Post-Mediæval Preachers: Some Account of the Most Celebrated Preachers of the 15th, 16th, & 17th Centuries; with outlines of their sermons, and specimens of their styleBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
Post-Mediæval Preachers: Some Account of the Most Celebrated Preachers of the 15th, 16th, & 17th Centuries; with outlines of their sermons, and specimens of their style
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Preaching
Conclusion. Finally, let all keep in mind the awful sentence of
Him who cannot err: “Many are called, but few are chosen.” Let
each fear for himself, lest he be found among the number of the
called who have neglected the vocation; and let him strive by
all means in his power to be of the number of the chosen.
This sermon is followed by another on the same Gospel; the subject being,
the small number of the elect.
The analysis given will show how wholesome and practical were the
discourses of this truly pious and learned man.
JEAN RAULIN.
John Raulin, born at Toul in 1443, of noble and wealthy parents, was
educated at the Navarre College in Paris, and took honours in theology in
the year 1479.
In 1481 he was elected President in the place of William de Châteaufort,
and he filled the position with the utmost probity, and ruled with
singular discretion.
In 1497 he resigned the mastership and retired to Cluni, where he lived a
life of great sanctity.
In 1501 he obtained a commission from Cardinal Ambassiani to introduce
a reform into the Benedictine Order. He died at Paris in the Cluniac
monastery, on February 6th, 1514, aged seventy-one.
Raulin was a man of considerable piety, of blameless life, and of the
utmost integrity. He seems to have been regarded in his day as a great
preacher, and his sermons have been several times republished. Those for
Advent have passed through six editions, and those for Lent through five.
Besides sermons, he wrote a “Doctrinale” on the triple death,—the
death of the body, the death in sin, and the last or eternal death. He
is also the author of a volume of letters and tracts on the reform of
the Cluniacs; also of “The Itinerary of Paradise,” “A Discourse on the
Reformation of the Clergy,” and a “Commentary on Aristotle’s Logic.”
He was a dry and methodical preacher, vehement in his denunciations of
the corruptions in Church and State, and ready unscrupulously to attack
all abuses in ecclesiastical discipline. His style is wholly devoid of
eloquence, and is precise and dull. His sermons are full of divisions and
subdivisions, which could never have fixed themselves in the minds of
his audience, and serve only to perplex his readers. They are wanting in
almost every particular which would make a sermon tolerable now-a-days;
and after a lengthened perusal, one rises from the volumes wondering
how there could have been found hearers to listen to such discourses,
or readers sufficiently numerous to necessitate a rapid succession of
editions.
As a representative man of a type common enough in the century which
produced him, he is valuable. For the age and the taste of his period, he
is grave; but he sometimes sinks almost as deep in buffoonery as Menot,
Meffreth, or Oliver Maillard.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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