Page:The sermons of the Curé of Ars - Vianney, tr. Morrissy - 1960.djvu/15

 prepared discourse, he began to improvise and in doing so found himself as a preacher.

The complete written sermons of the Curé d’Ars number eighty-five; taken as a whole they are extremely revealing on the subject of the preacher. This point can hardly be explored here for a whole biography would be needed for the purpose. What is more to the point in our present context is to examine the sources laid under contribution by the Curé d’Ars and the extent of his indebtedness to them.

A careful textual examination of the Curé’s sermons reveals the use that he made of other sources. He had a few sermon manuals, nearly all of which he acquired before 1830. Some few sermons are copied out almost verbatim from Bonnardel’s “familiar instructions,” others come from Msgr. Joly’s “Prones,” but here the Curé was more discriminating. He was prepared to follow his author into the high-flown oratory (that, one may imagine, came strangely from the lips of this simple country parish priest), but when Msgr. Joly became involved in learned and intricate theological discussion there his follower abandoned him not, as a rule, to write something of his own but to seek in another, more homely source (possibly the missionary sermons of Lajeune or Cochin’s book) the application and explanation of the point that he was trying to make.

Rodriguez’ book figures among those at Ars but it does not seem to have been used as a source save for anecdotes (those who are familiar with this classic on Christian perfection will remember that it is crammed with them, and they read strangely to modern ears). It has been said that the sermon on humility came from the Curé’s mastery of Rodriguez’ treatment of that subject, but we now know that this sermon came from another source.

It is interesting to notice that if the Curé d’Ars was indebted to Bonnardel the good canon himself was not above doing a little copying: he took the Sunday sermons of one Reguis (the book figures in the library at Ars) of something like half a century earlier and endowing them with a trifle more concision