Litchfield enquirer., 1879-04-03


 mo by which the editor of the religious news paper induces the new subscriber te listen to him for one year on the solemn themes of life and death and judgment. Other regular min isters have resortedto the same eXpedient, and treat their congregation to few minutes of secular matter" before beginning the ordinary religious exercises of the day.
 But the rule of 8 diadactic moralist is a very trying one. It is not every man, no matter what his parts or training who can fill it even moderately we'll The rules of right living are few and simple, and are we'll known. Nothing has been added to them in eighteen hundred years, and the world, in these days of iteration, has almost grown weary of them. But the application of them has been rendered increasingly difficult by the immense complex ity of modern life, by the wendrOus tangle of conflicting rights, and opposing duties, and delicately divided interests which constitutes, what we called civilized society. To lead even the humblest and simplest through it in safety is task for which hardly any training but that of an experience of life such as but very few men can boast will prepare one. Nothing requires higher order of talent and more varied acquaintance with trials and tempta- tions, than to make sermons on the conduct of life strike an average business or professional man in cur day fright on the topof the head" 7" as we once heard car-driver describe the way one of Moody's d1scourses affected him. No college course and no amount of reading can make up to the average preacher for not having seen and suffered much. Nothing can make up for it but genius, for genius has travelled in all lands and lived in all ages, has wept beside the graves of household and charged in the forlorn hope in the raw dawn of the winters morning. But then genius is rare, and the coarse-tibred and ill-equipped man, when he of F. awake, and paying the church debt and the salaries of the choir, not unnaturally falls into the humorous and grotesque vein, which is almost always successful if persued with a certain moderation at the outset. Talmage, for instance, makes uc attempt to conceal the fact that bouffe is his speciality. He defended himself, one Sunday not long ago. against the charge of unseemly levity by showing that while other churches were, as he said, ''the great dermitorles of civilization" nhis church nobody ever slept wink. In fact he keeps the congregation in a roar or with twinkle in their eye during the whole service. It is not very long since his invitation-'Let us sing a hymn"-brought out shout of laughter, just as it would have done at the Comic Opera, owing to the queer colocation in which he produced it. And yet no one can listen to his discourse or examine his mode of stimulating the religious feeling without seeing that there is nothing new in his style; that what he has done is simply to go little further than some others of his popular brethren, who also have been eminently successful in keeping their people awake.
 The main ingredient of pulpit beuffe, is however, essentially the same as that of opera bouffe. It consists in the irreverent treatment of things which people have been in the habit of looking on with reverence. In the first stage of this the shock is too great for laugh ter; bnt when people have become a little used to it, it supplies kind of fun which they relish enormously, especially if they have been strictly brought up. In the opera bouffe the humor lies in a kind of reversal of the moral order of society. A cowardly colonel who runs away in the field is at once promoted and decorated A defaulting banker is made State treasurer. The kings privy councillors, grave and elderly men, go out of the royal presence dancing jig. In the pulpit in like manner there are two essential features in the bouffe method. The first is the presentation of the Deity as governing the universe justly, but | still on the humorous plan-that is, convlctins the sinner by getting the better of him-or in l other words, being too smart for him. In fact, l the sinner usually appears in the sermons of the School as person who suffers for his sim- plicity, and generally cuts ludicrous figure when his wickedness is brought to light. The second is an appeal to the visibility which al- | ways lies concealed in decayed reverence When there has been a distinct decline in a | mans capacity for awe, his sense of the cOmi- cal is always touched by seeing the old objects of his worship treated with good-humored disrespect and familiarity. People who have received religious education, but who have fallen away from their early teaching, are therefore apt to be much tickled by slight comic handling of what they once held sacred. The sweetness of laughter on solemn occasions and in forbidden places is known to everybody, but it is hardly any sweeter, though usually more open, than the laughter of the irreverent religious man at the attempts of his pastor to make the Gospel en- tertaining to him and present the wicked in the light of greenhOrns The fatal defect in the plan is that to keep it effective steady broad ening of the humor is necessary. The jokes have to become day by day more palpable and the colors to be laid sn more deeply as the con- gregation's sense of decorum declines and it's appetite for amusement grows dull. The re- suit is that preacher of the Talmage school is condemned by the law of his method to con- tinued progress towards the extreme. If he once begins to make points in order to send a smile round the pews, he cannot stop till his flock begins to watch for jokes in his prayers or greets him now and then in his sermon with the regular theatrical roar. It is desirable, for the sake not of religion only but of all the vir- tues on which society rests, that such preachers should have no organizations outside their own churches to be responsible for them. For if there be anything certain in the lessons of his- tory 1t is that no community was ever long capable of great things in which the serious el. ement in character has been successfully attack. ed and either destroyed or enfeebled.