THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE
supererogation. If a passion for mental tidiness leads you to adopt it, well and good: only beware lest the mechanism of cross-references and the like becomes despotic! For those of us to whom such intricate and even formidable methods must remain counsels of perfection, quite beyond the compass of our less disciplined ways, something much simpler—a loose-leaf commonplace book, with headings—will prove adequate. It scarcely matters how rough-and-ready such a compendium may be, as long as it is veritably your own, sheaves of your own harvesting from the fields of literature and of life. In any case, avoid over-loading. Do not scorn the aid of illustration, but use it sparingly in your sermons, and with discretion. And remember the maxim: Better one illustration that is strong and apt and gripping than ten that are shoddy and irrelevant and sentimental.
II
Passing on to the place of quotations in preaching, we should do well to reaffirm the same rule: be sparing. "Let your moderation be known unto all men." People are not really so avid as some preachers suppose to learn what Confucius said in 500 B.C., or Emerson in A.D. 1850, or the Brains Trust in 1945. Beyond a certain point, the formula "As So-and-so has said" tends to become for some hearers merely irritating, for others positively soporific. Reference was made in an earlier lecture to St. Paul's sermon at Athens, its points
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