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This treatise is not a sermon in the ordinary acceptation of the term. It was not preached, but, according to the Latin usage of the word "sermo," was rather "a discourse," "a discussion," "a disputation" concerning baptism. Even in popular usage, the term "sermon" implies careful preparation and the orderly arrangement of thought.
'Et nos etiam Sermoni atque Rationi, itemque Virtuti, per quæ omnia molitum Deum ediximus, propriam substantiam Spiritum inscribimus; cui et Sermo insit prænuntianti, et Ratio adsit disponenti, et Virtus perficienti. Hunc ex Deo prolatum didicimus, et prolatione generatum, et idcirco Filium Dei et Deum dictum ex unitate substantiæ'. Tertull. Apol. c. 21.
The hero of the story uses the ordinary Latin speech of educated persons, though, from the nature of the work, the style is much more colloquial than that of the formal prose used for serious writing. But the conversation of many of the characters is in the plebeius sermo, the actual speech of the lower orders, of which so little survives in literature.
But Origen’s remark, that Celsus may have outlived the reign of Hadrian, has been overlooked. At any rate Origen speaks of the Sermo Verus as a work long known, and as he did not die until the year 253 A.D., in his time the work of Celsus would have been recognised as of considerable age, even if written after the year 155.
But in this absorption of the world into a single citizenship, the city itself was ceasing to be a world of its own; and with the self-centred urbs passed away the urbanus sermo, that austere and noble language which was the finest flower of her civilisation.
Est in manibus laudatio, quam cum legimus, quem philosophum non contemnimus? Nec vero ille in luce modo atque in oculis civium magnus, sed intus domique praestantior. Qui sermo, quae praecepta! Quanta notitia antiquitatis, scientia iuris auguri! Multae etiam, ut in homine Romano, litterae: omnia memoria tenebat non domestica solum, sed etiam externa bella.
But even after his imagination had become conscious of its prerogative, and his expression had been ennobled by frequenting this higher society, we find him continually dropping back into that sermo pedestris which seems, on the whole, to have been his more natural element.
He reaches the very ideal of that elegant wandering art of writing which the Latins called sermo pedestris. Indeed, he gives so much attention to the perfect mode of saying things that some critics have brought it as a charge against him that he overdoes it, that in fact his style is more weighty than his subject.
Proximi Gallis et similes sunt; seu durante originis vi, seu procurrentibus in diversa terris, positio coeli corporibus habitum dedit. In universum tamen aestimanti, Gallos vicinum solum occupasse, credibile est; eorum sacra deprehendas, superstitionum persuasione; sermo haud multum diversus."
Me vero et magisteria delectant a maioribus instituta et is sermo, qui more maiorum a summo adhibetur in poculo, et pocula sicut in Symposio Xenophontis est, minuta atque rorantia, et refrigeratio aestate et vicissim aut sol aut ignis hibernus.
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