“At the sight of an audience so strange to me, my brethren, it seems that I ought to open my mouth to ask your favour in behalf of a poor missionary, deficient in all the talents you require, when he comes before you to speak of your welfare. But far from it, to-day I feel a different sentiment; and though I may be humbled, do not think for one moment that I am troubled by the miserable anxieties of vanity;—as though, forsooth, I were preaching myself. God forbid that a minister of Heaven should ever think it necessary to excuse himself before such as you! Be you who you may, you are but like me, sinners before the judgment-seat of God. It is then only because I stand before your God and my God, that I am constrained now to beat my breast. Hitherto I have published the righteous dealings of the Most High in thatched temples. I have preached the rigours of penitence to unhappy ones, the majority of whom were destitute of bread. I have announced to the good inhabitants of the fields, the most awful truths of religion. Wretched one that I am, what have I done! I have saddened the poor, the best friends of my God; I have carried terror and pain into the simple and faithful souls which I should have sympathized with and consoled.
“But here, here, where my eyes rest only on the great, the rich, the oppressors of suffering humanity, the bold and hardened in sin; ah! here only is it, here in the midst of these many scandals, that the word of God should be uttered with the voice of thunder; here is it that I must hold up before you, on one hand the death which threatens you, on the other, my great God who will judge you all. I hold at this moment your sentence in my hand. Tremble then before me, you proud and scornful men who listen to me. Listen when I speak of your ungrateful abuse of every means of grace, the necessity of salvation, the certainty of death, the uncertainty of that hour so terrible to you, final impenitence, the last judgment, the small number of the elect, hell, and above all eternity! Eternity! behold the subjects on which I shall speak, subjects which I should have reserved for you alone. Ah! what need I your suffrages, which may, perchance, damn me without saving you? God Himself will move you, whilst I, His unworthy minister, speak; for I have acquired a long experience of His mercies. It is He, and He alone, who in a few moments will stir the depths of your consciences.”
Passing from the exordium to the subject: that which is so tedious in modern sermons is the want of variety in the matter. There are a stock of subjects of very limited range upon which changes are rung, but these subjects are so few that the changes are small in number. Many years ago I was staying with a relation in holy orders, after a tour through different watering-places, and I mentioned to him the curious fact, that on three consecutive Sundays, in different churches, I had heard sermons on Felix waiting for a more convenient season. Having mentioned this, I forgot the circumstance. Five years after I was in a cathedral town, and went to one of the churches there, on a Sunday morning. To my surprise I saw my relation sail up the nave in rustling silk, preceded by the verger, escorting him to the pulpit. As he passed my pew, our eyes met. He was as surprised to see me as I was to see him, as he was only a visitor like myself. I noticed signs of agitation in his countenance, and that he was some time before he delivered his text, which was upon Zaccheus in the sycamore-tree.
After service I waited for him, and on our meeting, his first words were, “You wretched fellow! You put me terribly out; I had Felix trembling in my pocket ready for delivery; but when I saw you, our conversation five years ago flashed across me, and I had to change the sermon in the pulpit.” But this was not all. Next Saturday I was at the other end of England, staying with a country parson, and I related this incident. My host pulled a long face, broke out into a profuse perspiration, and said,—“I am really very sorry, but I had prepared Felix for to-morrow, and what is more, I do not see my way towards changing the subject.”
The remarkable part of this anecdote is, that the moral application was similar in all these discourses. Now, the sermons of the divines of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries seldom offended in this manner. Matthias Faber published three enormous volumes of sermons for every Sunday in the year, containing some fifteen discourses for each, and they are perfectly varied in matter and in application.
The following is a list of the subjects for one Sunday—the second in Lent:—
St. Matt. xvii. “He was transfigured before them.”
Sermon I.—The means whereby a hardened sinner may be transformed into a new man, and his heart be softened.
1. By constantly hearing God’s Word.