ty thousand colliers, grimy from the Bristol
coalpits, and saw, as he preached, the tears making white
channels down their blackened cheeks. . . . The terrible sense of
a conviction of sin, a new dread of hell, a new hope of heaven,
took forms at once grotesque and sublime."[2]

[2] Green--"Short History of the English People."

We have heard preachers from whose lips each thought fell as
fresh and as hot as if that moment only it welled up from the
fountains of the heart; yet each rounded and chiselled sentence,
that seemed to flow so spontaneously, cosily nestled between the
covers of their manuscripts. We have watched the varied gestures,
the cadences of voice and facial expression to harmonize with and
so express the sense of the words that one seemed to grow out of
the other; still these graces of elocution, that looked so
artless and so charming, were the fruit of long years of study.
All was fresh! All was natural! All palpitated with the blood of
life, yet all were the products of previous toil. It is nonsense,
then, for any man to assert that the written sermon must bear the
stamp of artificiality or that the fire evaporates in the passage
from the desk to the pulpit.

[Side note: II.]

But I may be told there is small time for writing sermons. It is
singular that where there is most time on a priest's hands there
are fewest sermons on his desk. But to the objection. One of the
strongest motives urging the writer to insist on the written
sermon is his deep conviction of the shortness of time, for there
is no more expeditious way of squandering that precious gift of
God than by preaching extemporary sermons.

This is how the case stands. You have to spend as much time in
gathering and arranging the matter for the extemporary as for the
written one. Next year you may have to preach on the same gospel
or feast; of what use will your notes be then? The ideas,
arguments, and illustrations that now spring to your mind with a
glance at this cipher or note will then have vanished. The cipher
remains, but its inspiring power has passed. The oracle is dumb.
You may summon spirits from the vasty deep--but will they come?
You have again to face your old task; year after year the same
drudgery awaits you with less hope of success. The brain, at
first stimulated by novelty, poured forth the hot tide of
thought; now it will answer only to the lash. At the end of five
years what hoarded reserve have you laid by? Your h