lead the children of Israel out of Egypt!” My brother Aaron, who is an eloquent person—­and as it turned out later also a specious one—­is far better suited for this undertaking.  Thus he endeavored to evade the task and cried, “Let someone else do it!” Having thus expounded the word of God (!) the sermon proceeds to its final division in the application of this shrewd and practical wisdom to some current event or parochial situation.

Now, such preaching is indubitably effective and not wholly illegitimate.  Its technique is easily acquired.  It makes us realize that the early Church Fathers, who displayed a truly appalling ingenuity in allegorizing the Old Testament and who found “types” of Christ and His Church in frankly sensual Oriental wedding songs, have many sturdy descendants among us to this very hour!  Such preaching gives picturesqueness and color, it provides the necessary sugar coating to the large pill of practical and ethical exhortation.  To be sure, it does not sound like the preaching of our fathers.  The old sermon titles—­“Suffering with Christ that we may be also glorified with Him,” for instance—­seem very far away from it.  Nor is it to be supposed that this is what its author intended the story we have been using to convey nor that these were the reactions that it aroused in the breasts of its original hearers.  But as the sermonizer would doubtless go on to remark, there is a certain universal quality in all great literature, and genius builds better than it knows, and so each man can draw his own water of refreshment from these great wells of the past.  And indeed nothing is more amazing or disconcerting than the mutually exclusive notions, the apparently opposing truths, which can be educed by this method, from one and the same passage of Scripture!  There is scarcely a chapter in all the Old Testament, and to a less degree in the New Testament, which may not be thus ingeniously transmogrified to meet almost any homiletical emergency.

Now, I may as well confess that I have preached this kind of sermon lo! these many years ad infinitum and I doubt not ad nauseam.  We have all used in this way the flaming rhetoric of the Hebrew prophets until we think of them chiefly as indicters of a social order.  They were not chiefly this but something quite different and more valuable, namely, religious geniuses.  First-rate preaching would deal with Amos as the pioneer in ethical monotheism, with Hosea as the first poet of the divine grace, with Jeremiah as the herald of the possibility of each man’s separate and personal communion with the living God.  But, of course, such religious preaching, dealing with great doctrines of faith, would have a kind of large remoteness about it; it would pay very little attention to the incidents of the story, and indeed, would tend to be hardly expository at all, but rather speculative and doctrinal.