And interweave all your sentences with the
Sacred Text. All the temporal prosperity of England comes from the use
of the Bible, all its spiritual raggedness and nakedness from its
misuse. They made it a fetish. And their commentators are proving, or
rather trying to prove, that it is only a little wax and
pasteboard--only the literature of an obscure and subjugated race. But,
even as literature, it has had a tremendous influence in forming the
masculinity of the British character. They are now giving up the Bible
and the Sabbath. And the _debacle_ is at hand. But I often thought we
would have a more robust piety, a tenderer devotion, a deeper reverence,
if we used the Sacred Scriptures more freely. And our people love the
Sacred Writing. A text will hang around them, like a perfume, when all
the rest of our preaching is forgotten. Why, look at myself. Forty years
ago I attended a certain Retreat. I forget the very name of the Jesuit
who conducted it; but I remember his texts, and they were well chosen:--

'I have seen a terrible thing upon the earth: a slave upon
horseback, and kings walking in the mire.'

'You have taken my gold and silver, and made idols unto
yourselves.'

'If I am a father, where is my honor?'

'If I am a master, where is my fear?'

I have made hundreds of meditations on these words, and preached them
many a time. Then, again, our people are naturally poetic; the poetry
has been crushed out of their natures by modern education. Yet they
relish a fine line or expression. And again, their own language is full
of aphorisms, bitter and stinging enough, we know, but sometimes
exquisite as befits a nation whose forefathers lived in tents of skins.
Now give them a few of the thousand proverbs of Solomon, and they will
chew them as a cow chews the cud. But I should go on with this subject
forever."

"But what about the use of sarcasm, sir? Your allusions to the Gaelic
sarcasms reminded me of it. I often heard people say that our
congregations dread nothing so much as sarcasm."

"I'm glad you reminded me of it. I can speak on the matter like a
professor, for I was past-master in the science. I had a bitter tongue.
How deeply I regret it, God only knows. I have often made an awful fool
of myself at conferences, at public meetings, etc.; I have often done
silly and puerile things, what the French call _betises_; I think of
them without shame. But the sharp, acrid things I h