HERALDS OF GOD
right word and the telling phrase. Joseph Parker once asked R. W. Dale of Birmingham why he read his sermons; to which Dale frankly replied, "If I spoke extemporaneously I should never sit down." "My command of words," he confessed, "is such that as a young man I could preach standing on my head. To be condensed is my object in writing my sermons." It is eminently desirable that a sermon should be compact, clean-cut and as far as possible free from literary aberrations and logical anacoloutha: herein lies the virtue of the read sermon. Nor ought we to be influenced by what Phillips Brooks once called "the general impression of the piety of extemporaneousness": a crude, erroneous notion, based on a naive doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Have we not all heard sermons delivered without a scrap of paper which moved us not a whit, and merely left us feeling "The Lord was not in the wind"? And have we not listened to read discourses which were memorable in the deepest sense and charged with spiritual power?
There is, however, another side to this matter. The preacher who suffers himself to be tied slavishly to his manuscript is surrendering something—a quality of directness and pointedness, of versatility and verve and liveliness—which he can ill afford to lose. There is the ever-present danger that the typed or written sermon on the pulpit-desk in front of him may act as a barrier between himself and those to whom he speaks. Christian preaching strikes notes of challenge and appeal
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