* * * * *

I have already hinted at the qualities of the third class of preachers—­those who make me want to be good.  They seem to throw goodness as upon a screen, some vast screen of the world, of this real world about me.  They turn their souls, like still stereopticons, upon the faces of men—­men who are like the men and women I know.  I go about afterward all the week seeing their sermons in the street.  Everybody I see, everything that comes up Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the very patterns of the days and nights, of my duties and failures, keep coming up, reminding me to be good.  I may start in—­I often do—­with such a preacher, criticising him, but he soon gets me so occupied criticising myself and so lost in wondering how this something that he has and sees just beyond us, just beyond him, just beyond me, can be had for other people, and how I can have some of it for myself, that I forget to criticise.  He searches my soul, makes me a new being in my presence before my eyes—­that is, a new being toward some one subject, or some one possibility in the world.  He helps me while in his presence to accomplish the supreme thing that one man can ever do for another.  He helps me to get my own attention.  He makes me see a set of particular things that I immediately, before his next sentence, am trying to find means to do.  He does not attract my attention toward what he wants, like a preacher who teases; nor does he attract my attention to what God wants, like the preacher with the charts of goodness.  He succeeds in attracting and holding down my attention to what I really want for myself or others, and to what I propose to get.

The imagination of crowds is convinced only by men who have real genius for expression, for making word-pictures of real things, men who have what might be called moving-picture minds, and who are so picturesque and vivid that when they talk to people about goodness they have seen, everybody feels as if they had been there.  It has to be admitted that this type of preacher, who has a kind of genius, and has developed an art form for expressing goodness in words, is necessarily an exceptional man.  And it is unreasonable and unfair in the public to expect a man to get up in the pulpit and, with no costume and no accessories, merely with a kind of shrewd holiness or divination into human nature, present goodness so that we seem to be there.  It is small wonder that a man who finds he is expected to be a kind of combination of biograph, brother, spiritual detective, and angel all in one, in order to do his work successfully has days of feeling that he has joined the ranks of The Impossible Profession.

CHAPTER VIII

MAKING GOODNESS HURRY

Perhaps it has leaked out to those who have been following these pages thus far, that I am merely at best, if the truth were known, a kind of reformed preacher.