NO person who is wont to slake his intellectual thirst at “the wells of English undefiled,” will soon forget the tingling delight, the exhilaration of mind and spirit with which he first read the sermons of Robert South, the shrewdest, most caustic, most fiery, and, with the exception of Thomas Fuller, the wittiest of the old English divines. Among the giants of English theology he stands alone. Intellectually and morally, his individuality was strongly marked. To neither Hooker nor Barrow, — to neither Taylor nor Tillotson, — nor, indeed, to any one of his great contemporaries, except in intellectual might, can we compare him. Nature seems to have framed but one such, and then broken the mould. He was a kind of Tory Sydney Smith, yet lacking the genial, sunny disposition, and the humor, of that divine wit and witty divine; and in reading his works, it is difficult to say which is most to be admired, the thorough grasp and exhaustive treatment of the subject, the masterly arrangement of the thoughts, or the vitality, energy and freshness of expression, which have given his sermons a higher place in the library of the scholar than even in that of the theologian or the pulpit orator.
Robert South was the son of an eminent London merchant, and was born in 1633. In 1647 he was admitted a king’s scholar at Westminster, under the tuition of the 59 celebrated Dr. Busby, and, while there, gave indications of that out-and-out Toryism for which he was conspicuous through life by praying for Charles I, by name, while reading the Latin prayers in school on the day of that monarch’s execution. In 1651 he entered Christ Church, Oxford, at the same time with John Locke, — the future champion of the divine right of kings in company with the future champion of freedom. At college, he was a zealous student, indefatigable in his efforts to prepare himself for the gladiatorial contests in which he was to measure swords with some of the most adroit masters of theological fence of the time. He graduated in 1655, and only eight years after he had so distinguished himself by his learning and eloquence, that he obtained the degree of Doctor of Divinity. In 1660 he was elected public orator to the University, and preached before the king’s commissioners his celebrated discourse entitled “The Scribe Instructed,” the object of which is to show what are the qualifications of the Christian preacher, and the absurdity and wickedness involved in becoming a preacher of God’s word without sufficient ability, knowledge and preparation. Though preached at the early age of twenty-seven, this sermon is one of his most original and vigorous productions, and is characterized throughout by that logical arrangement, strength of thought, and freshness and epigrammatic pungency of style, which distinguish all of his best discourses. The intensity of thought and feeling which burns through this discourse must have stamped South, in the minds of all who heard him, as a preacher of the highest ability, — as a spirit “of the greatest size, and the divinest mettle.”
After speaking of the natural abilities of the preacher, 60 he proceeds to show the importance of perfecting them by study, exercise, and due improvement of the same, and says: “A well radicated habit, in a lively, vegete faculty, is like ‘an apple of gold in a picture of silver,’ . . . It is not enough to have books, or for a man to have his divinity in his pocket, or upon the shelf; but he must have mastered his notions, till they even incorporate into his mind, so as to be able to produce and wield them upon all occasions; and not, when a difficulty is proposed and a performance enjoined, to say that he will consult such and such authors: for this is not to be a divine, who is rather to be a walking library than a walking index. . . . It is not the oil in the wick, but in the vessel, which must feed the lamp. The former may indeed cause a present blaze, but it is the latter which must give it a lasting light. It is not the spending money a man has in his pocket, but his hoards in the chest, or in the bank, which must make him rich. A dying man has his breath in his nostrils, but to have it in the lungs is that which must preserve life.” Of quacks and mountebanks in divinity he proclaims himself the mortal foe, declaring that when Christ says that a scribe must be stocked with “things new and old,” he does not mean “that he should have a hoard of old sermons, with a bundle of new opinions,’ and as for “such mushroom divines generally, who start up so of a sudden, we do not find their success so good as to recommend their practice. Hasty births are seldom long-lived, but never was strong.” He has a sharp thrust at a class of preachers not altogether extinct in our own day, who so pray that they “do not supplicate, but compliment Almighty God” and he ridicules others who “lie grovelling on the ground 61 with a dead and contemptible flatness,” passing off “dullness as a mark of regeneration.”
Passages of this sermon rise to a high pitch of eloquence, as where he dwells on the duty of the preacher to employ significant speech and expression in enforcing the truths of the gospel. God’s word he pronounces a system of the best rhetoric, as well as a body of religion; and Politian, who says that he abstained from reading the Scriptures, for fear they would spoil his style, is declared to be a blockhead as well as an atheist, who has “as little gust for the elegancies of expression as for the sacredness of the matter.” As the highest things require the highest expressions, so, South says, we shall find nothing in Scripture so sublime in itself, but it is reached and sometimes overtopped by the sublimity of the expression. The passions, he asserts, have been more powerfully described by the Hebrew than by the heathen pots. “What poetry,” he asks, “ever paralleled Solomon in his description of love, as to all the ways, effects, and ecstasies, and tyrannies of that commanding passion” And where do w read such strange risings and fallings, now the faintings and languishings, now the terrors and astonishments of despair, venting themselves in such high amazing strains, as in Ps. lxxvii? Of where did we ever find sorrow flowing forth in such a natural prevailing pathos, as in the lamentations of Jeremy? One would think that every letter was written with a tear, every word was the noise of a breaking heart; that the author was a man compacted of sorrows, disciplined to grief from his infancy, — one who never breathed but in sighs, nor spoke but in a groan.”
In his boyhood, South was an admirer of Oliver Cromwell; 2 but he early became an ardent partisan of the Restoration, — “the very bulldog,” one has termed him, “of the civil and ecclesiastical establishment.” During the reign of William he rejected all offers of preferment; he was a great admirer of Archbishop Laud, and execrated the Toleration Act, being equally intolerant to indulgences and forebearances, to Papist and Puritan. In 1663, he preached before Charles the Second, on the anniversary of the “murder” of Charles I, his famous sermon, “Pretence of Conscience no Excuse for Rebellion,” — the fiercest and most truculent of his political discourses. The whole vocabulary of scorn is exhausted in this invective for terms in which to denounce the enemies of the late King, who was “causelessly rebelled against,” and “barbarously murdered by the worst of men and the most obliged of subjects.” This murder, which he pronounces the blackest fact which the sun ever saw since he hid his face upon the crucifixion of our Saviour, was perpetrated by the scum of the nation — that is, by what was then the uppermost and basest part of it. Like Actæon, Charles was torn by a pack of bloodhounds. The difference between being conquered and slain by another king, and being killed by infamous rebels, is the difference between being torn by a lion, and being eat up by vermin. Ask the Puritans what made them murder their lawful sovereign, rob the church, perjure themselves, and extirpate the government, and the constant answer is conscience — conscience — “still this large capacious thing, their conscience, which is always of a much larger compass than their understanding.” No terms are too scathing for Charles’s enemies; Sir Henry Vane is contemptuously termed “that worthy knight who was executed on Tower Hill;” and Milton is “the Latin 63 advocate, who, like a blind adder, has spit so much venom on the king’s person and cause.”
We commend this sermon of South to those croakers who are always bewailing the degeneracy of our age, and the fierceness of its religious controversies; who sigh for the good old times when the champions of opposite doctrines addressed each other in the dialect of doves, and disputed in bucolics. It is a common error to suppose that the controversies of the present day are carried on with a violence and bitterness unknown to past centuries, or, at least, to some golden age to which no date is fixed. The truth is, controversialists, like poets, have always been “an irritable race”; and those who doubt the statement have only to look into the ponderous folios which the giants of old hurled at each other, when contending on the battle-fields of thought. To go no further back than Gregory Nazianzen, we find him, when pitted against the Emperor Julian, hurling the most acrid anathemas, and bestowing upon him epithets which “a beggar, in his drink, would not bestow upon his callet.” Everybody knows with what fury Martin Luther, the hero of Wittenberg and Worms, waged war upon his theological adversaries— how he showered down upon them an incessant flood of darts, pointed with cutting wrath, and feathered with scorn. Of the Catholic divines, he says: “The Papists are all asses, and always will remain asses. Put them in whatever sauce you choose, boiled, roasted, baked, fried, skinned, beat, hashed, they are always the same asses.” Again: “What a pleasing sight it would be to see the Pope and the Cardinals hanging on one gallows, in exact order, like the seals which dangle from the bulls of the Pope.” But even Luther must yield the palm for virulence, not 64 to say scurrility, to John Calvin. The latter’s adversaries are always knaves, lunatics, drunkards, assassins; and sometimes bulls, asses, cats and dogs. But of all the controversialists of ancient or modern times, it would be difficult to name one who, with the same intellectual might, has descended to such low abuse as Milton. One who his conversant with the old bard through his exquisite poetry alone, — whose thoughts of him are identified with the gorgeous imagery of “Paradise Lost,” and who thinks of him as wandering where the Muses haunt clear spring, or sunny grove, smit with the love of sacred song, — as the blind old man, equal in fate and renown with blind Thamyris and blind Mæonides, — feeding on thoughts that voluntary move harmonious numbers, as the wakeful bird sings darkling, and, in shadiest covert hid, tunes her nocturnal note, — can hardly credit the fact that he is the same person who, in his prose writing, so out-Herods Herod in blackening and vilifying his opponents. Not content with riddling Salmasius with the “leaden rain and iron hail” of his logic, with tossing his giant adversary round the ring on the horns of his merciless dilemmas, he writes him down a dunce, in capital letters, page after page. Again, at he end of the sublime prose hymn which concludes his work, “Of Reformation in England,” he prays that certain of his adversaries “after a shameful end in this life, (which God grant them,) shall be thrown down eternally into the darkest and deepest gulf of hell, where, under the despiteful control, the trample and spurn, of all the other damned, that in the anguish of their torture shall have no other ease than to exercise a raving and bestial tyranny over them as their slaves and negroes, they shall remain in that 65 plight forever, the basest, the lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot and downtrodden vassals of perdition.” Neither South in his wildest excesses of invective, nor probably any later controversialist, ash anything in his writing which approaches to the awful severity of this imprecation.
Again, in the next century we find Rowland Hill calling Charles Wesley “a designing wolf,” a man “as unprincipled as a rook, and as silly as a jackdaw,” “a miscreant apostate, whose perfection consists in his perfect hatred of all goodness and of all good men.” We find Toplady charging Wesley with “low serpentine cunning,” “dirty subterfuges,” and “mean, malicious impotence,” which “degrade the man of parts into a lying sophister, and sink a divine into the level of an oyster-woman.” “I would no more enter into a formal controversy with such a scribbler, than I would contend for the wall with a chimney-sweeper.” Yet of these fierce controversialists two were authors of hymns which are sung oftener, perhaps, than any others in the language, — Toplady having written “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me“; and “Jesus, lover of my Soul,” being the production of Charles Wesley.
To return from this digression: in 1662 South preached his sermon on “Man Created in the Image of God,” which is unquestionably his masterpiece. In vigor and weight of thought, in comprehensive grasp of the theme, and in pregnant brevity of expression, it has never been surpassed by any production of the British pulpit. The subject of the discourse is the ideal man, whom South daguerreotypes as he supposes him to have been in Paradise. In doing this, he describes what he terms the universal rectitude of all the faculties of the soul, the 66 understanding, the will, the passions, and affections. Of the understanding he says that “it gave the soul a bright and full view into all things, and was not only a window, but was itself the prospect. Briefly, there is as much difference between the clear representations of the understanding then, and the obscure discoveries that it makes now, as there is between the prospect of a casement and of a keyhole.” Again, he says: “We may collect the excellency of the understanding then, by the glorious reminders of it now, and guess at the stateliness of the building by the magnificence of its ruins. Certainly, that must needs have been very glorious, the decays of which are so admirable. He that is comely when old and decrepid, surely was very beautiful when young. An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of paradise.” Of the passion of Joy, he says that it was not that which now often usurps the name. “It was not the mere crackling of thorns, or sudden blaze of the spirits, the exultation of a tickled fancy, or a pleased appetite. Joy was then a masculine and a severe thing; the recreation of the judgment, the jubilee of reason. . . . It did not run out in voice, or indecent eruptions, but filled the soul, as God does the universe, silently and without noise. It was refreshing, but composed, like the pleasantness of youth tempered with the gravity of age, or the mirth of a festival managed with the silence of contemplation.”
Hardly inferior to the foregoing discourse is the sermon on “The Pleasantness of Wisdom’s Ways,” which has many of those pithy, epigrammatic sayings, in which all of South’s writings abound. “When reason,” he says, “by the assistance of grace, has prevailed over and outgrown 67 the encroachments of sense, the delights of sensuality are to such a one but as a hobby-horse would be to a counsellor of state, or as tasteless as a bundle of hay to a hungry lion.” Of the fickleness and fleeting nature of popular applause, he says: “Like lightning, it only flashes upon the face, and is gone, and it is well if it does not hurt the man.” The pleasure of the religious man, he declares, “is an easy and a portable pleasure, such a one as he carries about in his bosom, without alarming either the eye or the envy of the world. A man putting all his pleasures into this one, is like traveller’s putting all his goods into one jewel; the value is the same, and the convenience greater.” The sermon closes with some characteristic sarcasms upon the austerities of the Romanists: “Pilgrimages, going barefoot, hair-shirts, and whips, with other such gospel artillery, are their only helps to devotion. . . . It seems that, with them, a man sometimes cannot be a penitent, unless he also turns vagabond, and foots it to Jerusalem, or wanders over this or that part of the world to visit the shrine of such or such a pretended saint; thus, that which was Cain’s curse, is become their religion.” Of self-scourging he concludes that “if men’s religion lies no deeper than their skin, it is possible that they may scourge themselves into very great improvements.”
In 1663 South was made Prebendary of St. Peter’s, Westminster. In 1670 he was installed a canon of Christ Church, Oxford. In 1678 he preached a sermon on “Christ’s Promise the Support of his Despised Ministers,” which has some sharp thrusts at Jeremy Taylor. Recommending simplicity of speech, he says: “There is a certain majesty in plainness; as the proclamation of a prince never frisks 68 it in tropes or fine conceits, in numerous and well-turned periods, but commands in sober, natural expressions. A substantial beauty, as it comes out of the hands of nature, needs neither paint nor patch; things never made to adorn, but to cover something that would be hid.” He then cites Paul’s mode of preaching, and says: “Nothing here of ‘the fringes of the North Star;’ nothing of ‘nature’s becoming unnatural’ nothing of the ‘down of angels’ wings,’ or ‘the beautiful locks of cherubims;’ no starched similitudes introduced with a ‘Thus have I seen a cloud rolling in its airy mansion,’ and the like. No, these were sublimities above the rise of the apostolic spirit. For the Apostles, poor mortals, were content to take lower steps, and to tell the world in plain terms, that he who believed should be saved, and that he who believed not should be damned. And this was the dialect which pierced the conscience, and made the hearers cry out ’Men and brethren, what shall we do?’ It tickled not the ear, but sunk into the heart.” South’s vehement and fiery spirit had but little taste for the “process of smoothness and delight” by which the Spenser of theology would have lured men into heaven. To his masculine understanding the diffuse, sensuous, and somewhat effeminate over-richness of Taylor’s writings was particularly distasteful; and the conceits, quaint similes, unexpected analogies, and gaudy flowers of rhetoric, which he scattered in thick profusion throughout sermons on the grandest and most solemn themes, were as offensive and incongruous as would be the placing of the frippery fountains, and clipped yews, and trim parterres of Versailles among the glaciers and precipices of the Alps. 69
In 1681 South preached before the king at Westminster his sermon on “All Contingencies Directed by God’s Providence.” In this occurs the famous hit at that “bankrupt, beggarly fellow, Cromwell,” who is represented as “first entering the Parliament House with a threadbare, torn cloak, and a greasy hat, and perhaps neither of them paid for,” — a gibe which so tickled Charles that he laughed heartily, and said to Rochester, “Odsfish! Lory, your chaplain must be a bishop; therefore, put me in mind of him at the next death.” But South was no place-hunter; it was no sycophantic motive that prompted his sarcasm at the Protector, or led him to champion the king or the church. During the reigns of both Charles and James he steadily refused a bishopric. Though he disliked James’s measures regarding the Catholics, his loyalty never wavered; and after the Prince of Orange ascended the throne, it was some time before he acknowledged the legality of the revolution settlement. When offered one of the sees vacated by the non-juring bishops, he declined, saying “he blessed God he was neither so ambitious, nor in want of preferment, as, for the sake of it, to build his rise upon the ruin of any one father of the church.”
During the last years of his life he suffered from painful and irritating ailments, yet they did not extinguish his sprightliness and vivacity, nor did his wit lose any of its keenness. In 1709 his infirmities were so great that the eyes of eager expectants were turned to him in hopes of a speedy vacancy in his prebend’s stall and rectory. There is a characteristic letter to Halifax from Swift, who coveted the place, and was impatient at South’s tenacity of life, in which he writes: “Pray, my lord, desire Dr. South to die 70 about the fall of the leaf, for he has a prebend of Westminster, which will make me your neighbor;” to which Halifax replies, October 6, 1709, “Dr. South holds out still but he cannot be immortal.” The infirm old man lingered, however, seven years longs, outliving Halifax himself, and ended his laborious life on the 8th of July, 1716, at the age of eighty-three.
The life and writings of South show that he was a man of powerful intellect, a worthy compeer of Hooker, Barrow, and Taylor, — in short, one of the giants of English theology. While his writings have not the depth and suggestiveness of Hooker’s, nor that mighty and sustained power controlled by the severest logic, that peculiar quality of mastery and vigor to which all tasks appear equally easy, which we find in Barrow, and while we miss in his page the imaginative fancies, the exquisite and subtle harmony which delight us in the sweet poet of theology, we find in South’s works a vigorous and sterling sense, a sharp and piercing wit, and a terseness, vitality, and freshness of expression which are surpassed in no other English discourses. To a large and acute understanding, he united a frank and courageous nature, and what he believed and felt he never feared to utter. Nice, squeamish persons, who dislike to hear ugly things called by ugly names, and prefer dainty, mincing terms, weighed in a hair-balance of propriety and good breeding, to the blunt and homely language in which honest indignation is wont to vent itself, will not relish his Spartan plainness of speech. They would have liked him better had he sought what an old poet calls
“Modest, close-couched terms
Cleanly to gird our looser libertines.”
but whatever other faults may be laid to his charge, he 71 was evidently no flincher, no trimmer; he was not “pigeon-livered, or lacking gall.” Vice he never feared to denounce, in high places or low, nor did he hesitate to declare the whole counsel of God to an unprincipled monarch and a dissolute court, whom his theories of political government led him to look up to with feelings of reverence. Tory as he was, there are passages in his sermons which must have made the cheeks of Charles and his sycophants tingle. A warm friend and an outspoken enemy, he had no reserves nor disguises, and always championed his principles à l’outrance. Wherever his sword fell, it always fell with the whole vigor of his arm, and he was satisfied with nothing less than cleaving his opponent from crown to chin. He never stopped to consider what expression would be most politic, or to hunt up dainty, holiday terms by which to characterize an opponent. No one can doubt that he would have fought, if necessary, with the same spirit that he wrote; and, indeed, during Monmouth’s rebellion, he declared he was ready, if there should be occasion, to change his black gown for a buff coat. That he was a bigot in politics and religion, who could brook no dissent from his own rooted and ultra opinions, is too true; but this fault becomes almost a virtue when contrasted with the opposite vices of cringing servility, hypocrisy, and cant, which at the Restoration were almost universal.
South’s writings are a storehouse of vehement expression, such as can be found in no other English writer. He had at his command the whole vocabulary of abuse, satire, and scorn, and, when his ire was aroused, he was never niggard of the treasures of his indignant rhetoric. Against everything, especially, which militated with the doctrines or ceremonies of the English church, he hurled his anathemas 72 and shot his sarcasms. Radical editors should study his writings day and night; nowhere else (except in Milton) will they find such biting words and stinging phrases with which to denounce wicked men, wicked institutions, and wicked practices. The intensity of thought and feeling which burns through his writings has hardly any parallel in English literature. It has been compared to the unwearied fire of the epic poet. There are times when he seems to wrestle with his subject, as if he would grind it into powder; and when he seems to say all that he does say to us, only that we may conjecture how much more he could say if he were able to wreak his thoughts upon expression. It has been truly said that many sentences in his works appear torn from his brain by main strength, expressing not only the thought he intended to convey, but a kind of impatient rage that it did not come with less labor. With all his command of language, he seems often to struggle with it in order to wrest from it words enough for his wealth of thought. He wrote doubtless from his own consciousness when he represented study as racking the inward and destroying the outward man, — as clothing the soul with the spoils of the body, — and as that which, “like a stronger blast of lightning, not only melts the sword, but consumes the scabbard.”
His sermons on “Extempore Prayer,” “Covetousness,” “Education,” “The Fatal Imposture and Force of Words,” “Shamelessness in Sin,” and “Prosperity ever Dangerous to Virtue,” are masterpieces of their kind, full of striking thoughts expressed with a never-flagging life, energy and splendor of language. It would be difficult to find in any other sermons so many aphorisms and maxims having a direct bearing on life and duty, — so many terse 73 sayings which are true, though not obvious, or moral reflections sharpened into epigrams. “When Providence,” he says, “designs strange and mighty changes, it gives men wings instead of legs; and instead of climbing leisurely, makes them fly at once to the top and height of greatness and power.” Of ingratitude he says that it is “too base to return a kindness, and too proud to regard it; much like the tops of the mountains, barren indeed, but yet lofty; they produce nothing; they feed nobody; they clothe nobody; yet are high and stately, and look down upon all the world about them.”
Again, he speaks of the politician as “treating gratitude as a worse kind of witchcraft, which only serves to conjure up the pale, meagre ghosts of dead and forgotten kindnesses to haunt and trouble him.” Of prayer he says: “Know that the lower thou fallest, the higher will thy prayer rebound.” Again he observes: “God does not command us to set off our prayers with dress and artifice, to flourish it in trope and metaphor, and to beg our daily bread in blank verse, or to show anything of the poet in our devotions but indigence and want. . . . Does not he present his Maker not only with a more decent, but also more free and liberal oblation, who tenders Him much in little, and brings Him his whole heart and soul wrapped up in three of four words, than those who, with full mouth and loud lungs, sends up whole vollies of articulate breath to the throne of grace? No doubt God accounts and accepts of the former as infinitely a more valuable offering than the latter; as that subject pays his prince a much nobler and more acceptable tribute who tenders him a purse of gold than we who brings him a whole cart-load of farthings, — in which there is weight without worth, and number without 74 account.” Again he observes on the same subject: “It is not length, nor copiousness of language, that is devotion, any more than bulk and bigness is valor, or flesh is the measure of the spirit. A short sentence may oftentimes be a large and a mighty prayer. Devotion so managed is like water in a well, where you have fullness in a little compass; which surely is much nobler than the same carried out into many little petit, creeping rivulets, with length and shallowness together.”
South’s style is more modern than that of any other divine of his century. It is fervid, forcible, and flexible, often rhythmic, never obscure, and readily adapts itself to all the demands of his thought.
William Cobbett, who, we fear, did not “reck his own rede,” says: “A man, as he writes on a sheet of paper a word or a sentence, ought to bear in mind that he is writing something which may, for good or evil, live forever.” How much more momentous is the same thought as expressed by South, — “He who has published an ill book must know that his guilt and his life determine not together; no, such an one, as the Apostle saith, ‘Being dead, yet speaketh’; he sins in his very grave, corrupts others while he is rotting himself, and has a growing account in the other world after he has paid Nature’s last debt in this; and, in a word, quits this life like a man carried off by the plague, who, though he dies himself, does execution upon others by a surviving infliction.”
Speaking of the dependence of the intellectual man upon the physical, he observes that while the soul is a sojourner in the body, “it must be content to submit its own quickness and spirituality to the dullness of its vehicle, and to comply with the pace of its inferior 75 companion, — just like a man shut up in a coach, who, while he is so, must be willing to go no faster than the motion of the coach will carry him.” In denouncing intemperance, he pithily says: “He who makes his belly his business, will quickly come to have a conscience of as large a swallow as his throat.” In a sermon on education, he satirizes some schoolmasters as executioners rather than instructors of youth, and says that “stripes and blows are fit only to be used on those who carry their brains in their backs.” Pride he declares to have been “the devil’s sin and the devil’s ruin, and has been, ever since, the devil’s stratagem; who, like an expert wrestler, usually gives a man a lift before he gives him a throw.” Of misrepresentation he forcibly says: “It is this which revives and imitates that inhuman barbarity of the old heathen persecutors, wrapping up Christians in the skins of wild beasts, that so they might be worried and torn in pieces by dogs. Do but paint an angel black, and that is enough to make him pass for a devil.” To be angry under the dispensations of Providence he pronounces the height of folly, as well as wickedness. “A man so behaving himself is nothing else but weakness and nakedness setting itself in battle array against Omnipotence; a handful of dust and ashes sending a challenge to the host of heaven. For what else are words and talk against thunderbolts; and the weak, empty noise of a querulous rage against him who can speak worlds, who could word heaven and earth out of nothing, and can, when he pleases, word them into nothing again?” One of his most vivid and striking images, conveyed with a Miltonian roll and grandeur of expression, illustrates the seeming strength which a revengeful spirit acquires from 76 resistance. “As a storm could not be so hurtful, were it not for the opposition of trees and houses, it ruins nowhere but where it is withstood and repelled. It has, indeed, the same force when it passes over the rush or the yielding osier; but it does not roar or become dreadful till it grapples with the oak, and rattles upon the tops of the cedars.” Denouncing ignorance in public men, he says: “A blind man sitting in the chimney corner is pardonable enough, but sitting at the helm, he is intolerable. If owls will not be hooted at, let them keep close within the tree, and not perch upon the upper boughs.” These pithy and pointed sayings are not rare and occasional gems that gleam on us at long intervals in South’s writings, and reward us only after we have sifted heaps of verbiage, but sparkle on every page, — we had almost said in every paragraph.
South had a keen insight of human nature. He had thoroughly anatomized the human heart, and laid bare the complex web of motives; and hence there is no “pleasant vice,” no self-congratulating hypocrisy, no evasion of duty under a complacent admission of its claims, no self-cheating delusion, no sham sentiment, that hides its true character from his searching glance. He “strips vice and folly of their foppery, scatters the delusions of pride and passion, and lays down the rule of Christian faith and practice with a precision which satisfies the intellect, while it leaves the transgressor without an excuse.”
South never juggles nor coquets with words; he has no verbal prudery; and hence he excels in expressive coarseness of language, or felicities of vulgar allusion: as when he speaks of “that numerous litter of strange 77 senseless, absurd opinions, that crawl about the world, to the disgrace of reason”; or says of the pleasures of the eating man and the thinking man, that they are “as different as the silence of Archimedes in the study of a problem, and the stillness of a sow at her wash.” Again, wishing to show that pleasure is merely a relative term, that what is such to one being may be pain to another, he says: “the pleasures of an angel can never be the pleasures of a hog.” Provided he can make his meaning clear, he never troubles himself about the niceties, elegancies, and refinements of expression; and his strongest terms are often what an old dramatist calls “plain, naked words, stript of their shirts.”
It is by their wit that the sermons of South are chiefly known, and against no class of persons is it more frequently or more mercilessly directed than against the Puritans, whose “heavenly hummings and hawings,” as well as their “blessed breathings,” he never tires of ridiculing. Regarding the Church of England royalists as “the best Christians and the most meritorious subjects in the world,” it is not strange that he delighted to satirize the sectarians with whom the country was overrun, — the preachers of the tub and the barn, — who denied the divine right of kings, declared that men should “be able to make a pulpit before they preached in it,” and held, as he believed, all human learning in contempt. Gifted with a razor-like wit, and exquisitely sensitive to the comic and the grotesque, he dwelt with delight on their meagre, mortified faces, their droning and snuffling whine, their sanctimonious look and demeanor; and with a proud consciousness of superior bearing, and a somewhat pharisaical conceit of superior integrity — with 78 the keenest sarcasm and the most undisguised contempt, — held up to the scorn of mankind those whom he deemed impudent pretenders to the gifts of the Spirit. That in his perpetual gibing at rebels and schismatics, he sometimes trembles on the verge of buffoonery, — that his wit and humor, even on more sacred themes, often border on grossness and indelicacy, — cannot be denied. South knew the truth of Horace’s maxim:
“Ridiculo acri
Fortius et mellius magnas plerumque secatis.”
But just as he begins to disgust us by his coarseness, he almost invariably recovers himself by some stroke of vigorous sense and language; and his excuse is to be found in the fact that he lived in an age of sinners whose rhinoceros skin of impudence was not penetrable by smooth circumlocutions, and whose vices required the scourge and the hot iron.
A few specimens of South’s wit are all that we shall have space to give. Of Popery and Puritanism, which in his opinion were one, he says: “They were as truly brothers as Romulus and Remus. They sucked their principles from the same wolf.” Sometimes he despatches the Puritans with the short dagger of a single phrase, as where he terms them “those seraphic pretenders,” or speaks of “this apocalyptic ignoramus.” Of the greatness and luster of the Romish clergy, he says: “We envy them neither their scarlet gowns, nor their scarlet sins.” In allusion to the many persons who in his time rushed into the ministry without serving an apprenticeship, he observes that “matters have been brought to this pass, that if a man amongst his sons had any blind or disfigured, he laid him aside for the ministry; and such a on was presently 79 approved, as having a mortified countenance.” Of the perversity of the Israelites, he observes that “God seems to have espoused them to Himself upon the very same account that Socrates espoused Xantippe, only for their extreme ill conditions, as the fittest argument both to exercise and to declare His admirable patience to the world.” Speaking of the paradoxes maintained by the Greek sophists, he declares: “Such a stupidity or wantonness had seized upon the most raised wits, that it might be doubted whether the philosophers or the owls of Athens were the quicker sighted.” Ridiculing the idolatry of the Egyptians, he asks: “Is it not strange that a rational man should worship an ox, nay, the image of an ox? fawn upon his dog? bow himself before a cat? adore leeks and garlic, and shed penitential tears at the smell of a deified onion? Yet so did the Egyptians, once the famed masters of all arts and learning.” Again, quoting Isaiah xliv, 14, “A man hews him down a tree in the wood, and a part of it he burns,” and in verses 16, 17, “with the residue thereof he maketh a god.” South thus comments: “With the one part he furnishes his chimney, with the other his chapel. A strange thing, that the fire must first consume this part, and then burn incense to that. As if there was more divinity in one end of the stick, than in the other; or as if it could be graved and painted omnipotent, or the nails and the hammer could give it an apotheosis.” Of sensualists, he says: “Saying grace is no part of their meal; they feed and grovel like swine under an oak, filling themselves with the mast, but never so much as looking up, either to the boughs that bore, or the hands that shook it down.”
Henry Ward Beecher declares that in his younger 80 days he was a great reader of the old sermonizers. “I read old Robert South through and through. I saturated myself with South. I formed much of my style, and of my handling of texts on in his methods.” Let the rising generation of preachers follow this example, and if there is not less complaint of the lack of freshness, force, and energy in the pulpit, we are sure the complaint will cease to be well founded.