[Side note:  Shiel]

What, then, becomes of this trite assumption when there are iron facts like these to fall upon it?  Again, it is objected that the freshness disappears in elaborate preparation, and an oft-repeated sermon becomes stale to its author.  Shiel, we are told, “always prepared the language as well as the substance of his speeches.  Two very high excellences he possessed to a most wonderful degree—­the power of combining extreme preparation with the greatest passion.”

[Side note:  Wesley]

That disposes of the first statement.  Now, does the repetition of the same sermon cause it to grow flat?  Listen to the actor on his hundredth night, and see have he and his words grown weary of each other.  Wesley wrote every sermon, and repeatedly preached the same discourse, with the result that so far from losing by repetition it gained; and Benjamin Franklin, who was the American ambassador in England at the time, assures us he never became truly eloquent with a sermon till he had preached it thirty times.  The following graphic picture of the effects produced by the preaching of Wesley and his two companions will scarcely help to support the theory that a sermon preached frequently becomes fruitless:—­“He looked down from the top of a green knoll at Kingswood on twenty thousand colliers, grimy from the Bristol coalpits, and saw, as he preached, the tears making white channels down their blackened cheeks. . . .  The terrible sense of a conviction of sin, a new dread of hell, a new hope of heaven, took forms at once grotesque and sublime."[2]

[2] Green—­“Short History of the English People.”

We have heard preachers from whose lips each thought fell as fresh and as hot as if that moment only it welled up from the fountains of the heart; yet each rounded and chiselled sentence, that seemed to flow so spontaneously, cosily nestled between the covers of their manuscripts.  We have watched the varied gestures, the cadences of voice and facial expression to harmonize with and so express the sense of the words that one seemed to grow out of the other; still these graces of elocution, that looked so artless and so charming, were the fruit of long years of study.  All was fresh!  All was natural!  All palpitated with the blood of life, yet all were the products of previous toil.  It is nonsense, then, for any man to assert that the written sermon must bear the stamp of artificiality or that the fire evaporates in the passage from the desk to the pulpit.

[Side note:  II.]

But I may be told there is small time for writing sermons.  It is singular that where there is most time on a priest’s hands there are fewest sermons on his desk.  But to the objection.  One of the strongest motives urging the writer to insist on the written sermon is his deep conviction of the shortness of time, for there is no more expeditious way of squandering that precious gift of God than by preaching extemporary sermons.