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
