path crumbles away behind them as they advance.  Their minds are in splendid working order:  they turn off admirable work Sunday by Sunday:  and while mind and nervous system keep their spring, that admirable work may be counted on almost with certainty.  They have Fortunio’s purse:  they can always put their hand upon the sovereigns they need:  but they have no hoard accumulated which they might draw from, should the purse some day fail.  And remembering how much the success of the extempore speaker depends upon the mood of the moment:  remembering what little things, menial and physical, may mar and warp the intellectual machine for the moment:  remembering how entirely successful extempore speaking founds on perfect confidence and presence of mind:  remembering how as one grows older the nervous system may get shaken and even broken down:  remembering how the train of thought which your mind has produced melts away from you unless you preserve a record of it (for I am persuaded that to many men that which they themselves have written looks before very long as strange and new as that produced by another mind):  remembering these things, I say to myself, and to you if you choose to listen:  Write sermons diligently:  write them week by week, and always do your very best:  never make up your mind that this one shall be a third-rate affair, just to get the Sunday over; and thus accumulate material for use in days when thoughts will not come so readily, and when the hand must write tremblingly and slow.  Don’t be misled by any clap-trap about the finer thing being to have the mental machine always equal to its task.  You cannot have that.  The mind is a wayward, capricious thing.  The engine which did its sixty miles an hour to-day, may be depended on (barring accident) to do as much to-morrow.  But it is by no means certain that because you wrote your ten or twenty pages to-day, you will be able to do the like on another day.  What educated man does not know, that when he sits down to his desk after breakfast, it is quite uncertain whether he will accomplish an ordinary task, or a double task, or a quadruple one?  Dogged determination may make sure, on almost every day, of a decent amount of produced material:  but the quality varies vastly, and the quantity which the same degree and continuance of strain will produce is not a priori to be calculated.  And a spinning-jenny will day by day produce thread of uniform quality:  but a very clever man, by very great labour, will on some days write miserable rubbish.  And no one will feel that more bitterly than himself.

I pass from thinking of these things to a matter somewhat connected with them.  Is it because preachers now-a-days shrink from the labour of writing sermons for themselves, or is it because they distrust the quality of what they can themselves produce, that shameless plagiarism is becoming so common?  One cannot but reflect, thus lazily inclined upon a summer day, what an amount of painful labour would be saved one if,