Page:The sermons of the Curé of Ars - Vianney, tr. Morrissy - 1960.djvu/14

 of a sermon and once it was all down on paper he set about learning it by heart, thirty or forty pages of it covered with his spidery, unformed handwriting, with never a paragraph and hardly a margin. His memory had always been poor. ‘When he thought that he had mastered his sermon he would try it over in the churchyard out aloud late on Saturday night and more than once, to his embarrassment, passers-by caught him in the act.

The congregation that at the beginning of his pastorate at Ars came to hear these sermons was scanty enough—a few old peasant women, the lady of the manor, perhaps a couple of men and some of the children. And the new parish priest made so much noise that they could not go to sleep while he preached. He shouted and declaimed. After the Gospel at the sung Mass on Sunday mornings, when he put off his chasuble and went up the rickety wooden steps to the pulpit, they knew that he would be there for a good hour, that they would be forced to listen and that they would hear nothing for their comfort.

Examples of these sermons of his early days at Ars are still extant. In later years, when he ceased to write them down beforehand and preached, not without preparation—his entire life was that—but without the set form that he at first adopted, the whole style was changed. In those first months as a parish priest he preached to his flock about the proper way to behave in church, about keeping Sunday holy and the purpose of his work in Ars as their priest which was, he told them, to lead them all to heaven. His instructions were moral rather than dogmatic; dancing, the frequentation of taverns, Sunday work, earned his severest reproofs.

There were occasions when he lost the thread of his sermons, stumbled over a phrase and, remembering no more, was obliged to leave the pulpit. After a short night, worn out with his efforts to learn it all by heart, chronically undernourished and still fasting at perhaps nearly eleven of a Sunday morning, he could hardly have expected it otherwise. There came a time when, caught in the pulpit and remembering nothing of his carefully