chapels like that in which Dr. Boyd
Carpenter officiated. And, in the absence of the children, the only
chance of reaching sublimity that offered itself to these unhappy
orators lay in making good use of the waiter, the stupid juryman, and
the scullery-maid. If the Rev. Bruno Leathwaite Chilvers really cannot
induce the children to abandon the bad habit in which they have been
trained, I urge him, as a friend and a brother, to adopt the same
ingenious expedient. But if he can get on the right side of a little
child, persuade him to sit the sermon out, and vow that he will look
straight into that bright little face, and say no word that will not
interest that tiny listener, I promise him that before long people will
say that his sermons are simply sublime. Robert Louis Stevenson knew
what he was doing when he discussed every sentence of _Treasure Island_
with his schoolboy step-son before giving it its final form. It was by
that wise artifice that one of the greatest stories in our language
came to be written.

The fact, of course, is that in the soul's sublimest moments it hungers
for simplicity. One of Du Maurier's great _Punch_ cartoons represented
a honeymoon conversation between a husband and wife who had both
covered themselves with glory at Cambridge. And the conversation ran
along these highly intellectual lines:

'What would Lovey do if Dovey died?'

'Oh, Lovey would die too!'

There is a world of philosophy behind the nonsense. We do not make
love in the language of the psychologist; we make love in the language
of the little child. When life approaches to sublimity, it always
expresses itself with simplicity. In the depth of mortal anguish, or
at the climax of human joy, we do not use a grandiloquent and
incomprehensible phraseology. We talk in monosyllables. As we grow
old, and draw near to the gates of the grave, we become more and more
simple. In his declining years, John Newton wrote, 'When I was young I
was sure of many things. There are only two things of which I am sure
now; one is that I am a miserable sinner, and the other that Christ is
an all-sufficient Saviour.' What is this but the soul garbing itself
in the most perfect simplicities as the only fitting raiment in which
it can greet the everlasting sublimities?

'Here are sublimity and simplicity together!' exclaimed John Wesley on
that hot July night at Dublin. 'How can any one that would speak as
the oracles of God use har