66

to "arise and go to his father" Why did he not write?" and he answers, that probably such an ill-conditioned youth could neither write nor read; not because his father had neglected to send him to school, but that it was as impossible to teach him letters" as a pig to play the trumpet."

66

66

is to be trusted, he was much more than a mere jester. He did not always make those laugh who listened to him," says Gueret; "he spoke truths which sent bishops back to their dioceses, and made many a coquette blush. He had the art of biting while he smiled." Far from priding himA popular German preacher in the next self upon the laugh which he sometimes century Abraham de Santa Clara seems raised when in the pulpit, he punished himto have studied Menot's and Bosquier's ex- self for such indulgence of his natural huposition of the parable, and to have endeav-mour by corporal discipline," and his oured to emulate their fulness of illustration. private life was in all respects that of a The German satirist is not less pungent, devout and austere Churchman. A writer, though perhaps somewhat heavier and who speaks of having been often present at coarser, than his French predecessors. He his sermons, declares that he himself had suggests that the prodigal was probably never heard the preacher indulge in any of "an Irishman.” What special spite the those buffooneries with which he was preacher had against the Irish does not ap- commonly credited; and it is very possible pear, as he gives no reasons for fixing on that many current anecdotes of his eccenthe nationality. His sermon is full of pon- tricities have as little foundation in fact as derous Latin puns; but there are points some which are told of a well-known modhere and there which no doubt would tell ern preacher. Some of the best attested upon a German congregation, over-given to show that the Little Father's jests must the frequenting of wine-shops. "It might often have been carefully-planted homebe said of the prodigal" (remarks the thrusts to his auditors. Preaching on the preacher) as of Joseph, an evil beast casting-out of the devil which was dumb,hath devoured him; an evil beast, indeed;" Know you, brethren, what a dumb devil an evil beast is the Golden Griffin; an evil is? I will tell you - it is a lawyer at the beast is the Golden Eagle, the Golden Buck, feet of his confessor. In court, these genand the Golden Bear." These tavern-beasts tlemen chatter like pies: but at the confeshad so dealt with him, that his breeches sional, devil a word can one draw out of were as full of holes as a fishing-net." The them dæmonium mutum a dumb devil prodigal's extravagant equipments were a indeed." Preaching before M. de Péréfixe, favourite and fertile theme with these scenic Archbishop of Paris, he saw the prelate preachers. Bosquier's and Santa Clara's asleep. He called out loudly to the Suisse descriptions read like Court tailors' bills; on duty, "Shut the doors! the shepherd is and the latter adds, in protest against the asleep; the sheep will get out; to whom new-fangled costumes of the day, that it am I to preach the word of God?" The would soon be necessary to establish uni- Archbishop was very soon awake, and reversities of tailors, and grant them degrees mained so to the end of the sermon. as "doctors of fashion." Petit André, dis- dré had no liking for the Jesuits. coursing one day on the same text when Ma- was requested on one occasion by them to dame de la Tremouille was present incog- deliver the usual panegyric on their foundnita, took occasion to paint the youth's ret- er. He complied; and in the course of the inue as follows:-"He had six splendid oration introduced an imaginary dialogue, dapple-grey horses, a grand carriage of in which St. Ignatius asked of Heaven a crimson velvet laced with gold, a rich ham- locality for the operations of his new Order. mercloth covered with coats of arms, pages "But where to place you? the deserts have and lacqueys in yellow liveries faced with been assigned to St. Benedict and St. black and white." It was the very carriage Bruno; St. Bernard occupies the valleys, and liveries in which her ladyship had come St. Francis the country towns where are to the sermon. you to be quartered?" Ah! master," replies the saint, "put us only in some place where there is something to get in the large towns, for example and trust us to do the rest." Nor does André seem to have had a very high opinion of the monastic orders in general. From the pulpit of a monastery which had lately been struck with lightning, he returned thanks to Heaven, which always "took such care of its own." "Do we need fur

This Father André, familiarly called "Le Petit" (Boullanger was his family name), was a friar of the order of Reformed Augustins, who preached during many Advents and Lents before Louis XIII. and XIV. He was a jester by nature, and used his talent in a fashion which is certainly startling to the sober taste of a modern congregation. But if the opinion of those critics who were nearly his contemporaries

An

He

ther proof," said he, "than what has just | Hugh Latimer, who made Paul's Cross ring happened to this pious house in which I am some half-century later, and who had in preaching? The lightning fell on the libra- him many of the characteristics of the forry, and consumed it, without hurting a single | eign humoristic preachers who have been monk. Had it unhappily struck the refec- noticed, complains bitterly of the low ebb tory, what numbers would have been killed! to which preaching had fallen in England. Mon dieu! what would have been the des- He speaks of the " strawberry preachers,” olation! " whose season was but once a year. "How few there be throughout this realm that give meat to their flock as they should do, the visitors could best tell. Too few, too few- the more is the pity; and never so few as now." A preacher at Paul's Cross, a little later, complains of the lack of preachers, even at the universities: "There is not now in all Oxford more than six or seven preachers." Latimer's own preaching may be well described in the words which he himself uses in one of his sermons:

Not only jest and anecdote and grimace were used by some of these living divines, but they even took with them occasionally into the pulpit certain of what less grave actors would call "properties," to help the action of the scene. The celebrated Father Honoré, preaching one Lent upon the vanity of human life, suddenly produced a skull, which he made the subject of a monologue, very much after the fashion of Hamlet in the tragedy. "Thou wast the skull of a magistrate - -was it not so ? He who makes no answer assents." Fixing on the ghastly image the cap of a judge"Ha!" said he, hast thou never sold justice for gold? Hast thou never entered into a villanous compact with advocates or procureurs-general? "Then he would throw aside the skull, and produce another, on which he put a woman's head-dress. "Thou wast the head of one of these ladies of fashion, it may be; where now are those bright eyes, which rolled so wantonly those pretty lips which formed such winning smiles?" So he would go through a series of imaginary characters, having the proper costume ready for each, producing such effect as may be conceived. But he was an earnest man, and a successful preacher, in spite of what we might call his buffooneries. He distracts the ear," said Bourdaloue of him, "but he also rends the heart." These dramatic effects have been made use of by modern preachers. Mr. Jackson tells us of a Yorkshire Methodist preacher, familiarly called "Our Billy," who has been known to take a pair of scales into the pulpit, and literally to weigh in the balance the several characters he described." Whitefield produced great effect upon his hearers on one occasion, by an illustration which appealed, something in the same way, to the eye as well as to the ear. 66 You seem to think salvation an easy matter. Oh! just as easy as for me to catch that insect passing by me." He made a grasp at a fly, real or imaginary. Then he paused a moment, and opened his hand

66

66

but I have missed it!"

The English pulpit, during the period which we have glanced at, was duller, if more decorous. There were few names of mark, and but little reliable account of their preaching has come down to us.

66

'I have a manner of teaching which is very tedious to them that be learned. I am wont even to repeat those things which I have said before, which repetitions are nothing pleasant to the learned: but it is no matter-I care not for them; I seek more the profit of those which be ignorant than to please learned men. Therefore I oftentimes repeat such things which be needful for them to know, for I would so speak that they might be edified withal.”

His Sermon on the Plough is an excellent instance of his homely but forcible expositions, but is perhaps too well known for quotation. Those "on the card"-or it should rather be on the "cards "are an instance of the way in which he turned to his purpose ideas. which might have seemed most foreign to his subject. He had the great art of the preacher, that of bringing forth things new and old." He abounds in anecdotes, and some well-known jests have been borrowed from his variegated pages. The tracing the cause of the Goodwin Sands to the existence of Tenterden steeple is one of the many stories told and well told-in his pages. He is occasionally coarse, bitter, violent, and even almost directly personal, as was the fashion of his time. He made home-thrusts at bishops and clergy, which must have been very disagreeable for them to hear; but he does not spare the other learned professions. He longs to fit some judges that he wots of with a Tyburn tippet" in lieu of the judicial ermine-"It will never be merry in England till we have the skins of such; and when he has to speak of the woman who had suffered many things of many physicians," he observes that well she might, "for physicians nowadays seek only their own profits." Latimer, with his yeoman's

66

birth and independent spirit, was a true Englishman to the core. One can fancy the men round Paul's Cross applauding, as they did audibly enough at times, when he spoke of the English bow as "that gift of God which He hath given us to excel all other nations withal."

allowing them to have any practical influence on the conduct of life. Something like it was seen, perhaps, in England under the Stuarts; but the phenomena were not so remarkable. The Court preachers at Versailles were admirably fitted for their office. They were men who might not have Proverbs have been largely used by all found their vocation, like some of the great popular preachers who addressed them- preachers before them, in missions to the selves to the masses. One need not quote heathen at home and abroad; they were the examples of St. Paul, but the great not born to be voices crying in the wildermedieval preachers are full of them. Ber-ness. But, on the other hand, neither nard and Peter of Blois made frequent use were they the mere "players upon a pleasof them. The French humoristic preachers ant instrument," to whom kings and courtwho have been noticed-Menot and Petit tiers might love to listen, as an intellectual André and Maillard-naturally seized upon excitement, and who carefully avoided, as such a ready means of appeal to the dull Court preachers before and since have done, popular intelligence. Latimer rejoiced in any such too plain delivery of their message them, no matter how homely. But perhaps as might, offend the ears of their royal and the most extraordinary use ever made of illustrious auditory. proverbs in the pulpit was in a sermon The first of this brilliant line of orators preached and printed by one Mr. Burgess, was Jacques Bossuet, who received his on the devils entering into the herd of early education at the Jesuits' College in swine. He entitled it, "The Devil driv- his native town of Dijon, and subsequently ing and drowning his Hogs;" and he divid- at the College of Navarre at Paris. There, ed his discourse into three heads, inasmuch before he was sixteen, the fame of his reas, he remarks, "the devil here verified markable talents and learning had reached these old English proverbs;" 1. "The devil even the fashionable circles of the capital. will play at small game rather than none At one of the celebrated soirées at the at all;" 2. "They run fast whom the devil Hotel de Rambouillet, the Marquis de Feudrives;" 3. "The devil brings his hogs to quières spoke in raptures of the extraordia fine market." And in spite of or even, nary promise of a protégé of his who was it may be, in consequence of-this more studying for the Church. He undertook than homely illustration, those who have that, if allowed a few minutes of solitude read the sermon pronounce it to have been for collecting his thoughts, the young stunot ill adapted to impress a rude and un-dent should preach an extempore sermon critical audience.

on any text which might be given him. After the date of those dramatic preach- The company, by whom any literary novers, as they may be called, there appears elty was welcomed with enthusiasm, at to have followed a temporary calm, which once challenged the Marquis to the proof. was not favourable to the growth of earnest- Young Bossuet was sent for, and in Ma ness of any kind in the unreformed branch dame de Rambouillet's salon, before that of the Church Catholic. It was broken brilliant and critical audience, the young first in France. There arose the line of preacher of sixteen delivered his first sergreat French preachers, the golden age of mon at eleven o'clock at night. Voltaire the pulpit, under Louis XIV. and XV. remarked that he had never heard any one Their reputation was coextensive with preach so early- or so late. The Bishop Christendom, and in spite of all the changes of Lisieux, who was then in Paris, heard of style and taste, they continue models of of the precocious performance; and Bospulpit eloquence to this day. The Court suet was invited to display his powers a of France at that date presented a curious second time before himself and two other contradiction. Vice was one of the com- prelates. They were equally astonished ponent parts of good society; and so was and charmed; and Cardinal de Bausset, the Catholic religion, at least so far as out- who tells the story, fairly remarks that their ward observances went. The King at- verdict as to the true qualifications of a tended the public offices of the Church preacher was more reliable than that of the regularly and his mistress with him. wits and courtiers of the salons of RamHis courtiers followed, in both respects, bouillet. The gifts which could impress the royal example. There was a paradoxical two such audiences must have been rekind of faith, which accepted, and appar-markable indeed. Bossuet distinguished ently realized, the truths of Christianity himself, soon after his ordination, as a conand the teaching of the Church, without | troversalist against the Protestants in the

the Church it was sure to become, a mere oration pronounced over earthly notabilities, it degenerated in many cases into either a sonorous enunciation of truisms, or a fulsome and too often unfounded panegyric. Henry Quatre, over whom the Abbé Valladier declaimed in a bombastic strain, which won him great applause, if not much of a saint, had at least the merit in the eyes of all good Catholics of being an illustrious convert; but the French kings and princes of the seventeenth century were in general but sorry subjects for the funeral preacher. The most striking and really solemn passage to be found in any sermon of this class is the well-known exordium of Massillon over Louis le Grand-"Dieu seul est grand, mes frères!" We may well believe that, with his impressive delivery, it thrilled the audience; and had he but stopped there it would have been a perfect funeral sermon.

diocese of Metz; but it was not until his time and under the relaxed discipline of thirty-second year that he had an opportunity of preaching before the Court; and even this, it must be remembered, was an unusually early age for such an honour. He had lost none of his youthful powers. He preached his six courses of Lent sermons, and four in Advent, at Paris and Versailles, and moved his courtly audience by turns to tears and admiration by his nervous eloquence. Yet these grand sermons, though not extempore, were merely hastily dashed on paper and roughly corrected; and he is said never to have preached the same sermon twice. He is best known, perhaps by his funeral orations; but this branch of pulpit oratory is by no means as congenial to the English as to the French taste, and in spite of their unquestioned eloquence they will be apt to weary the English reader. Dean Ramsay thinks otherwise, and quotes Robert Hall's marginal note written upon his copy of the volume "I never expect to hear language like this till I hear it from the lips of seraphs round the throne of God." But Hall's own taste was florid. What affects our appreciation of Bossuet's oratory is not only that the exciting interest is that of a bygone period, and that Condé and La Vallière are names almost forgotten in the busy present; but funeral sermons, even on the heroes of the day, are a mode of celebration which jars on the religious as well as the intel-ended, the King promoted him to the lectual instincts of most educated English

66

men.

The custom, it is true, has come down to us with all the sanction of antiquity. Bernard's touching apostrophe to his brother Gerard, whom he had himself converted to the faith, and who died on the very day on which the sorrowing survivor had to preach, has been often quoted for its simplicity and beauty; and the same great preacher delivered a panegyric, which has been compared with the grandest efforts of Demosthenes, over the Irish saint Malachi-him of the collar of gold" who died in his arms at Clairvaux. The preachers of the twelfth century took up and carried to an extreme a fashion which offered to the preacher a good field for pathetic declamation, with, it must be confessed, abundant facilities for sounding commonplaces on the uncertainty of human life and the vanity of worldly honours. It must be remembered, in defence of the primitive custom, that such sermons were preached only over those whose life and principles had been, to all human seeming, consistent with a sincere Christian profession. When the funeral sermon became, as in course of

But to return to Bossuet. The King was so delighted with his preaching, that he gave him the bishopric of Condon, and soon afterwards intrusted him with the education of the young Dauphin. From that time Bossuet preached but at rare intervals, and even then, it would seem, almost reluctantly, so absorbed was he with the duties of his diocese and the education of his royal pupil. When this charge was

66

richer bishopric of Meaux, where he continued and ended his laborious life, a zealous bishop and active controversialist to his death at the age of sixty-two. The good people of his new diocese hardly understood at first the treasure of ability and learning with which they were blessed. Louis, with a natural pride in so good an appointment, inquired of some of them how they liked their new bishop. Pretty well," was the cautious reply; on which the King expressed some surprise at their speaking so coldly. They explained that they thought he was scarcely the sort of man they expected: whenever they waited on him, they were told he was "at his studies;" and they should certainly have preferred a bishop whose education had been completed before he came.

Esprit Fléchier, afterwards Bishop of Nismes, was another favourite preacher of the Great Louis. His fame also rests most upon his funeral orations; and posterity scarcely accords him the high reputation in which he was held by his contemporaries, possibly because his published remains give but an imperfect impression of the vigour and attractiveness of his actual

preaching. It was said of our own Bishop | In all the private and public offices of his Sanderson, that (owing to his ineffective Church he was regular and devout; and delivery) "the best sermons that were ever written were never preached;" and probably some of the best ever preached have never been written or printed, because it is impossible to transfer to type the voice and manner of the preacher, often the most important element in rhetorical effect.

some years before the close of his life, it had been his wish to retire altogether from his work as a preacher, and to end his days in some religious house, where, to use his own touching words, he "might review before God the past years of his life in the bitterness of his soul." But the strict rule of the order of Loyola would not grant even this indulgence to the weary preacher. The final answer from Rome was, that the Church had still work for him in Paris; and there he died, in his harness to the last, having said his last public Easter mass but two days before.

Born in the same year as Fléchier, and only five years younger than Bossuet, Louis Bourdaloue, the Jesuit, did not reach his meridian nearly so early. It was not until ten years after Bossuet's first appointment as Court preacher, when he had already retired to the quiet duties of his diocese and his preceptorship, and his voice Five years before his death, in the last was heard in Paris but at rare intervals, year but one of the seventeenth century, that Bourdaloue-"Le predicateur des rois his great successor, Massillon, then a young et le roi des predicateurs began first, as priest of the Oratory, delivered his first Madame de Sevigné expressed it, "to thun-Court sermon, on All-Saints Day, at Verder at Notre-Dame." No one, she de- sailles, before the great King and his brilclared, had really preached before he came liant train of courtiers, on the pointed text -a remarkable testimony from one who "Blessed are they that mourn." Bourmust have heard Fléchier and Bossuet. daloue heard of the young preacher's growFor thirty-four years he preached before ing reputation, and remarked pathetically the Court or the fashionable congregations in the Baptist's words - it may be hoped in Paris, and year by year his reputation with as little jealousy-"He must inincreased. But it was not only the higher crease, but I must decrease." classes who thronged to hear him; the shopkeepers and artisans filled the aisles of Notre-Dame when he was announced to preach. One Father D'Harrouis, a Jesuit, told Menage (or at least Menage tells the story), that when the great preacher had visited Rouen, the whole place was thrown into disorder. The tradesmen shut up their shops the lawyers deserted the the physicians left the bedsides of their patients to hear him. But-added the good priest simply - when I went to preach there next year, I put all things to rights again there was not a man of them left his business." A sweet yet powerful voice, and a commanding presence, were natural advantages which came in aid of Bourdaloue's eloquence. But his matter was as good as his manner. He had been a diligent student, and not only the treasures of Scripture, but the best writings of the early Fathers, were largely drawn upon by him in his sermons. With a simple and unaffected delivery, and a chaste and inelaborate style, his were the legitimate triumphs of a Christian preacher. Nor was he by any means a preacher only; his hearers believed alike in his sincerity and his profound knowledge of the human heart, and flocked to him in private as the best director of their consciences. Five or six hours a-day were not uncommonly spent in the exhausting work of the confessional.

courts

66

Less powerful in the pulpit than either of his great predecessors, Massillon was even more persuasive; and when he began, with downcast eyes and quiet voice, and almost total want of the gesticulation so habitual to French orators, he held the congregation wrapt in a silence through which every modulated tone was heard distinctly. He has been called the Cicero of French pulpit eloquence, as Bossuet has been compared with Demosthenes: and he has much of Cicero's grace and elegance, with something of Cicero's fault of overpolish and dilution. French critics have preferred Bossuet: but Massillon has more attraction for the English reader. Voltaire is said to have kept the volume of his sermons, known as 'Le Petit Carême,' always on his writing-table, as one of the most perfect models of style. His Court sermons have a courtliness which is without servility, and may be favourably contrasted in this respect with some of our own great preachers in the days of Elizabeth and the Stuarts. He begins his first sermon, it is true, with a well-turned compliment to the great Louis, which drew forth an audible murmur of applause from his courtly audience; but he at once qualifies the eulogy, without retracting it, by the eloquent disclaimer, "Thus would the world speak; but, Sire, Christ speaks not as the world." He did not hesitate, on one occasion, to compare the King unmistak