HOW SHOULD THE YOUNG PRIEST PREPARE HIS SERMONS?
The pulpit, as an instrument for the salvation of human souls, holds, after the Sacraments, first place. Indeed the frequentation and proper reception of the Sacraments themselves largely depend upon it.
Never since the first Pentecost was its agency a more pressing necessity than to-day. The apostles of evil are busy. The printing press teems beyond all precedent, obscuring truth and belching forth poison over the world of intellect with a reckless audacity that scorns all restraint. The powers of darkness have seized, polished with unstinting labour and sharpened into slashing efficiency, the varied weapons in the armoury of the orator—crispness of style, brilliancy of diction, a declamation that covers the want of argument and gilds sophistry till it passes for truth. The question for us is—how shall we meet the enemy with steel as highly tempered as his own?
Cicero embraces within the compass of three words the whole scope of the orator.
Docere.—To instruct the intellects of his hearers.
Placere.—To use those varied arts and graces by which the instruction is rendered palatable and agreeable.
Movere.—To move their wills to action.
The last function is by far the most important.
The preacher's triumph lies not in the conviction of the intellect, nor in the approbation of the tastes, but in the arousing of the wills of his hearers. The will is the goal-point at which he aims from the beginning.
A doctor may persuade his patient that bitter medicine and active exercise are necessary, but so long as the sick man lies on the sofa and nods assent this barren conviction is of little profit. When, however, the persuasion forces him to take a six-mile walk and swallow the revolting draught, then, and only then, is triumph secured. So a preacher may convince the habitual sinner of the heinousness of sin; he may win his applause by the cogency of his reasoning and the brilliancy of his style; but not till he has moved his will to fling the old fetters to the winds, not till he brings him a tearful penitent to the confessional, is his work complete.
We shall now take the three words of Cicero in order.
Docere
How shall we accomplish all implied in that word "docere?" How embed conviction in the minds of our hearers? Fill your own head to repletion with the subject; be ambitious to leave, if possible, no book unread, books of even collateral bearing. The more thought stored up the more complete will be your mastery over the subject and the more abundant the materials from which to select. I was struck by a letter from Father Faber to a friend:—"I intend writing a book on the Passion. I have already read a hundred works on the subject; see if you can get me any more." A hundred volumes, yet he looks for more! Hence his brain was saturated with his subject, and when he tapped it, how copiously it flowed! What books should I read?
What books to read
The solid matter in Theology and the Sacred Scriptures and their developments. A book of sermons is the last to open. Why? You wish to raise a structure, then go to the original quarry where you have material in abundance. The arguments that bear the shaping of your own chisel, though not as polished as those you would borrow, will fit more naturally and adorn with greater grace. There are two great risks in reading sermon books—a tendency to imitate the style and a temptation to filch the jewels. The style may be very sublime, but the question is will it suit you. Your neighbour's clothes may fit him admirably, but on you they would hang lop-sided.
The second danger is even more fatal. A struggling tyro who makes an inartistic attempt to adorn his discourse with the most brilliant passages from Bossuet renders his production not only worthless but grotesque. The man who can build a labourer's cottage handsomely should be content; but when he attempts to engraft upon it the turrets and pilasters of the neighbouring mansion he covers his work not with ornament but ridicule. "Am I then," you will ask, "to cast aside the brilliant thoughts and happy imagery I meet in my reading?" No, I only ask you not to use them now. Note them for re-reading. Cast them as nuggets into the smelting-pot of your own brain. Trust to time and the alchemy of thought to transmute them. Wait till these thoughts become your thoughts. The intellect will assimilate this foreign material and send it forth on some future occasion, palpitating with the warm blood of natural life, to strengthen the frame-work of your reasoning or adorn your composition with veins of natural beauty.
How shall I read?
Read with a pencil and paper slip beside you, not only to jot down arguments and illustrations, but to seize on the inspirations that may come. The thoughts we get from books are not at all as valuable as the train of natural ideas these books excite. When the mind is once set going there is no knowing what rich ore it may strike. When the brain throbs in labour with thought struggling for birth, when the soul is full and the imagination in flame, this is the golden moment. Each idea now stands out clear cut as a cube of crystal, and colours of unwonted richness are draping the fancy. Hence, at all hazards, lay hold of this inspiration. Close the most interesting work; leave the most fascinating society; heed neither food nor sleep till it is secured.
For you this spirit may never breathe again. Let this moment pass, and when you do invoke the intellect it is cold and barren, and the heart that yesterday blazed with living fires holds lifeless ashes now. It is not always when you have pointed your pencils and spread the virgin page before you thought will come. The ideas that have revolutionized the world came at times and in places most unlooked for.
When musing on the swaying Sanctuary lamp during Benediction, Galileo discovered the laws of the pendulum. Such a trifle as the fall of an apple suggested the laws of gravitation to Newton; and the first idea of the steam engine came to Watt while he was watching the lid rising from the boiling kettle. During a royal banquet the argument to crush the Manicheans grew on the great mind of St. Thomas, and the king made his secretary write it down on the spot. Had not these men trained themselves to admit and welcome the angel visitant, no matter when or where he came, the stagnant pool of the world's ignorance might have remained for ever unstirred.
Your notes are now before you, some the offspring of original thought and others culled from reading. The former require only polishing and shaping, but the latter must pass through your own intellect; every thought must feel the brain heat before it becomes palatable. We do not ask people to eat meat raw, so we should take care not to offer them ideas cold and untouched by the warmth of our own reasoning. Think over, ruminate, roll them from side to side, let them sink down through the tissues of your own brain and settle there; then when you send them out warm, bearing the stamp of your own minting, they will be found effective.
Remember that to translate dry theology into questionable English, encumbered with technical expressions, is not writing a sermon; but the man who takes up the theological principles, simmers them in his own thought, wraps them in the transparency of clear language, illustrating them with his own imagery, and thereby bringing them within the grasp of the meanest intelligence, that man, in a sense, creates the truth anew.
You begin the work of construction by making out a sketch argument. Let a well-jointed syllogism underlie and form the framework of your sermon. The conclusion of that syllogism must be the goal point at which you aim. That once selected, all other parts of the sermon should tend towards it. As all roads lead to Rome, so all members of the argument should converge to this point. The congregation should leave the church with that idea fixed and clear as a star of light before their minds.
In writing, as in committing to memory, you should keep the audience ever before the mind's eye. Attack it on every side; pursue it with argument, and never leave it in the power of an intelligent man to say: "I do not understand what he means."
This habit of writing with the audience before us not only secures cogency and point for our arguments and clearness for our illustrations, but it saves us from the fatal mistake of producing not a sermon but an essay.
Here our meditations assist us. The daily habit of balancing and introspection enables a man to read and analyse his own heart, its strength and weakness. He becomes familiar with the springs and levers that move it, the storms that convulse and the sunshine that gladdens the mysterious world within his own breast. How useful this knowledge when he comes to train the artillery of the pulpit on the hearts of others!
Placere
So far we have been studying how to mortise the joints of our arguments into well-knit and shapely strength; the pure scholastic, however, possesses but half the weapons of the preacher. The best built skeleton is repulsive till it is clothed with flesh, colour and beauty. This is the rhetorician's task. He comes with his graceful art, and drapes the dry bones of hard reasoning, clarifies the arguments by illustrations, clothes them in language crisp and sparkling, weaves around them the warm glow of fancy and renders the hardest truths palatable by the grace of diction and delivery. He accomplishes all implied in the word "placere."
When rhetoric and logic clasp hands the standard of triumph is fairly certain to be planted above the stubborn heart. We must, however, remember that the arts of rhetoric are subordinate to the reasoning, and must be brought forward only for the purpose of driving the reasoning home. But since man's faculties are not divided into watertight compartments, neither should the sermon intended to influence him.
Our reason is not independent of our passions; our feelings so influence our judgment that even in our greatest actions it is hard to disentangle and say so much is the product of one and so much of the other. The sermon should be constructed to fit the man; argument and emotion should not stand apart, but dovetail and interlace.
Sheil
In the art of entwining the garlands of rhetoric around the framework of argument, Sheil stands conspicuous. Lecky says of him—"His speeches seem exactly to fulfil Burke's description of perfect oratory—half poetry, half prose. Two very high excellencies he possessed to the most wonderful degree—the power of combining extreme preparation with the greatest passion and of blending argument with declamation.
"We know scarcely any speaker from whom it would be possible to cite so many passages with all the sustained rhythm and flow of declamation, yet consisting wholly of the most elaborate arguments. He always prepared the language as well as the substance of his speeches. He seems to have followed the example of Cicero in studying the case of his opponent as well as his own, and was thus enabled to anticipate with great accuracy."
The hint contained in the last paragraph is invaluable to the man who proves or expounds doctrine. It sometimes happens that there is an objection so natural that it seems to grow out of the reasoning. Perhaps, while the preacher is speaking, it is taking shape on the minds of the hearers; at least sooner or later it is certain to recur.
How is it to be dealt with? Let it pass, and the audience carry away the argument with a cloud of doubt hanging around that goes far to destroy its force. Or it may be that when he opens the morning paper it confronts him, set forth in the most convincing shape, with the advantage of having, at least, twenty-four hours to rest on the public mind before he can touch it. Therefore, let no such objection pass, but grapple with it here and now, and tear it to shreds. Here you are master of the situation, and can present the objection in a shape most accessible to your own knife. By anticipating an antagonist you break his sword and render your own position unassailable.
Before our preacher goes into the pulpit just one word in his ear—Beware of two very common defects—(I) Rapidity of speech and (2) Want of proper articulation. A people who think warmly, as we Irish do, speak rapidly. Thought is rushed upon thought and sentence telescoped into sentence. Before sending forth an idea, take care that its predecessor has got time to settle on the minds of your hearers. In articulation try to earn the eulogy passed on Wendell Philips: "He sent each sentence from his lips as bright and clear cut as a new made sovereign from the mint."
Movere
What is the main weapon of the orator? Demosthenes answers— "Action." Mr. Gladstone—"Earnestness." But St. Francis Borgia probably explains what both mean when he advises us to preach with an evidence of conviction that makes it clear to the audience you are prepared to lay down your life at the foot of the pulpit stairs for the truth of what you say.
Without this deep-seated conviction and the enthusiasm that flows from it, your fire is but painted fire, your thunder the thunder of the stage. This living earnestness is the spark that illumines and vitalizes all. Without it the best built sermon is but a painted corpse; but when the soul gleams forth in the flashing eye and quivering lip, waves of unseen fire are issuing with every sentence, and arrows of light silently piercing every heart. The most stubborn prejudices are forced to melt and the most depraved wills are swept on the crest of the grand tidal wave, slowly gathering from the start; but when the preacher forgets himself and his surroundings, flings self-consciousness away, goes outside himself, pouring the hot tide from his own glowing heart, till every flash of his eye and every wave of his hand becomes a palpitating thought, then his audience surrender; their hearts are in the hollow of his hand, wax to receive any impression; their wills can be braced and lifted to the sublimest heights of heroism—this is triumph.
O'Connell
It is said that the great mastery O'Connell exercised over the people mainly sprang from the passionate earnestness of his conviction. The nation's heart seemed merged into his own. He stood forth her living, breathing symbol. When he spoke it was Ireland spoke. Her passions rocked his soul; her humour flashed from his eye; her scorn gleamed in his glances, and her sobs choked his utterance. Ah! if preachers were as filled with the Spirit of Christ as this man was with the spirit of patriotism, what a revolution we might witness!
You ask—"How then do actors move people since there can be no enthusiasm when men know they simulate unreal people and unreal passions?" I answer, that the first step towards becoming a great actor is to fling aside that knowledge and hand yourself over the willing victim of a delusion. You must not act but live your part: persuade yourself that you are the character you personate: surrender your heart to be torn by real passions and wrung by real sorrows.
The answer is well known which a celebrated actor once gave to a divine:—"How is it that you so move people by fiction and our preachers fail to move them by truth?" "Sir, we speak fiction as if it were fact, and your preachers speak truth as if it were fiction."
Here we leave our preacher facing his audience and filled with but one idea: I have a great message to deliver and I will lay hold of every means to send that message home; voice, passion, style, gesture, these are my arms, and with these I hope to conquer.
Parting glance at the preacher's mission
In parting we take a glance at the preacher's exalted mission, and we may well ask: What in the whole range of human occupations does this world hold worthy of being compared to it?
The battle-field, it is true, has its glories, but it has its horrors also. Who can paint the pride with which Napoleon saw the triumph of his skill crush two Emperors at Austerlitz or the rapture with which he beheld the trophies of great kingdoms at his feet? The fatigues of winter marches were forgotten when in the fiery flashes of his veterans' eyes he read his own renown, while their applauding shouts fell like music on his ears. But blood soils the proudest trophies of war, and across the perspective of victory the spectres of murdered men will stalk.
Human eloquence, too, has its conquests, the purest, the most beautiful in the natural order. How the pride flush heightens on the orator's cheek as he watches the crusts of prejudice melt and hostile hearts surrender; when he marks the bated breath and the hushed silence attesting his victory more eloquently than the stormiest applause! He sees the varied moods of his own soul mirrored in the faces around him, as he summons forth what spirit he lists: tears or laughter, murmurs or applause answer to his call.
What pen can picture the ecstasies that thrilled the soul of Grattan as he gave utterance to the spirit of expiring freedom in those orations that rank among the world's masterpieces? The snows of age melted and the decrepitude of years was flung aside, and his eyes gleamed with strange fires as he beheld sodden corruption struck dumb and hang its guilty head; when he saw the wavering drink fresh courage with each new outburst, and men of commonest clay transformed into heroes by the blaze of his genius. Glorious triumphs indeed; but, alas! human, and as such doomed to die.
But in the sublimity of his purpose and the imperishable nature of his conquests the preacher stands alone. Compared with his the greatest trophies of the battle-field or the forum are feeble trifles.
The preacher, in prayer and study, goes down over the green swards of Calvary, and there gathers the ruby drops of Redemption. He ascends the pulpit and pours them as a purple tide over souls that are parched and perishing. As when the Pentecostal fire rested on the Apostles' heads, a new light filled their minds and a new flame sprung up within their hearts; so when the same spirit breathes through the preacher's lips, the clouds of ignorance dissolve and the light of truth divine glorifies the minds and inflames the souls of his hearers. The ears of faith can hear the applause of angels and the eyes of faith can read Heaven's approval in the flashing glances of the Blest, as with each stroke the preacher widens the empire of the Precious Blood and piles palpitating trophies before the Sacred Heart. Ah! here is a field worthy of the highest ambition that ever burned within a human breast.
Hence, we should toil, toil, toil, and call no labour excessive that we put forth in burnishing into polished efficiency every weapon God has given us for the service of his pulpit.