THE PREACHER'S STUDY
shape." His words might stand as a description of a certain class of sermon—misshapen, disjointed, lopsided and ill-proportioned. Make sure that each point you are going to include receives due weight. Avoid giving so much space to the earlier and perhaps subordinate stages of your argument that you have to foreshorten and telescope the matters of main importance. Aim at a cumulative effect. Keep your most telling points to the last. Lord Palmerston, whose style was apt sometimes to be slipshod and untidy, was speaking one day in Parliament. "I think," he declared, "the honourable member's proposals an outrageous violation of constitutional propriety, a daring departure from traditional policy, and, in short, a great mistake." Bathos, which can play havoc with a sentence, can also damage seriously the total structure of a sermon. Never forget you are working for a verdict. You are hoping and praying to leave your people face to face with God in Christ. That goal must never fade from sight. Make the whole sermon an ascent thither. Construct it with that end in view. Fashion it with that deliberate design; and please God, it will lead men through the outer and the inner courts to the altar of incense, and the Holy Place, and the very presence of the Lord.
VI
This brings us to the crucial matter of sermon-endings. There are preachers who experience the
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