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HERALDS OF GOD virtue of plain, downright exposition. Your wisdom at such a time is to desist from weaving fancies around isolated phrases of Scripture: it is to take an entire passage, and let the Word of God speak for itself. It may be you will find that it is precisely the sermon wrought out in these difficult, ebb-tide hours for which God reserves His richest blessing.

The other remark to be added here is this. Resolve that every sermon you preach shall be in the truest sense your own. This indeed is involved in the very nature of the Gospel itself.

"This," wrote Elgar at the end of the original score of his great oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, "this I saw and knew"; and there is little hope of preaching being effectual unless the preacher can implicitly say the same. Every sermon must have something of your own life-blood in it. It is your personal act of witness. "That which we have seen with our eyes, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life, declare we unto you." Not that you are to bestrew your discourse with fragments of autobiography! Keep the first personal pronoun severely in the background. The pulpit is no place for indulging a propensity to egotistical reminiscence. To say that the preacher's sermon should be his own does not at all mean the obtruding of self into the picture. It does emphatically mean that God has a higher ideal in view for His commissioned 174