01.03. Lecture III. Medieval And Reformation Preaching

Lecture III. Medieval And Reformation Preaching

It is a great mistake, in surveying the history of Preaching, to pass at once from Chrysostom and Augustine to the Reformation. Besides the fact, now so generally recognized, that there were “ Reformers before the Reformation,” it is to be noticed that among the devoted Romanists of the Middle Ages there were some earnest, able and eloquent preachers. The common Protestant fashion of stigmatizing the “Dark Ages” is unphilosophical and unjust, and has proven, in some quarters, to be bad policy. Men who had been reared to think that everything Medieval was corrupt or silly, are sometimes so surprised by the first results of a little investigation that they go quite over to the opposite extreme. But not simply on grounds of general justice and fairness are we required to notice the Medieval preaching. The fact is that the history of preaching cannot be understood without taking account of that period. So far as the form of modern preaching differs from that of the early Christian centuries, the difference has had its origin in the Middle Ages.

It is true that in that period preaching was generally very much neglected. Over wide districts, and through long years at a time, there would be almost no preaching. When men assembled in churches it was only to witness ceremonies and hear chanting and intoning. If sermons were given, it was in many countries still the custom to preach only in Latin, which the people did not now understand, even in Southern Europe. Those who preached in the vernacular, would often give nothing but eulogies on the saints, accounts of current miracles, etc. Most of the lower clergy were grossly ignorant, and many of them grossly irreligious, while the bishops and other dignitaries were often engrossed with political administration or manœuvring, perhaps busy in war, if not occupied with pursuits still more unclerical and unchristian.

All this was true. And yet there were notable exceptions. Let us look for a moment at three or four leading examples.

Certainly Peter the Hermit was a great preacher. A man of very small stature and ungainly shape, his speaking was rendered powerful by fiery enthusiasm, and great flow of words. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance to an orator, of vigorous health; and yet several of the greatest preachers have been men in feeble health, as, besides Peter the Hermit, Chrysostom, St. Bernard, Calvin, Baxter—yea, apparently, the apostle Paul. But note that their diseases were not such as debilitate, not such as enfeeble the nervous system—that they were all capable of great mental application, and possessed great force of character, stimulated by burning zeal—and that most of them, though diligent students, were also much given to physical activity. In the time of Peter and Bernard, a feeble physique, especially if it appeared to be emaciated by fasting, rather helped a preacher’s oratory with the people; for first, it seemed to indicate great piety, and secondly, his powerful utterance when excited seemed in that superstitious age to be preternatural. The Hon. Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, is in this respect an anachronism—if he had lived in the Middle Ages the fact that so frail a man can speak two hours and hold a great audience would have stamped him as a saint, preternaturally supported, and with more than human claims to attention and belief.

Peter had a most inspiring theme; for with the great religious motive he united an appeal to the love of war, which was so strong in that age, and to the love of adventure, which is always so strong. But in addition to the inspiration of his theme, he himself must have been surpassingly eloquent. We are told (Michaud I, 43) that he made much use of “those vehement apostrophes which produce such an effect upon an uncultivated multitude. He described the profanation of the holy places, and the blood of the Christians shed in torrents in the streets of Jerusalem. He invoked, by turns, Heaven, the saints, the angels, to bear witness to the truth of what he told them. He apostrophized Mt. Zion, the rock of Calvary, and the Mount of Olives, which he made to resound with sobs and groans. When he had exhausted speech in painting the miseries of the faithful, he showed the spectators the crucifix which he carried with him; sometimes striking his breast and wounding his flesh, sometimes shedding torrents of tears.” Fanatical, no doubt he was, but our present concern is with his eloquence. Read, with this in view, the story of his preaching, and of the prodigious effects produced upon high and low, upon men, women and children, and you will probably believe that seldom, in all the history of man, has there been such overpowering popular eloquence as that of Peter. And while we are rejoicing to study the recorded and finished eloquence of Demosthenes and Daniel Webster, of Chrysostom and Robert Hall, we have also much to learn from the mere history of great popular orators like Patrick Henry and Peter the Hermit. But the case of the great Crusading Evangelist was very peculiar. We find a little later a notable example of preaching in the strict sense of the term.

Bernard of Clairvaux, commonly called St. Bernard, lived from A. D. 1091 to 1153 in France, a devoted monk and a fervently pious man. Pale, meagre, attenuated through much fasting, looking almost as unsubstantial as a spirit, he made a great impression the moment he was seen. He possessed extraordinary talents, and though he made light of human learning, he at least did so only after acquiring it. His sermons and other writings do not indicate a profound metaphysical thinker, like Augustine or Aquinas, but they present treasures of devout sentiment, pure, deep, delightful—mysticism at its best estate. His style has an elegant simplicity and sweetness that is charming, and while many of his expressions are as striking as those of Augustine, they seem perfectly easy and natural. His utterance and gesture are described as in the highest degree impressive. His power of persuasion was felt by high and low to be something irresistible. Even his letters swayed popes and sovereigns. This wonderful personal influence was shown in many cures, which he and others believed to be miraculous.

Bernard is often called “the last of the Fathers.” If we were asked who is the foremost preacher in the whole history of Latin Christianity, we should doubtless find the question narrowing itself to a choice between Augustine and Bernard. His sermons show more careful preparation than those of the early Latin Fathers. He has felt to some extent the systematizing tendencies of the scholastic thought and method—for Anselm’s principal works appeared before Bernard was born, and Abelard was his senior by a dozen years—and the effect of this systematizing tendency we see in the more orderly arrangement of his discourses, though they do not show formal divisions. He greatly loved to preach, and we are told that he preached oftener than the rules of his order appointed, both to the monks and to the people. He was accustomed to put down thoughts, and schemes of discourses, as they occurred to him, and work them up as he had occasion to preach—a plan which many other preachers have found useful. His methods of sermonizing have considerable variety, and his manner of treatment t is free. I need not say that he was devoted to allegorizing, which was universal in that age. I count in his works eighty-six sermons on the Song of Solomon, and when the series was cut short by his death, he had just begun the third chapter. In his other sermons too he quotes the Song of Solomon as often as Chrysostom quotes Job. Before we speak lightly of this passionate love for Solomon’s Song by medieval monks, as some Protestants do speak, it may be well to remember that Richard Baxter and Jonathan Edwards studied that book with peculiar delight.

Bernard was warmly praised by Luther, Melancthon and Calvin. I think that beyond any other medieval preacher, he will repay the student of the present day.

About fifty years after the death of Bernard, i. e. in the beginning of the thirteenth century, two new monastic orders were founded, the mendicant orders of Franciscans and Dominicans. The latter order was founded for the express purpose of preaching. And it is instructive to notice that the immediate occasion of its establishment was the observed popularity and power of preaching among the Waldenses. Besides settled preachers, Peter Waldo had recently begun to send out Evangelists, two by two, who were known as the “Poor Men of Lyons.” Dominic began his order to meet these heretics just as Protestantism afterwards led to the Society of Jesus. But in a few years Dominic went to Rome, and preached there with irresistible eloquence, drawing the highest dignitaries to sympathize with his plans. All men could see that preaching was everywhere greatly needed, and the idea of a general order of preachers, to be controlled by the eloquent Dominic, was welcomed, so that Rome now became its centre. Within a few years this order embraced four hundred and seventy different monasteries, in every country of Europe, and spreading into Asia, making probably twenty thousand travelling preachers. In the course of time the Dominicans became worldly, and less zealous in this great work. But for two or three generations this mighty order of “Evangelists,” as we should say, made the Christian world ring with their preaching. They formed also a singular and very influential outside order of laymen, called Tertiaries, who were bound by their vow to entertain the wandering preachers, to spread the fame of their eloquence, crowd to hear them, and “ applaud, at least by rapt attention.” You perceive that several things have been understood in the world before our day. The Franciscans addressed themselves especially to Foreign Mission work among the Mohammedans of Spain, Africa and the East, but also comprised many zealous preachers at home. To these two orders belonged the other two great medieval preachers of whom I shall speak, Antony of Padua being a Franciscan, and Thomas Aquinas a Dominican.

Antony, a Portuguese, and a Franciscan missionary to Africa, afterwards came to Italy, where he gained his extraordinary reputation as a preacher, and died in 1231, at the age of thirty-seven. He is reckoned by some as the most popular preacher that ever lived. We read of twenty thousand persons as crowding at night around the stand where he was to preach next morning, and after the sermon making bonfires of their playing cards, etc.; and sometimes as many as thirty thousand were present when he preached. In point of mere numbers, this surpasses Chrysostom, Whitefield, Spurgeon and Moody. Yet much of this popularity on the part of Antony of Padua was due to the superstitious belief that he had supernatural power, that he could work miracles. We are told, for instance, that once he preached to the fishes, “giving them in conclusion the apostolical benediction, and behold ! they showed their joy by lively movement of tail and fins, and raised their heads above the water, bowed reverently and went under. At this unbelievers were astonished, and the most dreadful heretics were converted."*

Yet these superstitious follies must not prevent our observing that he was really a great preacher; and some things in his manner of preaching are particularly noteworthy.

(1) Antony of Padua was the first preacher, so far as I can learn; who made a careful division of his sermons into several heads —which his extant sermons show that he commonly did, though not universally. For example, on the text, “ Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord,” Apocal. xiv., he begins thus: “Note that in these words death is described, about which the apostle John proposes three things, viz., the debt of nature, where he says, ‘The dead’; the merit of grace, where he says, ‘Who die in the Lord’; the reward of glory, where he says, ‘ Blessed.’ … “Likewise note that God gives us three things, viz. to live, to live well, to live forever. For in creation he gives us to live, in justification to live well, in glorification to live forever. But to live, little profits him to whom it is not given, or who does not strive, to live well; and to live well would not suffice if it were not given to live forever.” And so throughout, everything is formally divided.

These formal divisions, a new thing in the history of preaching, came from applying to practical discourse the methods then pursued in the Universities. Most of the great schoolmen were predecessors or contemporaries of Antony, and all the most vigorous thought of the time adopted their method. If it were asked how these methods themselves arose, the answer would seem to be this. The schoolmen sought to rationalize Christianity, to make it conformable and acceptable to human reason, as so many have done before and since their epoch. But these medieval thinkers could not rationalize as to the truth of Christianity, as to its sources, or its doctrinal contents, for all these were fixed for them by the unquestionable authority of the Church. So they fell to applying the processes of the Aristotelian logic to this fixed body of Christian truth, seeking by decomposition and reconstruction to bring it into forms acceptable to their reason. Each new philosopher would decompose more minutely and reorganize more elaborately. Thus logical division, formally stated, became the passion of the age. And while then and often afterwards carried to a great extreme, and though there have been many reactions, in preaching as in other departments of literature, yet this scholastic passion for analysis has powerfully affected the thought and the expression of all subsequent centuries. If any of you wish to examine the first known sspecimens of this method in preaching, and have not access to the rare old folio of Antony’s works in Latin, I have seen advertised a small volume of translations from Antony of Padua by Dr. Neale, who has also given some account of him in the volume on Medieval Preaching. You will notice that most of Antony’s sermons, as we have them, are really sketches of sermons, published, we are told, for the benefit of other brethren. Augustine dictated some short sermons, to be used by other preachers, but Antony has left the first collection of what modern pulpit literature knows only too well, as “Sketches and Skeletons.”

(2) But one would think it must have been something else than formal scholastic divisions that made Antony’s preaching so popular. And we find that he abounded in illustration, and that of a novel kind. Anecdotes of saints and martyrs had become somewhat stale, and Antony preferred to draw illustration from the trades and other occupations of those he was addressing, from the habits of animals, and other such matters of common observation.

(3) His allegorizing is utterly wild and baseless, beyond anything that I have seen even in the Fathers. But such stuff seems always to have a charm for the popular mind, as seen in many ignorant Baptist preachers at the present day, white and colored—probably for two reasons, because it constantly presents novelties, and because it appeals to the imagination. Strict interpretation takes away from us for the most part this means of charming audiences, but we can to some extent make amends, since strict and careful interpretation will itself often give great freshness of view, even to the most familiar passages, while illustration both affords novelty and appeals to the imagination.

Thomas Aquinas, the Neapolitan Count, and Dominican friar, who died six centuries ago (1274) at the age of fifty, is by common consent regarded as the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages, and one of the greatest minds in the history of philosophy. It is surely an interesting fact that he was at the same time very popular as a preacher to the common people, being thus faithful to his Dominican vow. Amid the immense and amazing mass of his works are many brief discourses, and treatises which were originally discourses, marked by clearness, simplicity and practical point, and usually very short, many of them not requiring more than ten minutes, though these were doubtless expanded in preaching to the common people. He has also extended commentaries on perhaps half the books of Scripture, in which the method of exposition is strikingly like that with which we are all familiar in Matthew Henry, leading us to believe that in the former as well as in the latter case the exposition was, for the most part, first presented in the form of expository sermons. He is not highly imaginative, nor flowing in expression; the sentences are short, and everything runs into division and subdivision, usually by threes. But while there is no ornament, and no swelling passion, he uses many homely and lively comparisons, for explanation as well as for argument.

It is pleasant to think of the fact that this great philosopher and author loved to preach, and that plain people loved to hear him. And many of us ordinary men would do well like him to combine philosophical and other profound studies with simple and practical preaching. Thirty years ago, Jacob R. Scott, a Massachusetts man, and graduate of Brown and of Newton, became chaplain to the University of Virginia, and gave his valued friendship to a young student who was looking to the ministry. When the young man began to preach, unfortunately without regular theological education, he wrote to Mr. Scott for information about books and advice as to study, and received a long and instructive letter, in the course of which was given a bit Of counsel which has several times since gone the rounds of the newspapers: “Read Butler, and preach to the negroes, and it will make a man of you.” The prediction has certainly been but very partially fulfilled, and one of the conditions, it must be admitted, has not been fully complied with. While preaching much to the negroes, and other ignorant people, he has not sufficiently studied Butler, and other philosophers. I tell the simple story partly in order to pay a slight tribute of gratitude to a son of Newton who has passed away, and partly because it may bring a little nearer to you the important thought that we ought to combine profound studies with practical preaching.

You may notice that the great medieval preachers I have mentioned all fall within the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. To the same period belong the greatest of the Latin hymn-writers, Adam of St. Victor (who is now regarded as the foremost of them all), and the authors of the Celestial City, the Stabat Mater, and the Dies Irae. If you inquire for the cause of this accumulation of eminent preachers and sacred poets in that age, the explanation would doubtless be chiefly the Crusades. These had powerfully stirred the soul of Europe, awakening all minds and hearts. At the same time, by keeping up a distant warfare, they had given many generations of peace at home, and thus afforded opportunity for the work of the great Universities and the rise of the great Schoolmen, and so likewise for the appearance of great preachers and hymn-writers. Moreover, the rise of the middle class greatly heightened the aggregate mental activity of society. And though what we call the “Revival of Learning” was much later than this, yet already there was a growing and inevitably inspiring acquaintance with the Classic Latin authors, as, for example, in the next generation after Thomas Aquinas, Dante shows himself familiar with Virgil. The study of the Roman Law had also been revived and there were now professors of Civil Law in all the great Universities. As regards preaching, we can see what causes ended this period of prosperity. For in the next two centuries (14th and 15th) there were again terrible wars in Europe itself. Scholasticism had run its course, the Papacy became frightfully corrupt, and the better spirits were either absorbed in Mysticism, or engaged in unsuccessful attempts to reform the ’Church. With the general corruption the great preaching orders rapidly degenerated. If Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican, and Tauler, so also was the infamous Tetzel, whose proclamation of indulgences called forth the theses of Luther. Of the great Mystics I can only mention Tauler, doubtless the foremost of his class in that age. Some of you are probably familiar with an admirable volume containing his Life and twenty-five sermons, published in New York in 1858. Tauler lived on the Rhine in the fourteenth century, having been educated at the University of Paris, then the greatest of all seats of learning. In a time of great political and social evils, of protracted civil war, followed by a terrible struggle between the Pope and the Emperor (for German Emperors and Popes have had many a fierce conflict before to-day), a time of frightful pestilence, a time of sadly dissolute morals even among priests and monks and nuns, Tauler labored as a faithful priest. After years thus spent, he was, at the age of fifty, lifted to what we call a Higher Life through the influence of a young layman, the head of a secret society which was trying to reform religion without leaving the Church. It was after this Higher Life period began with Tauler that he preached the sermons which were taken down by hearers and remain to us.

We ought to study these mystical writings. They represent one side of human nature, and minister, in an exaggerated way, to a want of men in every age. Our own age is intensely practical. Yet see how readily many persons accept the idea of a Higher Life, of the Rest of Faith, etc. Do not most of us so neglect this aspect of Christianity in our studies and our preaching, as to leave the natural thirst for it in some hearers ungratified, and thus prepare them to catch at, and delight in, such ideas and sentiments when presented in an extravagant and enthusiastic form? If we do not neglect the Scriptural mysticism—as found in the writings of John and also of Paul—we shall see less readiness among our people to accept a mysticism that is unscriptural. Let it be added that Tauler did not preach mere mystical raptures. He searchingly applies religious principle to the regulation of the inner and the outer life, and urges that ordinary homely duties shall be performed in a religious spirit.

I must pass with brief mention the preaching of the now celebrated “Reformers before the Reformation.” Of Wyclif, who died in England twenty years later than Tauler, and of his “poor preachers,” we may have time to think on another occasion. John Huss, who was a little later, and powerfully influenced by the writings of Wyclif, was an eloquent and scholarly man, University preacher and Queen’s Confessor in Bohemia, and his “fervid sermons” in favor of moral and ecclesiastical reformation long made a great impression. And to pass over many others, we must believe that there has seldom been more impressive preaching than that of the Italian Dominican Savonarola, who acted the part of prophet, preacher and virtual ruler in Florence during the last years of the fifteenth century, when Martin Luther was a child. A century before Luther, lived Thomas a-Kempis, in the Netherlands and Gerson in France. It is much disputed which of them wrote the tract on “The Imitation of Christ.” The former is said by historians not to have been a very eloquent preacher; Gerson was a preacher of real power, and highly esteemed by Luther.

We come now to the preaching of the great Reformers. In devoting to them the mere fraction of a lecture, we have at least the advantage that here the leading persons and main facts are well known. Let us notice certain things which hold true of the Reformation preaching in general.

(1) It was a revival of preaching. We have seen that in the Middle Ages there was by no means such an utter dearth of preaching as many Protestant writers have represented. Yet the preachers we have referred to were, even when most numerous, rather exceptions to a rule. Even the great Missionary organizations, the Franciscans and Dominicans, poured forth their thousands of mendicant preachers to do a work which the local clergy mainly neglected, and which they were often all the more willing to neglect because the travelling friars would now and then undertake it. Peripatetic preachers, evangelists, however useful under some circumstances and worthy of honor, become a curse to any pastor who expects them to make amends for his own neglect of duty. In general, the clergy did not preach. And the Reformation was a great outburst of preaching, such as had not been seen since the early Christian centuries.

(2) It was a revival of Biblical preaching. Instead of long and often fabulous stories about saints and martyrs, and accounts of miracles, instead of passages from Aristotle and Seneca, and fine-spun subtleties of the Schoolmen, these men preached the Bible. The question was not what the Pope said; and even the Fathers, however highly esteemed, were not decisive authority—it was the Bible. The preacher’s one great task was to set forth the doctrinal and moral teachings of the Word of God. And the greater part of their preaching was expository. Once more, after long centuries, people were reading the Scriptures in their own tongue, and preachers, studying the original Greek and Hebrew, were carefully explaining to the people the connected teachings of passage after passage and book after book. For example, Zwingle, when first beginning his ministry at Zürich, announced his intention to preach, not simply upon the church lessons, but upon the whole gospel of Matthew, chapter after chapter. Some friends objected that it would be an innovation, and injurious; but he justly said, “It is the old custom. Call to mind the homilies of Chrysostom on Matthew, and of Augustine on John.” And these sermons of Zwingle’s made a great impression. There was also at the basis of this expository preaching by the Reformers a much more strict and reasonable exegesis than had ever been common since the days of Chrysostom. Luther retained something of the love of allegorizing, as many Lutherans have done to the present day. But Calvin gave the ablest, soundest, clearest expositions of Scripture that had been seen for a thousand years, and most of the other great Reformers worked in the same direction. Such careful and continued exposition of the Bible, based in the main upon sound exegesis, and pursued with loving zeal, could not fail of great results, especially at a time when direct and exact knowledge of Scripture was a most attractive and refreshing novelty. The same sort of effect is to some extent seen in the case of certain useful laborers in our own day, who accomplish so much by Bible readings and highly Biblical preaching. The expository sermons of the Reformers, while in general free, are yet much more orderly than those of the Fathers. They have themselves studied the great scholastic works, and been trained in analysis and arrangement, and the minds of all their cultivated hearers have received a similar bent. And so they easily, and almost spontaneously, give their discourses something of plan. Accordingly they are in many respects models of this species of preaching. In general, it may be said that the best specimens of expository preaching are to be found in Chrysostom, in the Reformers, especially Luther and Calvin, and in the Scottish pulpit of our own time.

(3) The Reformation involved a revival of controversial preaching. Religious controversy is unpopular in our day, being regarded as showing a lack of charity, of broad culture, and in the estimation of some, a lack even of social refinement and courtesy. It is possible that a few preachers, even some of our Baptist brethren, are too fond of controversy, and do perhaps exhibit some of the deficiencies mentioned. But it must not be forgotten that religious controversy is inevitable where living faith in definite truth is dwelling side by side with ruinous error and practical evils. And preachers may remember that controversial preaching, properly managed, is full of interest and full of power.

(4) We must add that there was in the Reformation a revival of preaching upon the doctrines of grace. The methods of preaching are, after all, not half so important as the materials. These great men preached justification by faith, salvation by grace. The doctrine of Divine sovereignty in human salvation was freely proclaimed by all the Reformers. However far some Protestants may have gone at a later period in opposition to these views, yet Protestantism was born of the doctrines of grace, and in the proclamation of these the Reformation preaching found its truest and highest power. There are many who say now-a-days, “But we have changed all that.” Nay, till human nature changes and Jesus Christ changes, the power of the gospel will still reside in the great truth of salvation by sovereign grace. Let the humanitarian and the ritualist go their several ways, but let us boldly and warmly proclaim the truths which seem old and yet are so new to every needy heart, of sovereignty and atonement, of spiritual regeneration and justification by faith.

It would be difficult to find so marked a contrast between any two celebrated contemporaries in all the history of preaching as that between Luther and Calvin. Luther (1483–1546) was a broad-shouldered, broad-faced, burly German, overflowing with physical strength; Calvin (1509–64) a feeble-looking little Frenchman, with shrunken cheeks and slender frame, and bowed with study and weakness. Luther had a powerful intellect, but was also rich in sensibility, imagination and swelling passion—a man juicy with humor, delighting in music, in children, in the inferior animals, in poetic sympathy with nature. In the disputation at Leipzig he stood up to speak with a bouquet in his hand. Every constituent of his character was rich to overflowing, and yet it was always a manly vigor, without sentimental gush. With all this accords one of his marked faults, a prodigious and seemingly reckless extravagance, and even an occasional coarseness of language when excited, leading to expressions which ever since Bossuet have been the stock in trade of Anti-Protestant controversialists, and some of which it is impossible to defend. Calvin, on the other hand, was practically destitute of imagination and humor, seeming in his public life and works to have been all intellect and will, though his letters show that he was not only a good hater, but also a warm friend. And yet, while so widely different, both of these men were great preachers. What had they in common to make them great preachers? I answer, along with intellect they had force of character, an energetic nature, will. A great preacher is not a mere artist, and not a feeble suppliant, he is a conquering soul, a monarch, a born ruler of mankind. He wills, and men bow. Calvin was far less winning than Luther, but he was even more than Luther an autocrat. Each of them had unbounded self-reliance too, and yet at the same time each was full of humble reliance on God. This combination, self-confidence, such as if it existed alone, would vitiate character, yet checked and upborne by simple, humble, child-like faith in God, this makes a Christian hero, for word or for work. The statement could be easily misunderstood, but as meant it is true and important, that a man must both believe in himself and believe in God, if he is to make a powerful impression on his fellow-men, and do great good in the world. This force of character in both Luther and Calvin gave great force to their utterance. Every body repeats the saying as to Luther that “his words were half battles.” But of Calvin too it was said, and said by Beza who knew him so well, Tot verba, tot pondera, “every word weighed a pound,”—a phrase also used of Daniel Webster. It should be noticed too that both Luther and Calvin were drawn into much connection with practical affairs, and this tended to give them greater firmness and positiveness of character, and to render their preaching more vigorous, as well as better suited to the common mind. Here is another valuable combination of what are commonly reckoned incongruous qualities—to be a thinker and student, and at the same time a man of practical sense and practical experience. Such were the great Reformers, and such a man was the apostle Paul. The vast reputation of Calvin as theologian and church-builder has overshadowed his great merits as a commentator and a preacher. With the possible exception of Chrysostom, I think there is, as already intimated, no commentator before our own century whose exegesis is so generally satisfactory and so uniformly profitable as that of Calvin. And by all means use the original Latin, so clear and smooth and agreeable, Latin probably unsurpassed in literary excellence since the early centuries. All his extemporized sermons taken down in short hand, as well as his writings, show not so much great copiousness, as true command of language, his expression being, as a rule, singularly direct, simple, and forcible. The extent of his preaching looks to us wonderful. While lecturing at Geneva to many hundreds of students (sometimes eight hundred), while practically a ruler of Geneva, and constant adviser of the Reformed in all Switzerland, France and the Netherlands, England and Scotland, and while composing his so extensive and elaborate works, he would often preach every day. For example, I notice that the two hundred sermons on Deuteronomy, which are dated, were all delivered on week-days in the course of little more than a year, and sometimes on four or five days in succession. It was so with the other great Reformers. In fact, Luther accuses one preacher of leading an “idle life; for he preaches but twice a week, and has a salary of two hundred dollars a year.” Luther himself, with all his lecturing, immense correspondence, and voluminous authorship, often preached every day for a week, and on fast days two or three times.

Luther had less than Calvin of sustained intensity, but he had at times an overwhelming force, and his preaching possessed the rhetorical advantage of being everywhere pervaded by one idea, that of justification by faith, round which he reorganized all existing Christian thought, and which gave a certain unity to all the overflowing variety of his illustration, sentiment and expression. In fact, did he not carry his one idea too far, and have not Protestants yet to recover from following him in this error? The apostles speak of loving Christ and knowing Christ, as securing salvation, but Luther would in every case by main force reduce it to believng. * But the undecomposed idea of loving Christ is certainly more intelligible and practically useful in the Sunday School, and so there may be persons who will be more benefited by the idea of knowing Christ than by that of believing on him.

Luther shows great realness, both in his personal grasp of Christian truth, and in his modes of presenting it. The conventional decorums he smashes, and with strong, rude, and sometimes even coarse expressions, with illustrations from almost every conceivable source, and with familiar address to the individual hearer, he brings the truth very close home. He gloried in being a preacher to the common people. Thus he says: “A true, pious and faithful preacher shall look to the children and servants, and to the poor, simple masses, who need instruction.” “If one preaches to the coarse, hard populace, he must paint it for them, pound it, chew it, try all sorts of ways to soften them ever so little.” He blamed Zwingle for interlarding his sermons with Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and praised those who preached so that the common people could understand. This subject of popular preaching has been much discussed in Germany down to the present day. There is a greater difference between cultivated people and the masses in Germany and England than in our own country. Yet even in America, even in New England, with its noble common schools and the omnipresent newspaper, the masses are comparatively ignorant, and need plain preaching, and we must not forget it.

Luther is a notable example of intense personality in preaching. His was indeed an imperial personality, of rich endowments, varied sympathies and manifold experiences. They who heard him were not only listening to truth, but they felt the man. Those who merely read his writings, in foreign lands and languages, felt the man, were drawn to him, and thus drawn to his gospel. There are conflicting opinions as to what is best in regard to the preacher’s personality. Some offensively obtrude themselves, and push the gospel into the background. Others think the ideal is to put the gospel alone before the mind, and let the preacher be entirely forgotten. “Hide yourself behind the cross,” is the phrase. What is here intended is well enough, but the statement is extreme, if not misleading. What is the use of a living preacher, if he is to be really hidden, even by the cross? The true ideal surely is, that the preacher shall come frankly forward, in full personality, modest through true humility and yet bold with personal conviction and fervid zeal and ardent love—presenting the gospel as a reality of his own experience, and attracting men to it by the power of a living and present human sympathy—and yet all the while preaching not himself, but Christ Jesus the Lord. In the Dresden gallery there is a small portrait by Titian, of a brother painter. He is in the foreground, a fine, rugged face, illuminated with the light of genius, while on one side, and a little in the background is the face of Titian himself, gazing upon his friend with loving, self-forgetting, and contagious admiration. Thus ought we to stand beside the cross. And observe that with all his boldness, Luther often trembled at the responsibility of preaching. He says in one of his sermons, “As soon as I learnt from the Holy Scriptures how terror-filled and perilous a matter it was to preach publicly in the church of God. … there was nothing I so much desired as silence .…. Nor am I now kept in the ministry of the Word, but by an overruled obedience to a will above my own, that is, the divine will; for as to my own will, it always shrank from it, nor is it fully reconciled unto it to this hour.”

What I have time to say of Luther as to preaching must end with a paragraph from the Table Talk, which makes some good hits though very oddly arranged. “A good preacher should have these properties and virtues: first, to teach systematically; secondly, he should have a ready wit; thirdly, he should be elegant; fourthly, he should have a good voice; fifthly, a good memory; sixthly, he should know when to make an end; seventhly, he should be sure of his doctrine; eighthly, he should venture and engage body and blood, wealth and honor, in the Word; ninthly, he should suffer himself to be mocked and jeered of every one.” The expression, “he should know when to make an end,” recalls a statement I have sometimes made to students, that public speaking may be summed up in three things: First, have something to say; secondly, say it; third and lastly, quit. As to the preaching of the other leading Reformers, I cannot speak at any length. Melanchthon really preached very little. His lectures in Latin on Sundays were designed for his students. He did not enjoy preaching to miscellaneous congregations, and in the vulgar tongue. Zwingle (1484–1531) was a bold and energetic preacher, a thoroughly energetic man, and a most laborious student. Like Luther he was very fond of music, and would set his own Christian songs to music, and accompany them on the lyre. It is a German peculiarity that men have in every age so generally been practical musicians, and the neglect of this in our country is to be deplored. Singing will obviously be of very great profit, in many ways, to all young ministers, and instrumental music must not be considered unmanly or worthless in face of the fact that it has been so much practiced by those great peoples, the Hebrews, the Greeks and the Germans. Zwingle was not merely energetic and ardent, but tenderly emotional, as shown by his sorrowing tears during the great Conference with Luther at Marburg. Beyond even the other Reformers, he made much use of public debates, a practice which had been made common by the schoolmen. In the days of chivalry and tournaments, the professors and students began to hold intellectual tournaments also, two men being pitted against each other, or one man fixing his thesis, and undertaking to maintain it against all comers. You remember that the Reformation began with Luther’s theses as to Indulgences; and through all the period of the Reformation discussions were frequent. In Switzerland more than elsewhere these discussions appear to have produced important results. They seem in general to be moat useful where men are unsettled in their opinions and indisposed to wide reading. Among us, they have now almost ceased in the older States, but are continued with keen relish in some parts of the West and South-west. Zwingle had one qualification for public discussions, which has sometimes been considered particularly effective, viz., great readiness in personal abuse—as shown, for example, in his writings against those whom he scornfully calls the Catabaptists.

Farel, the friend of Calvin, had a blazing French eloquence. But we cannot begin to enumerate. It was an age of great preachers, an age that called spirits from the vasty deep, and in troops they came. Of John Knox and the English Reformation preaching we may have another opportunity to think.

I must not stop without a word as to certain preachers of that day who have been too much neglected. The Anabaptists of the sixteenth century have so thoroughly a bad name in general literature that some persons would be surprised at the intimation that there were among them preachers of great power. By the help of my friend Dr. Howard Osgood, of Rochester Seminary, who has made the history of the Anabaptists a specialty, I am able to state a few facts of interest. The most distinguished preacher among the Swiss and Moravian Baptists was Balthasar Hübmaier, whose name is now beginning to be heard of again, and concerning whom you will find a very good article in Herzog’s Encyclopadie. He was educated at the University of Freiburg in Baden, and professor, A. D. 1512, in the University of Ingolstaut, with the celebrated Eck as his colleague, and afterwards was Cathedral pastor in Regensburg. At these places he gained the fame of the most eloquent man of his day. But reading Luther’s earlier works, and then studying the apostle Paul, he joined the reformed party, and in 1523, was a popular preacher in Switzerland, already beginning to deny the propriety of Infant Baptism. In 1525 he was baptized. Then came fierce conflicts with Zwingle at Zürich, and banishment to Moravia, where in two years he brought many thousands into the rising Baptist churches, which then seemed likely to include the whole population. But Moravia fell into the hands of Austria, and Hübmaier was martyred at Vienna in 1528. A Reformed contemporary, not a Baptist, called him “truly a most eloquent and must highly cultivated man.” Zwingle, in replying to Hübmaier’s treatise on Infant Baptism, uses many hard words as usual, but shows great respect for his abilities. He calls Hübmaier ‘that distinguished Doctor,’ and admits (in a passage otherwise highly arrogant) that he has a greater faculty of speaking than himself. The writings of Hübmaier, which are difficult to obtain,. are said to be marked by clearness, directness and force. They chiefly treat of the constitution and ordinances of the church. I find a really beautiful address (A. D. 1525) to the three churches of Regensburg, Ingolstadt and Freiburg, entitled “The Sum of a truly Christian Life,” to be of the nature of a sermon. The arrangement is good, and the divisions distinctly stated. He is decidedly vigorous and acute in argument, making very sharp points. The style is clear and lively—when he has begun you feel drawn along, and want to follow him. Zwingle bears unintentional testimony to the excellence, in one important respect, of Hübmaier’s method of argumentation. “ You are wont to cry, ‘I want no conjectures, bring forward Scripture, make what you say plain by Scripture,’ etc.” To all his later writings Hübmaier prefixed the motto, “Truth is immortal;” and certainly the hopes he expressed by this motto have been strikingly fulfilled as to the doctrine of religious liberty, which it is said he was among the first to announce and which in a new continent he had barely heard of has at last attained a glorious recognition.

I shall merely mention Conrad Grebel, educated at Vienna, and for two years the leader of the Swiss Baptists, who is said to have been learned, brilliant, with great power over an audience, an opponent whom Zwingle feared more than all others. And there were other Baptist preachers in Switzerland and South Germany, who were learned and eloquent men. In Holland, Menno Simon, well known in Church History, was for twenty-five years (1536–61) “the greatest of all Baptist missionaries in Northern Europe, establishing hundreds of churches. He was a spiritual-minded man, and deeply verses in the Bible." * A translation of his works has been published in Indiana, among the “Mennonites.” His contemporary and successor, Dirck Phillips, is said by a Roman Catholic writer to have been “equal to Menno in eloquence and zeal, and superior in learning.” We may add Bouwens, a very apostle in Holland and Belgium, whose diary records the baptism of near ten thousand persons baptized by himself, with the places; and this when a great price was set on his head by the merciless Duke of Alva. In conclusion, let us remember that with the Reformation began the free and wide use of printing to aid the work of preaching. In a few years after Luther took decided position, brief and pointed treatises of his were scattered through all Western and Southern Europe. Colporteurs were employed especially for this purpose, besides the much that was done by private exertion.This revived and purified Christianity seized upon the press as an auxiliary to the living preacher. The same course has been more or less pursued ever since, and notably in our own time. And perhaps few have even yet any just conception of the varied and powerful assistance we may derive from printing—and this without its being necessary for each church to set up its own newspaper. Every now and then some people discuss the question whether the press be not now more powerful than the pulpit. But really that is an unpractical inquiry. It is our true task and our high privilege, to make the pulpit, with the help of the press, more and more a power and a blessing.

End Notes ^* Lentz, i, p. 229.

^* For example, ‘That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints,’ etc. Luther: “This, however, is only to be attained unto by faith. Love has not anything to do in this matter, although it is an assistance as being an evidence whereby we are assured of our faith.” So on John 17:3, ‘That they may know thee,’ etc. Luther: “For here you see the words are plain, and any one may comprehend and understand them. Christ giveth to all that believe eternal life.”

^* Osgood. See a good article in Herzog.