THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE
servants than that they should be mere borrowers and copyists.
It is hardly necessary to labour the point that to borrow another man's thoughts, ideas and expressions, and to present them as one's own, may be one way of reducing labour and maintaining the supply, but in God's eyes it is to be a castaway. Here is someone, let us say, who is so preoccupied throughout the week with a medley of good works, all of them doubtless legitimate and worthy in their own way, that at the week-end, finding himself sermonless and in desperate straits, he is driven to use another man's material, "reaping where he has not sown, and gathering where he has not strawed." Is it likely that such preaching should ring true? May not such a habit, if persisted in, neutralize and negative the grace of the preacher's ordination? Must it not imperil his spiritual vitality, and ultimately jeopardize his soul? The five wise virgins who refused to share their surplus oil with their five foolish sisters were not being stingy and cantankerous: they were simply giving realistic expression to the undoubted truth that in this world there can be no shining with a borrowed light. Far better the poorest and most halting discourse that is veritably a man's own than the most elaborate work of art tainted with the breath of plagiarism. But indeed it were superfluous to emphasize this further. The basic note of preaching must ever be reality. And where is honour towards God to be looked for if not in the work of those who are His heralds?
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