The Art of Preaching
THE ART OF PREACHING MANY good men have set themselves to explaining the decreasing attendance in the churches of our Protestant brethren, and it is astonishing with what unanimity they have passed...
...The natural history of ants, and the beauties of Teton National Park will have had their spokesmen...
...But these are not attractions which would considerably reduce the audiences of a Phillips Brooks, let us say, or a minor Jeremy Taylor...
...Now a good sermon, need it be said, cannot be whisked up like an apple pie...
...Given these conditions there is a chance that it may grow to its proper beauty...
...But these are impossible things to ask, now and for some time to come...
...That true, we can only prepare ourselves to hear worse, and still worse sermons...
...After all, the modern sermon has nothing of the dimensions of its ancestors...
...We regret to say, etc...
...And anyone who knows anything about newspapering in the United States knows that the one thing which almost any reporter can do is to improve upon any speech or sermon he is assigned to cover...
...It cannot be squeezed out in little half-hour parcels scattered through the week...
...And certainly the preacher has cause to complain about the increasing complexity of his duties...
...Accordingly, he has digested them into such a series, that they follow one another naturally, and make a continued system of practical divinity...
...motoring likewise, especially in decent weather...
...but most will have avoided any reference to these things, and most will appear to have been very dull...
...twenty minutes is about as much time as most preachers dare give themselves...
...It cannot be dictated offhand...
...Golf, no doubt, has its pleasantries on a Sunday morning...
...THE ART OF PREACHING MANY good men have set themselves to explaining the decreasing attendance in the churches of our Protestant brethren, and it is astonishing with what unanimity they have passed by the most obvious reason, which is the decline of the art of preaching...
...Saint Paul will have been proclaimed the first journalist...
...More often than not, he is so swallowed up in the business affairs of his congregation that he has little time in which to prepare a sermon...
...yet even this allotment is not short enough to hide the deficiencies of preaching today...
...It would solve two problems at once: eliminate the anguish of preparing the weekly sermon, and assure them of their meditative reading...
...There is no remedy that we can propose other than that commended by Sir Roger de Coverley, who made his chaplain a present of all the great sermons, "and only begged of him that every Sunday he would pronounce one of them in the pulpit...
...It cannot be outlined in the fifteen minutes between cutting the lawn and eating breakfast on Sunday morning, and written in the hour between breakfast and church...
...It is usual to attribute the decline of any of the arts to the press of social and economic distractions...
...It must develop slowly, amid the most sunny leisure...
...It may be unfair to trust to any single newspaper account of any single sermon, but surely week in and week out, month in and month out, the press gives an impression faithful enough of what preaching is like...
...Some few will have spoken out against current examples of injustice, or considered the eternal truths and problems, which is certainly a preacher's business...
...It is a work of art...
...received and contents noted...
...It should be said that we have addressed these remarks to our Protestant brethren, not because they suffer alone from the decline of the art of preaching, but because (for obvious reasons) that decline has not yet injured the attendance at Catholic churches...
...And here, perhaps, is the answer to the cry of the prophet: "Why do the heathen rage, and why do the people imagine a vain thing...
...If anyone doubts the low estate of the sermon, let him collect Monday editions of the newspapers in the principal cities of the United States, and read what the preachers of those cities had to say the day before...
...It is not simply a matter of "Yours of the 7th inst...
...This method should have its advantages for some of our more harassed preachers...
...They will have discussed such questions as, Does advertising pay?, and Is there biblical authority for the habitation of the other planets...
Vol. 11 • January 1930 • No. 11
