ve shown in listening
patiently to the frightful nonsense they talked and wrote. I have
already spoken of sermons. If you go early into the Church, say at
twenty-three or twenty-four, and write sermons regularly and diligently,
you know what landmarks they will be of your mental progress. The first
runnings of the stream are turbid, but it clears itself into sense and
taste month by month and year by year. You wrote many sermons in your
first year or two; you preached them with entire confidence in them,
and they did really keep up the attention of the congregation in a
remarkable way. You accumulate in a box a store of that valuable
literature and theology, and when by-and-by you go to another parish,
you have a comfortable feeling that you have a capital stock to go on
with. You think that any Monday morning, when you have the prospect of
a very busy week, or when you feel very weary, you may resolve that you
shall write no sermon that week, but just go and draw forth one from the
box. I have already said what you will probably find, even if you draw
forth a discourse which cost much labor. You cannot use it as it stands.
Possibly it may be structural and essential Veal: the whole framework of
thought may be immature. Possibly it may be Veal only in style; and by
cutting out a turgid sentence here and there, and, above all, by cutting
out all the passages which you thought particularly eloquent, the
discourse may do yet. But even then you cannot give it with much
confidence. Your mind can yield something better than that now. I
imagine how a fine old orange-tree, that bears oranges with the thinnest
possible skin and with no pips, juicy and rich, might feel that it has
outgrown the fruit of its first years, when the skin was half an inch
thick, the pips innumerable, and the eatable portion small and poor. It
is with a feeling such as _that_ that you read over your early
sermon. Still, mingling with the sense of shame, there is a certain
satisfaction. You have not been standing still; you have been getting
on. And we always like to think _that_.

What is it that makes intellectual Veal? What are the things about a
composition which stamp it as such? Well, it is a certain character in
thought and style hard to define, but strongly felt by such as discern
its presence at all. It is strongly felt by professors reading the
compositions of their students, especially the compositions of the
cleverest students. It is strongly