The 19th century was the "Age of the Sermon." It was also, however, as Keith A. Francis observes in his essay in this important volume, the "Age of Darwin." The notion of a war between faith and science has been abandoned by professional historians, but it stubbornly persists in the popular imagination. The archetypal moment is the debate on Darwinism between Bishop Wilberforce and T. H. Huxley. In the legendary account, Huxley presented sound reasoning and science which Samuel Wilberforce—son of the evangelical patriarch, William Wilberforce—stopped his ears against, choosing biblical obscurantism over truth.
A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century (A New History of the Sermon, 5)
Brill
571 pages
$268.05
Actually, that debate took place at the annual conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the premier venue for scientific discussions. This was the first possible occasion such an exchange could take place. (The Origin of the Species was published in November 1859 and the conference was held in June 1860.) In other words, it is ridiculous to label someone obscurantist for defending the reigning scientific viewpoint in the initial debate about a new theory immediately upon its publication. Moreover, Wilberforce (who, unlike his father, was a High Churchman, not an evangelical) criticized Darwinism on scientific not theological grounds. He had been chosen to present the anti-evolutionary case not because he was a bishop but because of his formidable skills as an Oxford debater.
In a careful study of the Victorian pulpit, Francis demonstrates that preachers showed scant interest in denouncing Darwinism. Moreover, those who did discuss it were sometimes supportive. The Anglican priest George Henslow delivered a sermon entitled, "Genesis and Geology. A Plea for the Doctrine of Evolution." The championing of Darwinism by the eminent clergyman and author Charles Kingsley is well known. Sherlock Holmes taught us that sometimes the best way to understand a situation is to observe what is absent, and Francis dubs the homiletic reaction to evolution through natural selection as "the dog that didn't bark."
Following in the footsteps of the illustrious detective from 221B Baker Street, I cannot help but notice a menagerie of mute mammals in this volume. Make no mistake, it is a strong collection of essays in a woefully understudied area, but one is still left longing for a book on the 19th-century sermon that would cover this neglected theme less episodically and more comprehensively. The greatest and most influential preacher of the age (indeed of many an age), Charles Haddon Spurgeon, does not even make it into the bibliography or the index (although there are a few incidental references to him that the indexer either missed or deemed too minor to trouble about).
The editor, Robert H. Ellison, who is himself the leading authority in this field, has clearly worked hard to include material beyond the predictable path of evangelical revivalists and Protestant city pulpits, including at least one and sometimes two chapters each on Mormons, Catholics, African Americans, and Jews. Nevertheless, I was disappointed by the relative neglect of women preachers. Some of the most celebrated Victorians—such as the co-founder of the Salvation Army, Catherine Booth, and the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry (who is kind of the Abraham Lincoln of British money as her image is on the £5 note)—had popular preaching ministries. Even Florence Nightingale, although she was a recluse for most of her adult life, occupied some of her time by writing sermons. None of these British figures or others like them receives even a passing mention.
The one essay on women—by Dorothy Lander—alas, is not very good. Readers are invited to think of actions such as "dress fashion" and "flower arrangement" as sermons, while A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century does not explore the rhetoric of numerous influential women in the Victorian age who actually did preach from church pulpits. Most of all, the entire conceptual frame of Lander's essay is the misguided assumption that conservative Protestant churches believed that women could "teach" but not "preach." This confusion seems to arise from a misunderstanding of what was and was not meant by a "Sunday school teacher" and an inexplicable failure to ever have listened in when Victorians discussed 1 Timothy 2:12.
Miriam Elizabeth Burstein has written an excellent essay on anti-Catholic sermons in which she argues that these were often actually targeted at the temptation toward idolatry that is in every soul, not least those of Protestants. Another silence to ponder, Burstein's about-the-author paragraph sticks to well-established conventions while refraining from mentioning that she is one of the most prominent figures in the field of Victorian studies today because of her "Little Professor" blog. One wonders if that omission will soon mark the last days of an era when the scholarly world had not yet come to terms with new media realities.
The great "Age of the Sermon" is sometimes referred to in other studies as the "Evangelical Century." Ellison's laudable desire to make sure as diverse a collection of subjects as possible is covered in this book has the paradoxical effect of serving further to underline the dominance of the Protestant pulpit. A Jewish sermon in the vernacular was a 19th-century innovation made by rabbis who were consciously seeking to have more "coordination" between synagogue services and Protestant norms.
Although Anglo-Catholics are thought of as championing more elaborate and aesthetically sophisticated forms of worship, when it came to the sermon they were preoccupied in the 19th century with the ideal of "plain" preaching. (The Tractarian father John Keble, as a kind of spiritual discipline for cultivating the gift of simplicity, even went so far as to make "a special effort to preach poorly." Other more saintly souls, one imagines, had such a measure of grace as to attain this standard more effortlessly.) By the Victorian age even Unitarians, who were hitherto known for rational and learned discourses, were insisting that the proper way to deliver a sermon was as a passionate, extemporaneous effusion. One can even see the prominence in Victorian fiction of the trope of the oily evangelical preacher as a kind of backhanded tribute to the cultural ascendancy of Low Church Protestantism.
The final essay, written by Dawn Coleman, is an outstanding piece of scholarship. Coleman mines the nine-volume series Annals of the American Pulpit (1866-69), which assessed the ministries of eminent preachers from across the denominations and the decades. One way it did this was by soliciting letters from those who could still remember listening to the orations of bygone ministers.
Coleman has a fine eye for the telling use of language in these reports. Updating the old analogy of a forceful sermon as an arrow to the heart, 19th-century Americans credited their best preachers with being gunslingers. One pulpiteer, for example, would "often pick out a case in his audience, like a practiced marksman." The popular diffusion of new scientific knowledge, however, made electricity into the metaphor of the century. Here is a typical example: "Under the ministry of Young, I knew whole assemblies electrified, as suddenly and as sensibly as if coming in contact with a galvanic battery. I have myself, under some of his powerful appeals, felt the cold tremors passing over me, and the hair on my head apparently standing on end." Again and again correspondents wanted to sing of the sermon electric.
Deploying this material to glean "the period's criteria for successful pulpit performance," Coleman catalogues the range of positive responses to powerful preaching: silent attentiveness, tears, cries, groans, shouts, and applause. From a 21st-century perspective, even Dr. Watson could hardly fail to be struck by the eerie absence of the sound of canine snickering.
No doubt because it was not a theme in her primary sources, Coleman makes no mention of humor whatever. If letters were solicited about today's leading ministers, perhaps even a majority of them would credit our preachers for their deftness at making a congregation guffaw. In the introduction, Ellison argues that 19th-century sermons did not merely reflect the spirit of the age but rather were influential enough to be a force shaping the culture. One cannot help but wonder what will someday be said about the 21st-century pulpit.
Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. He is the author most recently of A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (Oxford Univ. Press).
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