Page:Post-Mediaeval Preachers.djvu/64

 # Of the nature of the Transfiguration.
 * 1) Why Moses and Elias appeared.
 * 2) Why they spoke of the passion.
 * 3) Why the cloud overshadowed the vision.
 * 4) Why the disciples were bidden to be silent respecting the vision.
 * 5) How the Father is well pleased in the Son.
 * 6) The order of events in the Transfiguration.

These sermons of Matthias Faber, and indeed most of the sermons of great preachers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are very simple in construction: The system of dividing into a great number of heads, and then subdividing, had been cast aside by the Catholic preachers at the Reformation, as unprofitable. But Protestant orators continued the baneful practice. It prevailed till lately in England, and is common still in Scotland. Dr. Neale remarks, “One would think, to read some of the essays written on the subject, that the construction of a sermon was like a law of the Medes and Persians. Look at Mr. Simeon’s one-and-twenty tedious volumes of ‘Horæ Homileticæ.’ The worthy man evidently considered this the greatest system of divinity which English theology had ever produced. And of what does it consist? of several thousand sermons treated exactly in the same ways, in obedience to precisely the same laws, and of much about the same length. Claude’s Essay had laid down certain rules, and Simeon’s Discourses were their exemplification. … The preacher opens with a short view of the circumstances under which the text was spoken. This is