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world outside. He was proud doubtless of his race: like the crew in Lord Tennyson's Maeldune he would "chant the glories of Finn": he would feel so deeply for the heroes of old that he would even dream of Christianising them, musing sometimes so long on an old cairn that at last the chief whom it covered would seem to rise through the covering stones and lay off his armour and claim baptism from one who was perchance his kinsman. But this would not rid him of the goad of travel towards the great cen

tres. Perhaps among the most marvellous instances of self-sacrifice is that very few ever pushed on to Rome or to Jerusalem. They found work on the road, and they took it up manfully and died in doing it. But it was the love of travel which gave them the impulse. Who has not met, in these latter days, some poor parody of the wandering Scotic scholars, who, several centuries after Columban, took the place of the missionaries? The writer of this paper remembers one who walked into his garden in West Cornwall and handed him a card on which was printed Fitzsimon, Philomath. He knew much Latin, and some Greek, and he had just been to see the Land's End, having already seen many like "Ends" and wishing to add that to his list. That was his sole reason for coming down so far. He had a copy of verses on the railway in the Isle of Man,-such verses as the hedge-schoolmaster in an Irish parish used always to be ready with whenever anything happened, and of which the best known (and best) example is The Groves of Blarney. Thirteen hundred years ago our Philomath would very likely have gone out with one of the missionary saints and have satisfied his morbid longing for change by moving from one wild station to another. The old order changes; and such a man, purposeless, scarcely sound in mind, yet not the least given to drink, wandering as Goldsmith did, "alone, unfriended, melancholy, slow," but without either Goldsmith's genius

for his inward solace, or the musical gift which made him so popular in every French village, is a very poor exchange for the old Scotic monk. The old order changes; yet we need not forget Columban and his brethren any more than we forget our obligations to Rome. To Rome we owe an organisation which a monastic Church could never have given, and which has fostered the true idea that Church and State are one. But to the Scotic missionaries we owe that individuality, that power of initiative without which the most perfect organisation becomes a dead letter.

Montalembert notes admiringly the full freedom which Rome (then, as at so many other crises, healthily elastic) allowed to such a teacher as Columban. That the Gallic clergy were aggrieved at a sort of glorified compound of Mr. Moody and Father Ignatius getting into vogue to their discredit is no wonder; but at headquarters there is not a trace of repression or of formal disapprobation. Columban's virtue

and sanctity won for him the licence of action which an Indian fakeer wins by his austerities. Rome behaved very differently more than five hundred years later, when Saint Bernard was her mouthpiece, and Adrian the Sixth filled the Papal Chair. No one can say that then "she displayed an exemplary moderation." Bernard, directed by the self-seeking traitor Saint Malachy, was appointed Balaam-like to curse the Scotic church in order that Henry the Second might assume the virtue of an abater of religious abuses.

But it is no use thinking what might have happened had Ireland been permitted to develope along her own line, to become a nation instead of a set of clans, before she came into hostile contact with England. Mr. Lecky, and just lately Mr. Bagwell, have some good remarks on this ; but they were both anticipated by Sir Henry Maine who, in his Origin Of Institutions, showing the unexpected resemblances between the Brehon code

and the common law of England, remarks how little the English of Henry the Second's day were really in advance of the Irish, and how the Irish had all but attained the goal of national unity (one clan having become greatly predominant) when their advance along that line was checked by the invasion.

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It is hard for an Irishman to forgive men who have written as though all Ireland had to boast of was 66 few grotesque saints." Comgall is by no means grotesque, neither is Columban; nor were they only a few who did a like work to that of both; for if some are disposed to cite about the missionary monks the foolish old saw about an Irishman doing well everywhere except in his own country, let them remember that the Irish schools at home were for centuries as famous in their way as Luxeuil itself. The youth of England regularly resorted to them for instruction; and though Bangor was so destroyed by the Danes that not a trace of it remains, some of these schools survived even those singularly destructive invaders.

Mr. W. A. O'Conor, in his History Of The Irish People, has a fine chapter on these Irish missionaries. "To describe them," he says,

"as Christian teachers, interpreting the term by ordinary experience, would convey no true idea of their self-imposed duties or of their method of discharging them. . . By voluntarily enduring all the hardships which necessity imposed on others, by entire disregard of wealth, by condemning the violence of bar

barous chiefs, by dedicating themselves and their whole means to the deliverance of captives, they manifested the power of truth, and recommended the religion of Christ."

He notes their independent spirit:

"In Columban and the others when engaged in controversy we miss the subservient spirit of those who seek their private ends."

Of their stubborn adhesion to their own peculiarities, he remarks:

"They were in the battle, and regarded the proposal to change their tonsure or their time of celebrating Easter as soldiers would regard an order to change their uniform in presence of an advancing foe. Moreover, they shrank from making a surrender which would imply that the unity of the Church rested on externals. Their attachment to their own customs was founded, not on any power they supposed them to possess, but on their association with the hallowed names of Saint Patrick and Saint Columbkill. The subjects on which they differed from, and those in which they agreed with, Rome, had no analogy or connection whatever with the polemics of a later period."

And then, after pointing out (what must strike every reader of Columban's letters) "the startling modernness of Irish modes of thinking at this remote date," he adds:

"Their religious independence was only one feature of a mental constitution that knew no guidance save such as reason and justice inspired. Their spiritual pre-eminence was in religion, because religion was the science of the time. During many ages, a few Irishmen were the only champions of free thought."

All this is very true. What has been written in this paper of Columban will have been useless if its truth cannot be recognised in his case.

58

A DISCOURSE UPON SERMONS.

MUCH has been written about sermons, but the subject can never grow stale. However else sermons may be regarded, they at least loom large as a fact in our social economy. So long as two millions, more or less, continue to be preached every year, they will assert their claim to attention. It may be that the supply is just a little in excess of the demand: that here, as in so many other quarters, we are suffering slightly from over-production. Still, on the whole, sermons are firm (to borrow a phrase from the City) and, if moderately taxed, would yield a pretty steady revenue. As it is, the tax is now too often levied on the patience of the hearer as a kind of ecclesiastical excise on articles which, as delivered, are certainly sometimes "above proof."

It is the fashion to lament what is assumed to be the slight effect produced by the annual discharge of these two millions of sermons. The popular imagination seems disposed to regard them as a kind of artillery which should at once strew society with the wrecks and ruins of ancient errors. And even the philosophers, with that fondness for quantitative analysis which has distinguished them ever since the chemical balance was perfected, are always on the look-out for what may be termed ponderable results. Both classes of critics are equally at fault. It is a fallacy to assume that a result cannot be great unless it be conspicuous. It may be negative as well as positive: invisible, and yet real enough. The reviews made merry some years ago over a man who published a didactic poem and described himself as waiting for some result in people's altered manners. It is presumed that he is still waiting. Similarly, the critics are on the look-out for a result equally visi

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ble from the two millions of sermons. They forget that, if these sermons do nothing else, they may at least serve as ballast. The irreverent might say that they are exactly fitted to discharge a function for which heaviness is the first requisite. But they would be equally well-fitted if described as weighty, and the word is not obnoxious. Let us picture to ourselves for a moment society without its sermons: the ship without its ballast, heeling over to every dangerous blast, letting in the water of an acrid immorality and scepticism on all sides. Surely, that we are even as good as we are may, after all, be largely due to the unfailing supply of weighty pulpit-ballast every week.

So, again, to use another illustration, do we ever feel the weight of the atmosphere? And yet how happily and healthily it restrains our movements: fifteen pounds weight on every square inch of bodily surface. What light, flighty beings we should necessarily become were this restraint removed even for an instant! And so

we cannot be too thankful that there is no break in the long succession of discourses from the pulpit. Where should we be if this wholesome influence were removed for a single week -this steady pneumatic pressure in the region of morals and theology? England can never surely become incurably light-headed so long as there is this salutary burden of two millions of sermons pretty evenly distributed over the surface of society.

One is reminded in this connection of a schoolmaster of the olden type, well known years ago in a western county, who used to maintain that you could never be doing wrong in flogging a boy. Either the boy had already done something to deserve it, or he would very speedily do something. It

was not less fair for justice to be anticipatory than for it to be retrospective. So of sermons-they may be regarded as an anticipatory means of discipline. Who knows how much oftener we should all go wrong without them? Let us then accept them gratefully, whilst we maintain unimpaired our traditional right to criticise them the true Magna Charta of the English Churchman.

But even the keenest eritics must allow that they have of late years perceptibly improved-improved certainly as regards length. The tradi

tional answer of the man with eleven children, that he had "better than a dozen," was no doubt misleading. Not so the "better than an hour" sermon of the olden time. I remember still my childish horror when our good old rector used to mount the pulpit and, hooking himself on to the oaken panel by the third finger of his right hand (which, by a strange coincidence, chanced to have a diamond ring upon it), would there remain, tenacious as a crustacean of his position physical and theological, until the hand of the clock in front of the gallery pointed to one. Even then it was by no means certain that he would unhook himself. There might still be the "one word more, my brethren," which gave my childish mind such a terrible idea of the expansiveness of unity. In that dreary waste of theology the only fixed thing was the longitude. For the rest, the rector's great aim seemed to be always to begin at the beginning, or, if possible, a little before it. It was seldom that he would content himself with anything so far advanced in point of time as the Fall of Man. He was fonder of Chaos, and occasionally took us back behind the Creation altogether.

His greatest sermon (we had it many times over) was on the text: "They shall offer young bullocks upon thine altar." Each word of the text formed a separate heading. Due force was given to the "pronoun," to the "particle of futurity," to the "verb of

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Another of his great sermons, though not so great as the above, was professedly on Dives and Lazarus. It was really on the purple and fine linen incidentally mentioned in the parable. These excited all the worthy rector's sense of scholarship, and he gave an exhaustive disquisition on both. The only purpureus pannus,

or bit of colour, in it for me was his account (is it true or apocryphal ?—I know not) of the discovery of the Tyrian dye-a wandering dog licking a murex upon the sea-shore and getting its tongue stained therewith to the great astonishment of its master. I wonder the rector did not go on to quote the old and almost forgotten epigram on the serjeants-at-law, themselves now well nigh extinct :

"The serjeants are a grateful race,

And all their actions show it:
Their purple garments come from Tyre,
Their arguments go to it."

Those were emphatically the days of written sermons, for the most part recurring with the regularity of a repeating decimal. Litera scripta manet ; and most congregations had ample opportunity of verifying in their own experience the essential permanence of the written letter. These ancestral discourses, yellow with age and curly from the fingering of many generations of orators, came to be almost as well known as the details of a nursery legend, until at last the hearers grew to resent the slightest verbal alteration in the text. A mingled feeling took possession of their minds. They could not honestly assert that they loved the sermon; but if they must have it at all, they liked it unmu

tilated. Familiarity might have bred a something of contempt, but nothing was to be gained by a patchwork effort at disguise. Besides, they felt in a way defrauded of their due. Long prescription had given them an indefeasible right to the sermon, the whole sermon, and nothing but the sermon. In those good old conservative days men had no yearning for revised versions. Children freely correct their nurse if she deviates by a hair's breadth from the accustomed course of the adventures of Tom Thumb or Jack the Giant-killer; and the older members of a congregation felt inclined to do the same with their rector if he ever ventured to tamper with his time-honoured manuscript. A parenthesis might be pardoned, especially if founded on some State-anniversary: an alteration never. How much unconscious truth lay in the ignorant grandiloquence of the farmer whom I once heard say to his vicar, "You gave us a very good rotation to-day, sir," meaning presumably "oration."

It is true that comical results sometimes followed. There is a well-known story, probably apocryphal, of a South American clergyman, who, even when preaching in England, could seldom keep an earthquake out of his discourse. It is, however, a fact that a clergyman in Nottinghamshire, who had been a naval chaplain, electrified his congregation one Sunday by exclaiming, “When we hear, as we do now, the waves roaring around us —." This roused even the farmers, who fancied at once that the little river which flows through the village must have suddenly burst its banks and flooded their meadows. In reality the exciting phrase had slipped out unawares it was only a too slavish adherence to the text of a manuscript written in widely different circumstances that had led the worthy pastor to make this startling announcement.

And then, the interchange of manuscripts. At first sight there is much to be said for this. If an interchange

of preachers is a good thing, why not the interchange of sermons? Eight ounces of ruled paper will go farther, without necessarily faring worse, than fifteen or sixteen stone of ecclesiastically developed humanity. And is it not a clear waste of force to leave a well-composed sermon to languish in the recesses of a desk, when it might be doing good work in another parish? At the same time it cannot be denied that this interchange of manuscripts has its drawbacks. Circumstances are not identical in different parishes. The vicar of a squireless squireless village denounces Dives with absolute impunity. But let him lend his scathing discourse to the clerical friend who numbers a millionaire among his people, and the chances are that the friend will find himself arraigned before his bishop. It actually happened in Oxfordshire in the days of Bishop Wilberforce. It is true the clergyman triumphed, but the triumph was not without its humiliation. There could be no personal vindictiveness in a borrowed discourse. But if he disproved the appropriateness, he had to admit the appropriation. Personality or plagiarism-a sorry dilemma for any parson.

Still, after all, it is not very reasonable that there should be such an outcry against borrowed sermons. Where does any one get his ideas from? Unless a whole school of philosophers is in the wrong, we come into the world with minds blank as sheets of white paper. Who but a German ever evolved anything from his inner consciousness? Is not, in fact, all our knowledge borrowed? One man sits down and writes off a discourse almost without reference to books. Is he, therefore, original? Not a bit of it. He has only proved that he possesses a well-stored mind and a retentive memory. Another surrounds himself with commentaries, and painfully pieces together a bit of pulpit-mosaic. What memory did for the first, ingenuity does for the second,

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