or half educated
audience. In proof of this, Peter the Hermit and Mahomet are
striking examples. We are dealing, however, not with
extraordinary but the ordinary demands on a priest's powers, and
it would be poor wisdom to stake all his success on the chance
moods of his temperament. To-day the tempest may rock his soul
and his words bear the breath of flame; but, by next Sunday, the
spirit has passed, his passions are ice chill; he is confronted
with the duty of preaching, and on what support shall he now
lean? We must also remember that with increasing education the
popular mind is becoming more analytic, and congregations less
willing to accept emotions, no matter how sincere, as a
substitute for reason.

The second statement--that the written sermon cannot be vitalized
with fervour--seems childish in face of the fact that even
actors, speaking the thoughts of men dead three hundred years,
move people to tears or cause their blood to blaze. The great
pulpit orators, to whom allusion has already been made, preached
carefully written sermons, yet over ten thousand hearts they
poured lava tides that swept every prejudice in their fiery
breaths.

[Side note: Shiel]

What, then, becomes of this trite assumption when there are iron
facts like these to fall upon it? Again, it is objected that the
freshness disappears in elaborate preparation, and an
oft-repeated sermon becomes stale to its author. Shiel, we are
told, "always prepared the language as well as the substance of
his speeches. Two very high excellences he possessed to a most
wonderful degree--_the power of combining extreme preparation
with the greatest passion_."

[Side note: Wesley]

That disposes of the first statement. Now, does the repetition of
the same sermon cause it to grow flat? Listen to the actor on his
hundredth night, and see have he and his words grown weary of
each other. Wesley wrote every sermon, and repeatedly preached
the same discourse, with the result that so far from losing by
repetition it gained; and Benjamin Franklin, who was the American
ambassador in England at the time, assures us he never became
truly eloquent with a sermon till he had preached it thirty
times. The following graphic picture of the effects produced by
the preaching of Wesley and his two companions will scarcely help
to support the theory that a sermon preached frequently becomes
fruitless:--"He looked down from the top of a green knoll at
Kingswood on twen