SERMON • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Sermon

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/sˈərmən/ Listen

noun

Sermon n.

A discourse or address; a talk; a writing; as, the sermons of Chaucer. (Obs.)

Specifically, a discourse delivered in public, usually by a clergyman, for the purpose of religious instruction and grounded on some text or passage of Scripture. "This our life exempt from public haunts Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones and good in everything." "His preaching much, but more his practice, wrought, A living sermon of the truths he taught."

Hence, a serious address; a lecture on one's conduct or duty; an exhortation or reproof; a homily; often in a depreciatory sense.

verb

Sermon v. t.

To discourse to or of, as in a sermon. (Obs.)

To tutor; to lecture. (Poetic)

Sermon v. i. To speak; to discourse; to compose or deliver a sermon. (Obs.) "What needeth it to sermon of it more?"

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Etymology of 'Sermon'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Sermon" Quotes from Famous Books

... Southey says, "authenticates itself," that one day when he had preached "with peculiar warmth and enlargement," one of his hearers remarked "what a sweet sermon he had delivered." "Ay," was Bunyan's reply, "you have no need to tell me that, for the devil whispered it to me before I was well out of the pulpit." As an evidence of the estimation in which Bunyan was held by the highly-educated, it ...

— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables

... and expounds them in detail, I can't stand; nor the wooden logical machine that makes a proposition and proceeds to prove it; nor the unctuous fellow that rambles about, and says, 'dear friends,' and makes you wish he had studied his sermon. But, now and then, I fall in with a man who won't let me do any private thinking till he's done. You hear his text and his introduction, and wonder, how the dickens he is going to reconcile the two. He carries you on and on and on, till he does it in a grand whirl at ...

— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell

... up fly-fishing; it is a light, volatile, dissipated pursuit. But ground-bait with a good steady float that never bobs without a bite is an occupation for a bishop, and in no way interferes with sermon-making.—Sydney Smith. ...

— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... each Sermon, a Short Prayer, with some General Prayers for Families, Schools. &c., at the ...

— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman

... wondrously delicate carvings and flying buttresses, on which the moonlight glittered like little points of pale flame. He knew it of old; many and many a time had he taken train from Bonn, for the sole pleasure of spending an hour in gazing on that splendid "sermon in stone,"—one of the grandest testimonies in the world of man's instinctive desire to acknowledge and honor, by his noblest design and work, the unseen but felt majesty of the Creator. He had a great longing to enter it now, and ascended the steps with that ...

— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

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