Artificial embroidery, purple patches, and golden vapour are often the defects and not the perfection of style.

Language can be simple, however, without being vulgar or commonplace.

What book will ever equal the Bible for simplicity, yet what dignity?  What preacher ever approached OUR DIVINE LORD; and, humanly speaking, what was the source of His strength?

He accommodated Himself to His hearers.  From the open book of nature He made the realms of grace familiar to the minds of children.  He pointed to the lilies of the field, to the ravens of the wood, to the ripening bud and the angry cloud. “Ut ex iis quae animus novit, surgat ad incognita quae non novit."[1]

[1] Third Nocturn for Non-Virgins.

He used the world around us to lift our thoughts to the world above us.

When He spoke to fishermen His illustrations were taken from seas and nets.  When He preached to farmers the word of God was the seed falling on rocky soil or the fertile furrow.  When the merchants with caravans and silken tunics surrounded Him it becomes the pearl of great price.  When amongst simple villagers it is the lost groat in search of which the housewife sweeps the floor and searches each nook and cranny.

Here is language coming down to the level of every hearer, abounding in familiar pictures, yet never losing dignity.

While composing sermons for factory hands Cardinal Wiseman employed a weaver to teach him the technicalities of the loom that he might reach their hearts through the only channel of thought they understood.

It is wonderful how the natural world around us can be used to bring even the most sublime truths within the grasp of the plainest intellects.  Why do we not draw more frequently and more abundantly from this source?

When we hear of a man whose discourses “are too sublime for the ordinary intelligence” it is hard to forbear a smile.  Our pity goes out not to “the ordinary intelligence,” but to the cloudy dweller in Patmos.  Mystic obscurity is used more frequently as a cloak for muddle-headed thinking than as a robe with which to drape sublimity of thought.  Hence, if people do not understand the preacher, blame not the people, but let the preacher look to it.

Our nimble-minded imaginative people will rise to and grasp the most elevated ideas if properly presented.

I listened to a sermon in an English church preached before a congregation of Irish poor.  The keynote was lofty, but beautifully sustained throughout.  The range of thought was high, but the truths clarified by an abundance of happy illustration.  That discourse was so classic in its beauty that it might be preached before an Oxford audience, yet not an idea was lost on that breathless congregation, where every female head was covered by a shawl.  The speaker possessed in an eminent degree three gifts that must command success:—­He could think clearly; he could so express his thoughts that his language became the mirror of his mind; he made a large demand on the familiar scenes of nature with which to illustrate his ideas and send his reasoning home; he possessed a mind at once logical and imaginative and a manner of expression that formed a definition of perfect style—­Le style c’est l’homme—­the style is the man.