and church Fathers, 201, 202; Philadelphia ministry and the Civil War, 202, 203; Boston minis- try, 203, 204 ; breadth of sympathy and catholicity, 205 ; symmetrical and progressive development of char- acter, 206-208 ; physical equipment, 209; intellectual characteristics, 209- 212; artistic, ethical, and spiritual qualities, 212-217 ; relation of mes- sage to theology, 217-219 ; atti- tude toward the theology of the church, 220-222; theological aspect of message, 222-236 ; Yale Lectures on Preaching, conception of the func- tion of the sermon, 236, 237 ; Chris- toiogical centre of preaching, 237, 238 ; didactic and non-evangelistic quality, 238, 239; analytic skill, 239, 240; analogical method, 240, 241, 242; inferential thought, 242, 243, 244; appeal to experience, 244, 245; qualities of style, 245-248 ; uncon- ventional character of preaching, 248-251. Bushnell, Dr. Horace, influence of Coleridge on, 64, 166, 167; pre- eminence of preaching gifts, 143 ; intellectual tendencies, 143-146; gift for theology, 146-150; defective stu- dent habits, 150-152; Puritan real- ism, 152-153; impressiveness as a preacher, 153-154 ; physical person- ality, 155-159; inherited intellectual independence, 158-161; insight and logic, 161-163 ; didactic quality, 163- 165 ; artistic gifts, 165-166 ; literary style, 167-171 ; ethical forcefulness, 171-174; vital quality of preaching, 174-176; development of religious life, 176-182; Christian quality of preaching, 182-184; non-scientific and non-technical quality of the- ology, 184-185; changed theory of religious knowledge, 186-188 ; modi- fied Christology, 188 ; " nature and the supernatural," 189 ; " vicarious sacri- fice," 189; modified views of revela- tion, 191 ; Christocentric theology, 191-192; combination of the didac- tic and ethical interest, 193-194 ; cited, 226; Dr. Henry van Dyke on, 149; President Noah Porter on, 183 ; compared with Dr. Nathaniel W.Taylor, 147; Prof. Shedd, 151; Robertson, 152, 153, 157, 165, 176, 177, 178; Beecher, 154, 156, 163, 169, 174; Brooks, 154, 163; Paley, 167; Paul, Augustine, and Luther, 183 ; pioneer Ritschlian, 187; individual sermons of, 191, 193. Butler, Bishop Joseph, on the doctrine of probability, 281, 283. Byron, Lord, Robertson's estimate of, 67 ; stands between two periods, 257. Calvinism, Beecher's attitude toward, 135, cf. 117; Bushnell's antipathy to, 159 ; influence on Newman, 286 ; of Guthrie, 354, 365, 373, 374 ; of Chal- mers, 354 ; of Spurgeon, 385, 389, 390, 403, 404, 409. Campbell, Dr. McLeod, 373. Cappadocians, the, 304. Carlyle, Thomas, 53, 64, 65, 76, 257. Chalmers, Dr. Thomas ; school of, 350 ; church extension movement, 353,359, 360; administrative ability of, 357; leader of Scottish Evangelicals, 358, 361 ; compared with Spurgeon, 393. Channing, Dr. William E., influence of on Robertson, 87. Cheltenham, Robertson's ministry at, 54, 60, 70. Christian socialists, Robertson's rela- tion to the, 53. Christlieb, Prof. Immanuel, on Beech- er, 101-104, 115. Christology, Beecher's, 103, 107, 134; Bushnell's, 188. Chrysostom, St., 304, 382. Cockburn, Lord Henry, leader of Scot- tish bar, 361 ; on Guthrie, 363. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 61, 64, 187, 257, 263. Congregational churches of Connecti- cut, Bushnell's relation to, 172. INDEX 419 Congregational ministers of London, Beecher's address before, 117. Corinthian letters, Robertson on, 71, Covenanters, Guthrie's ancestors, 350. Demosthenes, Bushnell student of, 156- De Wette, Prof. Wilheim, on Schleier- macher's preaching, 32. Discourses on religion, Schleiermach- er's, Schelling on, 2; when written, 14; character of, 18, 21, 43; trans- lated, 64. Eberhard, Prof. Johann A., Schleier- macher's teacher in philosophy at Halle, 10. Edinburgh, Robertson at, 55; Guthrie pastor at " Old Gray Friars " church in, 360, 361 ; pastor of St. John's church in, 361 ; contemporaries of Guthrie at, 361. Edwards, Dr. Jonathan, Robertson a student of, 82 ; Beecher a student of the preaching of, 126. Erskine, Mr. Thomas, 373. Evangelicals, American, influence on Brooks, 197. Evangelicals, English, influence on Robertson, 57, 59, 85 ; influence on Newman, 59 ; character of the Ox- ford, 255 ; Whately's estimate of, 256. Evangelicals, Scottish, 354, 355, 358, 371. Free churches, English, compared with Anglican churches, 397, 398. Free church movement, Scottish, 367. French Revolution, a phase of political illuminism, 8 ; Schleiermacher's in- terest in, 13. Froude, Hurrell, relation to Newman, 276, 286. Gladstone, Hon. William E., on New- man, 255, 289, 308 ; "Vatican and Civil Allegiance," 326 ; on Spurgeon, 392. Goethe, poet, 2, 6, 8, 12, 257. " Grammar of Assent," N ewman's, con- tains his theory of religious knowl- edge, 282. Guthrie, Dr. Thomas, representative of the school of Chalmers on the prac- tical rather than the intellectual side, 350 ; ancestry and education, 350- 354 ; theological studies, 354-355 : scientific studies, 355-356; business life, waiting for a parish, 357; first parish, 356, 357, 358 ; " anti-patron- age" and "voluntary" controversy, 358, 359; Chalmers's "church ex- tension" movement, 359, 360; trans- fer to Edinburgh, pastorate at " Old Gray Friars" and St. John's, 360, 361 ; stimulating influences of Edin- burgh life, 361 ; withdrawal from the pastorate and editorship of Sunday Magazine, 362; physical and intel- lectual qualities, 363-365 ; ethical and rhetorical qualities, 365, 366; preaching as related to pastoral and philanthropic work, 367-371 ; com- pared with Spurgeon, 369 ; " The City, its Sins and Sorrows," illustra- tion of pastoral life, 369 ; preaching as to its material and formal aspects, 371-377 ; Biblical preaching illus- trated by "The Gospel in Ezekiel," "Christ and the Inheritance of the Saints," and "Parables," 372; Cal- vinistic theology, 373, 374; homiletic freedom, 375-377 ; sermon cited, 376 ; dramatic power, 377-382 ; French- man's opinion of, 377; compared with Chrysostom and Beecher, 382. Hall, Dr. Robert, 44; on the atone- ment, 412. Halle University, Schleiermacher's con- nection with, 9, 10, 15, 22, 24. Hamilton, Sir WiUiam, on Guthrie, 243. 381. Hampden, Dr. R. D., Mozley's pred- ecessor at Oxford, 317. Hare brothers, broad churchmen, 61. Hegel, Prof. G. W. F., contemporary and colleague of Schleiermacher, 2; conception of religion, 17. 420 INDEX Herder, Superintendent Johann G., contemporary of Schieiermacher, 2. Humboldt, Baron von, on Schleier- macher's preaching, 37. Hutton, editor, on Newman, 262, 290. Illumination, meaning of, 7, 8; influ- ence on Schieiermacher, 11, 12, 13. Jacobi, Friedrich H., Schieiermacher student of, 14; letter of Schieier- macher to, 28. Jeffrey, Lord, leader in literature, 361 ; parishioner of Guthrie, 381. Kant, Prof. Immanuel, promoter of the Illumination, 7, 8; Schieiermacher a student of, 10, 11, 14? Schlegel and, 263. Kantian philosophy, Schleiermacher's estimate of and relation to, 10, 16, 18, 22; philosophical works translated, 64. Keble, Rev. John, high churchman, 58 ; " Christian Year," 258 ; symbolic significance of the material world, 258; on probability, 283; friend of Mozley, 314. Kingsley, Rev. Charles, 61, 76; on Newman, 254, 261. Knapp, Prof. Georg C, 10. Law's " Serious Call," influence on Newman, 286. Landsberg, Schleiermacher's pastorate at, 12. Leibnitz, Gottfried W., 2. Lessing, Gotthold E., 2. Liberalism, English, Newman's esti- mate of, 259, 261, 274. " Library of the Fathers," product of the Anglican movement, 260. Liddon, Canon H. P., compared with Brooks, 209; dogmatic method of, 322, 323. Lincoln, President Abraham, Beecher as estimated by, 119; Brooks's esti- mate of, 207. London Times, estimate of Guthrie, 370, 381- Lotze, Prof. Herman Rudolph, Brooks's estimate of, 199. Liicke, Prof. Gottfried C. F., on Schieiermacher, 16, 27. Luther, Dr. Martin, contrasted with Newman, 284; Mozley on, 316; polemical preaching, 327. Magdalen College, Mozley fellow at, 315- McLeod, Dr. Norman, character of, 353; administrative ability, 357; compared with Guthrie, 365 ; pathos of, 371- Mariolatry, Newman's, 299, 300. Maurice, Prof. John Frederick D., broad churchman, 61, 261 ; Christian socialist, 76. Metaphysics, Bushnell on, 145, 279. Miller, Hugh, friendship of Guthrie with, 355, 381. Milman, Dr. Henry H., critical and historic method of, 259; Latin Christianity, 260. Milton, John, Robertson on, 53. Moderatism, Scottish, influence on Scottish churches. 353; Guthrie's antagonism to, 355; patronage party, 358. Monologues, Schleiermacher's, char- acter of, 14, 46 ; cited, 47. Moravianism, Schleiermacher's esti- mate of, 6. Moravian schools, Schleiermacher's connection with, 4, 5, 6. Mozley, Rev. T. T., his " Oxford Remi- niscences" cited, 253, 254, 25s, 256, 265, 273 ; on Newman's familiarity with sceptical literature, 280; on Newman's ignorance of men, 300; on J. B. Mozley, 310. Mozley, Canon James B., compared with Robertson, 80, 316, 326; with Newman, 310, 311 ; Newman's in- fluence on, 311, 312; London Spec- tator on, 310, 331 ; characteristics of, 310-313 ; compared with Liddon, INDEX 421 312; Arnold and, 313; student life at Oxford, 314-316; edits Christian Remembrancer , 316 ; essays, 316, 317 ; Old Shoreham parish, 316; paro- chial sermons, 317; professor of divinity and canon of Christ church at Oxford, 317; lectures, 317; com- •pared with Bishop Butler, 318, 319; characteristics as apologetic preach- er, 321-331 ; compared with other English apologetic preachers, 322- 323, 327; apologetic methods of uni- versity sermons, 324, 325 ; charac- teristics as ethical preacher, 331- 344; sermons cited, 324-326, 333, 334 ; analysis of" Reversal of Human Judgment," 334-336; Dr. William M. Taylor on " Reversal of Human Judgment," 334; view of life, 336- 344 ; Froebel compared with, 341 ; artistic aspects of preaching, 344- 349- " Nature and the Supernatural," Bush- nell, 189. Neander, Prof. Johann A. W,, estimate of Schleiermacher, 2. Newman, Francis, estimate of John Henry, 254, 261, 265, 276, 278, 299. Newman, Cardinal John Henry, rela- tion to the Anglican movement, 252 ; religious, literary, historical, and phil- osophical basis of the Anglican move- ment, 253-264; influence of Scott and Romaine on, 255; influences that led to Roman church, 265-287; compared with Brooks, 265, 266; sermons compared with those of Robertson, Bushnell, and Brooks, 290; sermons cited, 270, 271, 272; defence of hereditary privilege, 273 ; scepticism of, 281-283; "Sermons on Subjects of the Day," 287, 289; " Parochial and Plain Sermons," 289 ; "Occasional Sermons," 289; "Dis- courses to Mixed Congregations," 289; unworldliness and asceticism, 291-295 ; " Parting of Friends " cited, 291; exaltation of faith, 295-300; sermons cited, 296, 298 ; insight into the human soul, 300, 301 ; doctrinal subject-matter of his preaching, 301, 302, 303 ; scriptural and ecclesiastical citations, 303 ; rhetorical forcefulness of his positive message, 304 ; direct- ness, fulness, freedom, and cumula- tive energy of his method, 304, 305 ; literary style, 306, 307 ; sermons cited, 306, 307; pulpit manner, 307, 308; Gladstone's estimate of his preach- ing, 308. New Testament, Schleiermacher's atti- tude toward, 30. Novalis, 2, 257. Old Testament, Schleiermacher's atti- tude toward, 31 ; Robertson's preach- ing from, 70. Oriel School, Oxford, 61, 256, 259. Oxford movement, 252, 256, 257, 258, 259, 264, 273, 300, 316. Oxford University, Robertson at, 59, 63 ; Newman at, 255, 280 ; Mozley at, 314, 317.318. Park, ProfL Edwards A., on Spurgeon, 392. " Pastor's College," Spurgeon's, 389. Pfleiderer, Prof. Otto, on Schleier- macher, 21, 27. Philosophy, Bushnell's estimate of, 145. Plato, Robertson a student of, 63. Plato's Works, translated by Schlei- ermacher, II, 39. Porter, President Noah, on Bushnell, 183. Puritan, ancestry of Beecher, 99; ancestry of Bushnell, 152; ancestry of Brooks, 195, 196; qualities of Bushnell, 153, 165; qualities of Brooks, 210. Pusey, Dr. Edward B., relation to Ox- ford Movement, 254, 314 ; theological teacher with Newman, 315. Rationalism, Schleiermacher's relation to, 7. " Reversal of Human Judgment," 422 INDEX Mozley's sermon on the, 333, 334, 343- Richter, Jean Paul F., 2, 257. Ritschlianism, anticipated by Bushnell, 187. Robertson, Rev. Frederick W., on the Sacraments, 28 ; compared with Schleiermacher, 49; with Carlyle, 53, 94; with Milton, 53; with New- man, 59; with Augustine, 72; with Brooks, 75, 77; with Mozley, 80; with Bushnell, 86; English qualities, 50- 54; early home life, 54-56; Evan- gelical influences, 57 ; influences from the Anglican church, 57-62; change in philosophic basis, 63; in- fluence of Coleridge, 64, 65 ; literary influences, 66-69; Biblical quality of preaching, 69-79; edifying qual- ity, 79-84; religious experiences as related to preaching, 84-87; quali- ties of personality as related to preaching, 87-92 ; sermons cited, 91 ; rhetorical qualities, 92-97 ; too sub- jective life, 97. Romanticism, German, characteristics of, 12, 18 ; Schleiermacher's relation to, 13, 14, 17. 257. Rothe, Prof. Richard, on Augustine, 72. Ruskin, John, on Spurgeon, 392. St. Mary's Church, Oxford, Newman at, 59, 268, 271 ; resigns, 287, 291. Saurin, Rev. James, homiletic method of, 127. Schelling, Prof. Friedrich W. J., Schlei- ermacher contemporary of, 2; stu- dent of, 14. Schiller, poet, contemporary of Schlei- ermacher, 2; Schleiermacher's esti- mate of, 6. Schlegel, Friedrich von, 2, 12, 67, 263. Schleiermacher, Prof. Friedrich D. E., ancestry and home, 4; Moravian nurture, 4-7 ; at Halle University, 9- II ; licensure and early ministry, 11- 12; influence of Romanticism on, 12-14 1 teacher and preacher at Halle University, 15 ; life in Berlin as teacher, preacher, church leader, and patriot, 15-16; conception of reli- gion and theology, 16-22; theory of preaching, 24-28; subject-matter of preaching, 28-33; aim in preach- ing, 33-36; tone of preaching, 36- 39 ; formal aspects of preaching, 39- 44; type of preaching, 44-48; com- pared with Beecher, Bushnell, Brooks, and Robertson, 42, 45. Schlobitten, Schleiermacher's tutor- ship at, II, 40. Scott, Sir Walter, influence on Robert- son, 68; influence on Guthrie, 353. Semler, Prof. Johann S., 10. Shelley, poet, Robertson on, 51, 67. Sorbonne, the, Guthrie at, 356. South, Dr. Robert, 126, 322,327. Spencer, Herbert, influence on Beecher, 103. Spinoza, Baruch de, influence on Schleiermacher, 14, 17, 28. Spurgeon, Rev. Charles H., product of English dissent, 383 ; early ministerial success, 384; Dutch-Quaker ances- try and Puritan culture, 384-387; resemblance to Macaulay, 384 ; early familiarity with Bunyan, Baxter, and English Bible, 386 ; transfer to Bap- tist church, 387; independence of character, 387 ; usher at Newmarket, 387 ; refuses college education, 387- 388 ; influence of Puritan writers, 389, 391 ; compared with Beecher, 389; first pastorate, 390; called to London, 390; character of early preaching, 390-393; preaching at Exeter Hall, 392; building of taber- nacle, 392 ; reception at Oxford, 393 ; increase in vrisdom and power, 394 ; evangelistic preacher, 395-396 ; illus- trates power of naturalness, 396-401 ; compared with Moody, 400; person- ality, 399-400; consciousness of vo- cation, 401-403 ; sermons cited, 402 ; positivism and conservatism, 403- 407 ; bibliology, 403 ; " Down-Grade Movement," 404; withdraws from Baptist Union, 404; doctrine of INDEX 423 prayer, 405 ; compared with Rowland Hill, 406; working knowledge of the Bible, 407-410; sermons cited, 408; characteristics of style, 410; Anglo- Saxon quality in style, 410; "ad homtnem method," 411-413; ser- mons cited, 413-413; power of pa- thos, 413-415 ; sermons cited, 414- 415 ; value as evangelistic preacher, 415-416. Stanley, Dean Arthur P., 61. Stolpe, Schleiermacher's ministry at, 12, 14. Tauler, the mystic, Schleiermacher compared with, 46. Taylor, Dr. Nathaniel W., Bushnell's relation to, 147. Tennyson, poet, influence on Robert- son, 66, 88. Thirlwall, Bishop Connop, 259, 260. Tillotson, Archbishop John, 322. Tractarians, 61, 85. " Tracts for the Times," 253, 314. Trinity Church, Berlin, Schleiermacher pastor of, 16; Boston, Brooks pastor of, 213. Van Dyke, Dr. Henry, on Bushnell, 149. " Vicarious Sacrifice," Bushnell's, 189. War of the Rebellion, Beecher's ac- tivity in the, 99, 100, 114, 124, 125. Winchester, Robertson's ministry at, 60, 70. Whately, Archbishop Richard, leader of Oriel school, 61 ; influence on Newman, 259, 273. Wordsworth, poet, Robertson on, 51; influence on Robertson, 66. 67, 88 ; and modern literature, 257; mflu- ence on Newman, 263. Yale College, Bushnell's connection with, 177-178. Yale Lectures on Preaching, Brooks, 236. Princeton Theological Semmary-Spef 1 1012 127 2277