Concionum J. Osorii; Colon. Hierat. 1600, 12mo., 5 vols.; Lugduni, Pillehotte, 1601, 8vo.; Venetiis, 1601, fol.; Parisiis, M. Sonnium, 1601, 8vo., 5 vols.; Venetiis, 1604, 4to., 5 vols.; Monast. Westphaliæ, 1622, 8vo. 5 vols.
R. P. Osorii Concionum Epitome; Colon., 1602, 8vo., 3 vols.; De Sanctis, ibid., 1613, 8vo.
John Osorius was a preacher of a high order. He was eminently Scriptural, and thoroughly practical. He neither wasted his efforts on the discussion of profitless school questions, nor wearied his hearers by abstruse disquisitions on points of Canon law. His matter is always solid, and his method sound and clear. A man of refined taste and lively imagination, he could render his discourses attractive to both educated and uneducated. He seldom breaks into a torrent of eloquence, like De Barzia, but his style is polished and graceful. He had none of the fire of the Bishop of Cadiz, but in his heart burned the pure flame of a tempered zeal, not raging forth as a furnace, dazzling and scorching all around, but calmly glowing in unruffled peace, unnoticed perhaps in the glare of day, but steadily beaming as a guiding star to the wanderer in the night.
In one point he certainly resembles his countryman De Barzia, viz. in his accurate Biblical knowledge. But the use he made of Scripture was different to that made by the Bishop, as his audience was very different from that to which the Prelate addressed his Mission Sermons. Holy Scripture was the spiritual food of this Jesuit preacher, and his discourses prove his intimate acquaintance with every portion of God’s Word. His discourses do not contain, as do so many modern sermons, crude and undigested lumps of Scripture, clumsily pieced and awkwardly inserted to distend the dull oration to its conventional limits, but the words of Inspiration float lightly and fragrantly on the stream of simple eloquence, as strands of new-mown grass and cut meadow flowers on the calm brook which softly glides past the field where the mowers mow the hay.
If De Barzia roused long-dead consciences, waking them from their sepulchres with note like a trumpet, bringing them forth bound hand and foot in the corpse-clothes of evil habits, and delivering them over to the confessors to be loosed and let go, Osorius quickened the consciences but just dead, with still small voice, taking them as it were by the hand and lifting them up with tenderness, that he might restore them to their parents—to their God, who was to them a Father, to the Church, which was to them a Mother.
But with all these rare merits, Osorius had his defects. His sermons are wanting in arrangement and in unity of design. He preached on the Gospel for the day, and aimed rather at giving a running commentary on the selected passage of Scripture, than at elaborating one text and concentrating his powers upon its application. Hence, each of his sermons, which are very long, may well be broken into six or eight short discourses with separate points, but when preached in their entirety the effect is that of a surfeit. Nothing can be better than the food he provides, but it is in too great abundance, and it is too varied; briefly, in his sermons there is what the French call an embarras de richesses.
There is this excuse to be made for Osorius, that he did but follow in the wake of the Patristic and Mediæval preachers, whose public orations consisted almost invariably of Scripture expositions, partaking more of the character of our modern Bible-class lectures than our set sermons; and it was only bold men like De Barzia, who set all conventionalities at defiance, that originated the class of sermon now recognized as the normal type of a pulpit discourse. Osorius, however, could divest himself of the trammels of custom when he chose, and he has left some notable specimens of sermons which have but one point and subject, in his fourth volume; and I very much question whether any more noble and more vigorous have ever been composed than those written by John Osorius, the Jesuit, on the Four Last Things, the Three Foes of Man, and the Seven Last Words.
Osorius seldom relates anecdotes, and his sermons are almost entirely free from those stories which preachers of his age delighted in introducing to illustrate their subjects; but, in their place, he brings forward similes to an extraordinary extent. His sermons are studded with them, and his similes are almost invariably graceful and neat. It may be questioned whether he does not somewhat overdo it, when one sermon contains fifteen similes. Yet these are so beautiful that we could ill spare one. Perhaps we are too critical in requiring all sermons to be cut to the same shape; perhaps the beauty of the wood hyacinth may consist in the multitude of its azure bells, and the splendour of the tulip would be lost if it grew in a bunch.
But the reader shall judge for himself. I will give him a string of similes from the Trinity sermons of Osorius.