TIIE APOSTLE OF COMMON-PLACENESS.*
WE confess we opened these sermons with a prejudice, a prejudice with which we suspect our readers will only too fully sympathize ; but we were wrong, and so are they. After careful reading, we come to the conclusion that much as there undoubtedly is to be said against, there is still more to be said for them, and are disposed to enter ourselves as counsel for the defence. English culture is impatient of sermons : having outgrown the larger proportion of them, it looks down in the conceit of its ha- - maturity on all such teaching as mental pap fit only for children or peasants. It is, however, but a momentary attitude of the mind ; men who can and do read don't want dogmatic teaching of doctrines, which, if they desire either to believe or investigate, they can know more about in a week's patient study than in possibly a life-time of sermon hearing ; but even this class feel a want the pulpit could supply, the need of men of a strong faith and keen spiritual insight who can grapple with the complex thought of a complex age, can present a difficulty or a doubt not from its weakest but its strongest side, can bring daylight to bear on problems half the agony of which would disappear if once dragged from the darkness and isolation in which each man works them out, and, solved or unsolved, shown to be at least capable of being handled and understood by men whose highest spiritual life they had proved powerless to injure. But the audience would not be large, though men living almost exclusively among readers and thinkers are apt to imagine it would be, and to look down with sovereign contempt on that large class whose one idea of a sermon was once aptly expressed to us by one of them, who declared he "found it necessary to be wound up once a week." That is the condition of Mr. Beecher's audience, that is the condition of the large classes among ourselves who Sunday after Sunday, instead of being wound up, too often find themselves gently let down. It is not a high level for either teacher or taught, it resembles very closely Bacon's description, "Ile that delivereth knowledge desireth to deliver it in such form as may be best believed, and not as may be best examined, and he that receiveth knowledge desireth rather present satisfaction than expectant inquiry ; and so rather • Sermons. By Henry Ward Beecher. London: Sampson Low and Co. 1870.
not to doubt, than not to err." And this is the mass, those not rendered wise by Peter's vision are apt in their ignorance to dub as common-place. The world's work is mostly done by them, nevertheless, and if we fail to see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and to understand how much vitality they contrive to extract from what may seem to us dry bones of doctrine and skeletons of divinity, it is because we have gone in for culture on some one small acre of our mind's kingdom, and forgotten the important point of colonizing the rest ; our fancied superiority is provincial, after all, and we are compelled to own, with Paracelsus :—
" In my own heart love had not been made wise To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind, To know even hate is but a mask of love's, To see a good in evil, and a hope
In ill-success ; to sympathize, be proud Of their half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim Struggles for truth, their poorest fallacies, Their prejudice, and fears, and cares, and doubts ; 1Vhich all touch upon nobleness, despite Their error, all tend upwardly, though weak, Like plants in mines which never see the sun, But dream of him, and guess where he may be, And do their best to climb and get to him. All this I knew not—and I failed."
Well, if to be wound up, say, to the better performance of Christian duty be a legitimate object of preaching, we think Mr. Beecher succeeds ; the people who hear his sermons ought to go home the better for them. We grant his egotism, it annoys us at every page, it does not annoy his audience, to whom he stands in a different relation. His utter inability to be logical is irritating, but then his sermons are not intended as arguments, he assumes always that his audience is already convinced, needing only to practise what it knows. We grant, too, a certain vulgarity of expression, which does not strike and consequently does not injure those who hear him, and a yet more decided vulgarity of thought, which it is more difficult to pardon ; yet, on the whole, he is draw- ing an essentially materialistic people up to a higher platform of life, keeping them, only at rope's length, it may be, from sinking into a veritable quagmire of selfish cynicism. This is something, it is much ; we wish anything as good, and as likely to do good, were offered in many parishes in England it would be easy to name. We have only space to glance rapidly at two or three of these sermons in succession. Here are two, on the life of Christ as seen from within and without. We will give one passage :—
"How would Jew, and Greek, and Roman have joined in mirthful derison if you had pointed to that person, Jesus Christ, who was to be crucified, and said, 'In that man is the secret of the whole world's power!' But the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, with their philosophies, their governments, and their power, have gone down, while this shadow has risen into greater and greater power, until it fills the world. This loads mo to speak, next, of the greatest truth that Christ enunciated,—namely, the superiority of the moral over everything else. All the world believed in the power of force. The patrons of force are the passions and desires of the human heart. The Greek bad learned to believe that the secret of power was in the understanding. But the apostle Paul, repeating what the Master had taught, declared that it was the spiritual kingdom of righteousness in Christ Jesus that was the dominant power. Our Saviour, when he said, 'Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his right- eousness, and all these things shall be added unto you,' propounded the most original and the most revolutionary principle of human life that ever was made known. The man that lives under the supreme influence of moral elements is the matt that is victorious over all the elements that are represented by those faculties which are lower than the moral. So that, if any one would be great in wealth, literature, learning, or any dynastic quality, the secret of strength is not in money, or knowledge, or understanding, or political influence, but in the supremacy of the moral elements. We are still repeating that at which we smile in read- ing of the ambitious mother who brought her two sons to Christ, and said, 'Grant that these my two sons may sit, one on thy right hand, and the other on thy left, in thy kingdom.' We are every one of us seeking greatness by outside measures; and Christ is perpetually saying to us, 'Can ye drink of the cup that I shall drink of? and be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with ? Can you throw away your life ? Can you mortify your pride? Can you subdue your selfishness? Can you lay aside the old man ? Can you die that you may live ?' We are run- ning eagerly, one after wealth, another after praise, another after honour. One feels himself secura because the golden foundations of his wealth are so deep and broad ; another because his ideas are built into systems and sciences. And we still are making our manhood to lie in these external elements, in which Christ had no life, and in which He desired to have none. We are seeking to be Christians by achieving worldly eminence and power. We have not yet learned that it is not by the outward and physical, but by the inward and spiritual, that men become true men, and that manhood is to be measured."
Mr. Beecher's grammar is sometimes so bad, as hopelessly to involve the sense of his sentences to a reader, not, we can easily believe, to a hearer. For instance, "There is," he says, "an abstract piety, that is made despotic over the simpler elements of God in Christ ; and these operate to shut out that view of God which makes Him the Father of those who put their trust in Him." Mr. Beecher, in I the construction of this sentence, has made himself say exactly the I
reverse of what he intended, but we do not for a moment doubt his audience would catch the really essential truth he was pressing home. Again, there is force in this :—" The life of God is in every particle of truth and justice in this world. Men may crucify Christ again in this law or that policy ; may hustle Him out of Jerusalem to his Calvary, and shake their garments as the Sanhe- drim did, and say we have got rid of the disturber ; may lift Him on the cross to ignominy, and say, 'He shall never again touch this law or that policy ;' may bury Him in the rock, and put a stone there, and seal it with official seals, confident that no man can ever bring Him out again, and after all," &c. Or again, we can conceive, though conscious that in so doing we are open to the charge of excessive sympathy with common-placeness, we can conceive a burdened spirit going home the lighter for a sentence like the following :—
"Is there not here many a heart that is sorrowing in family matters? Are there not many of you who are conscious that you are bound with bonds and colds from which you could only release yourself by rending what are called the decencies and proprieties of life ? Are there not those here who are bearing the yoke and suffering for a parent, a brother, a sister, an orphan, some helpless or dependent one? You who are yielding your opportunities, and joys, and life for another, patiently, are carrying the cross of Christ. Yes, and it is Christ in you that is inspir- ing you to do that, and saying to you, 'Child, a little while longer lose your life. Do not be afraid to be lavish of it. Pour it out. Do not be economical. Lose it, lose it, and you shall save it unto lifo eternal.'"
Spoken by a living voice, the words would come with the sustaining power of sympathy to some whose anointed heads and washed faces bore no outward trace of needing it. A few strong words, too, to the men of strict integrity who have always "been said to stand in their own light," would probably send not a few home with strengthened resolution. Very feeble they to need them, much to be despised, no doubt, though a word of Mr. Tennyson's seems to check the rising contempt :—
"See thou, that countest reason ripe
In holding by the law within, Thou fail not in a world of sin, And e'en for want of such a type."
Mr. Beecher is terribly diffuse We once heard all he has contrived to express in the sermon on "The Sepulchre in the Garden" put into these words, "Let condensed sorrow turn the wheel of a joyful activity ;" but then very few who heard them had a just idea what those words meant ; Mr. Beecher's audience will not miss his meaning. In the sermon on "Faithfulness in Little Things" the subject brings out the preacher's special power, while it reveals an alarmingly low standard of integrity as commonly reached by this most select of American audiences. Into any higher range of teaching Mr. Beecher does not enter. No man, he himself says, can teach more of Christ than he has in him, and how far he may have himself attained we must leave those to judge who can understand how one, who should at least be able to recognize that men do not imagine Christ, but that Christ informs the imagination of men —can write such words as these :—" Our ideas of God must be learned through ourselves, there is nothing else in the world but ourselves that can teach us what God is." The whole teaching is from a low platform, but would he be heard from a higher? We think he would, that the highest truth is ever the most simple, has always the penetrative power ; and yet—would Christ get an immense audience in New York or in London ? We incline to think not. One of the greatest of modern poets has written one of the greatest of modern sermons, but in any five hundred who have read "The Ring and the Book," are there five who have read "Easter-Day"? The Ephesians had scarcely emerged from paganism when, we may presume, they understood St. Paul's prayer for them that "they might be strengthened with might by God's Spirit in the inner man, that Christ might dwell in their hearts by faith, and that they might be filled with all the fullness of God." After eighteen centuries of fancied familiarity with what such words might mean, we are putting in a plea for their dilution, and asking a niche for the Apostle of Common-placeness.
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