ho travels about, or who drops into churches wherever he
happens to be from Sunday to Sunday, is almost sure to find in every
city of considerable size at least one imperious capable baffling
clergyman. If one is strictly honest and fair toward him, to say nothing
of being a well-meant and hopeful human being who is living in the same
world with him and who feels very imperfect too, finding any serious and
honest fault with the sermon, or at least laying one's finger upon what
the fault is, seems to be almost impossible. One simply comes out of
the church in a nice, neat little glow of good-will and admiration, and
with a strange, soothing, happy sense of new, fresh, convenient wisdom.

The only fair way to criticise the preacher who belongs in this class
seems to be to take ten years for it, go in regularly and get a little
practice every Sunday. There are preachers who preach so well that the
only way one can ever find what is the matter with their sermons is to
sit quietly while they are preaching them, and look around at the
people. One thinks as one looks around, "These people are what this man
has done."

They are the same people they were ten years ago.

I often hear other sermons that are far easier to criticise. They are
one-sided or narrow, but they make new people.

I might not always like to be in a congregation when a man is preaching
a sermon that makes new people, because he may be making people or kinds
of people that at the time at least I do not need to be. But I naturally
prefer, at least part of the time, a preacher who puts in, before he is
through, some good work on me. There is a preacher in B---- who always
arouses in me, whenever I am in the city, the same old, curious, hopeful
feeling about him that this next one more time he is going to get to me,
that I am going to be attended to. I cannot say how many times I have
dropped in upon him in his big plain church, seen him with his hushed
congregation all about him, all listening to him up to the last minute,
each of them sitting all alone with his own soul, and with him, and with
the ticking of the clock. And the sermon is always about the same. You
see him narrowing the truth down wonderfully, ruthlessly, to You. You
begin to see everything--to see all the arguments, all the
circumstances, all the principles. You see them narrowing you down
grimly, closing in upon you, converging you and all your little, mean
life, driving you apparently at l