French Classics

by William Cleaver Wilkinson

Now I ask you, and I ask it smitten with terror, not separating in this matter my lot from yours, and putting myself into the same frame of mind into which I desire you to come—I ask you, then, If Jesus Christ were to appear in this sanctuary, in the midst of this assembly, the most illustrious in the world, to pass judgment on us, to draw the dread line of distinction between the goats and the sheep, do you believe that the majority of all of us who are here would be set on his right hand? Do you believe that things would even be equal? Nay, do you believe there would be found so many as the ten righteous men whom anciently the Lord could not find in five whole cities? I put the question to you, but you know not; I know not myself. Thou only, O my God, knowest those that belong to thee! But if we know not those who belong to him, at least we know that sinners do not belong to him. Now, of what classes of persons do the professing Christians in this assembly consist? Titles and dignities must be counted for naught; of these you shall be stripped before Jesus Christ. Who make up this assembly? Sinners, in great number, who do not wish to be converted; in still greater number, sinners who would like it, but who put off their conversion; many others who would be converted, only to relapse into sin; finally, a multitude who think they have no need of conversion. You have thus made up the company of the reprobate. Cut off these four classes of sinners from this sacred assembly, for they will be be cut off from it at the great day! Stand forth now, ye righteous! where are you? Remnant of Israel, pass to the right hand! True wheat of Jesus Christ, disengage yourselves from this chaff, doomed to the fire! O God! where are thine elect? and what remains there for thy portion?

Brethren, our perdition is well nigh assured, and we do not give it a thought. Even if in that dread separation which one day shall be made, there were to be but a single sinner out of this assembly found on the side of the reprobate, and if a voice from heaven should come to give us assurance of the fact in this sanctuary, without pointing out the person intended, who among us would not fear that he might himself be the wretch? Who among us would not at once recoil upon his conscience, to inquire whether his sins had not deserved that penalty? Who among us would not, seized with dismay, ask of Jesus Christ, as did once the apostles, “Lord, is it I?”

What is there wanting in such eloquence as the foregoing? Wherein lies its deficiency of power to penetrate and subdue? Voltaire avowed that he found the sermons of Massillon to be among “the most agreeable books we have in our language. I love,” he went on, “to have them read to me at table.” There are things in Massillon that Voltaire should not have delighted to read, or to hear read—things that should have made him wince and revolt, if they did not make him yield and be converted. Was there fault in the preacher? Did he preach with professional, rather than with personal, zeal? Did his hearers feel themselves secretly acquitted by the man, at the self-same moment at which they were openly condemned by the preacher? It is impossible to say. But Massillon’s virtue was not lofty and regal; however it may have been free from just reproach. He was somewhat too capable of compliance. He was made bishop of Clermont, and his promotion cost him the anguish of having to help consecrate a scandalously unfit candidate as archbishop of Cambray. Massillon’s, however, is a fair, if not an absolutely spotless, fame. Hierarch as he was, and orthodox Catholic, this most elegant of eloquent orators had a liberal strain in his blood which allied him politically with the “philosophers” of the time succeeding. He, with Fénelon, and perhaps with Racine, makes seem less abrupt the transition in France from the age of absolutism to the age of revolt and final revolution. There is distinct advance in Massillon, and advance more than is accounted for by his somewhat later time, toward the easier modern spirit in Church and in State, from the high, unbending austerity of that antique pontiff and minister, Bossuet.

In dealing with Saurin we are irresistibly reminded of the train of historic misfortunes that age after age have visited France. It bears eloquent, if tragic testimony to the enduring noble qualities of the French people, that they have survived so splendidly so much national suicide. What other great nation is there that has continued great and spilled so often her own best blood? The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, with its sequel of frightful hemorrhage in the loss to France of her Huguenots, the guillotine of the Revolution, the decimations of Napoleon, the madness of the Franco-German war, the Commune!

To such reflections we are forced; for Jacques Saurin preached his great sermons in French as a compulsory exile from France. He had a year or two’s experience as French preacher in London; but from his twenty-eighth year till he died at fifty-two he was pastor of the French church at The Hague in Holland.

Saurin’s living renown was great; and his renown has never been less, though it has been less resounding, since he died. This is as it could not but be; for the reputation of Saurin as preacher rested from the first on solid foundations that were not to be shaken. If he had been a loyal Roman Catholic, he would have been twinned with Bossuet, whom he somewhat resembles, in the acclamations of general fame. It is far more in name than in merit that Bossuet surpasses him. Bossuet’s quasi-pontifical relation to the Gallican Church indeed engaged him in various activities which seemed to display a talent in him correspondingly more various than that of Saurin, who remained almost exclusively a preacher. But the difference is probably a difference of fortune rather than a difference of original gift. The intellect that expresses itself in Saurin’s sermons is certainly a spacious intellect. Saurin is in mere intellect as distinctly “great” as is Bossuet. In imagination, however, that attribute of genius as distinguished from talent, to Bossuet we suppose must be accorded superiority over Saurin.

Clearness, French clearness; order, French order; solidity of matter; sobriety of thought; soundness of doctrine; breadth of comprehension; sagacity and instructedness of interpretation; solemnity of inculcation; progress and cumulation of effect; strength and elevation, rather than grace and winningness, of style; address to the understanding, rather than appeal to the emotions; certitude of logic, rather than play of imagination; a theological, more than a practical, tendency of interest—such are the distinguishing characteristics of Saurin as preacher.

Sermons are literary products in which change from fashion to fashion of thought and of form makes itself felt more than in almost any other kind of literature. The sermons of one age are generally doomed to be obsolete in the age next following. But to this general rule Saurin’s sermons come near constituting an exception. They might, many of them, perhaps most of them, still be preached. This, certain pulpit plagiarists of a generation or two ago, are said to have learned.

The following extract will give our readers an idea how Saurin, toward the close of a discourse—having now done, for the occasion, with dispassionate argument—would follow up and press his hearer with deliberately vehement, unescapable oratoric harangue and appeal. His text is: “Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.” Analyzing this, he states thus his second head of discourse: “Motives to virtue are superior to motives to vice.”

What [under the first head] I affirmed of all known truth, that its force is irresistible, I affirm, on the same principle, of all motives to virtue: the most hardened sinners cannot resist them if they attend to them; there is no other way of becoming insensible to them than to turn the eyes away from them....