Of Sermons One Would Wish to Have Preached

IMPALPABLE discourses these are to which I have reference. I am not thinking of the triumph in homiletics once delivered to the pews from that fresh and suggestive text, ‘And Ahaz said unto Obadiah.’ I would rather, it is true, have preached the nine-word sermon wherewith Sydney Smith once heaped the collection plates of Westminster Abbey for the London poor, than reduce any of my dream admonitions to an actual thirdly and fourthly. But I would rather still have sat in a pew to hear that immortal brevity. I would give something for the rich spiritual luxury of feeling the strings of my selfish, prudent purse loosed by that reasonable challenge: —

‘He that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord. If you like the security, down with the dust!’

I would give something, too, for the splendid throes of sensation which that dare-devil apoplectic ancient must have felt, who rose in gown and bands above the towering headdresses of a whole parish (in the days when headdresses towered two feet, or three), and thundered out his text,

‘Let those that are upon the house TOP-KNOT, COME DOWN! ’

It would have been a more sumptuous experience even than to have been one of the feminine parishioners who on that occasion

But I have dream-sermons, dear to me, I think, as were St. Elia’s shadowy children to him, in the wistful content of his most softly stealing reveries, while the kettle so sweetly simmered on the hob, and Bridget Elia applied her ‘gentle lenitive.’ One of them is from that darkly glowing text, ‘ And he went away sorrowful, because he had great possessions.’ I have a nebulous sermon, too, against the spiritual egotism of my own most unlovely conscience; it is founded on such congeries of verses as this: —

‘Judge not; Be like thv Father; For the rain falls alike on the just and on the unjust; And which of you by taking thought can add one cubit to the stature of his soul?’

I have a Catholic sermon in my astral chest. It is upon the Real Presence. I keep it in a frame of the imagination that it was once preached by St. Francis. I conceive that he used the ‘Inasmuch’ text, and, with all the frolicsome slyness of his primeval dialectic, fathered it in snowy innocence upon the councils of the Church. How the Real Presence is perpetual wherever there is a Son, or Daughter, of Man; how thus the Presence indeed is real; how thus it has the Flesh and Blood which is both human and divine.

The saint’s examples, his illustrations, the tropes and metaphors of his sermon, must have been the gathered beggars and wastrels listening. At the right rhetorical moment they would bloom; the inspiration, blowing where it listeth, would light on their faces, the sanctus bell of the spirit sounding in the belfry of their hearts.

I have two sermons from the Psalms: one upon the man who ‘hath not sat in the seat of the scornful.’

The other is such a sermon as I used to pant for in the wistful season of youth, before timid nature in us dares to expect the blisses of the incomparable thirties and forties. At the five o’clock service in a little church now vanished, whose place in the marshy meadow is usurped by willows and muskrats, I used to hear sermons; and in me, and in all young creatures who heard them, arose the wonder — why does the minister always console? It was then, in those rich August sundowns, that I collected my anthology of dancing verses from the poetical works of him who

danced before the Ark: such as ‘Sing we merrily . . . make a cheerful noise . . . blow up the trumpet in the new moon’; or ‘The singers go before, the minstrels follow after; in the midst are the damsels playing on the timbrels.’