Warm Weather Sermons
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WARM WEATHER SERMONS.
To-morrow our churches will, we presume, be filled, as usual, with throngs of worshippers and two more theological discourses will be stored up in most of our memories. We are a moral and religious people, as becomes the denizens of a "City of Churches," and even when the mercury stands at 80 in the shade attend—a very large portion of us, at least—to what we are accustomed to look upon as a sacred duty.
Such being the case, we call upon the reverend clergy to adapt in some manner the style and length of their discourses to the exigencies of the season. However well-disposed the people may be at ordinary times to listen to long polemical discussions, it is certainly asking too much of them to bear the burden of so much ponderous wisdom when the heated listener is trying his best to keep cool by the aid of a handkerchief and fan, and mentally groaning when sixthly is followed by seventhly and seventhly by eighthly as the preacher progresses in his theme. It is very true that now-a-days our divines do not go to such an extremity in this regard as in the olden time, but they have not by any means all found out the great secret of being brief and pungent, of giving the pith and marrow of a subject in as direct and pointed a manner as possible, of giving real, live sermons, calculated to interest as well as instruct a miscellaneous collection of sinners, instead of wordy, heavy and lengthy discourses on abstract points of doctrine. Many of them, forgetting that the world has not been standing still for the last fifty years, still go on in the "good old way" and deliver themselves of dry husks of doctrine and dead bones of theology to wearied, uninterested, half-asleep congregations, who are thirsting all the while for the "living waters." Why is it that such men as Beecher1 and Chapin2 and half-a-dozen more like them, attract such crowds of delighted auditors? It is not on account of their fine intellectual gifts alone, but because they are live men, fully up to the requirements of the times, who see what needs to be said and who have something to say and who say that something tersely, briefly and emphatically. These men, to use a transcendental cant phrase, but a very useful one, have a "mission" to preach. And unless a man has a mission to preach, he should let it alone and go to work at blacksmithing or editing a daily newspaper, or some other equally light and agreeable employment.
We hope then that our ministerial friends will bear in mind the state of the weather, and our many infirmities and give us a few warm-weather sermons, calculated to generate a Christian frame of mind in a thirsty, sweltering, mosquito-bitten, and much afflicted community.
The generality of people prefer during the hot summer months light nutriment in place of strong meats—"Harper" or the "Atlantic" instead of an ancient history or a geometrical treatise, lager-bier rather than spirituous compounds, spicy paragraphs instead of stupid leaders,—why then should we not have warm-weather sermons to suit the times and the season?
Notes:
1. Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) was a minister and social reformer who used his position in the church to advocate for anti-slavery. He is the brother of author Harriet Beecher Stowe. [back]
2. Edwin Hubbell Chapin (1814–1880) was a minister of the Universalist church and an author. He was active in many social reforms, such as temperance and anti-slavery. [back]