The quarrel between the preacher and the reporter was not long in breaking out. Here is the indignant complaint of Dr. Calamy in the preface of one of his discourses.—
“The iniquity of the times hath necessitated the printing of the ensuing Sermon. There is a Fellow, (who he is I know not) who hath for his own private advantage, published it very imperfectly and corruptly. And herein hath not only sinned against the 8th Commandment in taking away another man’s goods without his leave, but also against the 9th Commandment, in bearing false witness against his neighbour. For he makes me to say not only such things which I never said, but which are very absurd and irrational. As for example: That the Body is the worse part of the Soul. That the party deceased had not only dona sanaia, but selutifera. That I should tell a story of one good Pell, a Minister, born without doubt in Utopia, for of such a man I never either read or heard. To make some satisfaction to the living and the dead, here you have the same sermon in a truer edition with some few additions then omitted for want of time. If this unhappy necessity may contribute anything to thy good, or to the perpetuating of the Memory of the Reverend, Learned, and godly Minister (at whose Funeral it was preached), I shall not much repent for what I have done, though I am assured, that he that brought me into this necessity, hath cause to repent of this, his irregular and unwarrantable practice. (“The Saint’s Transfiguration,” a Sermon preached at the Funeral of Dr. Samuel Bolton, by Edmund Calamy, B.D., October 19, 1654. London, 1655).”
The preacher had of course alluded to Conradus Pellicanus, the German theologian, whose name the stenographer had but partially caught, and set down as “Pell!” Hinc illae lachrymae—of angry indignation.
The stenographers of the last century followed closely in the footsteps of their predecessors. James Weston’s “Stenography” of which various editions appeared between 1727 and 1740, has an engraving showing a cathedral, in which a bewigged divine is preaching to a crowd of fashionably dressed ladies and gentlemen, many of whom are busy with pen and notebook. Underneath the picture is the motto,—
“Be perfect in this useful art, and then
No word from pulpit can escape your pen.”
This idea was conveyed by Aulay Macaulay, whose “Polygraphy” has for a frontispiece a pretty engraving, in which two gentlemen and a lady are seen taking down the words which, from the preacher’s gestures, we may suppose to be both impressive and profitable.
In the nineteenth century, as in the seventeenth, the church is much frequented by stenographers, but more it is to be feared for practice in shorthand than for perfection in piety. The first ambition of the boy who is learning shorthand is to “report” a sermon by the preacher whose ministry he attends. Mr. Thomas Allen Reed has given an amusing account of his first exploit in this direction, when he was still struggling with the early difficulties of the system he soon after abandoned for phonography. He says, “I did not, however, relinquish my practice, and in a few weeks I resolved on making a grand attempt to take down the Sunday sermon. I rose early in the morning with the sense of a weighty responsibility resting upon me. I sharpened my pencil with the gravity of a senator, and folded several sheets of paper together, in the profound conviction that I was undertaking a serious, if not a formidable, duty. I did my best to conceal my emotions, but my heart was beating all the way to the church. As to the preliminary service, I understood as little of it as if it had been read in Cherokee. I stood when I ought to have knelt, and knelt when I should have sat or stood, and demeaned myself like a youth whose religious education had been sadly neglected. At length the clergyman entered the pulpit, and I took my sheets of paper from the Bible in which I had concealed them, and my pencil from my pocket. If I did not feel like Bonaparte’s soldiers, that the eyes of posterity were upon me, I devoutly believed that every eye in the church was directed to my note book. The colour mounted my cheeks (as it very often did at that period of my life,) and my whole frame trembled. I had a strong impulse to abandon my project, but I summoned all my energy to the task, and awaited the commencement of the sermon. ‘The 12th chapter of Isaiah and the 3rd verse,’ said the minister in solemn tones. This presented no great difficulty. I am sorry to say that, stenographically speaking, I burked Isaiah, and contented myself with the long-hand abbreviation, Is., and as to the text itself, I thought the first three words would suffice. And now for the sermon. ‘The remarkable words, my brethren, of this important prophecy.’ Laboriously I followed the deliberate utterances of the speaker, but when I reached the prophecy I floundered about in a maze of dire confusion. I thought it began with ph, and I accordingly started as I had been instructed, with the stenographic equivalent, f, but, finding that this would not do, I crossed it out. Then I tried p, r, and getting a good deal confused, plunged madly into the alphabet, the result being a combination of characters altogether beyond description. But where was the preacher? Away in the distance, almost out of sight and hearing. I was fairly beaten, but not quite disheartened. When another sentence was begun I made a fresh start, this time I was pulled up by the word ‘synonymous,’ I knew there were some n’s and m’s in it, but not how many. I must have written three or four of each, and while I was jerking out these segments of circles (their forms were the same as in Phonography,) the clergyman was remorselessly pursuing the intricacies of a long sentence, which I was compelled wholly to abandon. I made several other efforts with the like result. At length I secured an entire sentence of about twenty words, and felt very proud of the achievement. Some half-dozen such sentences rewarded my labour during the sermon. How I racked my brain in the afternoon in poring over these fragments! My memory (not then a bad one) was utterly useless. I had not the slightest conception of the drift of the sermon, but I was determined to make some kind of a transcript, and it was made. I presented it to my mother as my first attempt, and I believe she kept it carefully locked up in a drawer among her treasures. It was fortunate for my reputation that it never afterwards saw the light.” (Leaves from the Notebook of Thomas Allen Reed, vol. 1, p. 12; vol. 2, p. 24).
The professional reporting of sermons is now an important department of the stenographer’s work. The late Mr. Spurgeon’s sermons were thus reported by Mr. Reed. Dr. Cumming had his own reporter, as had Beecher, and as Talmage and others have. Dr. Joseph Parker’s discourses were “specially reported” by his wife. It is to the phonographic skill of a lady that we owe the preservation of many of the lectures, sermons, and prayers of the late George Dawson. The sermons of the Rev. Thomas T. Lynch were also reported by Mr. Reed. Yet the preacher had a strong dislike to his discourses being reported and printed, “especially without his revision.” There, no doubt, is the rub. Dr. Morley Punshon had a strong dislike to be reported, and some letters that passed between him and Mr. Reed are given in the Phonetic Journal, July 30th, 1881. His objections were that the reporter was sometimes inaccurate, and that the preacher alone had a right to decide whether he would or would not address the larger congregation to be reached by the press. And he urged very strongly that the arguments used by Macaulay as to the unauthorised publication of his speeches were equally applicable to the case of sermons. It is still a rather doubtful point whether sermons are covered by the law of copyright, and many single sermons and even volumes have been published without the sanction, and sometimes against the wishes, of the preachers. But as it has been held by the law courts that a professor’s lectures cannot be legally published without his consent, it is possible that some day a preacher may arise who will test the question and ask the judges to say if the pulpit is as much protected as the teacher’s desk. The late Bishop Fraser is said to have jocularly declared that there was no heresy that had not been attributed to him by the slips of note-takers and condensers.
Shorthand has been extensively used for the MS. of preachers, as by Dr. Chalmers, Job Orton, and a host of other preachers,—so many, indeed, that to deal with stenography in the pulpit would need a larger space than is here available.
Perhaps the most original use of shorthand in church was that due to the conscientiousness and business instincts of the late Rt. Hon. W. H. Smith. Ecclesiastical patronage he felt to be a great responsibility. When there was a minister to be appointed he sought the best information as to those who were recommended to him as suitable. Sometimes he corresponded with friends likely to know; “at other times he used to send his confidential shorthand writer to attend the services of clergymen who might be suitable for the vacancy, and bring him verbatim reports of the sermons, with confidential memoranda of their appearance, views, abilities, and other details. It was only after carefully examining this information that he would proceed to make the appointment.”