49. The admission of this principle would apparently decide the controversy, so far as it rests on religious grounds. But Locke has recourse to several other arguments independent of it. He proves, with no great difficulty, that the civil power cannot justly, or consistently with any true principle of religion, compel men to profess what they do not believe. This, however, is what very few would, at present, be inclined to maintain. The real question was as to the publicity of opinions deemed heterodox, and especially in social worship; and this is what those who held the magistrate to possess an authority patriarchal, universal, and arbitrary, and who were also rigidly tenacious of the necessity of an orthodox faith, and perfectly convinced that it was no other than their own, would hardly be persuaded to admit by any arguments that Locke has alledged. But the tendency of public opinion had begun to manifest itself against both these tenets of the high-church party, so that, in the eighteenth century, the principles of general tolerance became too popular to be disputed with any chance of attention. Locke was engaged in a controversy, through his first letter on toleration, which produced a second and a third; but it does not appear that these, though longer than the first, have considerably modified its leading positions.[745] It is to be observed that he pleads for the universal toleration of all modes of worship not immoral in their nature, or involving doctrines inimical to good government; placing in the latter category some tenets of the church of Rome.
[745] Warburton has fancied that Locke’s real sentiments are only discoverable in his first Letter on Toleration, and that in the two latter he “combats his intolerant adversary quite through the controversy with his own principles, well foreseeing, that at such a time of prejudice arguments built on received opinions would have greatest weight, and make quickest impression on the body of the people whom it was his business to gain.” Biogr. Britannica, art. Locke.
French Sermons. 50. It is confessed by Goujet that, even in the middle of the seventeenth century, France could boast very little of pulpit eloquence. Frequent quotations from heathen writers and from the schoolmen, with little solid morality and less good reasoning, make up the sermons of that age.[746] But the revolution in this style, as in all others, though perhaps gradual, was complete in the reign of Louis XIV. A slight sprinkling of passages from the fathers, and still more frequently from the Scriptures, but always short, and seeming to rise out of the preacher’s heart, rather than to be sought for in his memory, replaced that intolerable parade of a theological common place book, which had been as customary in France as in England. The style was to be the perfection of French eloquence, the reasoning persuasive rather than dogmatic, the arrangement more methodical and distributive than at present, but without the excess we find in our old preachers. This is the general character of French sermons; but those who most adorned the pulpit, had of course their individual distinctions. Without delaying to mention those who are now not greatly remembered, such as La Rue, Hubert, Mascaron, we must confine ourselves to three of high reputation, Bourdaloue, Bossuet, and Fléchier.
[746] Bibliothèque Française, vol. ii., p. 283.
Bourdaloue. 51. Bourdaloue, a Jesuit, but as little of a Jesuit in the worst acceptation of the word, as the order has produced, is remarkably simple, earnest, practical: he convinces rather than commands; and by convincing he persuades; for his discourses tend always to some duty, to something that is to be done or avoided. His sentences are short, interrogative, full of plain and solid reasoning, unambitious in expression, and wholly without that care in the choice of words and cadences which we detect in Bossuet and Fléchier. No one would call Bourdaloue a rhetorician, and though he continually introduces the fathers, he has not caught their vices of language.[747]
[747] The public did justice to Bourdaloue, as they generally do to a solid and impressive style of preaching. Je crois, says Goujet, p. 300, que tout le monde convient qu’aucun autre ne lui est supérieur. C’est le grand maître pour l’éloquence de la chaire; c’est le prince des prédicateurs. Le public n’a jamais été partagé sur son sujet; la ville et la cour l’ont également estimé et admiré. C’est qu’il avoit réuni en sa personne tous les grands caractères de la bonne éloquence; la simplicité du discours Chrétien avec la majesté et la grandeur, le sublime avec l’intelligible et le populaire, la force avec la douceur, la véhémence avec l’onction, la liberté avec la justesse, et le plus vive ardeur avec la plus pure lumière.
Compared with Bossuet. 52. Bourdaloue is almost in the same relation to Bossuet, as Patru to Le Maistre, though the two orators of the pulpit are far above those of the bar. As the one is short, condensed, plain, reasoning, and though never feeble, not often what is generally called eloquent, so the other is animated, figurative, rather diffuse and prodigal of ornament, addressing the imagination more than the judgment, rich and copious in cadence, elevating the hearer to the pitch of his own sublimity. Bossuet is sometimes too declamatory; and Bourdaloue perhaps sometimes borders on dryness. Much in the sermons of the former is true poetry; but he has less of satisfactory and persuasive reasoning than the latter. His tone is also, as in all his writings, too domineering and dogmatical for those who demand something beyond the speaker’s authority when they listen.
Funeral discourses of Bossuet. 53. The sermons, however, of Bossuet, taken generally, are not reckoned in the highest class of his numerous writings; perhaps scarcely justice has been done to them. His genius, on the other hand, by universal confession, never shone higher than in the six which bear the name of Oraisons Funèbres. They belong in substance so much more naturally to the province of eloquence than of theology, that I should have reserved them for another place, if the separation would not have seemed rather unexpected to the reader. Few works of genius perhaps in the French language are better known, or have been more prodigally extolled. In that style of eloquence which the ancients called demonstrative, or rather descriptive (επιδεικτικος), the style of panegyric or commemoration, they are doubtless superior to those justly celebrated productions of Thucydides and Plato that have descended to us from Greece; nor has Bossuet been equalled by any later writer. Those on the Queen of England, on her daughter the Duchess of Orleans, and on the Prince of Condé, outshine the rest; and if a difference is to be made among these, we might, perhaps, after some hesitation, confer the palm on the first. The range of topics is so various, the thoughts so just, the images so noble and poetical, the whole is in such perfect keeping, the tone of awful contemplation, is so uniform, that if it has not any passages of such extraordinary beauty as occur in the other two, its general effect on the mind is more irresistible.[748]
[748] An English preacher of conspicuous renown for eloquence was called upon, within no great length of time, to emulate the funeral discourse of Bossuet on the sudden death of Henrietta of Orleans. He had before him a subject incomparably more deep in interest, more fertile in great and touching associations—he had to describe, not the false sorrow of courtiers, not the shriek of sudden surprise that echoed by night in the halls of Versailles, not the apocryphal penitence of one so tainted by the world’s intercourse, but the manly grief of an entire nation in the withering of those visions of hope which wait upon the untried youth of royalty, in its sympathy with grandeur annihilated, with beauty and innocence precipitated into the tomb. Nor did he sink beneath this subject, except as compared with Bossuet. The sermon to which my allusion will be understood, is esteemed by many the finest effort of this preacher; but if read together with that of its prototype, it will be laid aside as almost feeble and unimpressive.
54. In this style, much more of ornament, more of what speaks in the spirit, and even the very phrase, of poetry, to the imagination and the heart, is permitted by a rigorous criticism, than in forensic or in deliberative eloquence. The beauties that rise before the author’s vision are not renounced; the brilliant colours of his fancy are not subdued; the periods assume a more rhythmical cadence, and emulate, like metre itself, the voluptuous harmony of musical intervals; the whole composition is more evidently formed to delight; but it will delight to little purpose, or even cease, in any strong sense of the word, to do so at all, unless it is ennobled by moral wisdom. In this Bossuet was pre-eminent; his thoughts are never subtle or far-fetched; they have a sort of breadth, a generality of application, which is peculiarly required in those who address a mixed assembly, and which many that aim at what is profound and original are apt to miss. It may be confessed, that these funeral discourses are not exempt from some defects, frequently inherent in panegyrical eloquence; they are sometimes too rhetorical, and do not appear to show so little effort as some have fancied; the amplifications are sometimes too unmeasured, the language sometimes borders too nearly on that of the stage; above all, there is a tone of adulation not quite pleasing to a calm posterity.