Page:Post-Mediaeval Preachers.djvu/165

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JACQUES MARCHANT.




Although the subject of this notice was well known in his own day as an eloquent preacher, his sermons, with few exceptions, have not come to us in their original condition, and Marchant is known now chiefly as a dogmatic and moral theologian. His great work, the Hortus Pastorum, contains the notes of his sermons and catechetical instructions, as we know from his own account; and he published them in a compendious form, that they might serve the like purpose to other preachers. The Hortus Pastorum differs widely from the Dictionaries and Libraries of Predication, which issued from the press at the close of the Middle Ages; for they contained crude extracts from the Fathers and from Mediæval expositors of Holy Scripture, without any attempt being made at digesting them into a form ready for delivery, whereas each proposition of Marchant might be pronounced from the pulpit verbatim, and indeed possesses all the ring of a popular sermon.

Jacques Marchant flourished in the Low Countries at the beginning of the seventeenth century. He had the