In this spirit of reverence for his work, he became through his whole ministry a student of his audiences. He was incessantly trying experiments upon his congregations. The same sermons he preached over and over, till they were crowded with variations and improvements. Garrick, who himself owed much to his study of Whitefield, said that Whitefield never finished a sermon till he had preached it forty times. He preached from thirty to forty thousand sermons, but only about seventy-five have found their way into print. This is some index to the extent to which he must have carried repetition of the same discourses.

The pulpit is crowded with illustrations, either of the neglect, or the use, or the abuse, of this study of men as a source of homiletic culture. They might be multiplied indefinitely, but it is needless.

(3)I proceed, therefore, to remark that the same view is confirmed by the opinions of a class of writers and speakers derogatory to the value of rhetorical culture.

Oratorical study has to contend with the expressed judgments of certain orators and writers who say that it is useless. They have succeeded, as they imagine, without it. They have refused to be hampered by it. They have trusted to the instinct of speech and the cravings of a full mind for utterance. They have but filled the mind with thought, and then let it express itself. They have followed the counsel they so often give to young preachers, "Find something to say, and then say it." They therefore dispute the value of all conscious effort for oratorical discipline. Cicero, after writing the "De Oratore," condemned books on rhetoric. Macaulay, though the author of criticism enough to make volumes of rhetorical suggestion, decries con

LECT. VI.]

RHETORICAL STUDY.

93

scious study of rhetorical science. George William Curtis in this country has reproduced Macaulay's judg ment with approval. He sums up the whole argument by saying that rhetoric makes critics, but never orators nor writers.

These men represent a class of writers and speakers, themselves successful, whom every flourishing age of literature has produced, and who have no faith in the scientific culture of oratory for any other purpose than that of mental gymnastics. Its direct practical value they doubt or deny.

Test, now, these opinions by the actual experience of such men, and what do they amount to? Simply this: they are comparative opinions, in which abstract rhetoric is weighed against the literary discipline of real life. Such critics have profited so much more from the study of men than from the study of rhetorical treatises that the latter sink into insignificance in the comparison. Is it conceivable that Cicero's orations grew out of innate, unstudied eloquence alone? His own confessions contradict this. Is it imaginable that Macaulay's style was the fruit of unconscious ebullition of power? A thousand years of criticism could never convince the literary world of that. Is it possible that Mr. Curtis's "Easy Chair" was never manufactured? If the styles of these writers are specimens of spontaneous generation, the world does not contain any thing which is not such. The immortal columns of Greek architecture are no more made, studied, elaborated things than are such styles as theirs. Those styles have been originated, compacted, adorned, polished, by laborious study of speech and authorship in real life. Their authors have studied rhetoric in embodied forms. They have prac

ticed it, as literary journeymen, in the mental collisions and abrasions of public life. They lived it many years before they could command their facile pen.

All opinions, therefore, of successful writers, derogatory to the study of oratory, are to be taken as only practical testimonies to the value of the study of it as embodied in living men. Whatever may be the bearing of them upon the scholastic culture of rhetoric, they are the most emphatic witness possible to the value of its practical culture through an elaborate and lifelong study of mankind.

To recapitulate, then, the several aspects of the subject which we have considered: we have observed that every preacher may obtain much oratorical culture from the study of his own mind; that he has a similar source of culture in the study of other men; that this study is often undervalued, because of a factitious reverence for books; that this study should be stimulated by that which is well known to be the popular idea of a clergyman; that the need of it in some quarters is indicated by the idea of a clergyman which is most common in literary fiction; that the absence of it discloses itself, not only in the unfitness of the pulpit to its mission of reproof, but also in its unfitness to the mission of comfort; that we may learn something to the purpose from the study of eccentric preachers; that the study of men is specially needful to educated preachers, because the literature of the world is not constructed, in the main, for the masses of mankind; that the need of it is enforced by the fact that often great changes of popular opinion occur independently of the cultivated classes as such; that in such popular changes the clergy are the natural leaders of the peo

LECT. VI.]

SUMMARY.

95

ple; that a certain minority of the clergy are found to be insensible or hostile to such changes; that, when the pulpit becomes identified with the cultivated classes alone, it loses power of control over all classes; that, when the pulpit betrays a want of knowledge of men as they are, the result is the creation of anomalous relations between the church and the world; and that the study of men here recommended is supported by the practice of leading minds in history.

You will not understand me as decrying scholastic discipline in the comparison. On that subject I have, in the sequel, other things to say. But I have wished to establish at present this as one part of a preacher's necessary and perpetual discipline for his life's work: that he must be a student of men, himself a man of his own times, living in sympathy with his own times, versed in the literature of his own times, at home with the people of his own charge, observant of the movements of the popular heart, and aspiring in his expectations of controlling those movements by the ministrations of the pulpit.

That was a confession which no minister should oblige himself to make, as a late professor in one of our theological seminaries did in the last year of his life, that for half a century he had read more Latin than English. That was the mark of a mind whose roots were in an obsolete age, and whose culture was chiefly in a language, a literature, and a style of thinking, which never can again be dominant in the civilization of the world.

7

LECTURE VII.

THE STUDY OF LITERATURE FOR CLERICAL DISCIPLINE. OBJECTS OF THE STUDY.

II. WE have observed in analyzing the sources of our oratorical knowledge, that, while there is but one original source, an auxiliary source is found in the study of models, and that in the term "models" we include all successful and permanent literature. This extension of the term is essential. Our primary notion of a model is limited. When a painter speaks of a model, he means by it a painting, or the thing which is to be transferred to canvas, and nothing more. When a sculptor speaks of a model, he means by it the human form, or a piece of statuary, and nothing more. In criticism of poetry a model is a poem, and nothing more. In military art a model is a historic campaign, or the plan of a battle, and nothing else. That is to say, a model has primarily a professional limitation.

When, therefore, a preacher conceives of a model, he is apt to think only of a sermon, or at most of an oration. Consequently he is in danger of limiting his reading for homiletic discipline to sacred or secular speech. The point, therefore, needs to be emphasized as a preliminary, that we should not restrict our idea of models to any such professional range. The advice often given to young preachers in respect to their reading is nar