Flowers from Old English Gardens

ILLUSTRATIONS are not plants that do well when bedded out from the garden plots of an earlier age into the preacher’s garden of our own times. The best illustrations are those that grow in the soil, and in the atmosphere, of the time in which they are used. Still it is interesting to study the preachers of former times and to note their methods of illustration. The sermon volumes of the eighteenth century are arid reading.

In the early part of that century the chilly air of rationalism was fatal to the feeling which generates illustrations. The appeal of the preachers was to the head and not to the heart. There was no mysticism in religion, no poetry, no New Jerusalem all radiant with jasper walls and with foundations of precious stones. As there was no deep feeling, senti- ment and humour were alike lacking, for humour is the sunny side of sentiment.

Later in the eighteenth century, when the ice of the long winter of rationalism began to melt in the spring of the Evangelical Revival, flowers began to bloom again in the preachers’ gardens; but Whitefield and John Wesley were far too intent on getting souls saved to give much attention to the orna- mentation of their sermons. We have to go back into the seventeenth century to find preachers who were masters of the art of illustration. Such masters there The Art of Sermon Illustration were indeed even in the sixteenth century, when the early Protestant preachers were making their messages known to “the common people,” to whom the open Bible was a wonderful new revelation.

Honest Hugh Latimer, like Luther in Germany, was rich in homely illustrations drawn from common life, and some- times his illustrations were amazingly audacious. In his famous “Card Sermon” he drew upon the pack of cards and the gambling methods of the time to play a winning game with the sinners whose souls he was seeking.

When denouncing the absenteeism of bishops and clergy who were negligent shepherds, he held up to them the devil as a model bishop who was always in his diocese and always at work. Such illustrations drove in his teaching as a hammer drives in nails, and none who heard them could ever forget them. Let us confine ourselves, however, to the seventeenth century.

A search through the volumes of the great Anglican and Nonconformist preachers, down to the time when the first chilly blasts of rationalism began to be felt, discovers a rich store of illustrations racy of the soil in which they were grown. We soon find that the seven- teenth century preachers were very scholarly men. They had the contents of the Bible at their finger ends, but they knew the classical writers of Greece and Rome almost as well as they knew the Bible.

They seem to have read everything in Greek and Latin literature, from Homer and Herodotus, Virgil and Tacitus, down to the decadent writers of the latest age. We are dazed by the display of their learning, and amazed and amused at the use they made of it in the illustration of their Flowers from Old English Gardens sermons. We wonder what the congregations made of their classical illustrations. Doubtless the congrega- tions liked to hear them as evidences of the weight of learning of the preachers, and as compliments paid to their own intelligence, but it is permitted to question whether the illustrations did not oftener confuse than enlighten.

Often they quote passages in Greek, Latin, or Hebrew, without troubling to translate them for the benefit of the congregation. And they continually introduce names and references, assuming that the congregation will readily understand them without explanation, as, for instance, Jeremy Taylor, condemn- ing contemporary fondness for fashions, says, “Menan- der in the comedy brings in a man turning his wife from his house because she stained her hair yellow, which was then the beauty”; and in his “Apples of Sodom” sermon, “What man is there in the world that thinks himself covetous or proud? and yet millions there are who, like Heiphaste, think that the house is dark but not themselves.”

Thomas Adams shows him- self a prodigy of classic learning, which he pours out in such illustrations as these: “Philip was wont to say that an ass laden with gold would enter the gates of any city, but the golden loads of bribes and extortions shall bar a man out of the city of God. All that is so gotten is like quicksilver, it will be running.” “The Christian seeks, like Mary, that better part which shall never be taken from him.

The wise man’s mind is ever above the moon, saith Seneca. Let the moon make never so great a noise as if it all ran upon coaches, and all these full of roarers, yet all peace is there.” The Art of Sermon Illustration The pedantry of classical quotation disfigures the ser- mons of most of the early and middle seventeenth century preachers, but we do in some of them find plenty of native English wildflowers.

Foremost among these is Jeremy Taylor, who has been styled “the Shakespeare of the English pulpit.” As a prose writer, Taylor is the Ruskin of the seven- teenth century. His imagination runs riot, and he often indulges in illustrations with such prodigality that his hearers must have been embarrassed by the riches placed at their disposal. Some of the illustrations, however, are brief enough, little more than a simile, as “He that wishes his sin big and prosperous wishes his bee as big as a bull and his hedgehog like an elephant”; “Great knowledge, if it be without vanity, is the most severe bridle of the tongue.

For so have I heard that all the noises and prating of the pool, the croaking of frogs and toads, is hushed and appeased upon the instant of bringing upon them the light of a candle or a torch.” Jeremy Taylor was not gifted with a sense of humour, or he might have avoided such remarkable illustrations as that in which he says some men never trouble about religion until they are sick or in adversity, “as the hog never sees the sky until it is turned upon its back.”

When we come, however, to Jeremy Taylor’s extended illustrations, then we understand why he has been called the Shakespeare of the English pulpit. They are pure poetry, “linked sweetness long drawn out”; and there is a dash of Milton as well as Shakespeare. Peculiar to Jeremy Taylor is the opening “So have I seen,’ Flowers from Old English Gardens evidently an imitation of the epic simile method of Homer and Virgil. Readers will thank me for extract- ing four examples of Jeremy Taylor’s illustrations, showing the characteristics that have been described.