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HERALDS OF GOD sermon, mixing your ingredients in order to have something in the dish for every palate! There is a cautionary recipe in an eighteenth-century book for the making of a salad. It specifies scores of different delicacies, and bids the ingenuous cook add a little of this, a touch of that, a flavour of something else, until every imaginable ingredient has been included; then somewhat sardonically it goes on to say, "After mixing well, open a large window and throw out the whole mess." To concentrate too much into one miscellaneous masterpiece—whether it be a salad or a sermon—is the surest way to fail All sermons should indeed be crammed with the Gospel, and it is nothing less than "the whole counsel of God" that you are commissioned to declare; but to say that all sermons should comprise every facet of Christian doctrine is absurd. "There are those highly illuminated beings," complained Joseph Parker, "who expect a whole scheme of theology in every discourse, I trust," he added, "they will be starved to death,"

There is, however, another sense in which the thought behind the title If Had Only One Sermon to Preach may prove salutary; and Richard Baxter's injunction—"preach as a dying man to dying men"—is not simply to be discounted as morbid hyperbole. For every gathering of God's people for worship is a quite distinctive event; and though a congregation may meet twice a Sunday all the year round, no such event ever exactly repeats itself. Always there are differentiating circumstances; always "Now is the 60