HUMOROUS PREACHING by J. O.

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 8, 1859

HUMOROUS PREACHING.

By J. O.

DID Christ or his disciples make any attempts at humorous preaching? Think of Christ in his sermon on the mount, bringing down his audience in peals of laughter, or Paul in his discourses before Felix, or before the people, attempting to display his wit, of which he had an abundant supply no doubt, if he had been disposed to desecrate it to so low a purpose.

Think of one in the pulpit, preaching Christ and him crucified to admiring crowds, and ever and anon (as if for amusement) assuming the manners of a theatrical clown, in order to produce laughter.

Have not the American and English pulpits descended very low indeed, when their most popular preachers on this and the other side of the Atlantic, entertain their audiences with displays of their wit, as they hold forth the holy doctrines of the Bible?

What must be the state of the professed church, when a secular paper like the London Times, administers such a rebuke as the following, with such cause? No wonder it jars upon the ears of a political man, who hoped for better things from an ambassador of Christ.

Has not the time come for every true child of God to cry out, Babylon is fallen! come out of her my people! when the pulpits of the two leading nations of the earth are prostituted to such purposes? The following I clip from the N. Y. Tribune. J. O.

“The London Times of Aug. 9, has the following:

“Mr. Spurgeon, in preaching at Norwich last week, indulged in some of his characteristic humor. Content, he said, made our cup run over, while discontent knocked the bottom out. The story which had recently appeared in the papers about his having a large fortune left him was a complete hoax; if he were to have a guinea for every falsehood told about him, he could build his great chapel very soon, and probably have enough left for a cathedral or two. . . . Christian men sometimes fell terribly foul of each other, like the two English ships which broadsided each other for two hours in a mist without knowing that the British flag was flying at their mastheads. The lazy man was one of the biggest sinners on earth; if he did nothing else, he broke one of God's greatest commandments. There was a very strict Sabbatarian gardner, who was very hard upon his master about the observance of the Sabbath. His master said to him, ‘Why, you break the commandments yourself!’ ‘How?’ said the gardner, ‘I don't work on Sunday.’ ‘No,’ quoth the master, ‘nor on any other day. Just repeat the commandment.’ The gardner obeyed, and when he came to ‘six days shalt thou labor and do all that thou hast to do,’ his master said, ‘There, stop there; that is as much a part of the commandment as that ‘the seventh day is the Sabbath.’ . . . The stickling for sectarian distinctions was as absurd as if a hungry man, about to eat some bread, were told by a Churchman, ‘No bread like the tin loaf;’ or by a Methodist, ‘You must eat twists.’ The hungry man would say, ‘Give me some bread, and I will settle the shape afterward.’ It jars, somehow, upon the feelings to see the copious reports which the country papers give of Mr. Spurgeon's ‘sermons,’ curiously interlarded with ‘laughter.’ ”