Hints on extemporaneous preaching

by Henry Ware

There was a class of rhetoricians and orators at Rome in the time of Cicero, who were famous for having made the same mistake. They would do every thing by a fixed and almost mechanical rule, by calculation and measurement. Their sentences were measured, their gestures were measured, their tones were measured; and they framed canons of judgment and taste, by which it was pronounced an affront on the intellectual nature of man to assail him with epithets, and exclamations, and varied tones, and emphatic gesture. They censured the free and flowing manner of Cicero as “tumid and exuberant,” nec satis pressus, supra modum exultans et superfluens. They cultivated a more guarded and concise style, which might indeed please the critic or the scholar, but was wholly unfitted to instruct or move a promiscuous audience; as was said of one of them, oratio—doctis et attente audientibus erat illustris; a multitudine autem et a foro, cui nata eloquentia est, devorabatur. The taste of the multitude prevailed, and Cicero was the admiration of the people, while those who pruned themselves by a more rigid and philosophical law, coldly correct and critically dull, “were frequently deserted by the audience in the midst of their harangues.”[2]

We may learn something from this. There is one mode of address for books and for classical readers, and another for the mass of men, who judge by the eye and ear, by the fancy and feelings, and know little of rules of art or of an educated taste. Hence it is that many of those preachers who have become the classics of a country, have been unattractive to the multitude, who have deserted their polished and careful composition, for the more unrestrained and rousing declamation of another class. The singular success of Chalmers, seems to be in a considerable measure owing to his attention to this fact. He has abandoned the pure and measured style, and adopted a heterogeneous mixture of the gaudy, pompous, and colloquial, offensive indeed to the ears of literary men, but highly acceptable to those who are less biassed by the authority of a standard taste and established models. We need not go to the extreme of Chalmers,—for there is no necessity for inaccuracy, bombast, or false taste—but we should doubtless gain by adopting his principle. The object is to address men according to their actual character, and in that mode in which their habits of mind may render them most accessible. As but few are thinkers or readers, a congregation is not to be addressed as such; but, their modes of life being remembered, constant regard must be had to their need of external attraction. This is most easily done by the familiarity and directness of extemporaneous address; for which reason this mode of preaching has peculiar advantages, in its adaptation to their situation and wants.

The truth is, indeed, that it is not the weight of the thought, the profoundness of the argument, the exactness of the arrangement, the choiceness of the language, which interest and chain the attention of even those educated hearers, who are able to appreciate them all. They are as likely to sleep through the whole as others. They can find all these qualities in much higher perfection in their libraries; they do not seek these only at church. And as to the large mass of the people, they are to them hidden things, of which they discern nothing. It is not these, so much as the attraction of an earnest manner, which arrests the attention and makes instruction welcome. Every day’s observation may show us, that he who has this manner will retain the attention of even an intellectual man with common-place thoughts, while with a different manner he would render tedious the most novel and ingenious disquisitions. Let an indifferent reader take into the pulpit a sermon of Barrow or Butler, and all its excellence of argument and eloquence would not save it from being accounted tedious; while an empty declaimer shall collect crowds to hang upon his lips in raptures. And this manner, which is so attractive, is not the studied artificial enunciation of the rhetorician’s school, but the free, flowing, animated utterance, which seems to come from the impulse of the subject; which may be full of faults, yet masters the attention by its nature and sincerity. This is precisely the manner of the extemporaneous speaker—in whom the countenance reflects the emotions of the soul, and the tone of voice is tuned to the feelings of the heart, rising and falling with the subject, as in conversation, without the regular and harmonious modulation of the practised reader.

In making these and similar remarks, it is true that I am thinking of the best extemporaneous speakers, and that all cannot be such. But it ought to be recollected at the same time, that all cannot be excellent readers; that those who speak ill, would probably read still worse; and that therefore those who can attain to no eminence as speakers, do not on that account fail of the advantages of which I speak, since they escape at least the unnatural monotony of bad reading; than which nothing is more earnestly to be avoided.

Every man utters himself with greater animation and truer emphasis in speaking, than he does, or perhaps can do, in reading. Hence it happens that we can listen longer to a tolerable speaker, than to a good reader. There is an indescribable something in the natural tones of him who is expressing earnestly his present thoughts, altogether foreign from the drowsy uniformity of the man that reads. I once heard it well observed, that the least animated mode of communicating thoughts to others, is the reading from a book the composition of another; the next in order is the reading one’s own composition; the next is delivering one’s own composition memoriter; and the most animated of all is the uttering one’s own thoughts as they rise fresh in his mind. Very few can give the spirit to another’s writings which they communicate to their own, or can read their own with the spirit, with which they spontaneously express their thoughts. We have all witnessed this in conversation; when we have listened with interest to long harangues from persons, who tire us at once if they begin to read. It is verified at the bar, and in the legislature, where orators maintain the unflagging attention of hearers for a long period, when they could not have read the same speech without producing intolerable fatigue. It is equally verified in the history of the pulpit; for those who are accustomed to the reading of sermons, are for the most part impatient even of able discourses, when they extend beyond the half hour’s length; while very indifferent extemporaneous preachers are listened to with unabated attention for a full hour. In the former case there is a certain uniformity of tone, and a perpetual recurrence of the same cadences, inseparable from the manner of a reader, from which the speaker remains longer free. This difference is perfectly well understood, and was acted upon by Cecil, whose success as a preacher gives him a right to be heard, when he advised young preachers to “limit a written sermon to half an hour, and one from notes to forty minutes.”[3] For the same reason, those preachers whose reading comes nearest to speaking, are universally more interesting than others.

Thus it is evident that there is an attractiveness in this mode of preaching, which gives it peculiar advantages. He imparts greater interest to what he says, who is governed by the impulse of the moment, than he who speaks by rule. When he feels the subject, his voice and gesture correspond to that feeling, and communicate it to others as it can be done in no other way. Though he possess but indifferent talents, yet if he utter himself with sincerity and feeling, it is far pleasanter than to listen to his cold reading of what he wrote perhaps with little excitement, and delivers with less.

In thus speaking of the interest which attends an extemporaneous delivery, it is not necessary to pursue the subject into a general comparison of the advantages of this mode with those of reading and of reciting from memory. Each has prevailed in different places and at different periods, and each undoubtedly has advantages and disadvantages peculiar to itself. These are well though briefly stated in the excellent article on Elocution in Rees’ Cyclopædia, to which it will be sufficient to refer, as worthy attentive perusal. The question at large I cannot undertake to discuss. If I should, I could hardly hope to satisfy either others or myself. The almost universal custom of reading in this part of the world, where recitation from memory is scarcely known, and extempore speaking is practised by very few except the illiterate, forbids any thing like a fair deduction from observation. In order to institute a just comparison, one should have had extensive opportunities of watching the success of each mode, and of knowing the circumstances under which each was tried. For in the inquiry, which is to be preferred in the pulpit,—we must consider, not which has most excellencies when it is found in perfection, but which has excellencies attainable by the largest number of preachers; not which is first in theory or most beautiful as an art, but which has been and is likely to be most successful in practice. These are questions not easily answered. Each mode has its advocates and its opponents. In the English church there is nothing but reading, and we hear from every quarter complaints of it. In Scotland the custom of recitation prevails, but multitudes besides Dr. Campbell[4] condemn it. In many parts of the continent of Europe no method is known, but that of a brief preparation and unpremeditated language; but that it should be universally approved by those who use it, is more than we can suppose.

The truth is, that either method may fail in the hands of incompetent or indolent men, and either may be thought to succeed by those whose taste or prejudices are obstinate in its favor. All that I contend for, in advocating unwritten discourse, is, that this method claims a decided superiority over the others in some of the most important particulars. That the others have their own advantages, I do not deny, nor that this is subject to disadvantages from which they are free. But whatever these may be I hope to show that they are susceptible of a remedy; that they are not greater than those which attend other modes; that they are balanced by equal advantages, and that therefore this art deserves to be cultivated by all who would do their utmost to render their ministry useful. There can be no good reason why the preacher should confine himself to either mode. It might be most beneficial to cultivate and practise all. By this means he might impart something of the advantages of each to each, and correct the faults of all by mingling them with the excellencies of all. He would learn to read with more of the natural accent of the speaker, and to speak with more of the precision of the writer.

The remarks already made have been designed to point out some of the general advantages attending the use of unprepared language. Some others remain to be noticed, which have more particular reference to the preacher individually.

It is no unimportant consideration to a minister of the gospel, that this is a talent held in high estimation among men, and that it gives additional influence to him who possesses it. It is thought to argue capacity and greatness of mind. Fluency of language passes with many, and those not always the vulgar, for affluence of thought; and never to be at a loss for something to say, is supposed to indicate inexhaustible knowledge. It cannot have escaped the observation of any one accustomed to notice the judgments which are passed upon men, how much reputation and consequent influence are acquired by the power of speaking readily and boldly, without any other considerable talent, and with very indifferent acquisitions; and how a man of real talents, learning, and worth, has frequently sunk below his proper level, from a mere awkwardness and embarrassment in speaking without preparation. So that it is not simply superstition which leads so many to refuse the name of preaching to any but extemporaneous harangues; it is in part owing to the natural propensity there is to admire, as something wonderful and extraordinary, this facility of speech. It is undoubtedly a very erroneous standard of judgment. But a minister of the gospel, whose success in his important calling depends so much on his personal influence, and the estimation in which his gifts are held, can hardly be justified in slighting the cultivation of a talent, which may so innocently add to his means of influence.