READINGS FOR THE AGED. SELECTED FROM SERMONS PREACHED IN SACKVILLE BY THE LATE REV. J. M. NEALE, D.D., WARDEN OF THE COLLEGE. BIBLIOTHE MAR 1879 BODLEIANA LONDON: J. MASTERS AND CO., 78, NEW BOND STREET. MDCCCLXXVIII. 100. PREFACE. THE Sermons in this Volume are a selection from the fuller publication of Dr. Neale's Sackville College Discourses, and are intended to meet the needs of those for whom the larger issue is from any cause inconvenient. In particular, a compendious book such as this will be found of much value for the use of District Visitors and others who minister to the sick and aged poor. It is to be remembered that those inmates of Sackville College to whom the Sermons were addressed, consisted, with the rarest exceptions, of a class uniting in itself quite unusual obstacles to a preacher's work. They were nearly all agricultural poor from southern England, (usually a much less intelligent class than the corresponding grade in other parts of the country, especially in the north,) quite uneducated, and for the most part with their faculties, never very acute, further dulled advanced years and bodily infirmities. It was not as though there were varied elements in the congregation to give it a mixed character, and to en courage a preacher to believe that where he had failed to interest or instruct one or more of his hearers, he might yet have proved more successful with others, and thus not have wasted his efforts; but contrariwise, the level of receptivity was nearly unbroken, and to fail with one was to fail with all. It will be acknowledged by most of the really intelligent hearers and critics of sermons, and by some at least of the more humbleminded preachers of them, that there is at any rate a residuum in each ordinary congregation which is, as a rule, unable to derive any instruction whatever from the pulpit, and so departs unfed. The preacher, aware of the slow movement of the brain in hearers of this stamp, and of the almost insuperable difficulty of communicating ideas to them, abandons the effort in despair, if even he have ever really made it, and contents himself with directing his address to his somewhat more intelligent hearers, with the practical result that the agricultural poor, in a formidably large proportion of English parishes, have never obtained any Church teaching at all level to their understandings, and become only too readily converts to various forms of sectarian religion. These Sermons, and the manner in which they were listened to, followed, and readily taken in by the exceptionally disabled class to which exclusively they were preached-of which the writer of these lines has been a very frequent witness-prove beyond cavil that the cause of failure to reach the rural or aged poor rests with the preacher, and not with the flock. The perfect limpidity of diction, the great preponderance of common and easy words-albeit Dr. Neale's own literary tastes inclined him to the use of a learned dialect when writing for the educated-the directness of the thought, the simple construction of the sentences, enabled him to reach the recesses of minds which others would have thought impenetrable. Nor did he shrink from bringing before his flock some of the harder and obscurer passages of Scripture, nor yet to communicate to them some portion of that mystical theology in which he was a proficient, and which flows abundantly in his conventual discourses, so that his success was not attained by that timorous and incapable method of confining his teaching to the mere primer and rudiments of religious instruction, which is the leading characteristic of most of the so-called "plain sermons" of the day, milk for babes indeed, but never providing the nutrition which will aid them to reach adolescence. It was his conscientious endeavour to put himself at the standpoint of his hearers, careful adaptation of his words to their vocabulary and understanding, and, above all, the keen sympathy and affection which he entertained for them, which placed him foremost amongst preachers to the sick, the aged, and the poor. Consequently, these Sermons are not only easy to understand-they might have that merit, and no other |