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.

The merit of devising and first carrying into execution this excellent plan of preaching the Five-Minute Sermons at Low Mass belongs to the late Rev. Algernon A. Brown, C.S.P. It is quite proper to praise the works of one who has departed this life, even though he was one of our own society. Many of the sermons written by Father Brown and contained in the present volume are masterpieces in the art of miniature discourse. They are not fragments or sections of sermons, reading like pages taken from longer discourses or meditations, but genuine sermonettes, each one complete and perfect in itself. They are marked, also, by a grave and solemn earnestness remarkable in the utterances of so very young a priest, and seeming to be like a shadow from a very near proximity to the eternal world, cast over his spirit as he rapidly drew near to the goal of his appointed course. It will surely be deemed appropriate, and prove agreeable to the readers of this volume of sermons, that a few lines should be consecrated to the memory of the one who may justly be called its author, although the greater portion of its actual contents came from others who succeeded to him in the task from which he was called away at so early a period of his sacerdotal life.

Father Algernon Brown, the son of a respectable physician who is still living and resides in the Isle of Wight, was born at Cobham, Surrey, England, May 30, 1848. He was bred in the Established Church of England, and during his early youth was educated at a ritualistic school in Brighton. His tastes and predilections were ecclesiastical, and he entered warmly into the study and practice of the doctrinal, moral, and liturgical views and ways of the Anglican ritualists. At the age of eighteen he was received into the Catholic Church by Father Knox, of the Oratory, and went first to St. Edmund's College, afterwards to Prior Park, in order to prepare himself for the priesthood.

After nearly completing his course, and having already received minor orders, he came in 1871, with two younger brothers, both converts, and one of the two an ecclesiastical student, to the United States, and was ordained priest by the Most Rev. Archbishop Purcell in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, May 25, 1872.

In the year 1874 he was received as a member of the Congregation of Paulists after a year's novitiate. During the four years which elapsed between this period and that of his death Father Brown suffered continually, and often severely, from ill health, yet nevertheless continued to labor bravely and cheerfully, beyond his strength, until he was actually overpowered by fatal disease. His special department of work lay in the direction of the sacristy and of the ceremonies at the public offices of divine worship, and the management of the devout confraternities established in the parish. His accurate knowledge of the rubrics, ceremonial, and sacred chant, his ardent zeal for the order and decorum of the divine service, and his untiring assiduity in the work assigned him, were equally valuable to the religious community of which he was a member, and edifying to the people.

After the Easter of 1877 his failing health obliged him to make a visit to his native England and his paternal home as the last hope of prolonging his life. In the following autumn he returned, enjoying a considerable but only temporary amelioration in his physical condition, which soon after began to grow sensibly worse. On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception he attempted for the last time by a heroic effort to say Mass, but was prevented by a fainting-fit which prostrated him at the foot of the altar as he was commencing the Introit. From this day forward he was slowly dying, until at last, after long and careful preparation, he closed his eyes peacefully under the icy hand of death. His death occurred on Monday in Passion Week, the 8th of April, 1878, at the age of twenty-nine years and eleven months, and his solemn obsequies were celebrated on the following Wednesday. All the sermons in this volume which can be identified with certainty as his are marked with his initial letter, B. May they long remain unfaded, a bouquet of immortelles.

[Transcribers's note: His full name has been substituted for "B" and a "B" has been inserted in the Table of Contents entry.]

In MEMORIAM!
St. Paul's Church,
Ninth Avenue And Fifty-ninth Street, New York.
Feast of All Saints, 1879.

Five Minute Sermons
Volume 1.