The Making of the Sermon

Am to speak to you to-day about the making of a sermon, and if you compare their titles you will see in what relation this lecture and the last stand to each other, for the make of a sermon must always be completely dependent upon the idea of a sermon. The idea is perfectly supreme. It is the formative power to which all accidents must bow. If any rule of the composition or form contradicts the idea, it is rebellious and must be sacrificed without a scruple. I have heard sermons where it was evident that some upstart rule of form was in rebellion against the essential idea and the idea was not strong enough to put the rebellion down, and the result was that the sermon, like a country in the tumult of rebellion, had neither peace nor power. What I say to-day then is in subordination to what I said before. Any law of execution which I may lay down that is inconsistent with the idea and purpose of preaching is an intruder ind must be thrust aside.

The elements which determine the make of any particular sermon are three, the preacher, the material, and the audience; just as the character of any battle is determined by three elements, the gun (including the gunner), the ammunition, and the fortress against which the attack is make. The reason why a sermon preached last Sunday in the Church of St. John Lateran at Rome differed from the sermon preached in the First Congregational Church of New Haven must have been partly that the preacher was a different sort of man, partly that the truth which he wanted to preach was different, partly that the man he wished to touch and influence was different, at least in his conception. Make these three elements exactly alike, and all sermons must be perfectly identical. It is because these three elements are never exactly the same, and yet there always is a true resemblance, that we have all sermons unlike one another and yet a certain similarity running through them all. No two men are precisely similar, or think of truth alike, or see the men to whom they speak in the same light. Consequently the make of every man’s sermons must be different from the make of every other man’s. Nay, we may carry this farther. No live man at any one moment is just the same as himself at any other moment, nor does he see truth always alike, nor do men always look to him the same; and therefore in his sermons there must be the same general identity combined with perpetual variety which there is in his life. His sermons will be all like and yet unlike each other. And the making of every sermon, while it may follow the same general rules, will be a fresh and vital process, with the zest and freedom of novelty about it. This is the first thing that I wish to say. Establish this truth in your minds and then independence comes. Then you can stand in the right attitude to look at rules of sermon making which come out of other men’s experience. You can take them as helpful friends and not as arrogant masters. I wish that not merely in sermon writing but in all of life we could all come to understand that independence and the refusal to imitate and repeat other people’s lives may come from true modesty as well as from pride. To be independent of man’s dictation is simply to declare that we must live the special life which God has marked out for us and which he has indicated in the special powers which we discover in ourselves. We are fit for no other life. There can be nothing more modest than that. It is not pride when the beech-tree re- i fuses to copy the oak. He knows his limitations. The only chance of any healthy life for him is to be as full a beech-tree as he can. Apply all that, and out of sheer modesty refuse to try to be any kind of preacher which God did not make you to be.

The lack of flexibility in the preacher, resulting in the lack of variety in the sermon, has very much to do with our imperfect education. The true result of 10 education is to develop in the individual that of which I have been speaking, the clear consciousness of identity together with a wide range of variety. The really educated man will be always distinctly himself, and yet never precisely the same that he was at any other moment. His personality will be trained both in the persistency of its central stock and in its susceptibility and responsiveness to manifold impressions. He will have at once a stronger stand and a wider play of character. But an uneducated man will be either monotonously and doggedly the same, or else full of fickle alteration. The defects of our education are seen in the way in which it sometimes produces the narrow and obstinate specialist, sometimes the vague and feeble amateur in many works, but not often the strong man who has at once clear individuality and wide range of sympathy and action, This is the kind of man that the preacher above all ought to be. Education alone, thorough education, nothing but true, wise, devoted study can make him so. Education alone gives a man at once a good stand and a good outlook. It is the Frenchman’s rule for fencing, “Bon pied, bon ceil,” a good foot and a good eye. As I begin to speak to you about literary style and homiletical construction, I cannot help once more urging upon you the need of hard and manly study; not simply the study of language and style itself, but study in its broader sense, the study of truth, of history, of philosophy; for no man can have a richly stored mind without its influencing the style in which he writes and speaks, making it at once thoroughly his own, and yet giving it variety and saving it from monotony. I suppose the power of an uneducated man like Mr. Moody is doing something to discredit the necessity of study among ministers and to tempt men to rely upon spontaneousness and inspiration. I .honor Mr. Moody, and rejoice in much of the work that he is doing, but if his success had really this effect it would be a very serious deduction from its value. When you see such a man, you are to consider both his exceptionalness and his limitations. In some respects he is a very remarkable and unusual man, and therefore not a man out of whom ordinary men can make a rule. And his work, valuable as it is, stops short at a clear line. He leaves undone what nothing but an educated ministry can do, and he who is most filled with thankfulness and admiration at that man’s career ought to go the more earnestly to his books to try to be such a preacher as can help fulfil the work which the great revivalist begins.

Every preacher’s sermon style then ought to be his own; that is the first principle of sermon making. “The style is the man,” said Buffon. Only we must remember that the man is not something invariable. He is capable of improvement. He is something different when he is filled with knowledge and affection and enthusiasm, from what he was in his first emptiness. The practical conclusion then that will come from our first principle will not be simply that every preacher is to accept himself just as he finds himself, and hope for nothing better; but rather this, that style is capable of indefinite cultivation, only that its main cultivation must come through the cultivation of the man; not by mere critical discipline of language, which at the best can only produce correctness, but by lifting the whole man to a more generous and exalted life, which is the only thing that can make a style truly noble. I think, indeed, that the question, as to wherein lies the power of a sermon style, corresponds very largely with the question about the inspiration of the Scriptures. Various ideas have prevailed about the point in which was lodged that quality of the Bible which makes us separate it from other books and talk about it as inspired. One idea of inspiration puts it in the language, and supposes each word to be a dictation of the Holy Ghost. Another idea puts it in the writer and supposes, with a profounder philosophy, that the power of exalted and truthful utterance was a truthful and exalted soul. Another idea puts it in the material. The history itself was full of God, and when men wrote that God-filled history their writings were different from other men’s, more full of the divine atmosphere, because of the strange divine character of the things they wrote about. And so the sermon comes forth peculiar. Wherein does its peculiarity reside? Is it that a certain language, certain forms of speech, belong there which do not belong to other literature? Is it that the sermon writer is in a condition and an attitude that no other man ever quite assumes? Is it that the subjects with which the sermon deals are more solemn, and more touching, more divine than any others? No doubt all three ideas are true in their degrees, but no doubt, also, he who looks to the deepest truth in the matter will get the deeper power. He who aspires to the strength of truth and character will be a stronger man than he who tries to prevail by the finish and completeness of his language.

The history of a particular sermon begins with the selection of a topic. Ordinarily, except in purely expository preaching, that comes before the selection of a text. And the ease and readiness of this selection depends upon the richness of a man’s own life, and the naturalness of his conception of a sermon. I can conceive of but two things which should cause the preacher any difficulty in regard to the abundance of subjects for his preaching. The first is a sterility of his own mind; the second is a stilted and unnatural idea of what the sermon he is going to write must be. Let the man’s own mind be everywhere else except upon the things of God, let his own spiritual life be meagre and unsuggestive, let him feel no developing power in his own experience, and I can see him sitting in despair, or hurrying hither and thither in distraction, as the day approaches when he must talk of something, and he has nothing of which to talk. Or let him once get the idea that every sermon, or that any particular sermon, is to be a great sermon, a “pulpit-effort,” as the dreadful epithet runs, and again he is all lost. Which of these quiet, simple, practical themes that offer themselves is suitable to bear the aspirations and contortions of his eloquence? The first of the difficulties I say no more about, only because I seem to have talked to you of nothing else than the way in which there must be a man behind every sermon, though, indeed, I do think that the most important, I had almost said the only important thing in this matter of learning to preach. But I say no more of that just now. This other matter let me dwell on for a moment. The notion of a great sermon, either constantly or occasionally haunting the preacher, is fatal. It hampers, as I said, the freedom of utterance. Many a true and helpful word which your people need, and which you ought to say to them, will seem unworthy of the dignity of your great discourse. Some poor exhorter coming along the next week, and saying it, will sweep the last recollection of your selfish achievement out of the minds of people. Never tolerate any idea of the dignity of a sermon which will keep you from saying anything in it which you ought to say, or which your people ought to hear. It is the same folly as making your chair so fine that you dare not sit down in it. There will come great, or at least greater sermons in every live minister’s career, sermons which will stand out for vigor and beauty, distinctly above his ordinary work, but they will come without deliberation, the flowers of his ministry, the offspring of moments which found his powers at their best activity and him most regardless of effect. It is good and encouraging, it helps one’s faith in human nature, and it has an influence to keep us from the pulpit’s besetting follies, when we see how universally the deliberate attempt to make great sermons fails. They never have the influence, and they very seldom win the praise that they desire. The sermons of which nobody speaks, the sermons which come from mind and heart, and go to heart and mind with as little consciousness as possible of tongue and ear, those are the sermons that do the work, that make men better men, and really sink into their affections. They are like the perfect days when no man says, “How fine it is;” but when every man does his best work and feels most fully what a blessed thing it is to live.

I think, too, that this wrong notion about sermons has led to a great deal of the bad talk which is running about now among both clergymen and laymen about the excessive amount of preaching. “How is it possible,” they say, “that any man should bring forth two strong, good sermons every week? It is impossible. Let us have only one sermon every Sunday; and if the people will insist on coming twice to the church, let us cheat them with a little poor music and a ’ few remarks,’ and call it 4 vesper service,’ or let us tell a few stories to the Sunday-school, and call it ’ children’s church; ’ but let us not preach twice to men and women. It is impossible.” It is impossible, if by a sermon you intend a finished oration. It is as impossible to produce that twice, as it is undesirable to produce it once a week. But that a man who lives with God, whose delight is to study God’s words in the Bible, in the world, in history, in human nature, who is thinking about Christ, and man, and salvation every day, that he should not be able to talk about these things of his heart, seriously, lovingly, thoughtfully, simply, for two half hours every week, is inconceivable, and I do not believe it. Cast off the haunting incubus of the notion of great sermons. Care not for your sermon, but for your truth, and for your people; and subjects will spring up on every side of you, and the chances to preach upon them will be all too few. I beg you not to fall into this foolish talk about too much preaching. It is not for us ministers to say that there is no need of more than one discourse a day. If you have anything to Bay, and say it bravely and simply, men will come to hear you. If you will preach as faithfully and thoughtfully at the second service as at the first, the second service will not be deserted. At any rate, it is our place to stand by our pulpits till men have deserted us, and not, for the sake of saving our own credit, to shut the church doors while they are still ready to come and hear.

But to return more closely to our subject; having settled in general what topics may be preached upon, how shall the topic for a single sermon, the sermon for next Sunday, be selected? I answer that there are three principles which have a right to enter into the decision. They are the bent of the preacher’s inclination, the symmetry and “scale” of all his preaching, and the peculiar needs of his people. I mention the three in the order in which they are apt to present themselves to the minister as he makes his choice. Reverse that order, begin with the last, and you have the elements of a right choice rightly arranged. First comes the sympathetic and wise perception of what the people need; not necessarily what they consciously want, though, remember, no more necessarily what they do not want. This perception is not the sudden result of an impression that has come from some lively conversation which has sprung up on a parish visit, not the desire to confute the cavil of some single captious disputant; it is the aggregate effect of a large sympathetic intercourse; the fruit of a true knowledge of human nature, combined with a special knowledge of these special people, and a cordial interest in the circumstances under which they live. That evidently is no easy thing to win. It requires of a minister that timeliness and that breadth which it is very hard to find in union with each other. It is not something to be picked up in the easy intimacy of parochial visiting. It may be helped there, but it must be born of an alert mind, fully interested in the times in which it lives, and a devout soul really loving the souls with which it has to deal.

The second element of choice, the desire to preserve a symmetry and proportion in our preaching, of course comes in to modify the action of the first. Not merely by our present perception of what people need, but in relation to our whole scheme of teaching, to what has gone before and what is to come after, the subject of next Sunday is to be selected. I have suggested to you in another lecture how great a help the ancient calendar of the church year is in this respect. The prolonged and connected course of sermons is a safeguard against mere flightiness and partialness in the choice of topics. The only serious danger about a course of sermons is, that where the serpent grows too long it is difficult to have the vitality distributed through all his length, and even to his last extremity. Too many courses of sermons start with a very vital head, that draws behind it by and by a very lifeless tail. The head springs and the tail crawls, and so the beast makes no graceful progress. I think that a set and formally announced course of sermons very seldom preserves both its symmetry and its interest. The system of long courses is apt to secure proportion at too great an expense of spontaneity. The only sure means of securing the result is orderliness in the preacher’s mind; the grasp of Christian truth as a system, and of the Christian life as a steady movement of the whole nature through Christ to the Father.

Then comes the third principle by which the choice is regulated, the principle that a man can preach best about what he at that moment wishes to preach about, the element of the preacher’s own disposition. You can see why it should not be made the first element. I could tell you of pulpits which have sinned and failed by making it the first element. But you can see, also, why it must come in at least as the third element. It gives the freshness and joyousness and spring to the other two. You cannot think of a people listening with pleasure or vivacity to a sermon on a subject which they knew the minister thought they needed to hear about, and thought the time had come to preach about, but which they also knew that he did not care for, and did not want to preach upon.

The personal interest of the preacher is the buoyant air that fills the mass and lifts it.

These three considerations then settle the sermon’s topic. Evidently neither is sufficient by itself. The sermon preached only with reference to the people’s needs is heavy. The sermon preached for symmetry is formal. The sermon preached with sole reference to the preacher’s wish, is whimsical. The constant consideration of all three makes preaching always strong and always fresh. When all three urgently unite to settle the topic of some special sermon I do not see why we may not prepare that sermon in a solemn exhilaration, feeling sure that it is God’s will that we should preach upon that topic then; and, when it is written, go forth with it on Sunday to our pulpit, declaring, almost with the certainty of one of the old prophets, — u The Word of the Lord came unto me, saying.”

Let me add this, that the meeting of these various elements of choice is clearest when the selection is most deliberate. Always have the topic of your sermon in your mind as long as possible before you begin your preparation. Whatever else is hasty and extemporaneous, let it not be your decision as to what you will preach about.

The subject chosen, next will come the special preparation for the sermon. This ought to consist mostly in bringing together, and arranging, and illuminating, a knowledge of the subject and thought about it which has already been in the possession of the preacher. I think that the less of special preparation that is needed for a sermon, the better the sermon is. The best sermon would be that whose thoughts, though carefully arranged, and lighted up with every illustration that could make them clearer for this special appearance, were all old thoughts, familiar to the preacher’s mind, long a part of his experience. Here is suggested, as you see, a clear and important difference between two kinds of preachers. One preacher depends for his sermon on special reading. Each discourse is the result of work done in the week in which it has been written. All his study is with reference to some immediately pressing occasion. Another preacher studies and thinks with far more industry, is always gathering truth into his mind, but it is not gathered with reference to the next sermon. It is truth sought for truth’s sake, and for that largeness and ripeness and fullness of character which alone can make him a strong preacher. Which is the better method? The latter beyond all doubt. In the first place, the man of special preparations is always crude; he is always tempted to take up some half considered thought that strikes him in the hurry of his reading, and adopt it suddenly, and Bet it before his people, as if it were his true conviction. Many a minister’s old sermons are scattered all over with ideas which he never held, but which once held him for a week, like the camps in other men’s forests where a wandering hunter has slept for a single night. The looseness and falseness, the weakening of the essential sacredness of conviction which must come from years of such work, any one may see. And in the second place the immediate preparation for a sermon is something that the people always feel. They know the difference between a sermon that has been crammed, and a sermon which has been thought long before, and of which only the form, and the illustrations, and the special developments, and the application of the thought, are new. Some preachers are always preaching the last book which they have read, and their congregations always find it out. The feeling of superficialness and thinness attaches to all they do. The exegesis of a passage which the man never thought of till he began to preach about it may be clever and suggestive, but it inspires no confidence. I do not rest on it with even that amount of assurance which the same man’s careful study would inspire. It is got up for the occasion. It is like a politician’s opinions just before election. But the strongest reason for the rule which I am stating comes from the very nature of the sermon on which I have dwelt so much. The sermon is truth and man together; it is the truth brought through the man. The pertonal element is essential. Now the truth which the preacher has gathered on Friday for the sermon which he preaches on Sunday, has come across the man, but it has not come through the man. It has never been wrought into his experience. It comes weighted and winged with none of his personal life. If it is true, it is a book’s truth, not a man’s truth that we get. It does not make a full real sermon.

If I am right in this idea, then it will follow that the preacher’s life must be a life of large accumulation. He must not be always trying to make sermons, but always seeking truth and out of the truth which he has won the sermons will make themselves. I can remember how, before I began to preach, every book I read seemed to spring into a sermon. It seemed as if one could read nothing without sitting down instantly and turning it into a discourse. But as I began and went on preaching, the sermons that came of special books became less and less satisfactory and more and more rare. Some truth which one has long known, stirred to peculiar activity by something that has happened or by contact with some other mind, makes the best sermon; as the best dinner comes not from a hurried raid upon the caterer’s, but from the resources of a constantly well-furnished house. Constant quotations in sermons are, I think, a sign of the same crudeness. They show an undigested knowledge. They lose the power of personality. They daub the wall with un tempered mortar. Here is the need of broad and generous culture. Learn to study for the sake of truth, learn to think for the profit and the joy of thinking. Then your sermon shall be like the leaping of a fountain and not like the pumping of a pump.

For over six hundred years now it has been the almost unavailable custom of Christian preachers to take a text from Scripture and associate their thoughts more or less strictly with that. For the first twelve Christian centuries there seems to have been no such prevailing habit. This fact ought to be kept in mind whenever the custom of a text shows any tendency to become despotic or to restrain in any way the liberty of prophesying. At the present day there can be no doubt that the change in the way of considering the Bible which belongs to our times has had an influence upon our feeling with regard to texts and our treatment of them. The unity of the Bible, the relation of its parts, its organic life, the essentialness of every part and yet the distinct difference in worth and dignity of the several parts, these are now familiar ideas as they were not a few years ago. There was a time when to many people the Bible stood, not merely a collection of various books, all equally the Word of God, all equally useful to men, but also as a succession of verses, all true, all edifying, all vital with the Gospel. & page of the Bible torn out at random and blown into some savage island seemed to have in it some power of salvation. The result of such a feeling was, of course, to clothe the single text with independent sacredness and meaning. It hardly mattered from what part of the Bible it might come. Solomon’s Song and St. John’s Gospel were preached from as if they taught the same truth with the same authority. The cynical author of the Ecclesiastes was made to utter the same message as the hopeful and faithful St. Paul. This is not the place to re- -count the causes for the change, nor to estimate its value or its dangers. Considered simply as it has affected the preacher’s relation to the Bible I think there can be no doubt of the improvement it has brought. It has made the single text of less importance. It has led men to desire an entrance into the heart and spirit of the Bible. It has made biblical study to consist, not in the weighing of text against text, but in the estimating of great streams of tendency, the following of great lines of thought, the apprehension of the spirit of great spiritual thinkers who “had the mind of Christ.” The single verse is no longer like a jewel set in a wall which one mayj pluck out and carry off as an independent thing. It is a window by which we may look through the wall and see the richness it incloses. Taken out of its place it has no value. To enter thoroughly into the spirit of this new and better relation to the Bible seems to 11 me to be all that the preacher needs to guide him with reference to the selection and the use of texts. Make them always windows. Go up and look through them and then tell the people what you see. Keep them in their places in the wall of truth. I would not say that it is not good to use them, though certainly there may be true sermons without them. They are like golden nails to hold our preaching to the Bible. Whether the subject spring out of the text as stating the divine philosophy that underlies some Scripture incident, or the text spring out of the subject as describing some incident that illustrates divine philosophy, is unimportant. There are both kinds of sermons and both kinds are good. Only, as one rule that has no exceptions, let your use of texts be real. Never make them mean what they do not mean. In the name of taste and reverence alike, let there be no twists and puns, no dealing with the word of God as it would be insulting to deal with the word of any friend. The Bible has suffered in the hands of many Christian preachers what the block of wood which the savage chooses for his idol suffers from its worshipper. The same selection which consecrates it

as more sacred than other blocks of wood condemns it also to have all his ugly fancies and fantastic conceits painted and carved upon it. It is the most sacred and most hideous block of wood in the village. So the sacredness of the Bible has subjected it to a usage that no other book has received. Such a fantastic and irreverent way of manifesting our reverence has lasted too long. It is time that it were stopped. I beg you to do what you can to stop it. At least make your own use of the Bible reverent and true. Never draw out of a text a meaning which you know is not there. If your text has not your truth in it, find some other text which has. If you can find no text for it in the Bible, then preach on something else.

I pass on to a few remarks, which will be mere suggestions, about the style of sermons. The matter will control the style if it is free. The object of every training of style is to make it so simple and flexible an organ that through it the moving and changing thought can utter itself freely. I pity any man who writes the same upon all topics. He is evidently a slave to himself. To be yourself, yet not to be haunted by an image of yourself to which you are continually trying to correspond, that is the secret of a style at once characteristic and free. I go to hear a preacher whose style is peculiarly his own, and very often indeed I find him a slave to his own peculiarities. He must not’ think anything except what is capable of being said in a certain way. A true style is like a suit of the finest chain armor, so strong that the thought can go into battle with it, but so flexible that t can hold the pencil in its steel fingers for the most delicate painting. For the acquisition of such a style no labor is too great. I think that it is good for every minister to write something besides sermons, — - books, articles, essays, at least letters; provided he has control of himself and still remains the preacher, and does not become an amateur in literature instead. If he can do it rightly, it frees him from the tyranny of himself, and keeps him in contact with larger standards. Some of our noblest thinkers fail of effect for want of an organ of utterance, a free pulpit style. The trouble with them, often, is that they never wrote anything but sermons. Indeed I do not think there is any such thing as a sermon-style proper. He. who can write other things well, give him the soul and purpose and knowledge of a preacher and he will write you a good sermon. But he who cannot write anything well cannot write a sermon well, although we often think he can. To him who has no literary skill all subjects are alike. If you cannot swim, it matters not whether there be twenty or forty feet of water.

In a word then I should say, get facility of utterance where you can; in part at least, outside of sermon writing. Make your style characteristic and forcible by never writing unless you have something that you really want to say; then let the changes of your truth freely play within it and shape its special forms. A style which is really a man’s own will grow as long as he grows. One of the best things about Macaulay’s life is his belief that as a writer he was improving to the last. It belonged to that vitality of which the man and the writing were both so full.

The range of sermon writing gives it a capacity of various vices which no other kind of composition can presume to rival. The minister may sin in the same sermon by grandiloquence and meanness, by exaggeration and inadequacy. He needs a many sided watchfulness, or rather a perfectly true literary nature, in order that he may do what Roger Ascham so quaintly and tellingly sums up thus, “in Genere Sublimi to avoid Nimium, in Mediocri to atteyne Satis, in Humili to eschew Parum.” The way that advises he to do it is to study Cicero. Certainly, stated more generally, the true way is to know first what style is for, that it is an instrument and not an end, and then as an instrument to perfect it by every noble intimacy and laborious practice.

It would be impossible to speak of this matter of style without saying something of the danger of imitation and the way to guard against it. It is connected with that personalness of the work of preachng about which I have said so much. A successful preacher is not like a successful author. He stands out himself more prominently through his work. Men realize him more and feel in themselves the same powers by which he has succeeded. A mere finished result such as the author gives us in his book does not excite the desire of imitation like the sight of the process going on in personal action before us in the pulpit. This is the reason why those preachers whose power has in it the largest element of personality are the richest in imitators. There are some strong voices crying in the wilderness who fill the land with echoes. There are some preachers who have done noble work, of whom we are often compelled to question whether the work that they have accomplished is after all greater than the harm that they have innocently done by spoiling so many men in doing it. They have gone through the ministry, as a savage goes through the forest, blazing his way upon the trees that stand around him, so that you can tell as you travel through the land just where they have been by the tones of voice and the turns of sentences which they have left behind them. They leave their imitators behind them when they die, and in a sense which is not pleasant “being dead yet speak.” Often the circle of one man’s influence widens, growing feebler and feebler until it meets the wave that is spreading from another centre, another popular pulpit, and only there they obliterate each other and calmness is restored and freedom to be oneself is reasserted.

The dangers of imitation are two — one positive, the other negative. There is evil in what you get from him whom you imitate and there is a loss of your own peculiar power. The positive evil comes from the fact that that which is worst in any man is always the most copiable. And the spirit of the copyist is blind. He cannot discern the real seat of the power that he admires. He fixes on some little thing and repeats that perpetually as if so he could get the essential greatness of his hero. There is a passage in Macaulay’s diary which is full of philosophy. u I looked through,” he says. “He is, I see, an imitator of me. But I am a very unsafe model. My manner is, I think, and the world thinks, on the whole a good one, but it is very near to a very bad manner indeed, and those clear characteristics of my style which are the most easily copied are the most questionable.” All this is very true of ministers. There is hardly any good pulpit style among us which is not very near to a very bad style indeed, and the most prominent characteristics are very often the most questionable. The obtuseness of the imitator is amazing. I remember going years ago with an intelligent friend to hear a great orator lecture. The discourse was rich, thoughtful, glowing, and delightful. As we came away my companion seemed meditative. By and by he said “Did you see where his power lay? “I felt unable to analyze and epitomize in an instant such a complex result and meekly I said” No,

UJTI7SRSITfcv m B» ft. did you? “Yes,” he replied briskly, “I watched hira and it is in the double motion of his hand. When he wanted to solemnize and calm and subdue us he turned the palm of his hand down; when he wanted to elevate and inspire us he turned the palm of his hand up. That was it.” And that was all the man had seen in an eloquent speech. He was no fool, but he was an imitator. He was looking for a single secret for a multifarious effect. I suppose he has gone on from that day to this turning his hand upside down and downside up and wondering that nobody is either solemnized or inspired.

The negative evil of imitation, the loss of a man’s own personal power is even more evident and more melancholy. If it were only the men who were incapable of any manner of their own that caught up other people’s manners it would not be so bad, but often strong men do it. Men imitate others who are every way their inferiors and so some pretentious blockhead not merely gives us himself, but loses for us the simple and straightforward power of some better man, as a log of wood lodged just in the neck of the channel stops the water of a free, live stream.

I am convinced that the only escape from the power of imitation when it has once touched us — and remember it often touches us without our consciousness — you and I may be imitating other men to-day and not at all aware of it — lies in a deeper seriousness about all our work. What we need is a fuller sense of personal responsibility and a more real reverence for the men who are greater than we are. Give a man real personal sense of his own duty and he must do it in his own way. The temptation of imitation is so insidious that you cannot resist it by the mere determination that you will not imitate. You must bring a real self of your own to meet this intrusive self of another man that is crowding in upon you. Cultivate your own sense of duty. The only thing that keeps the ocean from flowing back into the river is that the river is always pouring down into the ocean. And again, if you really reverence a great man, if you look up to and rejoice in his good work, if you truly honor him, you will get at his spirit, and doing that you will cease to imitate his outside ways. You insult a man when you try to catch his power by moving your arms or shaping your sentences like his, but you honor him when you try to love truth and do God’s will the better for the love and faithfulness which you see in him. So that the release from the slavery of superficial imitation must come not by a supercilious contempt, but by a profounder reverence for men stronger and more successful than yourself.

With regard to the vexed question of written or unwritten sermons I have not very much to say. I think it is a question whose importance has been very much exaggerated, and the attempt to settle which with some invariable rule has been unwise, and probably has made stumbling speakers out of Borne men who might have been effective readers, or stupid readers out of men who might have spoken with force and fire. The different methods have their evident different advantages. In the written sermon the best part of the care is put in where it belongs, in the thought and construction of the discourse. There is deliberateness. There is the assurance of industry and the man’s best work. The truth comes to the people with the weight that it gets from being evidently the preacher’s serious conviction. There is self-restraint. There is some exemption from those foolish fluent things that slip so easily off of the ready tongue. The writer is spared some of those despairing moments which come to the extemporaneous speaker when a wretched piece of folly escapes him which he would give anything to recall but cannot, and he sees the raven-like reporters catch the silly morsel as it drops. Whatever may be said about the duty of labor upon extemporaneous discourses, the advantage in point of faithfulness will no doubt always be with the written sermon. King Charles the Second used to call the practice of preaching from manuscript which had arisen during the civil wars, “this slothful way of preaching,” but he was comparing it probably with the method of preaching by memory, the whole sermon being first written and then learnt by heart, — a method which some men practice, but which I hope nobody commends. On the other hand, the extemporaneous discourse has the advantage of alertness. It gives a sense of liveliness. It is more immediately striking. It possesses more activity and warmth. It conveys an idea of steadiness and readiness, of poise and self-possession, even to the most rude perceptions. Men have an admiration for it, as indicating a mastery of powers and an independence of artificial helps. A rough backwoodsman in Virginia heard Bishop Meade preach an extemporaneous sermon, and, being somewhat unfamiliar with the ways of the Episcopal Church, he said “He liked him. He was the first one he ever saw of those petticoat fellows that could shoot without a rest.”

It is easy thus to characterize the two methods; but, when our characterizations are complete, what shall we say? Only two things, I think, and those so simple and so commonplace that it is strange that they should need to be said, but certainly they do. The first is, that two such different methods must belong in general to two different kinds of men; that some men are made for manuscripts, and some for the open platform; that to exclude either class from the ministry, or to compel either class to use the methods of the other, would rob the pulpit by silencing some of its best men. The other remark is that almost every man, in some proportion, may use both methods; that they help each other; that you will write better if you often speak without your notes, and you will speak better if you often give yourself the discipline of writing. Add to these merely that the proportion of extemporaneous preaching may well be increased as a man grows older in the ministry, and I do not know what more to say in the way of general suggestion. The rest must be left to a man’s own knowledge of himself and that personal good sense which lies behind all homiletics.

But there is one thing which I want very much to urge upon you. The real question about a sermon is, not whether it is extemporaneous when you deliver it to your people, but whether it ever was extemporaneous, — whether there ever was a time when the discourse sprang freshly from your heart and mind. The main difference in sermons is that some sermons are, and other sermons are not, conscious of an audience. The main question about sermons is, whether they feel their hearers. If they do, they are enthusiastic, personal, and warm. If they do not, they are calm, abstract, and cold. But that consciousness of an audience is something that may come into the preacher’s study; and if it does, his sermon springs with the same personalness and fervor there which it would get if he made it in the pulpit with the multitude before him. I think that every earnest preacher is often more excited as he writes, kindles more then with the glow of sending truth to men than he ever does in speaking; and the wonderful thing is, that that fire, if it is really present in the sermon when it is written, stays there, and breaks out into flame again when the delivery of the sermon comes. The enthusiasm is stowed away and kept. It is like the fire that was packed away in the coalbeds ages ago and comes out now to give us its undecayed and unwasted light. As you preach old sermons, I think you can always tell, even if the history of them is forgotten, which of them you wrote enthusiastically, with your people vividly before you. The fire is in them still. Fe”nelon had a favorite maxim that anything which was truly written with enthusiasm could be quickly learned even by some one else than its author. It is the same idea: that which once has true life in it never dies. Believe me, this is the most important principle about the matter. It differs, no doubt, in different subjects. Some kinds of discourses we can never write. They must be made as we deliver them. Others we may better write, if we can write with the people there before us. Some medicines you must mix on the spot; others you may mix beforehand and they will keep their power. Only be sure that you are a true preacher, that you really feel your people, and the details of method may be settled by minute and personal considerations, — by your special fitness, in some degree even by your peculiar taste. I really think that you will be surprised to see how often this idea describes the secret of some power in a sermon which you have found it hard to discover while you have felt it very deeply. The minister who reads his manuscript had you with him as he wrote those pages. In the calm air of his study, sacred with the thought and prayer of years, nothing came in between him and you; and so the accidents of the paper and the reading amount to nothing. The sermon still speaks to you. But sometimes to an extemporaneous preacher his very extemporaneousness proves a dull, dead cloud, which wraps itself around him, and separates him from the people who are crowded up close about his feet. The struggles of thought are on him. He is busy with the choice of words. His mind is watching its own action as it seizes on thought after thought. There is a process of memory and a process of anticipation going on all the time which prevent his perfect occupation in the present act. He is forced to recollect himself, and so he does not feel the people. This, I am sure, is a true account of what is no unusual condition of the extemporaneous preacher’s mind. I think that the best sermons that ever have been preached, taking all the qualities of sermons into account, have probably been extemporaneous sermons, but that the number of good sermons preached from manuscript have probably been far greater than the number of good sermons preached extemporaneously; and he who can put those two facts together will arrive at some pretty clear and just idea of how it will be best for him to preach.

Let me offer only a few suggestions upon one or two other points, and first, with regard to illustrations. The Christian sermon deals with all life, and may draw its illustrations from the widest range. The first necessity of illustration is that it should be true, that is, that it should have real relations to the subject which it illustrates. An illustration is properly used in preaching either to give clearness or to give splendor to the utterance of truth. Both objects, I believe, are legitimate. Ruskin says that “All noble ornament is the expression of man’s delight in God’s work.” And so I think that we confine too much the office of illustration if we give it only the duty of making truth clear to the understanding, and do not also allow it the privilege of-7 making truth glorious to the imagination. Archbishop Whately’s illustrations are of the first sort, Jeremy Taylor’s of the second. The ornament that fills his sermons is almost always the expression of man’s delight in God’s truth. But both sorts of illustration, as you see, have this characteristic. They exist for the truth. They are not counted of value for themselves. That is the test of illustration which you ought to apply unsparingly. Does it call attention to or call attention away from my truth? If the latter, cut it off without a hesitation. The prettier it is, the worse it is. Here as everywhere the love of truth for itself is the only salvation. Love the truth, and then, for your people’s good and for your own delight, make it as beautiful as you can.

As to the subjects from which illustrations may be drawn, I cannot but think that it would be well if we made a much greater use of the history of the Old Testament to illustrate the Gospel of the New. And for these reasons: first, that the two have an essential connection with each other and so they come together with peculiar sympathy and fitness; second, that the very antiquity of that history makes it timeless and passionless, as it were, and so enables us to use it purely as ornament or illustration, without the danger of its introducing side issues from its own life; and thirdly, we should thus revive and preserve people’s acquaintance with the Old Testament which is always falling into decay. The second of these reasons shows where the weak spot is in the illustration drawn from the events of the current hour, which is otherwise so strong and vivid. It is difficult to make it serve purely as an illustration. It brings in its own associations and prejudices. It is too alive. It is as if you made the cornice of your house out of wood with so much life in it that it sprouted after it was up, and hid with its foliage the architecture which it was intended only to display. It was hard during the rebellion to illustrate the Christian warfare by the then familiar story of the soldier’s life without hearing through the sermon the drums of the Potomac, and seeing the spires of Richmond quite as much as the walls of the New Jerusalem in the distance. Besides this, an over eagerness to catch the last sensation to decorate your sermon with, gives a certain cheapness to your pulpit work. With cautions such as these in mind, we cannot still afford to lose the freshness and reality which comes from letting men see the eternal truths shining through the familiar windows of to-day, and making them understand that the world is as full of parables as it was when Jesus painted the picture of the vineyard between Jerusalem and Shechem, or took his text from the recent terrible accident at Siloam.

One prevalent impression about sermons, which prevails now in reaction from an old and disagreeable method, is, I think, mistaken. In the desire to make a sermon seem free and spontaneous there is a prevalent dislike to giving it its necessary formal structure and organism. The statement of the subject, the division into heads, the recapitalation at the end, 12 all the scaffolding and anatomy of a sermon is out of favor, and there are many very good jests about it. I can only say that I have come to fear it less and less. The escape from it must be not negative but positive. The true way to get rid of the bonyness of your sermon is not by leaving out the skeleton, but by clothing it with flesh. True liberty in writing comes by law, and the more thoroughly the outlines of your work are laid out the more freely your sermon will flow, like an unwasted stream between its well-built banks. I think that most congregations welcome, and are not offended by clear, precise statements of the course which a sermon is going to pursue, carefully marked division of its thoughts, and, above all, full recapitulation of its argument at the close. A sermon is not like a picture which, once painted, stands altogether before the eye. Its parts elude the memory, and it is good before you close to gather all the parts together, and as briefly as you can, set them as one completed whole before your hearer’s mind. Leave to the ordinary Sunday-school address its unquestioned privilege of inconsequence and incoherence. But give your sermon an orderly consistent progress, and do not hesitate to let your hearers see it distinctly, for it will help them first to understand and then to remember what you say.

Of oratory, and all the marvellous mysterious ways of those who teach it, I dare say nothing. I believe in the true elocution teacher, as I believe in the existence of Halley’s comet, which comes into sight of this earth once in about seventy-six years. But whatever you may learn or unlearn from him to your advantage, the real power of your oratory must be your own intelligent delight in what you are doing. Let your pulpit be to you what his studio is to the artist, or his court room to the lawyer, or his laboratory to the chemist, or the broad field with its bugles and banners to the soldier, only far more sacredly let your pulpit be this to you, and you have the power which is to all rules what the soul is to the body. You have enthusiasm which is the breath of life.

I have spoken to-day about the making of a sermon. I alluded at the beginning of one lecture to a young man whom I saw just entering on his work. To-day I have been thinking of one whom I knew — nay, one whom I know — who finished his preaching years ago and went to God. How does all this seem to him? — these rules and regulations of the preacher’s art, which he once studied as we are studying them now. Let us not doubt, my friends, that while he has seen a glory and strength in the truth which we preach, such as we never have conceived, he has seen also that no expedient which can make that truth a little more effective in its presentation to the world is trivial, or undignified, or unworthy of the patient care and study of the minister of Christ.