instead of toiling to see the way through a subject, and then to set out one’s views in an interesting and (if possible) an impressive manner, one had simply to go to the volumes of Mr. Melvill or Bishop Wilberforce or Dean Trench; or, if your taste be of a different order, to those of Mr. Spurgeon, Mr. Punshon, or Mr. Stowell Brown—­and copy out what you want.  The manual labour might be considerable—­for one blessing of original composition is, that it makes you insensible to the mere mechanical labour of writing,—­but the intellectual saving would be tremendous.  I say nothing of the moral deterioration.  I say nothing as to what a mean, contemptible pickpocket, what a jackdaw in peacock’s feathers, you will feel yourself.  There is no kind of dishonesty which ought to be exposed more unsparingly.  Whenever I hear a sermon preached which has been stolen, I shall make a point of informing every one who knows the delinquent.  Let him get the credit which is his due.  I have not read many published sermons, and I seldom hear any one preach except myself; so that I do not speak from personal knowledge of the fact alleged by many, that there never was a period when this paltry lying and cheating was so prevalent.  But five or six times within the last nine years I have listened to sermons in which there was not merely a manifest appropriation of thoughts which the preacher had never digested or made his own, but which were stolen word for word; and I have been told by friends in whom I have implicit confidence of instances twice five or six.  Generally, this dishonesty is practised by frightful block-heads, whose sole object perhaps is to get decently through a task for which they feel themselves unfit; but it is much more irritating to find men of considerable talent, and of more than considerable popularity, practising it in a very gross degree.  And it is curious how such dishonest persons gain in hardihood as they go on.  Either because they really escape detection, or because no one tells them that they have been detected, they come at length to parade themselves in their swindled finery upon the most public occasions.  I do believe that, like the liar who has told his story so long that he has come to believe it at last, there are persons who have stolen the thoughts of others so often and so long, that they hardly remember that they are thieves.  And in two or three cases in which I put the matter to the proof, by speaking to the thief of the characteristics of the stolen composition, I found him quite prepared to carry out his roguery to the utmost, by talking of the trouble it had cost him to write Dr. Newman’s or Mr. Logan’s discourse.  ’Quite a simple matter—­no trouble; scribbled off on Saturday afternoon,’ said, in my hearing, a man who had preached an elaborate sermon by an eminent Anglican divine.  The reply was irresistible:  ’Well, if it cost you little trouble, I am sure it cost Mr. Melvill a great deal.’