MODERN SERMONS.
[To THE EDITOR or THE " SPECTATOR.")
Soz,—The Rev. Norton G. Lawson, in your issue of Saturday last, disagrees with your noteworthy article on " Modern Sermons " to the extent at least of not himself regarding them as generally unpopular and congregations inattentive. 16 gives his own prescription for sermon-making, the ingredients being : taking pains; respect for the hearers, i.e., not preaching down to them; carefully chosen language; putting it into short sentences of Anglo-Saxon words; few adjectives; and (mirabile dicta) the avoidance of sentiment. By these means Mr. Lawson claims to get a " response' from his hearers, by which he perhaps means respectful attention and no yawning. But, Sir, are not these things the mere literary mechanics of sermon- making? and how trivial in comparison with the high message with which every sermon should be charged, seeing that the preacher speaks as an " ambassador for Christ "!
Most modern sermons seem to leave out of count the emotional or imaginative side of the human soul. For as Matthew Arnold (Preface to God and the Bible) affirmed: " The power of Christianity has been in the immense emotion which it has excited; in its engaging for the government of man's conduct the mighty forces of love, reverence, gratitude, hope, pity and awe—all that host of allies which Wordsworth includes under the one name of imagination when he says that in the uprooting of old thoughts and old rules we must still ask:- ` Survives imagination to the change Superior? Help to virtue does she give? If not, 0 Mortals, better cease to live,' " and yet Mr. Lawson says avoid sentiment.
Much of the historical illusion of religion has been shattered, but it is open to us to seek and to find complete satisfaction in reflection on the realities which those illusions once illustrated. The modernist Churchmen are doing their best to cherish and aid the disposition so to reflect. Would that preachers generally attuned their sermons to the changed attitude of the Christian laity whom it is hopeless ever to see again under the credal servitude of the fourth century !—I am, Sir, &c.,
-54 Shooters Hill Road, Blackheath, S.E. DANIEL EIRT. August 28th.
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