SERMONS NEW AND OLD
"The reign of Charles the Second seemed to be impregnated with a free and easy moral atmosphere that engendered lewdness in human product. It is said by a great historian that Thomas Hobbes had, in language more precise and luminous than has ever been employed by any other metaphysical writer, maintained that the will of the prince was the standard of right and wrong, and that every subject ought to be ready to profess Popery, Mahometanism, or Paganism, at the royal command. Thousands who were incompetent to appreciate what was really valuable in his speculations eagerly welcomed a theory which, while it exalted the kingly office, relaxed the obligations of morality and degraded religion into a mere affair of state. Hobbism soon became an almost essential part of the character of the fine gentleman. All the lighter kinds of literature were deeply tainted by the prevailing licentiousness. Poetry stooped to be the pander of every low desire. Ridicule, instead of putting guilt and error to the blush, turned her formidable shafts against innocence and truth. The restored Church contended indeed against the prevailing immorality, but contended feebly, and with half a heart. It was necessary to the decorum of her character that she should admonish her erring children, but her admonitions were given in a somewhat perfunctory manner. Her attention was elsewhere engaged. Little as the men of mirth and fashion were disposed to shape their lives according to her precepts, they were yet ready to fight for her cathedrals and places, for every line of her rubric and every thread of her vestments. If the debauched cavalier haunted brothels and gambling houses, he at least avoided conventicles. If he never spoke without uttering ribaldry and blasphemy, he made some amends by his eagerness to send Baxter and Howe to gaol for preaching and praying. Thus the clergy, for a time, made war on schism with so much vigour that they had little leisure to make war on vice."
"Charles the Second wished merely to be a King who could draw without limit on the treasury for the gratification of his private tastes, who could hire with wealth and honours persons capable of assisting him to kill the time, and who, even when the state was brought by maladministration to the depths of humiliation and to the brink of ruin, could still exclude unwelcome truth from the purlieus of his own seraglio, and refuse to see and hear whatever might disturb his luxurious repose. Later in life, the ill-bred familiarity of the Scottish divines had given him a distaste for Presbyterian discipline, while the heats and animosities between the members of the Established Church and the Nonconformists, with which his reign commenced, made him think indifferently of both. His religion was that of a young prince in his warm blood, whose inquiries were applied more to discover arguments against belief than in its favour."
"The wits about the Court, who found employment in laughing at Scripture, delighted in turning to ridicule what the preachers said in their sermons before him, and in this way induced him to look upon the clergy as a body of men who had compounded a religion for their own advantage. So strongly did this feeling take root in him that he at length resigned himself to sleep at sermon-time—not even South or Barrow having the art to keep him awake. In one of these half-hours of sleep, when in Chapel, he is known to have missed, doubtless with regret, the gentle reproof of South to Lauderdale during a general somnolency:—'My lord, my lord, you snore so loud you will wake the King.'"
"He was altogether in favour of extempore preaching, and was unwilling to listen to the delivery of a written sermon." (Indeed, if we had more people like him in this day, we would hear far more of the gospel and far less of politics and jokes which so demoralize the pulpit and take away all sacredness. The King was right, as all mankind will agree, in his idea of preaching.) "Patrick excused himself from a chaplaincy, 'finding it very difficult to get a sermon without book.' On one occasion the King asked the famous Stillingfleet 'how it was that he always reads his sermons before him, when he was informed that he always preached without book elsewhere?' Stillingfleet answered something about the awe of so noble a congregation, the presence of so great and wise a prince, with which the King himself was very well contented,—'But, pray,' continued Stillingfleet, 'will your Majesty give me leave to ask you a question? Why do you read your speeches when you can have none of the same reasons?' 'Why truly, doctor,' replied the King, 'your question is a very pertinent one, and so will be my answer. I have asked the two Houses so often and for so much money, that I am ashamed to look them in the face.'"
"This 'slothful way of preaching,' for so the King called it, had arisen during the civil wars; and Monmouth, when Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, in compliance with the order of the King, directed a letter to the University that the practice of reading sermons should be wholly laid aside."
There was much ignorance in the seventeenth century; but 'twas of the people's own choosing; 'twas not of necessity. Lewdness was preferable to purity; it was easier had. And when the King led the pace, why not they of lesser rank and fortunes? But was there ever a thing created in all the world without its right and wrong sides? It seemed there was no room in Charles' time for aught but evil. "The ribaldry of Etherege and Wycherley was, in the presence and under the special sanction of the head of the church, while the author of the Pilgrim's Progress languished in a dungeon for the crime of proclaiming the gospel to the poor."
As time waxed, even the vigilant persecutors became passive, relaxed themselves into indifference; but before immorality was aware the still, small voice was heard. The seed that was twelve years in planting had taken root and Pilgrim's Progress became known and John Bunyan stood without the prison gates to preach and pray at will, to keep on extending that influence that lives to-day. And for once the King did not go to sleep when, through caprice or curiosity, he went to hear him preach.
"When Bunyan went to preach in London, if there was but one day's notice, the meeting house was crowded to overflowing. Twelve hundred people would be found collected before seven o'clock on a dark winter's morning to hear a lecture from him. In Zoar St. Southwark, his church was sometimes so crowded that he had to be lifted to the pulpit stairs over the congregation's heads." He strove not for popularity, as could be seen in the one little circumstance when "a friend complimented him, after service, on 'the sweet sermon' which he had delivered. 'You need not remind me of that,' he said. 'The devil told me of it before I was out of the pulpit.'"
"Charles Doe, a distinguished nonconformist, visited him in his confinement. 'When I was there,' he writes, 'there were about sixty dissenters besides himself, taken but a little before at a religious meeting at Kaistor, in the county of Bedford, besides two eminent dissenting ministers, Mr. Wheeler and Mr. Dun, by which means the prison was much crowded. Yet, in the midst of all that hurry, I heard Mr. Bunyan both preach and pray with that mighty spirit of faith and plerophory of Divine assistance, that he made me stand and wonder.'"