Page:Sermons by John-Baptist Massillon.djvu/25

 these tender repetitions, but we feel obliged to him for the motive which has multiplied them: we are convinced that they proceed from one who delights in the love of his fellow-creatures, and whose overflowing sensibility requires room for expansion.

It is surprising that the French clergy, who possessed so eminent an orator, should not once have nominated him to preach in their assemblies. He never desired this honour, but left to moderate capacities and ambitious tempers a petty glory of which he had no need. He was even rarely chosen a member of the Assembly; and readily consented, as he said, that prelates less attached than himself to residence should have recourse to this decent excuse for intermitting it. The marked indifference which his episcopal brethren seemed to display toward him was neither intentional, on their parts, nor even voluntary : it was the obscure work of some men in place, who, from motives worthy of them, secretly kept Massillon out of the view of the court, not as an intriguer, for they knew him too well to believe him one, but as an illustrious and a respected prelate, whose superiority, viewed too near, might have shone with a lustre which powerful men of inferior capacity can never bear. But what a loss to such an auditory was a preacher such as Massillon ! What could be a more interesting topic than to address the assembled princes of the church on the august duties imposed on them by their dignity; on the great examples expected from them by a whole people; on the right they may acquire, from the sanctity of their character and of their lives, to speak the truth to kings, and to lay at the foot of the throne the complaint of the innocent and the oppressed ? Could it be thought that Massillon was unworthy to treat so grand a subject, or was it rather feared that he would treat it with too much eloquence ?

This great orator, either before or after becoming a bishop, pronounced some funeral orations, the merit of which was eclipsed by that of his sermons. If he had not that flexibility which proclaims the truth with harshness, he had that candour which does not permit to disguise it. Even through the praises which in these discourses he grants to decorum, or perhaps to truth, the secret judgment of his own heart concerning the persons whom it was his office to celebrate, escapes from his natural frankness, and swims on the surface, as it were, in hair of himself; and it is apparent, on reading them, that there are some of his heroes whose history he would rather have composed than their eulogy.

Once alone, a failure of memory happened to him on preaching. Deceived by the mortification this slight accident caused him, he thought it would be much better to read than to repeat his sermons. We venture to differ from him in this point. Reading forces an orator either to renounce that free action which is the soul of the pulpit, or to render it ridiculous by an air of preparation and exaggeration which destroys its nature and truth. Massillon seems himself to have been sensible that the greatest merit in an oratorical discourse, with regard to effect, is, that it should appear produced on the spot, without any trace of premeditation; for,