Page:Heralds of God.djvu/152

HERALDS OF GOD of strength and of weakness. It is not without significance that the occasion when the apostle, oppressed perhaps by the shadow of Demosthenes, appears to have argued with himself, "If they want literary allusion—poetry, philosophy, comparative religion—let them have it," was one of the conspicuously less successful days of his ministry: so that going on from there to Corinth, and meditating as he journeyed on the recent disappointment, he "determined not to know anything save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified."

There is one class of quotations which might well be dispensed with altogether—those which have grown hackneyed and threadbare through over-use. It would be much kinder to W. E. Henley and A. H. Clough if all preachers everywhere would agree to give "Invictus" and "Say not, the struggle nought availeth" a complete rest for the next ten years. It is a different matter, of course, when some commonplace allusion can be set in a suddenly new light or viewed from an unfamiliar angle. Take, for example, Sir Oliver Lodge's dictum, "The modern man is not worrying about his sins." I wonder in how many thousand sermons that remark has made a punctual reappearance? Ought it not now to be disqualified, and to have its sermon-licence suspended sine die? Certainly, if only the obvious sense of the words is intended. But suppose that one day in a sermon you are concerned to emphasize the crucial paradox, so imperfectly understood by many, that the more a man sins the less he is able to realize that he is a sinner (the 146