They are the same people they were ten years ago.

I often hear other sermons that are far easier to criticise.  They are one-sided or narrow, but they make new people.

I might not always like to be in a congregation when a man is preaching a sermon that makes new people, because he may be making people or kinds of people that at the time at least I do not need to be.  But I naturally prefer, at least part of the time, a preacher who puts in, before he is through, some good work on me.  There is a preacher in B——­ who always arouses in me, whenever I am in the city, the same old, curious, hopeful feeling about him that this next one more time he is going to get to me, that I am going to be attended to.  I cannot say how many times I have dropped in upon him in his big plain church, seen him with his hushed congregation all about him, all listening to him up to the last minute, each of them sitting all alone with his own soul, and with him, and with the ticking of the clock.  And the sermon is always about the same.  You see him narrowing the truth down wonderfully, ruthlessly, to You.  You begin to see everything—­to see all the arguments, all the circumstances, all the principles.  You see them narrowing you down grimly, closing in upon you, converging you and all your little, mean life, driving you apparently at last into one helpless beautiful corner of doing right.  You feel while you listen the old sermon-thrill you have felt before, a kind of intellectual joy in God, in the very brains of God; you think of how He has arranged right and wrong so cunningly, laid them all out so plain and so close beside each other for you to choose to be good.  Then the benediction is pronounced over you, the sevenfold amen dies away over you, and you go home and do as you like.

One sees the sermon for days afterward lying out there in calm and orderly memory, all so complete and perfect by itself.  There does not really seem to be any need of doing anything more to it.  It is what people mean probably by a “finished sermon.”  It is as if goodness had been put under a glass globe in a parlour.  You go home proud to think of it, and proud of course to have such a sermon by you.  But you would never think of touching such a complete and perfect thing during the week the way you would a poorer sermon, disturbing it hopefully or mussing it over, trying to work some of it into your own life.

* * * * *

So much for the first two types of preachers:  the preachers who stand before us Sunday morning with goodness placed beside them in a dense darkness while they talk, and who tease us to look at it in the darkness and to take some; and those who stand, a cold white light all about them, and use pointers and blackboards and things—­maps of goodness, great charts of what people ought to be like—­and who make one see each virtue just where it belongs as a kind of dot, like cities in a geography, and who leave us with the pleasant feeling of how sweet and reasonable God is, or rather would be if anybody would pay any attention to Him.