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HEADS OF SERMONS

Scottish sermons have always had a prevalent doctrinal character and a markedly logical treatment of their subject. It has never been the habit north of the Tweed to think that ‘dulness is sacred in a sound divine.’ The clergy have appealed as much to the head as to the heart. In bygone generations the doctrines evolved from the text were divided into numerous heads, and these into subordinate sections and subsections, so that the attention of those listeners who remained awake was kept up as at a kind of intellectual exercise. If anyone wishes to realise the extent to which this practice of subdivision could be carried by an eminent and successful preacher, let him turn to the posthumous sermons of Boston of Ettrick.8 Thus, in a sermon on ‘Fear and Hope, objects of the Divine Complacency,’ from the text, Psalms cxlvii. 11, this famous divine, after an introduction in four sections, deduced six doctrines, each subdivided into from three to eight heads; but the last doctrine required another sermon, which contained ‘a practical improvement of the whole,’ arranged under 86 heads. A sermon on Matthew xi. 28 was subdivided into 76 heads. If it is not quite easy to follow the printed sermon through this maze of sub-division, it must have been much more difficult to do so in the spoken discourse. All the enthusiasm and fire of the preacher must have been needed to rivet the attention and affect the hearts of his congregation. It is still usual to treat the subject of a text under different heads, but happily their number has been reduced to more reasonable proportions.