Ebook Five Minute Sermons, Volume I.

These short sermons were commenced in St. Paul's Church, New York, toward the close of the year 1876. The motive for doing this was that the great number of persons who generally attend only a Low Mass on Sundays might enjoy the advantage of hearing the word of God preached, without being delayed too long for their convenience. For this reason they were limited in time to five minutes, while the effort was made to condense within this brief compass a sufficient amount of matter at once instructive and hortatory, in plain and simple language, to answer the practical purposes of a popular discourse. In order to secure this twofold object of making the sermons so short that they would not overrun the limit of five minutes, and at the same time so solid and pungent that they would furnish a real nutriment and stimulus to the minds and hearts of the audience, it was obviously necessary that they should be carefully written out. For each priest to write and commit to memory his own sermon would be undertaking too much; and therefore the plan was adopted of assigning to one the task of writing all the sermons, to be read by each priest celebrating a Low Mass for the people. 

The sermons have been published every week in the Catholic Review, and an advanced sheet of the printed copy, pasted on a tablet, has been furnished, to be used in preaching the sermon at each one of the Low Masses on the Sunday. The utility of these sermons, the satisfaction they give to the people who hear them, and the advantage which can be derived by reading them after they have been published, are too obvious to need explanation. This advantage we hope to make more extensive by now publishing the greater part of the sermons which have been thus far preached, and printed in a weekly newspaper, in the more convenient and permanent form of a volume. It is hoped that they will be practically useful to many priests who may read them, or use them in preparing similar short sermons of their own for those occasions when it is not practicable to give longer and more elaborate discourses to their congregations. Many of them will be found, besides, to furnish a nucleus for the composition of sermons of the usual length and rhetorical completeness. To the faithful they afford matter for spiritual reading and profitable meditation which is all the better for being put into a brief and simple shape.