129 - Henry Smith: England's Silver-Tongued Preacher

Henry Smith:
England's Silver-Tongued Preacher
By Ronald B. Jenkins
Macon, Mercer University Press, 1983. 131 pp. $10.95.

"Golden-mouthed," "Golden-worded," "Silver-tongued"-such epithets were once applied to preachers of the Word of God, In the case of the first two they became permanent parts of the names, as in St. John Chrysostom and St. Peter Chrysologus, both bishops, both canonized, and both "doctors of the Church." When we come to Henry Smith in later times, the epithet has remained just that--"Silver-tongued Smith" or "Smith, the silver-tongued preacher." But, then, Smith, as an Anglican and Puritan divine, a licensed preacher rather than a holder of a cure, was never really eligible for bishopric, canonization, or the status of doctor ecclesiae. But he was certainly eligible for an independent biographical-critical study, though it has taken almost four-hundred years for one to appear. Henry Smith: England's Silver-Tongued Preacher, will probably remain the only such study for a long time to come. It is a serviceable piece of work, if not itself exactly silver-tongued.

Smith has not remained completely unknown to scholarship and history, having gained the notice of Anthony á Wood and Thomas Fuller in the seventeenth century and that of Thomson Cooper in the nineteenth, and various others in between. Cooper's two-page entry in the Dictionary of National Biography has long been the most accessible account of Smith's life and talents. The work of all these predecessors, along with other notices and information from antiquarian sources, provided Jenkins with the material for his presentation of Smith's biography. Even so, all the known information gathered together allows Jenkins only a sixteen-page chapter's worth of biographical description. Brief as it is, it will now stand as the fullest statement in a single place of what is known of the life of the silver-tongued preacher.

His life can be briefly summarized. Smith was born about 1560, studied at both Cambridge and Oxford, became a full-time and eventually very popular licensed preacher at St. Clement Danes in the Strand, where his eloquence was used in the service of a moderate Puritan doctrinal approach to preaching. This meant a strong emphasis upon the

130 - Henry Smith: England's Silver-Tongued Preacher

biblical word and on the necessity of each individual soul to seek his own salvation. Smith flourished only briefly, retiring from public preaching in 1589 because of ill health. He died between 1591 and 1613 according to various seventeenth-century accounts.

Rather more was available for Jenkins' examination of Smith's sermons. These were widely published in Smith's lifetime and into the early seventeenth century, sometimes in pirated form from poor shorthand notes or "Characterie," but often enough under Smith's own supervision. Individual sermons have been periodically reprinted, but the most recent collection of all the known surviving sermons dates from the mid-nineteenth century and from the hand, again, of Thomson Cooper. One twentieth-century dissertation reprints four of Smith's sermons.

It is on the sermons that Smith's claim to our attention must rest. Accordingly, Jenkins devotes most of his monograph to a consideration of the state of Elizabethan preaching and to an examination of Smith's sermons themselves. While much here will be broadly informative, not a great deal will strike the reader as new, profound, or searching. Jenkins does a good job of categorizing the areas of Smith's preaching concerns and a good job of summarizing the kind of rhetorical organizations and devices Smith employed in his sermons. Much of this discussion is, like the biographical, an assembling by Jenkins of the work of other scholars. There is little in the way of original analysis by Jenkins himself; but he does bring collectively to bear the useful insights of twentieth-century scholar-critics like J. K. Blench, T. K. Ehret, Alan F. Herr, and John Livesay who have worked with Smith's sermons.

If the reader still wonders at the end of this study why the term "silver-tongued" was used so widely for Smith, the fault may lie not so much with Jenkins or with the critics he relies upon so heavily, as with the inherent impossibility of preserving in writing a quality so intangible as eloquence. Smith's words are effective enough, but they do not, in the reading, grip the reader as Smith was said to do from the pulpit. Nor do Jenkins' explications quite supply the deficiency. The missing quality must be what Smith brought to his delivery over and above the words themselves. Though the words of Silver-tongued Smith remain with us on the page-and well-turned, forceful, sometimes moving words they are-still much of the silver has gone out of them. It is a reflection that might have prompted Smith himself to a good sermon. He would surely have found an appropriate biblical passage on which to base it. My suggestion would not be anything quite so harsh as Isaiah's "thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water," but perhaps instead from the Psalms: "The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times." Smith would have used that passage to argue that all preaching should be directed to God's word.

G. B. Tennyson
University of California
Los Angeles, California