JUDAIC SERMONS.

Westport Times, Volume VII, Issue 1076, 30 May 1873, Page 3

JUDAIC SERMONS.

[Saturday Eeview.] The great mass of preachers seem really to forget that those to whom they are speaking aro Englishmen of the nineteenth century. It is strange 'how the Judaic leaven clings to them. It is an inheritance alike from mediaeval and from Puritan times, but it is 'decidedly a case of salt which has lost its savour. Mediaeval preachers and "writers were brimful and running over with Old Testament quotations and illusions ; but they never fancied that their hearers were Jews. They never forgot that they were Englishmen or Frenchmen of the time in which they happened to live. The references to the *elddr dispensation might be •'allegories, or they might be examples, ; but they were all meant to have a very practical bearing on the state of things which was really going on then •and there. We speak of the common run of sermons, not of such sermons as the dean and canons of St. Paul's are not afraid to preach to rational Englishmen as rational Englishmen. In the regular conventional sermon there is not a word directly addressed to Englishmeu of the nineteenth century as such. We get, we dare say, very good dogmatic theology—we get •very good sound, general morality; but it is a theology and a morality which, so far as it belongs to any particular time or place, seems not to belong to England now, but to Judea ; in past ages.