# Under Dispute/The Preacher at Large

THE spirit of Hannah More is abroad in the land. It does not preach the same code of morals that the good Hannah preached in her lifetime, but it preaches its altered code with her assurance and with her continuity. Miss More preached to the poor the duty of an unreasonable and unmanly content, and to the rich the duty of personal and national smugness. Her successors are more than likely to urge upon rich and poor the paramount duty of revolt. The essence of preaching, however, is not doctrine, but didacticism. Beliefs and behaviour are subject to geographical and chronological conditions, but human nature lives and triumphs in the sermon.
Hannah More was not licensed to preach. She would have paled at the thought of a lady taking orders, or ​climbing the pulpit steps. She had no intellectual gifts. Her most intimate critic, the Honourable Augustine Birrell (the only living man who confesses to the purchase of her works in nineteen calf-bound volumes, which he subsequently buried in his garden), pronounced her to be "an encyclopædia of all literary vices." Yet for forty years she told her countrymen what they should do, and what they should leave undone, in return for which censorship they paid her boundless deference and thirty thousand pounds, a great deal of money in those days.
Miss More is a connecting link between the eighteenth century, which moralized, and the nineteenth century, which preached. Both were didactic, but, as Mr. Austin Dobson observes, "didactic with a difference." Addison was characterized in his day as "a parson in a tie-wig," an unfriendly, ​but not altogether inaccurate, description, the tie-wig symbolizing a certain gentlemanly aloofness from potent and primitive emotions. Religion is a primitive emotion, and the eighteenth century (ce siècle sans âme) was, in polite life, singularly shy of religion; reserving it for the pulpit, and handling it there with the caution due to an explosive. Crabbe, who also lapped over into the nineteenth century, was reproached by his friends for talking about Heaven and Hell in his sermons, "as though he had been a Methodist."
From such indiscretions the tie-wig preserved the eighteenth-century moralists. Addison meditates for a morning in Westminster Abbey, and the outcome of his meditation is that the poets have no monuments, and the monuments no poets. Steele walks the London streets, jostling against vice and misery, and pauses to tell us that a sturdy beggar extracted from him the ​price of a drink by pleading mournfully that all his family had died of thirst; a jest which took easily with the crowd, and might be trusted to raise a sympathetic laugh to-day. It is plain that these gentlemen felt without saying what Henry Adams said without feeling, that "morality is a private and costly luxury," and so forbore to urge it upon a bankrupt world.
The paradox of our own time is that clergymen, whose business it is to preach, are listened to impatiently, while laymen, whose business it is to instruct or to amuse, are encouraged to preach. I open two magazines, and am confronted by prophetic papers on "The Vanishing Sermon," and "Will Preaching Become Obsolete?" I exchange them for two others, and find lengthy articles entitled "Can We Control Our Own Morals?" and "Spiritual Possibilities of Business Life." Now, if a disquisition on "Spiritual Possi​bilities of Business Life" be not a sermon, of what elements is a sermon composed? Yet when I endeavour to ascertain these possibilities, I read that business men often refuse to listen to professional preaching, because, while their democratic ideals, their enthusiasm for human values, and their passion for scientific perfection in their products "leave them not far from the Kingdom of Heaven," the Church, unhappily for itself, "has not been big enough or strong enough to captivate their imagination, and hold their allegiance."
This would seem to imply that business men are too good to go to church—a novel and, I should think, popular point of view. Congregations hear little like it from the pulpit, the average clergyman being unable to observe any signs of a commercial Utopia, and having a tiresome and Jeremiah-like habit of pointing out defects. As for ​asking a group of magazine-readers if they can control their own morals, the query is a vaporous one, not meant to be answered scientifically, but after a formula settled and approved. Even the concession to modernism implied in its denial of religion as a compelling force gets us no nearer to our goal. "The faith we need is not necessarily faith in any supernatural help; but only in the demonstrated fact of the possibility of controlling our own minds and morals by going at it in the right way." The tendency of a simple truth, that abstraction which we all admire, to develop into a truism, is no less noticeable when set forth in the persuasiveness of print than when delivered with ecclesiastical authority.
Personally, I cannot conceive of a sermonless world. The preacher's function is too manifest to be ignored, his message too direct to be diverted. Joubert said truly that devout men ​and women listen with pleasure to dull sermons, because they recognize the legitimate relation between priest and people, and their minds are attuned to receptivity. And if a dull sermon can command the attention and awaken the sympathy of a congregation honest enough to admit that dullness is the paramount note of human intercourse, and that it is as well developed in the listeners as in the speaker, think of the power which individual intelligence derives from collective authority. This is the combination which so fascinated Henry Adams when he speculated upon the ecclesiasticism of the thirteenth century; its nobility, lucidity and weight. "The great theologians were also architects who undertook to build a Church Intellectual, corresponding, bit by bit, to the Church Administrative, both expressing—and expressed by—the Church Architectural."
With the coming of the printed ​word, the supreme glory of the spoken word departed. Reading is the accepted substitute for oratory as for conversation, a substitute so cheap, so accessible, so accommodating, that its day will wane only with the waning warmth of the sun, or the exhaustion and collapse of civilization. Yet even under the new dispensation, even with the amazing multiplicity of creeds (twenty-four religions to one sauce, lamented Talleyrand a hundred years ago), even though ecclesiastical architecture has ceased to express anything but a love of comfort and an understanding of acoustics, the preacher holds his own. There are always people interested in the relation of their souls to God; and when it happens that a man is born into the world capable of convincing them that the only thing of importance in life is the relation of their souls to God, he becomes a maker of history.
​John Wesley was such a man. I read recently that, when he was preaching at Tullamore, a large cat leaped from the rafters upon a woman's head, and ran over the heads and shoulders of the closely packed congregation. "But none of them cried out any more than if it had been a butterfly." There was a test of the preacher's supremacy. What other influence could have been so absolute and coercive? When I was a very little girl I was taken to see Edwin Booth play "Hamlet," in the old Walnut Street theatre of Philadelphia. That night a cat entered with the ghost, and paced sedately in his wake across the ramparts of Elsinore. The audience shouted its amusement, and the poignancy of a great scene, interpreted by a great actor, was temporarily lost. "Spellbound" is a word in common use, expressing, as a rule, very ordinary attention. Booth cast a spell, but it ​was easily broken. Wesley cast a spell which defied both fear and laughter. Nothing short of dynamite could have distracted that Tullamore congregation from the business it had on hand.
That the sermon was tyrannical in the days of its pride and power is a truth which cannot be gainsaid. Eloquence in the pulpit has no more bowels for its victims than has eloquence on the rostrum. History is full of instances that move our souls to wonder. When Darnley, new wedded to Mary Stuart, and seeing himself in the rôle of peacemaker, went to hear Knox preach in Saint Giles', that uncompromising divine likened him to Ahab, who incurred the wrath of Jehovah by acquiescing in the idolatry of Jezebel, his wife. James Melville says that when Knox preached, "he was like to ding the pulpit to blads, and fly out of it." Darnley, furious, or frightened, or both, left the church while the victorious preacher was still ​marshalling the hosts of Israel to combat.
Charles the Second was wont to recall with bitter mirth a certain Sunday in Edinburgh when he was forced by his loyal Scotch subjects to hear six sermons, a heavy price to pay even for loyalty. Paris may have been worth one mass to Henry of Navarre; but all Scotland was not worth six sermons to Charles Stuart, and the memory of that Sunday sweetened his return to France and to freedom.
It is a far cry from Knox hurling the curses of his tribal God at alien tribesmen, from Wesley convicting his narrow world "of sin, and of justice, and of judgment," even from that "good, honest and painful sermon" which Dr. Pepys heard one Sunday morning with inward misgivings and troubled stirrings of the soul, to the sterilized discourse which offends against no assortment of beliefs, and no stand​ards of taste. Frederick Locker gives us in his "Confidences" a grim description of the funeral services of George Henry Lewes, at Highgate Cemetery. Twelve gentlemen of rationalistic views had gathered in the mortuary chapel, and to them a thirteenth gentleman, also of rationalistic views, but who had taken orders somewhere, delivered an address, "half apologizing for suggesting the possible immortality of some of our souls."
This may indicate the progress of the ages; but does it also indicate the progress of the ages that the moral essay, which was wont to be satiric, is now degenerating into the printed sermon, which is sure to be censorious; that the very men who once charmed us with the lightness of their touch and the keen edge of their humour are now preaching thunderously? For years Mr. Chesterton gave us reason to be grateful that we had learned to read. ​Who so debonair when he was gay, who so incisive when he was serious, who so ready with his thrust, who so understanding in his sympathy? We trusted him never to preach and never to scold, and he has betrayed our trust by doing both. He calls it prophesying; but prophesying is preaching, plus scolding, and no one knows this better than he does.
The earth is a bad little planet, and we hope that other planets are happier and better behaved. But the vials of Mr. Chesterton's wrath are emptied on the heads of people who do not read him, and who have no idea that they are being anathematized. Swift used to say that most sermons were aimed at men and women who never went to church, and the same sort of thing happens to-day. We, Mr. Chesterton's chosen readers, are not capitalists, or philanthropists, or prohibitionists, or any of the things he abhors; and we ​wish he would leave these gentry alone, and write for us again with the old shining wit, the old laughter, the old mockery, which was like a dash of salt on the flavourless porridge of life.
Twenty-one years ago Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson published an American edition of the "Letters from a Chinese Official," a species of sermon, it is true, but preached delicately and understandingly, in suave and gleaming sentences, its burden of thought half veiled by the graceful lightness of its speech. American readers took that book to heart. We could not make over the United States into a second China. "Some god this severance rules." But we accepted in the spirit of reason a series of criticisms which were reasonably conveyed to our intelligence, and a great deal of good they did us.
Much has happened in twenty-one years, and few of us are so light-​hearted or so reasonable as of yore. Is it because we have grown impatient of strictures that Mr. Dickinson's sermons now seem to us a trifle heavy, his reproaches more than a trifle harsh? We did not mind being compared adversely to China, but we do mind being blamed for Germany's transgressions. When, as the mouthpiece of suffering Europe, Mr. Dickinson says, "America is largely responsible for our condition," a flat denial seems in order. America did not invade Belgium, she did not burn French towns, she did not sink merchant ships. It seems to be Mr. Dickinson's impression that our entrance, not without provocation, into the war "prolonged" the struggle, to the grievous injury of the Allies as well as of the Central Powers. There is a veracious paragraph in one of Mr. Tarkington's "Penrod" stories, which describes the bewilderment of an ordinary American ​boy who does something he cannot well help doing, and who is thrashed or rewarded by an irate or delighted father, according to a point of view which is a veiled mystery to him. So, too, the ordinary American adult gapes confusedly when a British pacifist tells him that, by fighting the war to a finish, he and his nation are to blame for the economic ruin of Europe.
There is the same misunderstanding between unprofessional as between sectarian preachers, and the same air of thoughtful originality when they deal with the obvious and ascertained. When I see a serious essayist hailed as "the first wholly realistic and deductive moralist" that the country, or the century, has produced, I naturally examine his deductions with interest. What I find is a severe, but well-merited, denunciation of the civilized world as hypocritical, because its practice is not in accord with its profession. ​Readers of the New Testament will recall the same divergence between the practice and the profession of the Jews two thousand years ago. It has been neither unknown nor unobserved in any age, in any land, amid any people since.
There were a great many clergymen preaching in Hannah More's day, and there are a great many clergymen preaching now. Churches and temples and halls of every conceivable denomination, and of no conceivable denomination, are open to us. There is something fair and square in going to a place of which sermons are the natural product, and hearing one. There is also something fair and square in taking a volume of sermons down from the shelf, and reading one. I am not of those who believe that a sermon, like a speech, needs to be spoken. A great deal of quiet thinking goes with the printed page, and the reader has ​one obvious advantage over the listener. He can close the book at any moment without disedifying a congregation. But just as Hannah More intruded her admonitions into the free spaces of life, so her successors betray us into being sermonized when we are pursuing our week-day avocations in a week-day mood, which is neither fair nor square. It is the attitude of the nursery governess (Hannah was the greatest living exemplar of the nursery governess), and there is no escape from its unauthorized supervision.
When a hitherto friendly magazine prints nine pages of sermon under a disingenuous title suggestive of domestic economy, and beginning brightly, "What right has any one to preach?" we feel a sense of betrayal. Any one has a right to preach (the laxity of church discipline is to blame); but a sense of honour, or a sense of humour, or a sense of humanity should debar ​an author from pretending he is not preaching when he writes like this: "If we have a desire that seems to us contrary to our duty, it means that there is a conflict within us; it means either that our sense of duty is not a sense of the whole self, or that our desire is not of the whole self. This then is to be aimed at—the identity of duty and desire." And so on, and so on, through nine virtuous pages. The reluctance on the part of magazine preachers to refer openly to God tends to prolixity. Thomas à Kempis, reflecting on the same situation, which is not new, briefly recommends us to submit our wills to the will of God. Monk though he was, he understood that duty and desire are on opposite sides of the camp, and refuse to be harmoniously blended. This is why living Christians are called, and will be called to the end of time, the church militant.
​A sanguine preacher in "The Popular Science Monthly" holds out a hope that duty and desire may be ultimately blended through an adroit application of eugenics. What we need, and have not got, is a race which "instinctively and spontaneously" does right. Therefore it behooves us to superinduce, through grafting and transplanting, "the preservation and perpetuation of a human stock that may be depended upon to lead moral lives without the necessity of much social compulsion." It sounds interesting; and though Mr. Chesterton loudly asserts that eugenics degrade the race, we are too well accustomed to these divergencies on the part of our preachers to take them deeply to heart.
Mr. Chesterton has also used strong language (understatement is not his long suit) in denouncing "the diabolical idiocy that can regard beer or tobacco as in some sort evil or unseemly"; ​and I am disposed, in a mild way, to agree with him. Yet when some time ago I read a pleasantly worded little sermon on "An Artist's Morality," being curious to know how a moral artist differed from a moral chemist, or a moral accountant, the only concrete instance of morality adduced was the abandonment of tobacco. As soon as the artist resolved to amend his blameless life, he made the discovery that its chief element of discord was his pipe. "As a thing of sudden nastiness, I threw it out of the window, drawing in, almost reverently, a deep breath of cool October air."
It is possible that the American public likes being preached to, just as Hannah More's British public liked being preached to. This would account for the little sermons thrown on the screen between moving pictures, brief admonishments pointing out the obvious moral of the drama, ​deploring the irregularity of masculine affections, the soulless selfishness of wealth; and asserting with colossal impudence that the impelling purpose of the entertainment is to bring home to the hearts of men an understanding of the misery they cause. As it is the rule of moving-picture plays to change their scenes with disconcerting speed, but to leave all explanatory texts on the screen long enough to be learned by heart, these moral precepts dominate the show. The franker its revelations, the more precepts are needed to offset them. Rows of decent and respectable men, who accompany their decent and respectable wives, are flattered by being accused of sins which they have never aspired to commit.
"I must acknowledge that some writers upon ethical questions have been men of fair moral character," said Sir Leslie Stephen in a moment of expansion which was no less wise ​than generous, seeing that he was himself the author of two volumes of lay sermons, originally delivered before ethical societies. Didacticism can go no further than in these monitory papers. There is one on "The Duties of Authors," which is calculated to drive a light-minded or light-hearted neophyte from a profession where he is expected in his most unguarded moments to influence morally his equally unguarded readers. But Sir Leslie played the game according to rule. A plainly worded notice on the fly-leaf warned the public that the sermons were sermons, not critical studies, or Alpine adventures. If they seem to us overcrowded with counsel, this is only because they are non-religious in their character. When religion is excluded from a sermon, there is too much room left for morality. Without the vast compelling presence of God, the activities of men grow feverish, ​and lose the "imperious sweetness" of sanctity.
If our preachers are trying to recivilize humanity, it behooves us, perhaps, to be more patient with their methods. All civilizing formulas are uneasy possessions. Ruskin evolved one, and no man could have been more sincere or more insistent in applying it. So painfully did he desire that his readers should think as he did, that he grew to look upon the world with a jaundiced eye because it was necessarily full of people who thought differently. Even Hannah More had a little formula for the correction of England; but it gave her no uneasiness, because she could not conceive of herself as a failure. Advice flowed from her as it flows from her followers to-day. There was but one of her, which was too much. There are many of them, and great is their superfluity. The "Vanishing Sermon" has not vanished. It has ​only changed its habitat. It has forsaken the pulpit, and taken up quarters in what was formerly the strong-hold of literature.