presented,
though, behind such ineffective presentation, there may be sincerity of
motive and sublime enthusiasm. The preacher may fail as a messenger by
failing as a sermoniser. He may fail as a sermoniser from neglect of
principles which so wait upon his discovery that it is nothing less
than a mystery when they are not seen.

And yet, obvious as these principles are, the art of the sermon maker
needs learning, and even the study of methods of delivery is of immense
importance to success. We have spoken of "the born preacher"; even
_he_ must cultivate his gifts in order to realise his highest
possibilities. We speak sometimes of "diamonds in the rough"; the
value of these precious stones increases as the art of the lapidary is
carefully exercised upon them. If it be only to prevent the formation
of false methods and bad habits of thought and utterance, a preacher
should give attention to the study of Homiletics. He may, as the end
of all his studies, feel led deliberately to reject much of what he has
been taught in favour of original methods of his own. As the years go
on he may forget many of the rules laboriously learned. Neither of
these circumstances should be held to prove that time spent in the
sermonising class has been wasted. It is a fact that most of us have
forgotten the greater part of what we learned at school. The dates
which made up so large a part of our historical lessons, the rules we
slavishly committed as we struggled to master the difficulties of
syntax and prosody, our latinity, our grounding in the tongue of
ancient Greece so hardly won--who amongst us, having grey hairs in
abundance, could face to-day the examination room where once we
triumphed in these things? Yet in a sense they are all still with us.
We reproduce them in effectiveness in the daily battle; in the thousand
and one duties forming the work of life. It may be much the same in
the case of homiletics. We may reject; we may forget; but we cannot
altogether fail to profit richly in many ways from studies the object
of which is to make the student more skilful in the use of the powers
bestowed upon him. Had these pages been written for young men only,
they would have contained more than one chapter devoted to an effort to
enforce the absolute necessity of bending the mind, and with the mind
the heart, to the earnest pursuit of all that can be learned about the
actual building-up of discourses from the foundation of exe