eat, with _Faust_,

"True sense and reason reach their aim
With little help from art and rule;
Be earnest! then what need to seek
The words that best your meaning speak?"

So we thought; and many of us have since suffered for it. We know how
many sermons are preached in the churches of the country every Sunday;
but does anyone know how many are listened to? The newspapers supply
us now and then with statistics of how many hearers are present in our
congregations; but who will tell us what proportion of these are
listeners? If we knew the exact percentage, I suspect, it would appal
us. Yet it is not because there is not good matter in the sermons, but
because it is not properly spoken. In the manufacture of steam-engines
the problem is, I believe, to get as much work as possible out of the
coal consumed. In every engine which has ever yet been constructed
there has been a greater or less waste of heat, which is dispersed
into the surrounding air or carried away by the adjacent portions of
the machinery, without doing work. Engineering skill has been
gradually reducing the amount of this waste and getting a larger and
larger proportion of work out of the fuel; and a perfect engine would
be one in which the whole of the coal consumed had its full equivalent
in work done. One of our problems, it seems to me, is a similar one.
There is an enormous disproportion between the amount of energy
expended during the week in preparation and the amount of impression
made on the hearers on Sunday. Ministers do not get enough of result
in the attention, satisfaction and delight of their hearers for the
work they do; and the failure is in the vehicle of communication
between the study and the congregation--that is to say, in the
delivery of the sermon. What I am pleading for is, that there should
be more work to show for the coal consumed.[37]

4. Allow me, gentlemen, in closing this lecture, to emphasize another
sense in which the prophets were men of the Word, and in which they
are worthy of imitation. They were masters of the Written Word. They
not only spoke the word of God, but wrote it for publication, in a
form sometimes more diffuse and sometimes more compressed than their
oral utterances; and by this means they not only extended their
influence in their own day, but have enormously prolonged it since.

It is surprising how few of those who have spoken the word of God
have cultivated this mode of delivering