study for the consumption of the hearers. This is the oral delivery;
and it is a part of the natural history of the sermon which must not
be overlooked. A sermon may be well composed in the study and yet be a
failure in the pulpit. Indeed, this is one of the most critical stages
of the entire process. There are few things more disappointing than to
have received a message to deliver and spent a laborious and happy
week in composition, and yet on Sunday, as you descend the pulpit
stair, to know that you have missed the mark. This, however, is far
from an infrequent occurrence. The same sermon may even be a success
on one occasion, and on another a partial or a total failure.

Wherein a good delivery consists it is difficult to say. It is the
rekindling of the fire of composition in the presence of the
congregation; it is the power of thinking out the subject again on
your feet. This must not be a mere repetition of a byegone process,
but a new and original action of the mind on the spot. Tholuck, to
whom I have already alluded in this lecture, says that a sermon needs
to be born twice: it must be born once in the study in the process of
composition, and it must be born again in the pulpit in the process of
delivery. Many a sermon is a genuine birth of the mind in the study
which in the pulpit is still-born.[36]

Some preachers have an extraordinary facility of putting themselves at
once, and every time, _en rapport_ with the audience, so that there is
from first to last, whilst they speak, a commerce between the mind in
the pulpit and the minds in the pews. To others this is the most
difficult part of preaching. The difficulty is to get down amongst the
people and to be actually dealing with them. Many a preacher has a
thought, and is putting it into good enough words, but somehow the
people are not listening, and they cannot listen.

If the Senate of this University were ever to try the experiment of
asking a layman to deliver this course of Lectures on Preaching, I am
certain he would lay more stress on this than we do, and put a clear
and effective--if possible, a graceful and eloquent--delivery among
the chief desiderata of the pulpit. I do not know how it may be among
you; but, when I was at college, we used rather to despise delivery.
We were so confident in the power of ideas that we thought nothing of
the manner of setting them forth. Only have good stuff, we thought,
and it will preach itself. We like to rep