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eat, with _Faust_, "True sense and reason reach their aim With little help from art and rule; Be earnest! then what need to seek The words that best your meaning speak?" So we thought; and many of us have since suffered for it. We know how many sermons are preached in the churches of the country every Sunday; but does anyone know how many are listened to? The newspapers supply us now and then with statistics of how many hearers are present in our congregations; but who will tell us what proportion of these are listeners? If we knew the exact percentage, I suspect, it would appal us. Yet it is not because there is not good matter in the sermons, but because it is not properly spoken. In the manufacture of steam-engines the problem is, I believe, to get as much work as possible out of the coal consumed. In every engine which has ever yet been constructed there has been a greater or less waste of heat, which is dispersed into the surrounding air or carried away by the adjacent portions of the machinery, without doing work. Engineering skill has been gradually reducing the amount of this waste and getting a larger and larger proportion of work out of the fuel; and a perfect engine would be one in which the whole of the coal consumed had its full equivalent in work done. One of our problems, it seems to me, is a similar one. There is an enormous disproportion between the amount of energy expended during the week in preparation and the amount of impression made on the hearers on Sunday. Ministers do not get enough of result in the attention, satisfaction and delight of their hearers for the work they do; and the failure is in the vehicle of communication between the study and the congregation--that is to say, in the delivery of the sermon. What I am pleading for is, that there should be more work to show for the coal consumed.[37] 4. Allow me, gentlemen, in closing this lecture, to emphasize another sense in which the prophets were men of the Word, and in which they are worthy of imitation. They were masters of the Written Word. They not only spoke the word of God, but wrote it for publication, in a form sometimes more diffuse and sometimes more compressed than their oral utterances; and by this means they not only extended their influence in their own day, but have enormously prolonged it since. It is surprising how few of those who have spoken the word of God have cultivated this mode of delivering
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