Page images
PDF
EPUB

flames. When Narni taught the populace in Lent from the pulpits of Rome, half the city went from his sermons crying along the streets, Lord have mercy upon us, Christ have mercy upon us, so that in only one passion week two thousand crowns worth of ropes were sold to make scourges with; and when he preached before the pope to cardinals and bishops, and painted the crime of nonresidence in its own colours, he frightened thirty or forty bishops, who heard him, instantly home to their dioceses. In the pulpit of the university of Salamanca he induced eight hundred students to quit all worldly prospects of honour, riches, and pleasure, and to become penitents in divers monasteries. Some of this class were martyrs too. We know the fate of Savonarola, and more might be added; but all lamented the momentary duration of the effects produced by their labours. Narni himself was so disgusted with his office, that he renounced preaching, and shut himself up in his cell to mourn over his irreclaimable contemporaries, for bishops went back to court, and ropemakers lay idle again.

Our reformers taught all the good doctrines, which had been taught by these men, and they added two or three more, by which they laid the ax to the root of apostacy, and produced generat reformation. Instead of appealing to popes, and canons, and founders, and fathers, they only quoted them, and referred their auditors to the holy scriptures for law. Pope Leo X. did not know this, when he told Prierio, who complained of

Luther's heresy, Friar Martin had a fine genius !

They also taught the people what little they knew of christian liberty, and so led them into a belief that they might follow their own ideas in religion without the consent of a confessor, a diocesan, a pope, or a council. They went further, and laid the stress of all religion on justifying faith. This obliged the people to get acquainted with Christ the object of their faith, and thus they were led into the knowledge of a character altogether different from what they saw in their old guides, a character, which it is impossible to know, and not to admire and imitate.. The old papal popular sermons had gone off like a charge of gunpowder, producing only a fright, a bustle, and a black face; but those of the newe learninge, as the monks called them, were small hearty seeds, which, being sown in the honest hearts of the multitude, and watered with the dew of heaven, softly vegetated, and imperceptibly unfolded blossoms and fruits of inestimable value.

These eminent servants of Christ excelled in various talents, both in the pulpit, and in private. Knox came down like a thunder-storm, Calvin resembled a whole day's set rain, Beza was a shower of the softest dew. Old Latimer in a coarse. frieze gown trudged a foot, his testament hanging at one end of his leathern girdle, and his spectacles at the other, and without ceremony instructed the people in rustic style from a hollow trec; while the courtly Ridley in sattin and fur taught the same principles in the cathedral of the metropolis. Cranmer, though a timorous man, ventured to give the most powerful and lascivious tyrant of his

[ocr errors]

time a new testament with the label, whoremongers and adulterers God will judge; while Knox, who said, there was nothing in the pleasant face of a lady to affray him, assured the Queen of Scots, that, "if there were any spark of the spirit of God, yea of honesty or wisdom in her, she would not be offended with his affirming in his sermons, that the diversions of her court were diabolical crimes, evidences of impiety or insanity." These men were not all accomplished scholars; but they all gave proof enough, that they were honest, hearty, and disinterested in the cause of religion; and to these, and not to literary qualifications, all were indebted for popularity in the pulpit, and publick confidence out of it. Happy had it been for succeeding ages had they been trusted less.

All Europe produced great and excellent preachers, and some of the more studious and sedate reduced their art of publick preaching to a system, and taught rules of a good sermon. Bishop Wilkins enumerated in 1646 upwards of sixty, who had written on the subject. I have endeavoured to procure a sight of all their books; but some few I have not been so happy as to find. Several of what I have seen are valuable treatises, full of edifying instructions; most of them are very small; but all, I think, are on a scale too large, and by affecting to treat of the whole office of a minister, leave that capital branch, public preaching, unfinished and vague.

One of the most important articles of pulpit science, that, which gives life and energy to all

the rest, and without which all the rest are nothing but a vain parade, is either neglected or exploded in all these treatises. It is essential to the ministration of the divine word by publick preaching, that preachers be allowed to form principles of their own, and that their sermons contain their real sentiments; the fruits of their own intense thought and meditation. Preaching cannot be in a good state, in those communities, where the shameful traffick of buying and selling manuscript sermons is carried on. Moreover, all the animating encouragements, that arise from a free unbiassed choice of the people, and from their uncontaminated disinterested applause, should be left open to stimulate a generous youth to excel. Command a man to utter what he has no inclination to propagate, and what he does not even believe, threaten him at the same time with all the miseries of life, if he dare to follow his own ideas, and to promulge his own sentiments, and you pass a sentence of death on all he says. He does declaim, but all is languid and cold, and he lays his system out as an undertaker does the dead. Instead of referring him to those, who deal most in religion, and therefore best understand the value of every thing in it, the people I mean, give him to understand, that even their consent to be taught by him is not necessary to be obtained, and you instantly turn his eye from his bible, his people, and his God, and fix it on the seat of a patron, who must be approached by a circle of collusion and intrigue.

These books consider the pulpit as the religious tribunal of the civil magistrate, preachers as ser¬ vants of the crown, and preaching as a human art, a branch of rhetorick to be taught in the schools. In one thing they made it different from all other arts and sciences; these they considered as capable of improvement; but that they pretended was in a state of absolute perfection. Other sciences they left open, and would have laughed at a proposal to admit every future youth to study philosophy by swearing him to believe and maintain the ideas of Plato, to live in the faith and to die in the comfort of the speculations of Cicero, or the categories of Aristotle; but this science, religion, this, they said, an inhuman reprobate had begun, a sickly child improved, and a female tyrant completely finished off. This was going beyond a Cæsar, who thought nihil actum dum aliquid agendum, yea beyond an apostle, who exclaimed to his followers, leaving rudiments let us go on unto per- ́ fection. Brethren, be ye followers of me. I count not myself to have apprehended: but this only have I attained, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things, which are before, I press toward the mark, for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

This is the place, where, would our limits allow it, we should take our stand, and reconnoitre

*

"Tu Elisabetha operi ab Henrico parenti felicitur inchoato, ab Edwardo fratre in immensum aucto, coronidem jam consummato imponeres. . . Pater incepit. . . . adolescens promovit . . . filia absolvit." Epist. Synod. Elizabet. Reg. Dat. Sueca ex Frisiorum oppido, ex Synodo 22 Aprilis 1587. Fris. occid.

« EelmineJätka »