ast into one helpless beautiful corner
of doing right. You feel while you listen the old sermon-thrill you have
felt before, a kind of intellectual joy in God, in the very brains of
God; you think of how He has arranged right and wrong so cunningly, laid
them all out so plain and so close beside each other for you to choose
to be good. Then the benediction is pronounced over you, the sevenfold
amen dies away over you, and you go home and do as you like.

One sees the sermon for days afterward lying out there in calm and
orderly memory, all so complete and perfect by itself. There does not
really seem to be any need of doing anything more to it. It is what
people mean probably by a "finished sermon." It is as if goodness had
been put under a glass globe in a parlour. You go home proud to think of
it, and proud of course to have such a sermon by you. But you would
never think of touching such a complete and perfect thing during the
week the way you would a poorer sermon, disturbing it hopefully or
mussing it over, trying to work some of it into your own life.

* * * * *

So much for the first two types of preachers: the preachers who stand
before us Sunday morning with goodness placed beside them in a dense
darkness while they talk, and who tease us to look at it in the darkness
and to take some; and those who stand, a cold white light all about
them, and use pointers and blackboards and things--maps of goodness,
great charts of what people ought to be like--and who make one see each
virtue just where it belongs as a kind of dot, like cities in a
geography, and who leave us with the pleasant feeling of how sweet and
reasonable God is, or rather would be if anybody would pay any attention
to Him.

* * * * *

I have already hinted at the qualities of the third class of
preachers--those who make me want to be good. They seem to throw
goodness as upon a screen, some vast screen of the world, of this real
world about me. They turn their souls, like still stereopticons, upon
the faces of men--men who are like the men and women I know. I go about
afterward all the week seeing their sermons in the street. Everybody I
see, everything that comes up Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the very
patterns of the days and nights, of my duties and failures, keep coming
up, reminding me to be good. I may start in--I often do--with such a
preacher, criticising him, but he soon gets