Page:Heralds of God.djvu/140

HERALDS OF GOD It was quite a common practice with preachers of a former generation to announce the main divisions of their subject at the very outset of a sermon. Now this is bad psychology. It gives everything away. It holds no surprises in reserve. It may, indeed, if used on rare occasions prove effective enough. But, on the whole, it is apt to be destructive of interest if people know in advance exactly where you intend to lead them. You handicap yourself if you divulge incontinently the heads you are proposing to use. But let me repeat, whether you formally announce any divisions or not, you must have them clear in your own mind. It is quite fatal to embark on a sermon without having a plainly charted course to follow. How can you hope to have any freedom or conviction in delivery if there is no connecting-thread running through from start to finish, no measured march and progression of thought? Far too many sermons wander erratically from one thing to another, going off at sudden tangents, perpetrating aimless involutions, anon returning upon their own tracks, moving in circles, with divisions overlapping, heads leading to anticlimax, transitions muddy and blurred. The manuscript of Carlyle's essay on Robert Burns went for revision before publication to Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review. When the proof sheets came, the author found—he complained—"the first part cut all into shreds—the body of a quadruped with the head of a bird, a man shortened by cutting out his thighs and fixing the knee-caps on the hips"; and Carlyle refused to let his work appear "in such a horrid 134