I. The Period of the Apostles and Early Fathers. — Notwithstanding the brevity of its record, the New Testament is by no means silent as to the subject of preaching. The Gospels not only contain our Lord's Sermon on the Mount, but many fragments of the ad- dresses or sermons which he delivered to his disciples and the multitudes. The Acts of the Apostles report in brief several of the discourses of Peter and Paul, while the Epistles may be understood to be summaries of the discussions and instructions which the different apostles were accustomed to give in their discourses as preachers. The specimens of preaching contained in the New Testament are, in fact, more full and satisfac- tory than any found in ecclesiastical history for several centuries after the close of the sacred canon. Indeed, our chief mode of forming any judgment of the preach- ing of those early centuries is from the fruits following. Even Eusebius, who wrote in the early part of the 4th century, acknowledges himself indebted to tradition for all that he knew of those successors of the apostles who had " spread the seeds of salvation and of the heavenly kingdom throughout the world far and wide."
During most, if not all, of this period, pulpits were not in existence, and even churches, as separate religious edifices, were unknown, or, at most, only beginning to exist. Worshippers, instead of assembling in large numbers, met by twos and threes wherever they could escape the surveillance of persecutors. Such circum- stances would necessarily control, to no small extent, the form of address employed by Christian ministers and teachers for the propagation of the Gospel, making especially necessary personal address to individuals wherever a listener could be found. Moreover, as the New-Testament Scriptures only existed in fragmentary manuscripts, it would be necessary to employ a part of the time allotted to pastoral instruction in reciting and explaining such portions of them as were in the posses- sion of the several pastors and teachers.
The prevailing form of ministerial address during the period referred to must, therefore, have been that of ex- planation and exhortation; but of its efficiency in the best result of eloquence — namely, that of persuading men to abandon error and embrace the truth — the prog- ress of Christianity during that period of abounding pa- ganism is the best possible proof. The power of the early preachers of Christianity, like that of the apostles themselves, must have consisted chiefly in a straight- forward utterance of the truth — the direct witness of the Gospel and its appeal to the human heart. There is no reason to think that oratory was studied, or perhaps thought of; but the influence of Christian truth and life was in plain words brought to bear upon the thoughts and lives of others, as well as upon the errors and super- stitions of heathenism.
II. The Period of the Later Fathers, or the Oratorical Period of the Ancient Church. — During and following the age of Constantine, Christian churches became com- mon, and the canon of Scripture having been completed, copies were multiplied by transcription. But as manu- scripts were costly, they could rarely be possessed by in- dividuals, not always even by churches; hence a great part of the work of preachers was to expound consecu- tively portions of the sacred text. Thus homilies or fa- miliar expositions of Scripture became the form of pul- pit address which primarily characterized that period. Voluminous and valuable examples have come down to us in the homilies of Athanasius, Ephraem Syrus, Basil, the Gregories, the Cyrils, Hilary, Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Augustine.
The same period was also marked by the cultivation, among the more prominent preachers, of the Grecian style of oratory. Several of the most distinguished fathers having not only been students, but teachers of rhetoric, they did not neglect opportunities offered them for sacred orations and panegyrics. The latter style of address, in fact, became very common in commemoration of the martyrs and in celebrations of the great feasts of the Church.
The best specimens of the Christian oratory of this period have been much eulogized, and having been of- ten pointed out as models for study and imitation, have exerted no little influence on the preaching of modern times, more particularly in France and on the continent of Europe. Even the historian Gibbon, in a paragraph which severely, but not without justice, censures certain serious errors into which many of the teachers of the Church had already fallen, says, " But the compositions of Gregory and Chrysostom have been compared with the most splendid models of Attic, or at least of Asiatic, eloquence."
That the mistakes of the preachers of the ancient Church came largely from ignorance, and that the ten- dency of education and enlightenment was to increase the influence of truth and the power of the pulpit, is sufficiently evident from the edict of the apostate em- peror Julian, which prohibited the Christians from teach- ing or being taught the arts of grammar and rhetoric. The motives which prompted the edict are thus set forth by Gibbon: "Julian had reason to expect that (under the influence of his edict) in the space of a few years the Church would relapse into its primeval simplicity, and that the theologians who possessed an adequate share of the learning and eloquence of the age would be succeeded by a generation of blind and ignorant fanat- ics incapable of defending the truth of their own princi- ples or of exposing the various follies of polytheism." Notwithstanding the early death of Julian and the res- toration of the civil rights of the Christians, yet, through a series of untoward events, to which prevailing corrup- tion in the Church greatly contributed, the evils of gen- eral ignorance and the degradation of preaching and of the clergy came only too soon and remained too long. From the first development of ceremonialism in the Church there was manifested a tendency to limit preach- ing to bishops only. This tendency grew with the mul- tiplication of ceremonial observances, until it resulted in a general transposition of preaching from its primary design as an ever-active agency of evangelization into a ceremony itself, in which it was shorn even of its ora- torical power. When the number of preachers was re- duced to a minimum, the chances for the development of the talent of eloquence were correspondingly dimin- ished, and the more so since an election to the office of bishop would do little towards conferring the gift of elo- quence upon men previously unaccustomed to preach. Thus it may be seen that what has been called the ora- torical period of the ancient Church derived that char- acter from a comparatively few men of extraordinary ability, rather than from the general prevalence of preaching power among the clergy. Moreover, the lat- ter part of that period witnessed a serious decline in the spirit and practice of preaching, which was destined to project itself forward into centuries following.