Preaching and Preachers [pp. 454-483]

5Preachling and Preachers.
notwithstanding the eloquent examples of reading by such men
as Chalmers, Irving, Candlish, and Hamilton. The citation
of Scripture passages, and the custom of "turning up" the
same in the little Bible of the hearer, have given a peculiarly
textual character to Scottish sermons. The great stress laid
upon strong and tender emotion at the Lord's table, the meeting of several ministers and multitudes of people on sacramental
occasions, and the continuance of these services during several
days, have contributed to an unction and pathos which have
been extended to our own churches, among the purer settlements of strict Presbyterians. The power of the pulpit has,
therefore, been nowhere more manifest. No public authority
has ever availed to silence this mode of popular agitation and
rebuke.
In the sermons of the Scottish Church two very unlike tendencies are clearly distinguishable; one is the fondness for
scholastic method and minute subdivision, derived from the
dialectical turn of the people, and the familiarity of the preachers with the severe manuals of Calvinistic theology; the other
is the disposition to give outlet to high religious feeling. In
some portions of the Kirk both have been active throughout
the entire period; there have been manifest the acumen and ratiocinative precision, as well as what Buchanan calls the ingeniumn perfervidunm Scotorum. This has been diversified by the
constant practice of lecturing in the forenoon service, which has
maintained expository preaching for three hundred years, and
done much to mould the religious temper of the nation. There
was indeed a period in the eighteenth century, when the chill
of Moderatism fell upon public discourses, in a part of the
Church, producing the tame literary elegance of Robertson
and Blair. But the same age produced the Erskines of the
Secession, in one school of homiletics, and Walker and Witherspoon in another. The Ecclesiastical Characteristics and the
Corporation of Servants, did much to stigmatize the unfaithfulness of the frigid preachers, and even to open the way for
those triumphs of principle which have since resulted in the
strength and fervour of the Free Church. It would carry us
beyond all due limits to enlarge on the new modes of pulpit discourse which have owed their origin to the brilliant but some)
463
1854.]