Your notes are now before you, some the offspring of original thought and others culled from reading.  The former require only polishing and shaping, but the latter must pass through your own intellect; every thought must feel the brain heat before it becomes palatable.  We do not ask people to eat meat raw, so we should take care not to offer them ideas cold and untouched by the warmth of our own reasoning.  Think over, ruminate, roll them from side to side, let them sink down through the tissues of your own brain and settle there; then when you send them out warm, bearing the stamp of your own minting, they will be found effective.

Remember that to translate dry theology into questionable English, encumbered with technical expressions, is not writing a sermon; but the man who takes up the theological principles, simmers them in his own thought, wraps them in the transparency of clear language, illustrating them with his own imagery, and thereby bringing them within the grasp of the meanest intelligence, that man, in a sense, creates the truth anew.

You begin the work of construction by making out a sketch argument.  Let a well-jointed syllogism underlie and form the framework of your sermon.  The conclusion of that syllogism must be the goal point at which you aim.  That once selected, all other parts of the sermon should tend towards it.  As all roads lead to Rome, so all members of the argument should converge to this point.  The congregation should leave the church with that idea fixed and clear as a star of light before their minds.

In writing, as in committing to memory, you should keep the audience ever before the mind’s eye.  Attack it on every side; pursue it with argument, and never leave it in the power of an intelligent man to say:  “I do not understand what he means.”

This habit of writing with the audience before us not only secures cogency and point for our arguments and clearness for our illustrations, but it saves us from the fatal mistake of producing not a sermon but an essay.

Here our meditations assist us.  The daily habit of balancing and introspection enables a man to read and analyse his own heart, its strength and weakness.  He becomes familiar with the springs and levers that move it, the storms that convulse and the sunshine that gladdens the mysterious world within his own breast.  How useful this knowledge when he comes to train the artillery of the pulpit on the hearts of others!

[Side note:  Placere]

So far we have been studying how to mortise the joints of our arguments into well-knit and shapely strength; the pure scholastic, however, possesses but half the weapons of the preacher.  The best built skeleton is repulsive till it is clothed with flesh, colour and beauty.  This is the rhetorician’s task.  He comes with his graceful art, and drapes the dry bones of hard reasoning, clarifies the arguments by illustrations, clothes them in language crisp and sparkling, weaves around them the warm glow of fancy and renders the hardest truths palatable by the grace of diction and delivery.  He accomplishes all implied in the word “placere.”