od, and there is hardly any one who
has not come to quite definite conclusions of how he should be preached
to. I have thought it would be not unfruitful to consider in this
connection either our parents or our preachers. I have decided to
consider the preachers who try to make me good, because they are a
little less complicated than parents.

Preachers can only be put into classes in a general way. They often
overlap, and many of them change over from one class into another every
now and then on some special subject, or on some special line of
experience which they have had. But for the most part, at least as
regards emphasis, preachers may be said to divide off into three
classes:

Those who tease us to do right.

Those who make us see that doing right, if any one wants to do it, is
really an excellent thing.

Those who make us want to do it.

* * * * *

I never go to hear a second time, if I can help it, a preacher who has
teased me to do right. I used to hope at first that perhaps a clergyman
who was teasing people might incidentally slip off the track a minute,
and say something or see something interesting and alive. But,
apparently, preachers who do not see that people should not be teased to
do right, do not see other things, and I have gradually given up having
hopeful moments about them. Why, in a world like this, with the right
and the wrong in it all lying so eloquent and plain and beautiful in the
lives of the people about us, and just waiting to be uncovered a little,
waiting to be looked at hard a minute, should audiences be gathered
together and teased to do right?

If the right were merely to be had in sermons or on paper, it might be
different. My own experience with the right has been, if I may speak for
one, that when I get out of the way of the people who are doing it, and
let the right they are doing be seen by people, everybody wants it. When
people who are doing right are quietly revealed, uncovered a little
further by a preacher, everybody envies them, and teasing becomes
superfluous. People sit in their seats and think of them, and become
covetous to be like them. If, this very day, all the ministers of the
world were to agree that, on next Sunday morning at half-past ten
o'clock, they all with one accord would preach a sermon teasing people
to be rich, it would not be more absurd, or more pathetic, or more away
from the point, than it would be to preach