No VIII.

VOL. II.

ON THE PULPIT ELOQUENCE OF SCOT

LAND.

No I.-Chalmers.

THERE is perhaps no triumph of human genius so instantaneous, so unrivalled, and so splendid, as that of the Preacher. It is more peculiar than that of the General, for he shares his glory with multitudes, and there is not one in all his army who would consent to give him the undivided praise. The eloquence of the Lawyer is corrupted by our knowledge that he has received a fee, and that of the Politician is fettered by the details of business, and the certainty of a reply. The Poet is the only one whose art can boast of producing an equal effect on the human passions; but then the days of solemn recitation and choral accompaniments have long since gone by, and the enthusiasm excited in a closet must always be inferior to that which is kindled in an assembly. The Dramatic Poet, indeed, who should be present at the representation of his own tragedy, must be supposed to have attained the summit of literary enjoyment. But even here the triumph is neither instantaneous nor entire. The Parisians, it is true, used to call for the poet when the curtain fell; and they crowned Voltaire with garlands, and carried him in procession about the stage. But all this was an after thought; and the first and most hearty of their acclamations fell to the share of Clermont and Le Kain.

The sacred preacher is elevated above his audience; he speaks as one having authority; and the honour, if honour there be, is entirely and indisputably his own. He is furnished, indeed, with no VOL. II.

inconsiderable advantage by the character of the scene, the audience, and the subject. The sanctity of the place, the very spectacle of a multitude assembled to unite in the worship of their Creator, is sufficient to still every unworthy passion, and to exclude every debasing thought. We are in the house of God, and we cannot enter it without having our attention carried away from the business, the amusements, the passions of the world, and fixed upon the great concerns of the nobler part of man-death, judgment, and eternity. We invoke the pity of a pure and compassionate Creator, in the merits of a divine, a gentle, a suffering, Redeemer. look around us, and we see the old and the young, the rich, the poor, the noble, and the menial, all gathered together for one purpose, and confessing before the throne of God that they are equal in his sight, all children of Adam, all sinful dust and ashes. When we enter the church we have the same sense of our degraded condition and immortal destiny with which we walk over the graves. If we have the power of thought, we must be serious; if we have the feelings of men, we must be humble, kindly, and composed.

We

mysterious lives. Our predominant feelings are those of shame, sorrow, and awe; and we are there, with the unsuspecting confidence and reposing simplicity of children, waiting to have our faith confirmed, our hopes exalted, and our love kindled, by the voice of the messenger of God. We stand drooping and silent among the gloomy columns and tombstones of the choir -it is his to open the gates of the sanctuary, and reveal the redoubled height and splendour of the aerial dome.

A portion of that reverence which we feel for our God, mingles insensibly with our ideas of those who have devoted themselves to his service. We think of the lowly, and affectionate, and cheering offices in which the minister spends his days. We see the man whose business it is to comfort the broken-hearted, and to bind up the wounds of the afflicted spirit,who sits by the sick-bed of the Christian, and composes the fainting soul to meet without horror the agonies of death. We cannot look without love and admiration on the godlike devotion of that man who has forfeited all hopes of worldly preferment and worldly fame, and given his undivided strength to benevolence, which is its own reward, and piety, which holds its communion with the heavens, and looks for its recompence upon high. He is the type of all that is kind, and pure, and lovely, in our nature. He is the martyr of humanity. His watchings have been not for himself but for his brethren. If the veteran soldier be at all times entitled to respect, surely the gray hairs of the aged priest are worthy of a yet more melting veneration; and in these moments of silent contemplation, when our thoughts turn not on the comparative strength of human intellects, but on the more awful and eternal relations between God and man, we are willing to confess that he has chosen the bet ter part, that all other occupations are mean when compared with his,and that the internal peace and conscious heroism of a mind devoted to employments such as these, must in themselves be a treasure far beyond all the riches, power, and honour, to which other men attain.

It is perhaps from the very excellence of this preparation that the main difficulties of sacred eloquence arise.

Were our thoughts of a more ordinary cast, it would be more easy to elevate them were our feelings less excited the preacher might have it more in his power to mould them to his will. He has the delicate task of supporting enthusiasm, which is already great and when the fire is in its brilliancy, it is scarcely possible to feed its flames without diminishing its lustre. It is, besides, of the nature of all powerful emotions, either to become stronger or to become weaker; there is no stedfastness in passion. The incantation must become more awful as it proceeds, and there is fear, when once the deep charm is upon us, that a single hasty word or unhallowed motion may dissolve the mystery. least vulgarity of expression, the least meanness of thought, the least obtuseness of feeling, seems as out of place in the pulpit as a profane jest would be on the scaffold or the death-bed. The more majestic the character of the preacher, the more painful would be to us the imperfections of the man. Our thoughts would begin to flow into another channel, and the meditations with which we departed, might be more earthly than those with which

we came.

The

t. They have endeavoured to lay side their usual thoughts, and they ould fain be pious for a season; but he weight of wordly corruption hangs ose about them, and their unwilling irits are but too prone to sink back to the ordinary level of their desires. heir passions are strong, their purits industrious, their holiness a ruggle, their religion a violence; and requires all the art of a consummate aster, to preserve alive that faint ark of devotion which has been indled in their souls. To the truly evout and godly of his audience, and the minister himself, a few simple aculations, a few heavenly breathgs of confidence, a few words of unfected tenderness, might be a suffient homily. But the preacher must Idress, not the few, but the many; ad it is this which renders it necesry that sacred eloquence should be

n art.

Like every other great and digified art-like painting, sculpture, r poetry, its most perfect perform nces appear, indeed, to be the work of inspiration or enchantment. Who ver represented to himself Raphael ouching and retouching the divine ineaments of his Madonna? or Phiias shaping a rude mass of stone into he countenance of his Olympic Jove? r Milton seeking for rhymes in Lyidas, or balancing similes for the peeches of Satan? or who that quakes eneath the unfettered eloquence of Chalmers remembers that pages were lotted, and the midnight oil consumal in search of images which seem to be the easy suggestions of an overflowng fancy, or sentences which come ipon his ear like the first and natural anguage of a commanding soul? Yet t is most true, that he who is the best reacher of the day is also the most aborious, and that it would be as impossible for a careless extemporist to uter a sermon like one of his, as it would be for a player of voluntaries to strike off the dead march in Saul, or a Nepolitan improvisatore to thunder out THE GIAOUR.

But if it be true that there is no art more difficult than that of the preacher, it is at least certain that no other theme contains so many elements of inspiration as that upon which he has chosen to dilate. We, indeed, are very seldom able to appreciate that to which we are accustomed.

The

majesty of the Christian Religion is familiar to us;-its lofty images are ever before us ;-its mysterious truths are revealed to us in our childhood ;the spirit of its tenderness is diffused over all our feelings, and the sublimity of its promises over all our hopes; -we may call ourselves what we will, but it is as impossible for us not to be Christians, as it is for us not to be men. The hardiest infidel owes the boasted purity of his morality, and dignity of his conceptions, to those Scriptures at which he scoffs, and that faith which he would undermine. The oracles of God were not uttered in vain; and they who are the most unconscious of their influence, cannot write a line in their disparagement, without bearing witness to their power. Voltaire, who spent a long life in wilful mockery of our religion, was not aware that the most noble of his productions is a mere cento from the Bible, and that it was only his intimacy with Isaiah which could ever have enabled his light spirit to dictate such a poem as Zaïre. If we look back to the most splendid ages of Greece and Rome, and examine the writings of their profoundest philosophers and most elevated poets, we shall see no confidence in immortality, -no sense of deity-no purity of affection-no gentleness of love, which can sustain a comparison with what we may find in the treacherous writings of that scoffing Frenchman. In Homer we see a melancholy dread of dissolution, and an undisguised belief that the true happiness of man is inseparable from the possession of his senses-in Æschylus, a dark and mysterious impression of fatality-in Sophocles, a vague presentiment of retribution-in Euripides, a restless and sophistical scepticism-in Plato, mystic and undefinable aspirings-in Cicero, doubts which would fain be satisfied-in Lucan, contempt-in Tacitus, despair. But if we turn to the book of any modern infidel, we shall find a morality, before which Socrates would have bowed himself like a child-hopes which would have illuminated the gloomy dreams of Eschylus-and faith which would have cheered and gladdened the majestic spirit of Plato.

Christianity is not only the fountain of all our hopes, she is also the guide of all our science, and the inspiration of all our art. The great fathers of