adjunct to public worship. It is the natu- volume Pulpit Talk,' is merely an amplifi

ral reaction of an educated and fastidious cation of two popular lectures delivered beage against the undue exaltation of the pul- fore the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution pit in other days. No modern pulpit re- -pleasant, like the writer's previous volformer has yet gone so far as George Fox ume, but slight, as might be expected from the Quaker, who proposed that sermons the circumstances. The Dean is an aushould be abolished altogether; — he, to be thority to whom men of all shades of religsure, had just then heard six preached run-ious opinion will listen with respect; a ning on a fast day in Scotland; but it is suggested that their use- or abuse should be limited. As the bell used to be rung in many parishes "to call dissenters to the sermon who would not join in the previous Common Prayer; so now it is proposed by some (and those perhaps the most honest censors of the pulpit) that some similar pause should be interposed to allow those who like prayers, but object to a divinity lecture, to go out. There does not seem to be any real objection to such an arrangement, except popular feeling, or prejudice, or whatever it may best be termed; for although you may insure a man's reluctant presence at the sermon, you cannot command his unwilling attention; and in the case of children, it is clear that some such course would be desirable. There is very little fear that even a moderate preacher would, under the proposed arrangement, find himself without an audience, for preaching of almost any kind is still popular with the masses; and for a very bad and careless preacher, it might be a wholesome check to feel that his congregation had it in their power to pass a very intelligible vote of censure on his performances, without withdrawing themselves, in the last resort, as at present, from public worship altogether.

preacher not only in the pulpit but out of it, whose wise and kindly influence has been widely felt for good. Mr. Hood's volume - published two years ago under the title of Lamps, Pitchers, and Trumpets,' in a questionable taste which he has adopted from some of the old divines whom he quotes is also a reproduction of lectures delivered before a Dissenters' Training College, and is much more elaborate and more professional, not free from some narrow Nonconformist prejudices, but containing much interesting matter, carefully collected and well put together. Mr. Neale and Mr. Baring-Gould take but a limited portion of the ground-the "Mediæval" and "Post-Mediæval Preachers." Mr. Jackson seems to have drawn pretty largely upon his predecessors, or from the same sources -repeating not unfrequently their mistakes but producing a readable book, in spite of a somewhat haphazard arrangement. A good many of the popular anecdotes which all the writers give us are well known, especially the ludicrous ones, which are the most apocryphal; but there might be room yet for a popular history of the pulpit, which none of these little books, or others of a similar type, either supply or probably have aspired to supply.

The pulpit has gone through as many phases of life as the Christian Church itself. Of the great preachers of primitive times we know comparatively little, with some two or three exceptions. Augustine, Chrysostom, Ambrose, and the two Gregories live still in their homilies which have been preserved; but we are hardly in a position to judge of the style or effects of their ordinary preaching. Augustine has left on record both precept and example as to one essential duty of a preacher - to preach so as to be understood of the people. Of all temptations to be avoided, he warns the Christian orator against the use of "sesWhat profits the gold

Yet this popular interest in the question of preaching is strong evidence, even in the most satiric strictures which it has called forth, of the powerful agency which still belongs to the pulpit, however dormant or imperfectly exercised. It will probably not be without its good results. The preachers themselves are evidently not unaffected by it. Treatises upon preachers and preaching, from the hands of "the cloth" itself, have been abundant lately. Some few of those which are least professional as taking rather the historical, anecdotal, and critical view of the subject — now lie before Dean Ramsay's unpretending little quipedalia verba."

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en key," he says, "if it will not open the | Philip de Narni, a Capuchin friar, preached lock? and what objection to the wooden at Rome against non-residence the standkey, if it will?” The Bishop of Hippo was ing sore of an established church from his essentially a preacher to the multitude; and, times down to our own, against which sucfar less eloquent than John of the "Golden cessive preachers took up their parable in Mouth," was perhaps even more than he vain and with such effect, that thirty a model for the teachers whom the Church bishops who heard him are said to have demands at present. rushed back in compunction to their own dioceses the next morning. Jerome Savonarola, a reformer before his age, thundered so powerfully at Florence against the corruptions of the Papal court under Alexander VI., that the too popular preacher was brought to the stake as a heretic. If he was too faithful an exponent of the vices of the Papacy, he was equally honest in his denunciations of popular sins; and some notion of the fiery temperament of the man-possibly even some excuse for his persecutors—may be gathered from the story told of his sometimes working himself up to such a pitch of righteous indignation that he would quit the pulpit suddenly without finishing his sermon, as though shaking the dust from his feet against an evil generation.

When these great voices were silent, there followed an interval in which either there were no effective masters of the pulpit or we at least have lost their works and their names. At last, in the twelfth century, rose Bernard of Clairvaux - "the last of the Fathers." He was emphatically the preacher in high places. Kings and nobles were awed by the wondrous eloquence of his language, or won by the persuasion of his dove-like eyes, and pressed to take from his hand the crosses the pledge of the Second Crusade-as fast as they could be supplied by tearing up his monastic cowl. But after his death something like a dark age of preaching seems again to have followed. Here and there lights shone out of the gloom solitary "Lamps" with their accompanying "Trumpets," as Mr. Hood The pulpit oratory of the middle ages would term them. One of the greatest of was, of course, leavened with the peculiar these was Anthony of Padua, who wore out tenets and corruptions of Roman doctrine. his life (dying at thirty-six) in missionary The personages of the Old and New Testalabours throughout Italy. Wherever he ment were set forth as having been good went, crowds filled the churches at early Catholics, with the most utter disregard of daybreak to hear him. He, like Augustine, the unities of time and place, and with an was a preacher to the people. Allusions to effrontery which tells its own tale of the igcommon trades and occupations occur con- norance and credulity of the hearers. The tinually in his extant homilies. He was French ecclesiastics were the boldest in this also one of the first who introduced that ele- respect. Abraham and Isaac, on their jourment of humour into his sermons which (as ney to Mount Moriah, are represented as we shall have occasion to notice hereafter) employing themselves by the way in duly was carried out even to abuse by many of reciting aves and paternosters; and the his successors. But the mere skeletons of Virgin Mary at the Annunciation, is said his preaching which have come down to us, to have been telling her beads and reading give no fair specimens of his powers. He in her Hours not in Latin, however, was adopted as the patron saint of Portu- or in French, carefully adds the preacher, gal; and the Portuguese Government, in but in Hebrew. Father Chatenair, so late 1706, conferred on him formally the title of as 1715, speaks of "L'abbé Jesus: "Nich"Marshal General" of the army, taking olas de Lyrà asserted that He was of the however, to pass him regularly but order of Friars Minorites. But in spite of rapidly through all intermediate grades, this and other drawbacks, there can be no from private upwards. They assigned him doubt but that the medieval pulpit from time an annual pay of 150 ducats; and for many to time produced men who were deeply read years subsequently an image of the saint, in the Scriptures, and who interpreted them in full uniform, was carried on a chair in with a depth of thought and a fulness of ilevery campaign at the head of the army.lustration which, if often mystical and fan

care,

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ciful, was always interesting and attractive. | Cornelius Musso, Bishop of Bitonto, preach The age was ignorant, credulous, super- ing on the Ascension in the sixteenth censtitious; the mass of preachers were like- tury, speaks of Christ as dying like Herculy to share its faults; but the great names les, rising like Apollo or Esculapius, of the Church were, as Dean Ramsay says, ascending to heaven as a true Bellerophon, far in advance of their age.

"a second Perseus, who had slain the Medusa who changed men into stones." Another Bishop of the same date paints Him as "the young Horatius, who had slain the three Curiatii of ambition, covetousness, and sensuality; the Hercules who destroyed the Cerberus with three heads." The same prelate quotes continually from "le grand Virgile," as he calls him; and Peter Marini, confessor to René, Count of Provence, a preacher not over-scrupulous in his style of illustration, gives a quotation from Ovid's

ers went farther still, and with worse than bad taste forced even the fables of Adonis and Danaë into illustrations of their sacred subject.* Even the homely Latimer quotes Terence and quotes him wrong. Philip Cospeau, Bishop of Lisieux, has the credit of being the first eminent French preacher who reverted to the primitive and praiseworthy custom of citing the Scriptures in evidence instead of Pagan authors.

The ancient mode of preaching was of course extempore, with what amount of previous preparation would depend on the powers or habits of the preacher. The sermons of Origen are the first which are recorded as having been taken down by shorthand writers; and it was probably not until a date comparatively recent that any preacher thought of actually writing out his sermon at length beforehand, with the view of delivering it from memory, as has been the habits with many of the most success-Remedium Amoris'! The Spanish preachful modern extempore preachers. The practice of reading from a manuscript seems only to have come in with the Reformation, and even then to have been for a long time exceptional and unpopular. The Puritans, with one consent, and with a torrent of virulent abuse, as was their fashion, scouted it. Even after the Restoration, it was only tolerated, and not always that. An ordinance issued by Charles II. to the University of Cambridge in 1674 declares that the practice "took its beginning from the disorders of the times," and forbids "that supine and slothful wayof preaching" to be used at the universities in future. But it crept in again, and maintains its ground- whether for good or evil this is not the place to inquire. Some of the best modern preachers have failed entirely in extempore efforts. Sanderson, though he had an excellent memory, declared after one trial that he would never make the attempt again; and Massillon, who always committed his sermons carefully to memory, on one occasion broke down entirely before the king, when once he had lost himself.

Humour and anecdote were in frequent use with medieval and post-medieval preachers, especially with the French and Germans, though Gabriel Barletti of Naples set an early example of it. Jean Raulin, who preached in Paris about the middle of the fifteenth century, was remarkable for the quaintness of his fables and apologues. One of his best, satirically aimed at the power of the nobles and the claims of the regular priesthood, is given by Mr. BaringGould in a diluted modern form, which is a very doubtful improvement. We prefer, even for brevity's sake, to translate the Latin.

"The lion summoned the wolf, the fox, When classical literature was almost the and the ass into chapter, that they might only literature in existence, it was natural confess their sins, and that he might imthat the language of the pulpit should be pose penance on them according to their largely leavened with allusions, and even guilt. The wolf came and confessed himquotations, from Greek and Roman writers. self thus: - 'I have sinned, in that I have If a man was not a classical scholar, he was eaten a sheep which certainly did not belong no scholar at all. It is unnecessary to re- to me; but I hold this as of ancient privimind readers of our own Jeremy Taylor; lege from my forefathers, who have ever but it would be curious to learn what the exercised the right-father, grandfather, simple parishioners of the little church great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfaof Llanvihangel Aberbrythic, where he ther- so that the memory of man runneth preached occasionally while living at Golden not to the contrary but that wolves have Grove, could have thought of his sermons, always eaten sheep.' Is it so?' said the richly jewelled as they are with Pagan lion; have you really such prescriptive learning. Some of the French and Italian

preachers were far more pedantic in their Predicatoriana,' par G. P. Philomneste: Dijon, display. They quoted from profane authors 1841. To this rare and curious volume these pages (and possibly many others) are considerably infar more largely than from the Scriptures.debted.

Next came the fox, who confessed that he had done ill, in that he had eaten sundry capons and hens not his own; but then he had a right, from all precedent of antiquity, so to eat them. And so in like manner he was absolved for a single paternoster.

right?' And when the wolf replied, 'Yea,' | or evil, to call a spade a spade. Mr. Dishe imposed on him for that great crime a raeli, who was probably the first English single paternoster. writer who dug much into the printed volume of his Sermons - - which is scarce enough, in spite of repeated editions places him not unfairly among Jocular Preachers; " but if he had been nothing more than this, he would have hardly been called by his countrymen Langue d'or. "Last came the ass, and confessed that Menot's sermons, written in a mediæval he was guilty of three mortal sins. First, Latin interlarded with French, are full of he had eaten some hay that had been quaint conceits, and homely, often coarse dropped by somebody's carts along the illustrations, pushed not seldom to a point banks and bushes. A grave sin, O ass!' which to our taste is palpable buffoonery: said the lion, to have eaten what was not but upon the ruder audience of his day such your master's. Secondly, he had committed preaching would tell with considerable a nuisance in the cloisters of the monastery. effect. Some of his more extraordinary

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A heinous crime,' said the lion, defiling ebullitions have been quoted quite often sacred ground!' The third offence could enough by collectors of such specimens; hardly by any persuasion be wrung out of but his exposition of the Parable of the him. At last, with much doleful braying Prodigal, though the details are here and and groaning, he said he had sung- -or there ludicrous and coarse, as might be brayed, after his manner. - in harmony with naturally expected from such a subject in the pious brethren who were singing in such hands, shows very considerable dechoir. The lion answered that this was the scriptive power; and his additions to the gravest sin of all, to have made a discord in Scripture narrative, not much more unwarthe holy brethren's music. So the ass was rantable than those of some modern exposihorribly scourged for his little offences, tors, are forcible and graphic enough to while the wolf and the fox were dismissed, impress the moral strongly on an unlettered with full absolution, to enjoy their heredi- auditory. tary privileges."

Oliver Maillard, a Cordelier, one of the preachers to Louis XI. of France, was another of those early divines who acted on Horace's maxim, that a jest may sometimes do duty for a sermon. He was as bold, however, as he was humorous, and launched his bitter jests against ladies of high degree, judges on the bench, and even Louis himself, with as much earnestness as point. A courtier told him the King threatened to have him thrown into the Seine. "Tell his majesty," said Maillard, "that even then I shall get to heaven by water sooner than he will with all his post-horses." The establishment of posts through France was just then the King's favourite project, and Louis was wise enough to laugh and forgive

him.

When he describes the younger son as the spoilt child who had always had his own way, coming to his father "as bold as the Pope himself" — and asking to have his portion of goods; pleading that, as the father surely did not mean to disinherit him "when it should please Providence to do so much for the children as to take their father out of the world," the inevitable legacy might as well come now, - -he boldly appeals to the young men amongst his audience, whether such be not, in too many cases, "the form and pattern of their own life:"

When he blames the father as too indulgent for complying, and urges on parents the sin of supplying money which they know will be spent in riot and extravagance, he touches a point which modern expositors Another remarkable preacher of nearly have perhaps too entirely overlooked. the same date, and of very similar style, When he shows the prodigal thrust out with was Michael Menot, also a Cordelier. insult and contumely by the false friends on Modern criticism commonly treats him as a whom he has lavished his money; when the mere ecclesiastical buffoon, and quotes his rich man to whom he goes to ask for emsermons as instances of the bad taste and ployment mocks at his white hands and fair grossness of his times. The character of cheeks, asks him "what work he can do," those times was gross, it is true, and the and gets the humble answer that he "has prevalent vices, both amongst laity and never learned to do anything," but that he ecclesiastics, were gross; and Father Menot" will be content with very low wages," spared neither. His diction, his illustra- there is a homely pathos in these additional tions, his points, were adapted to his audi- touches which might not be without its effect ence; and it was the habit of the day, good upon an impressionable hearer, and which

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has not been reached by modern preachers nearly a century after Menot, took that who have taken quite as great liberties in worthy father's original sermon as a sort of improving" the sacred text. Even when text for a course of fifty-two discourses of Menot accommodates his lessons so entirely his own, which he composed and printed on to the fashions of the time as to dress out that single parable. In burlesque he went the prodigal youth, when setting forth on even beyond his model; but there are not his travels, in a "pourpoint fringed with wanting passages in which sarcasm is brought velvet, a Florence cap, a shirt of fine linen, to bear upon his audience with a point which puckered at the neck, scarlet boots of per- might have told in spite of its apparent buffect fit, and a cloak of damask silk floating foonery. He thinks it "a mercy that the at his back," and returning home to his young man did not rob his father at once," father's house clad in "a scanty rochet instead of going through the ceremony of which scarcely covered his hams," - he asking him for the money: many modern does but translate literally into the vulgar prodigals (St. Francis, his own founder, tongue the spirit of the sacred original, and among the number) had done so before, and set forth vividly to men of the sixteenth would do it now. He, too, dilates on the century an ancient parable in sixteenth- culpability of parents in the matter of unrecentury language. There is no more inten- strained indulgence and neglect of discitional burlesque of Scripture in Menot's ser- pline: he goes farther, and accuses the pamon than in the works of an unknown and rents of his own day as not merely winking forgotten artist, probably as reverent a stu- at the immorality of their sons, but even dent of the Gospel as the more learned or setting an immoral example in their own more fastidious reader, which may still be persons. "Such fathers," he says, “are seen, as we have seen them, hanging on the devourers of their own offspring in a worse walls of English farm-houses and cottages. sense than Saturn of old." Such mothers There the prodigal takes his leave, dressed are like the apes who crush and strangle in scarlet coat, hessian boots, and stiff choker their little ones in the foolish ardour of of the period when George the Third was their embraces. "O blind affection!" he king; mounting his tilbury, the fast vehicle exclaims, "O worse than apish love! Coof that day, which a groom in top-boots is cus amor prolis!” They will not even holding. The father is in the costume of have the patience to wait," he says, "for the British farmer, with two plethoric bags their daughters' corruption in due course, of money in his hand. The whole series of when they shall come to years of discretion." six or seven plates is equally grotesque; The biting sarcasm of Horace was evidently but their queer anachronisms no more imply in the mind of the classical Franciscan, and any irreverence on the part of the designer he adds to it a point of his own. He enters, than on that of the rude villagers who still as may be conceived, into profuse detail of admire them. They were the product of the items of the prodigal's extravagance; the same era of taste which thought it the but though the description is spun out with correct thing to play Cato in a full-bottomed a prolix verbosity wearying enough to the wig and laced coat, such as Addison himself might have worn on grand occasions, and when, as a curious counterpoise, plethoric British kings and their gouty ministers were exposed in effigy by a grateful country to all the rigours of a London climate in an unmitigated Roman toga and sandals. Let the reader who chances to fall in with any of these quaint old Bible prints in his rural wanderings, study them curiously, but, if possible, with a grave face, for the sake of some stander-by who may be more shocked at levity on such subjects than at anachronisms of costume. An inward smile will do no harm to any one. The truth of the parable is independent either of Father Menot's scarlet boots, or the British artist's hessians. The history of the prodigal was a favourite subject with the Franciscan preachers. It gave ample scope for the dramatic details in which they delighted and excelled. Philip Bosquier, another of the order, who lived

modern reader, there is a wealth of imagery in his illustrations which may have been very attractive to those who were entirely dependent for their intellectual sensations on the harangues of the preacher, few and far between. The scenes of a prodigal's life have seldom been painted in more lively colours. Bosquier dwells much, towards the close of the story, on the indignity of a youth of high birth and breeding being set to feed hogs, of all employments; and he concludes this portion of his subject with the strong remark, that as he had chosen to live the life of a hog, so with the hogs he was at last sent to feed. Anticipating a favorite practice of some modern preachers, who are fond of putting forward supposed doubts and objections which would otherwise never have entered into the heads of the most skeptical audience, Father Bosquier starts this query, towards the close of the parable, where the young man determines