Chapter VI.
The Sermon Should Be Short.
The Discourses of the Fathers were short.
The French Mind is quick to apprehend.
Sermons are generally too long.
Sermons of Ten, Seven, and of Five Minutes.
"Long sermons bore us," [Footnote 16] says M. de Cormenin; "and when a Frenchman is bored, he leaves the place and goes away. If he cannot so retire, he remains and talks. If he cannot talk, he yawns and falls asleep. Anyhow, he declares that he will not come again. …"
[Footnote 16: "Nous ennuient." It is useless to attempt giving the full force of the French ennui in any one English word. That above adopted appears to me the nearest approach to it which our language affords; still it comes far short of the expressive original. Translator.]
The sermon should be short. At all events, it must not bore. Bore or ennui is fatal in France, and is never pardoned. It has been said, there are two things which are not permitted in France, namely, to ridicule and to bore. Unhappily the former is allowed nowadays, for there are many who use it, and many who abuse it; but on the article of bore society is still inflexible and implacable. The man who is deemed a bore is shunned and detested. We, the clergy, must beware of exciting this antipathy on the score of religion; the more so, because most minds secrete a stock of the sentiment, which is readily called forth when they are brought in contact with any thing serious.
On the other hand, why preach so long? I know not how we have allowed ourselves to be led into these lengthy discourses. What is the good of it? What is the object? We speak in God's name. Now, power and majesty are always chary of words; yet such words are not the less efficacious for being few. The instructions of our blessed Lord, who is the Divine Master of us all, were uniformly short. Even the Sermon on the Mount, which has revolutionized the world, does not appear to have lasted more than half an hour. The homilies of the Fathers also were short, and Saint Ambrose says:— "Nec nimium prolixus sit sermo ne fastidium pariat; semihorae tempus communiter non excedat." Saint François de Sales, too, recommends short sermons, and remarks that excessive length was the general fault in the preachers of his time.
He says:—"The good Saint François, in his rules to the preachers of his Order, directs that their sermons should be short.
"Believe me, and I speak from experience, the more you say, the less will the hearers retain; the less you say, the more they will profit. By dint of burdening their memory, you will overwhelm it; just as a lamp is extinguished by feeding it with too much oil, and plants are choked by immoderate irrigation.
"When a sermon is too long, the end erases the middle from the memory, and the middle the beginning.