waying Sanctuary lamp during Benediction,
Galileo discovered the laws of the pendulum. Such a trifle as the
fall of an apple suggested the laws of gravitation to Newton; and
the first idea of the steam engine came to Watt while he was
watching the lid rising from the boiling kettle. During a royal
banquet the argument to crush the Manicheans grew on the great
mind of St. Thomas, and the king made his secretary write it down
on the spot. Had not these men trained themselves to admit and
welcome the angel visitant, no matter when or where he came, the
stagnant pool of the world's ignorance might have remained for
ever unstirred.

Your notes are now before you, some the offspring of original
thought and others culled from reading. The former require only
polishing and shaping, but the latter must pass through your own
intellect; every thought must feel the brain heat before it
becomes palatable. We do not ask people to eat meat raw, so we
should take care not to offer them ideas cold and untouched by
the warmth of our own reasoning. Think over, ruminate, roll them
from side to side, let them sink down through the tissues of your
own brain and settle there; then when you send them out warm,
bearing the stamp of your own minting, they will be found
effective.

Remember that to translate dry theology into questionable
English, encumbered with technical expressions, is not writing a
sermon; but the man who takes up the theological principles,
simmers them in his own thought, wraps them in the transparency
of clear language, illustrating them with his own imagery, and
thereby bringing them within the grasp of the meanest
intelligence, that man, in a sense, creates the truth anew.

You begin the work of construction by making out a sketch
argument. Let a well-jointed syllogism underlie and form the
framework of your sermon. The conclusion of that syllogism must
be the goal point at which you aim. That once selected, all other
parts of the sermon should tend towards it. As all roads lead to
Rome, so all members of the argument should converge to this
point. The congregation should leave the church with that idea
fixed and clear as a star of light before their minds.

In writing, as in committing to memory, you should keep the
audience ever before the mind's eye. Attack it on every side;
pursue it with argument, and never leave it in the power of an
intelligent man to say: "I do not understand what he means."

This habit