his brief, ransacking tomes, wading through statutes, in search
of one to support his contention, knitting his defence in logical
terseness, cudgeling his brains for ingenious appeals to move a
jury. The lives of eminent lawyers are records of appalling
drudgery.

Turn to the great doctors of the church. After preaching for
thirty years, St. Augustine did not consider himself free from
the obligation of writing his sermons. He prepared, he tells us,
_cum magno labore_. "I have," says St. John Chrysostom,
"traversed land and ocean to acquire the art of rhetoric." If
giants so laboured, who are we to expect exemption? Ah! if our
bread entirely depended on our sermons, as a lawyer's on his
briefs or an actor's on his parts, what a revolution we should
behold! Yet how humiliating the thought! Every time you go into
the pulpit it is to plead a brief for Christ. The destiny of many
a soul hangs on your effort. Will you permit yourself to be
outdone in generous toil by the lawyer, who consumes his night
not to save a man from an unending hell, but from a month's
imprisonment?

To-day the devil's agents put forth sleepless activity. The world
rings with the clash of warring forces. The priest, then, that
idly folds his arms and manufactures sops for a gnawing
conscience, while the very air is electric with the energies of
assault, that priest is set up not for the resurrection but the
ruin of many in Israel.

CHAPTER FOURTH

HOW SHOULD THE YOUNG PRIEST PREPARE HIS SERMONS?

The pulpit, as an instrument for the salvation of human souls,
holds, after the Sacraments, first place. Indeed the
frequentation and proper reception of the Sacraments themselves
largely depend upon it.

Never since the first Pentecost was its agency a more pressing
necessity than to-day. The apostles of evil are busy. The
printing press teems beyond all precedent, obscuring truth and
belching forth poison over the world of intellect with a reckless
audacity that scorns all restraint. The powers of darkness have
seized, polished with unstinting labour and sharpened into
slashing efficiency, the varied weapons in the armoury of the
orator--crispness of style, brilliancy of diction, a declamation
that covers the want of argument and gilds sophistry till it
passes for truth. The question for us is--how shall we meet the
enemy with steel as highly tempered as his own?

Cicero embraces within the compass of three words the whole scope
of the o