The best and most suggestive truths that most of us could come to with regard to doing right, would come from a study of the people who have tried to make us do it.  Most of us, if we were asked to name the people most prominently connected with the virtues that we have studied and wondered about most, would mention, probably, either our parents or our preachers.  Many of us feel quite expert about parents.  We have studied vividly, and sometimes with almost a breathless interest, all their little ways of getting us to be good, and there is hardly any one who has not come to quite definite conclusions of how he should be preached to.  I have thought it would be not unfruitful to consider in this connection either our parents or our preachers.  I have decided to consider the preachers who try to make me good, because they are a little less complicated than parents.

Preachers can only be put into classes in a general way.  They often overlap, and many of them change over from one class into another every now and then on some special subject, or on some special line of experience which they have had.  But for the most part, at least as regards emphasis, preachers may be said to divide off into three classes: 

Those who tease us to do right.

Those who make us see that doing right, if any one wants to do it, is really an excellent thing.

Those who make us want to do it.

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I never go to hear a second time, if I can help it, a preacher who has teased me to do right.  I used to hope at first that perhaps a clergyman who was teasing people might incidentally slip off the track a minute, and say something or see something interesting and alive.  But, apparently, preachers who do not see that people should not be teased to do right, do not see other things, and I have gradually given up having hopeful moments about them.  Why, in a world like this, with the right and the wrong in it all lying so eloquent and plain and beautiful in the lives of the people about us, and just waiting to be uncovered a little, waiting to be looked at hard a minute, should audiences be gathered together and teased to do right?

If the right were merely to be had in sermons or on paper, it might be different.  My own experience with the right has been, if I may speak for one, that when I get out of the way of the people who are doing it, and let the right they are doing be seen by people, everybody wants it.  When people who are doing right are quietly revealed, uncovered a little further by a preacher, everybody envies them, and teasing becomes superfluous.  People sit in their seats and think of them, and become covetous to be like them.  If, this very day, all the ministers of the world were to agree that, on next Sunday morning at half-past ten o’clock, they all with one accord would preach a sermon teasing people to be rich, it would not be more absurd, or more pathetic, or more away from the point, than it would be to preach a sermon teasing people to be good.  They want to be good now; they envy the people that they see going about the world not leaning on others to be good—­self-poised, independent, free, rich, spiritually self-supporting persons.