Preaching, or systematic instruction in religion given by word of mouth, has been almost from the beginning of the Christian church the principal means of disseminating its doctrines, and already its application to the poor is given by our Lord himself as one of the significant signs of the new economy. It is thus distinctively Christian, although it is true that it traces its ancestry to part of the function of the ancient Israelitish prophets, who were instructors of the people as to their duties in the present, as well as foretellers of the future. The teaching of Christ himself, so far as recorded, mostly took the form of the parable, and throughout we find its characteristic marks to be simplicity and variety, some common fact in nature or human experience being taken as the basis of the sermon, and spiritualised in a free and natural manner. But, as Vinet says, Jesus himself instituted little, though he inspired much. The discourses given in the Acts also differ widely from modern sermons, their main object being to bring the person and history of Christ plainly before their hearers. The facts of His life, death, and resurrection are everywhere put forward as the roots of Christian faith and practice, and doctrine is ever interpreted without complexity, as practically connected with His person. Justin Martyr (Ap. maj. chap. 67) and Tertullian (Apol. chap. 39) describe the exhortations that followed the reading of Scripture in their time; but Origen was the earliest preacher in the modern sense of the word, although he employed largely the allegorical method of interpreting Scripture, happily now almost extinct. In the early church the bishop was long responsible for the preaching, although presbyters and deacons came to be employed, as Origen was before his ordination, and Constantine frequently. Monks were not allowed to preach until the special preaching-orders were organised in the middle ages, nor yet women, although the Montanist heretics permitted them. Sermons were usually delivered on Sundays, as part of the regular religious service, and approbation was expressed by stamping of feet and clapping of hands, a practice which Chrysostom condemned. After the 9th century preaching appears to have declined, and indeed it never seems to have flourished much at Rome. The mediæval sermon gradually took the form of a short address after mass; but, with the rise of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, we find a great revival of preaching, in form popular, racy, the anecdotes told and spiritualised perforce (Exempla) often anything but edifying in themselves. Among the most famous of the mediæval preachers were Antony of Padua, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventura, Berthold the Franciscan of Regensburg, John of Monte Corvino, Savonarola, John Tauler of Strasburg, and Francis Coster (1531-1619). The Reformers were preachers to a man, and the swift progress of the new doctrines was in great measure due to the power with which they were given forth from the pulpit. As sacramentalism lost hold of men's consciences, the higher appeared the value of the new method of learning by what means to draw near to God. Wyclif and his Poor Priests, and after him the Lollards, established an evangelical tradition of the supremacy of the pulpit as a means of grace, which we find at its greatest strength in Puritanism. Seventeenth-century preaching was very scriptural, and put prominent in the foreground the cardinal evangelical facts of the fall of man, the doom of sin, the redemption of Christ, the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. Its strength lay in the reality and vigour with which it realised these truths; its weakness was a tendency to be over-abstract, and to become theological rather than religious. In the unspiritual barrenness of the 18th century preaching became mainly ethical and apologetic—preaching about Christianity rather than preaching Christ; but, as Dr Johnson says, men at last got tired of hearing the apostles tried once a week for the crime of forgery, and turned for relief to listen to the earnest direct harangues of a Wesley and a Whitefield.
The whole century could show no preachers to be compared with Latimer, Donne, Hall, Andrewes, Jeremy Taylor, Howe, Baxter, as well as Fuller, Sanderson, South, Barrow, and Tillotson: still less with their magnificently eloquent French contemporaries Saurin, Bourdaloue, Bossuet, Fénelon, Massillon, La Rue, and Fléchier. But in the 19th century the pulpit recovered all its power, despite a stock platitude of the modern press to the contrary, with such an illustrious roll of preachers as Chalmers, Edward Irving, Robert Hall, F. W. Robertson, Henry Melville, Maurice, Hook, Newman, Mozley, Wilberforce, Martineau, Archer Butler, Arnold, Spurgeon, Caird, Guthrie, Beecher, Talmage, Moody, Magee, Liddon, Knox Little, Farrar, Maclaren, Parker, and Philips Brooks. In France again we find the names of Lacordaire, Monod, Bersier, and Pressensé; in Germany the Reformation preaching has been choked by Rationalism, but within the century reached its finest flower in Schleiermacher, in whose sympathetic heart there met in strange harmony Pietistic and Rationalist traditions alike. Spener the Pietist, Zollikofer, and Reinhard were earlier German preachers of high rank.
The modern Church of England has been driven, through the activity of its dissenting rivals, to recognise its neglect of preaching by opening the naves of its cathedrals for special evening services, and now actively employs the pulpit in every parish as a principal engine of its warfare against evil, still recognising it, however, in the words of Dr Hook, as 'a means of instruction, more than a direct means of grace.'
The chief difficulties of the preacher are that he has to speak always to the same hearers—Wesley said even in a year he would preach both them and himself asleep; his audience is of very varying degrees of education and intelligence; his theme is so familiar that it is difficult to compass the grace of novelty—indeed the wonder is rather, as Borrow said, that so many are so good as they are, seeing that the demand in the British Isles alone extends to about 100,000 sermons a week. The foundations of the preacher's success may be said to be his personality, his sincerity, piety, and enthusiasm, his respect and love for his hearers, knowledge of their conditions of life, wider knowledge of human nature and experience of the world, together with gravity, courage, and intellectual and moral honesty. If to these be added exegetical learning, natural eloquence and fire, with the power of forgetting self in the message to be delivered as an ambassador for Christ, and finally unction—which, as Vinet says, there is no artificial means of gaining—a preacher of the very highest order is formed. The greatest snare to the young preacher is a not unnatural self-consciousness, and still more the assumption of affections of voice or action, from which he would quickly shake himself free if he could see how really ridiculous he appears to the pews. The best tonic for his self-consciousness is to be reminded that he himself is but an accident in the vast Christian scheme for the propagation of the gospel, and that the greatest of the apostles was himself content to be nothing so Christ was preached. Happily men without some approximation to a vocation now choose the clerical profession less frequently than formerly, for it is more difficult now to be a Charles Honeyman than it was in our great satirist's days. The sovereign law of preaching is to be genuine and natural, for, as Faust says, 'no heart will take fire if the spark does not come first from the speaker's heart.' In nothing is this bane of unreality to be more guarded against than in the pulpit tone—the high falsetto, the impressive roll, the insinuating whisper, or even whine, are one and all to be abhorred, as suggesting to the ear merely simulated emotions. The best method is to begin from a conversational level, to employ a completely unaffected language and style, and to aim throughout at clearness, all unfair use of the text and unauthorised spiritualising being inadmissible. Plain sensible thoughts in sensible English will always be listened to with patience, if not too long, for the modern hearer endures with difficulty more than thirty to forty minutes, where his fathers expected something at least twice as long. The judicious preacher will seasonably lighten his discourse with illustrations, terse proverbs, and anecdotes, for, as Fuller says, 'while reasons are the pillars, similes are the windows of every structure.' The same over-witty old divine adds a caution which it can scarcely be said he himself never forgot, 'The preacher avoids such stories whose mention may suggest bad thoughts to the auditors, and will not use a light comparison to make thereof a grave application, for fear his poison go farther than his antidote.' But, while avoiding the grotesque, the preacher must not forget Quintilian's fatal judgment of mediocrity—'his excellence was that he had no fault, and his fault that he had no excellence.' Jeremy Taylor was a master in the art of illustration, some of his examples being among the most exquisite passages in English prose. The preacher may find his inspiration in the legitimate use of the sermons and other writings of others, no less than in his own experience of life. Even so original a man as Robertson of Brighton says, 'I cannot copy, nor can I work out a seed of thought, developing it myself. I cannot light my own fire; but whenever I get my fire lighted from another life I can carry the living flame as my own into other subjects, which have been illuminated in the flame.' Even the preacher's old sermons are full of advantage to him, if judiciously employed to enrich, rather than merely fill out, the new. For is it not true that 'the good parishioner inquireth not whether the sermon be new or old, but, like good venison, if it be savoury, falls to to profit by it?' There is an honest use that may be made of the thoughts of others and even of one's self, when these are vivified anew by the judgment and thought of the present occasion. Rank plagiarism is entirely to be reprobated, but there is an honest middle course which will not vex the conscience of the preacher himself, nor exercise the most careful listener. What is taken from all books is borrowed from none, and the preacher may do with sermons what Dr Johnson tells us Watts did with materials gathered from a wider range—'every kind of information was, by the piety of his mind, converted into theology.'
The early preachers, as Chrysostom and Augustine, spoke extempore, and indeed the practice of reading sermons from a manuscript does not seem to have been practised before the Reformation, when Burnet tells us the book of Homilies was compiled on account of the fewness of qualified preachers and the urgent necessity to get the people instructed. Still, reading long remained unpopular, and 'the present supine and slothful way of preaching' was actually forbidden by statute to the university preachers at Cambridge in 1674. Leighton disliked it as detracting from the weight and authority of preaching—'I know,' he says, 'that weakness of the memory is pleaded in excuse for this custom; but better minds would make better memories. Such an excuse is unworthy of a father addressing his children. Like Elihu, he should be refreshed by speaking.' Reading gained ground in the 18th century, and sermons were bought, borrowed, or stolen by preachers less honest than Sir Roger de Coverley's chaplain. The advantage of reading is that it usually ensures a better ordered discourse and saves the preacher from what to many is a grievous slavery; but Dr James Martineau puts its defence on yet higher grounds as the best means of maintaining the high level of thought and feeling at which the sermon was composed. And it is true that many, perhaps most, extempore preachers forget their argument, and never progress, but eddy round and round, as Coleridge said, in verbiage, vain repetitions, and feeble and garrulous fluency. But against this there is the obvious disadvantage in the loss of power and reality that must needs follow the rearming of premeditated emotion. The recitation of sermons by heart is scarcely better, if not indeed still more likely to destroy spontaneity and naturalness of expression, not to speak of the risk of some accident depriving the helpless reciter of his memory, as once happened to South, whereupon he left the pulpit abruptly with the words, 'Lord be merciful to our infirmities.' The method of extempore preaching is in every respect the best, provided the speaker's standard of excellence is one sufficiently high, and he is not one of those vain men who make a boast of going into the pulpit without premeditation. Provided the sermon has been carefully thought out beforehand, and the preacher has some measure of faculty in speech, this method of preaching will be found the most effective, the thoughts being previously methodised, the words and sentences left to the moment. For it is both the most natural manner and it allows speaker and hearers alike to be lifted simultaneously on the same waves of thought and emotion. For, unhappily, there are few men capable of reading a sermon with the same fire and glow as Chalmers. But the speaker must be cool and self-possessed—'a great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage,' says Sydney Smith—and this quality he must possess in a quite unusual degree if he essays the task of preaching to crowds in the open air. The great French preachers, again, recited their sermons, apparently finding it easier than Englishmen do to revive premeditated emotion. Massillon said that his best sermon was the one he knew best; Bourdaloue, whose memory was apt to give way in presence of any distraction, used to preach with his eyes closed.
'Most men,' said Leighton, 'begin to preach too soon, and leave off too late;' and still worse for the quality of the sermon is the too frequent necessity for the production of two or more every week. Bishop Andrewes said, 'He who preaches twice will prate once;' and Robert Hall used to say, 'A man who concentrates his ideas, and thinks out his subject properly, can write one; a diffuse, shallow man may manage two, and a fool might very likely write half a dozen.' Those under the necessity of producing two might well be permitted to make the second a diet of eatechising, as Hooker did at Bishopbourne; or an address specially directed to children—an admirable new feature of modern preaching; or the second might be frankly allowed to be taken from some great divine, or at least to be merely one of those simpler extemporaneous sermons Hooker describes, 'which spend their life in their birth, and may have public audience but once.' Over-tasked preachers will find help in those collections of skeleton sermons, of which Simeon's Horæ Homileticæ (21 vols. 1783–1836) and Spurgeon's Sermon Notes (4 vols. 1884–88) are well-known examples.
As for the form of the sermon, it is usual for it to be divided into an introduction or exordium, the proposition, the proof, and finally the conclusion or peroration. Simeon and his school announced the divisions at the outset; Newman notices them only as he passes from one to the other. As for the logical divisions or heads, in which the Puritan preachers were so prolific—Baxter once having as many as 120—the more modern usage is to emphasise these but lightly and to have as few as possible. These are of course all important in the structure of the sermon, for, as Quintilian says, 'Qui rectè diviserit, nunquam poterit in rerum ordine errare.' George Herbert, in The Country Parson, warns against 'crumbling a text up into small parts;' and Bishop Leighton introduced into Scotland the method of preaching without heads—'skimming the text,' as it seemed to the zealots of his day. The introduction should be of the shortest, and may take the form of an exegetical connection of text with context—as in Liddon almost always, or an analogy, or an anecdote. The proposition should be clearly set forth, and the proof should follow in logical order, although the heads need not be named. The conclusion, peroration, or application should be an earnest, pointed appeal, warranted by the arguments that have preceded it. 'Hic, si unquam, totos eloquentiæ fontes aperire fas est,' says Quintilian. Indeed, fire and passion we cannot have too much of, if only it is justified by maseuline feeling, keeping pace with the march of the argument, yet allowing the speaker to become the clearer the more he glows. Hume said John Brown of Haddington preached as if Jesus Christ was at his elbow, and James Melville tells us that Knox ere he had done with his sermon 'was like to dig the pulpit in blads, and fly out of it.' Or if a tender closing appeal best fits the subject the speaker must remember that he is a man and not allow himself to be dissolved in tears, unless he needs must, when nature will save him from being ridiculous. Bishop Heber converted the closing words of his sermon into a prayer.
In the expository discourse, technically known in Scotland as 'a lecture,' the preacher takes a series of texts or a whole passage, and opens up its meaning, the central truth being clearly set forth, and the minor truths in their relation to it.
Many of the older preachers of the evangelical persuasion never closed a single sermon without a hasty course round the whole range of cardinal doctrines in the scheme of salvation, however wide some of these might lie from the subject proper of the text. This might be well for itinerating preachers like Whitefield and Wesley, who would most probably never address the same hearers again; but is manifestly absurd in the case of a parish clergyman whose duty is to instruct the saints as well as rouse the unconverted, and who speaks to the same people twice a week. Those preachers whose sermons invariably deal with the initiatory stages of Christian experience sometimes arrogantly claim for themselves a monopoly of 'preaching Christ.' No phrase has been more abused than this of St Paul's, which has been twisted to mean a monotonous iteration of the necessary conditions of the starting-point only of a Christian experience, as if the pupils of a school were to stand still at their primer because one had not yet learned to spell. But indeed there is too little variety in our teaching—'We hold a few texts,' says Archer Butler, 'so near our eyes that they hide the rest of the Bible.' Still less profitable were those weekly tirades against the Socinians, the Scarlet Woman, or Prelacy, forced into the conclusion of every sermon by many a painful old Presbyterian divine. Even hell lost its terrors when made a weekly show, and the majestic personality of the devil, once familiar, became contemptible. But the pains of hell have furnished the fuel for many a noble sermon, even without such a special accessory as Fuller tells us belonged to Mr Perkins, who 'would pronounce the word damn with such an emphasis as left a doleful echo in his auditors' ears for a good while after.' The autobiographical style is a persistent snare to young converts in their preaching, forgetting how diverse are human character and conditions, how complex is Christian experience, and how large and varied was Christ's own conception of the kingdom of heaven. The most alarming danger to the pulpit in the present day is, however, a maudlin hysterical style of treating religious truths, natural enough in a society debauched with the over-excitement and fever of an age of competition, but ultimately fatal to the dignity and authority of a venerable institution, the real foundations of which must be mastery over emotion and firmness of intellectual fibre, as well as comprehensive grasp of the truths revealed by Jesus Christ.
See Dr J. M. Neale, Mediæval Preachers and Preaching (1857); Rev. S. Baring-Gould, Post-mediæval Preachers (1865); Rothe, Geschichte d. Predigt vom Anfang bis auf Schleiermacher (Bremen, 1881); the Rev. G. J. Davies, Papers on Preaching (3d ed. 1883); Professor Mahaffy, Decay of Modern Preaching (1882); Professor John Ker's fragmentary Lectures (1887); the treatises on Homiletics by Vinet (1858), Kidder (1864), Hoppin (1869), and Blaikie (1873); also the excellent series of Yale lectures by Beecher, Phillips Brooks, Dale, and others.