SCOTCH SERMONS.*
" ALLow me to make the sermons of a people, and I care not who may make its laws." That is quite as sound a dictum as the say- ing which was quoted by Fletcher of Saltoun, and which is usually attributed to himself. At least, it was quite as sound in the days before the daily and the weekly press had pushed the clergy out of the pulpit. And it was specially applicable to Scotland, for the preachers of that country have been its chief teachers ; they have taught it politics as well as theology ; they have helped to make it more free than England from the superstitious respect for what has been consecrated by usage or by time. The explanation is, that the Scotch have a higher idea than the English of the place which the office of instruction should fill in the services of the Church. The English people have so far clung to the old faith of Roman Catholic days that they have made the public services of religion chiefly devotional. While putting away the mass, they have held fast by a liturgy, and have filled up the crevices of written prayer with bursts of choral song. They have so woven the supplications of all past Christendom into their own liturgy that, when reciting the litany or the creed, they seem to be linking their own devotions with those that have come from the whole hierarchy of past religion, and to be enjoying, while yet on earth, that felicity and that comfort which the; Church calls the com- munion of saints. The sight has a curious beauty of its own, and, whether or not it presents a high ideal of worship, it is certainly the one form of devotion which suits the genius of the English people, with its shrinking from religious eccentricity, and its conservative clinging to the piety of routine. Hence the tendency of the English ritual is to degrade the sermon into some such place as it holds in the Church of Rome ; which, by filling up the mind of the devotee with the solemn glories of the mass, the elaborate comforts of the seven sacraments, and the sweet macerations of penance, leaves no room for the growth of a craving to hear the voice of sanctified discussion. At some seasons, it is true, the Latin Church has seen preaching to be of vital use, and she once sent a crowd of Franciscan and Dominican friars into the furthest corners of Europe to win back to obedi- ence by their impassioned harangues those souls who had listened to the voice of heresy. Both the Latin and the Anglican Churches hare, it is likewise true, been enriched by the greatest pulpit oratory of which literature presents a token. Bossuet and Massillon, Barrow and South, find no rivals among the crowd of sects who, at the Reformation, broke clear away from the cere- monial of medizeval age, and tried to link their theology with that of the First Christians, as they are pictured in the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of St. Paul. Nor, although those great teachers have left no descendants in their own communion, do the Hyacinthes, the Felixes, the Beraiers, the Newmans, and the Liddons stand less certainly in the front of living preachers. If Nonconformity can offer rivals, it is only here and there in such preachers as Mr. Martineau, who, as men of genius, come under no rule. But, both in the Latin and the Anglican Churches, little is done to quicken the preaching power of ordinary pastors. The congregation of a village church is satisfied with its morning prayers and hymns, which fill up and round off the Sunday forenoon. They do not seek argumentative discussion, and would • Benno= and Lectures. By William McCombie. Edinburgh : T. and T. Clark
resent rather than welcome the utterances of a reasoned theology. They do not expect the pastor to attempt anything more ambitious in the pulpit than to offer a few words of simple advice. Thus he has no inducement to prepare his sermon by such read- ing and thought as the corresponding class of teachers, pro- fessional writers, devote to their work. And hence the village sermon comes to be,—what we see it I We shall offer no descrip- tion, when the language of strictest truth would read like insult. Nor, indeed, would it be easy to give a picture of the sermons which are addressed Sunday by Sunday to average village worshippers ; for what the preacher seeks to prove, or by what mysterious process of logic he links his text to his conclusion, is a mystery which will never be unveiled until the secrets of all hearts shall be made known, and the sea of the curate's intellect shall give up its dead syllogisms. But the guilt of such discourses can- not be chiefly cast on the pulpit. The pastors are, for the most part, cultivated and sensible men, who, when out of doors com- mand respect by their unaffected intelligence and their consider- able range of timid reading. Just as one is often amazed and pleased to see how full of good sense is the man or woman whose novel has seemed to exhaust the possibilities of mental vacuity, so one is equally surprised and gratified to find at the dinner-table that the sermon heard on the previous Sunday was no index of the preacher's mind, and that it had been constructed in defiance of much intelligence, and an unquestionable power of discriminating between contradictory propositions. The village pastor is a martyr to ecclesiastical etiquette.
Scotland presents a totally different scene of pulpit life. Ever since the Reformation her people, although at least as pious as the English, have displayed an invincible repugnance to any form of liturgy. They cannot be made to see the philosophy of printed and formal prayers. When they came under the sway of John Knox, they cut themselves clean away from the traditional symbolism of the Church, and took their Christianity from Saint Paul. Hence in the office of public worship they gave a chief place to instruction. Like the first Christians, they came to Church to hear the Gospel preached, quite as much as to pour forth their supplications or to offer up their praises unto the most High. And the hard, logical character of the people has, demanded from their preachers, not mere platitudes about the dictates of the Church, or the beauties of the Gospel, but long chains of reasoning, which shall link together the isolated utter- ances of the Epistles, and shall so bring the mystery of the Atone- ment within the grasp of the logical understanding as to give the process of reconciliation to God through Christ the rigour of a suit in equity. Indeed, when a stranger first listens to the Calvinistic sermon of an able and thoroughly trained Scottish preacher, and sees the wondrously complex machinery of law by which the task of conversion must be wrought, he is apt to marvel why the sinner does not call in an attorney, and take the opinion of counsel. No intellect less logical than that of a Scotehmam could possibly master the legal problem of conversion as it is set forth by the preachers whom Scotland has fed on the Institutes of Calvin. If her repentant Christians are in practice much like those of England, and display a healthy power of forget- ing the attorney-like devices of Calvinism when they come to the realities of religion, they are not more inconsistent than the logician who forgets his syllogisms when talking to his sweetheart, or than the High Churchman who finds himself negligent of the magical powers conferred by Apostolical succession when con- fronted with the grim ironies of living fact. Calvinism is not an amiable form of creed. It is absolutely repulsive to those minds which seek the soft atmosphere of mysticism, which hate to hear the jargon of law in the sanctuary of the Temple, and which covet a misty horizon for their faith. Nevertheless, Calvinism has done one signal service to the Scottish people. It has made their sermons logical and intellectual. By forcing the clergy to preach discourses which mean something, it has for ever divorced the pulpit from the consolations of twaddle„- and has made the people a nation of thinkers. The Calvinistie theology, and the sermons which it shapes, have done more to quicken the intellect of Scotland than all her parish schools and • universities. A group of Scotch farmers and small tradesmen will, when returning from church on Sunday forenoon, criticize the reasoning of the minister, and the soundness of his doctrines, with an acuteness that might well astonish a professional student, and that redeems from contempt the acrid and intolerant dogmatism of their creed. They are intellectually awake. Their religious feelings have become linked to their reason. They belong to an altogether different zone of human nature from that which is the dwelling- place, the agricultural labourers, the small tradesmen, and the
middle-class magnates, who are content to believe what is said to be said by the Church, without asking what the Church means, and who are driven back from the sacrilegious task of criticizing the 'Thirty-Nine Articles by the fear of their neighbours and of hell-fire.
Of course, the typically Scotch theology and Scotch sermon belong to a barbaric stage of the human intellect. The many able preachers who still represent the Ephraim M'Briars are the survivors of theological and scientifically trained savages. In his great book on the Descent of Man, Mr. Darwin might have shown how they sprang from the schoolmen by the process of evolution ; how the law of natural selection, or the sur- vival of the fittest, has enabled them to retain for three centuries an iron hold over the Scottish people ; and how the inexorable rigour of the same great law is now smiting them with death, and filling their places with a new species of theological creature. In Scotland, as in every other country, the future of Christianity belongs to the Broad Church. The dogmas of the High Churchmen have become for ever incredible to the thought that leads the world and shapes its destinies. The dogmas of Calvinism are too sharply cut, too complete, too in- vested with the rigidity of a statute to be a real picture of the link which binds a human soul to the awful mysteries of the un- veiled hereafter. And both High Churchism and Calvinism are fated to be doomed to extinction by that moral sense which is the last court of theological appeal, and which ultimately determines the creed of Christendom; by that sense of right and wrong which no hierarchy can ultimately deprave, and which all the General Councils of the Church are as powerless to conquer as human arm is to keep back the tides of the sea. It is the theology of the conscience, and not of the clergy, that is to be the Christianity of the future, and to that theology Scotland is now turning an attentive ear. All her most eminent preachers are now Broad Churchmen. In theology, Dr. Macleod, Dr. Caird, Principal Tulloch, and Dr. Wallace stand side by side with Dean Stanley, Mr. Jowett, and Mr. Maurice. Even in the Free Church, which really inherits the narrow theology of the Rutherfords and the Erskines, the younger men are learn- ing how to overspread the legal machinery of Calvinism with a haze of mysticism borrowed from the teaching of Mr. Maurice and Robertson of Brighton.
But, even among the Evangelical sermons of Scotland all are not Calvinistic. How Scotch a discourse may be in tone, sentiment, and reasoning, and at the same time how hostile it may be to the distinctive dogmas of Calvinism, is attested by the lectures _and sermons of the late Mr. McCombie, the editor of the Aberdeen Free Press. Mr. McCombie, whose character and attainments we described at the time of his death, was one of the most remarkable men that Scotland has produced for many years. The volume that has been edited by his daughter presents some faint idea of the metaphysical bias, the deep thoughtfulness, the profound conviction that Christianity was the one system of regenerating truth, and the austere loneliness of piety, by which he was dis- tinguished from the mass of men. Although a layman, he was often invited to preach, and indeed he belonged to a sect which is nervously hostile to the recognition of any clerical caste. His discourses were, for the most part, penned hastily and in hours snatched from far different work ; yet they display such vigour, richness, and depth of thought as we find in the sermons of few professional preachers. In one respect they are typically Scotch. They are so intensely Scotch in tone and temper as to recall the utterances of those Covenanters who fled to the hill-side, and allowed themselves to be hunted to death by the dragoons of Claverhouse and Dalziel, rather than enter into communion with the mammon of unrighteousness. Although the discourses are not polemical, they reveal the mind of a Puritan who detested all forms of sacerdotalism, who hated the claims of any priesthood as he hated the devil, and in whose eyes the office of the Christian ministry was directly conferred by the Almighty, and bore a sanctity beyond that which could be conferred by the impress of earthly hand. But while he thus represented the spirit of the Covenanters, Mr. McCombie stood at the opposite pole of theology from the Calvinists. He wrote an elaborate book to show that the free agency of man was compatible with the omnipotence and omniscience of God, and he vehemently protested against the Predestinarian doctrine which Calvinism draws from the teaching Saint Paul. So far he was not Scotch. But none the less do his sermons merit study for the light which they cast on all that is noble in the thoughts and the piety of the Scottish people.
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