I am speaking, you remark, of those despicable individuals who falsely pass off as their own composition what they have stolen from some one else.  I do not allude to such as follow the advice of Southey, and preach sermons which they honestly declare are not their own.  I can see something that might be said in favour of the young inexperienced divine availing himself of the experience of others.  Of course, you may take the ground that it is better to give a good sermon by another man than a bad one of your own.  Well, then, say that it is not your own.  Every one knows that when a clergyman goes to the pulpit and gives out his text, and then proceeds with his sermon, the understanding is that he wrote that sermon for himself.  If he did not write it, he is bound in common honesty to say so.  But besides this, I deny the principle on which some justify the preaching of another man’s sermon.  I deny that it is better to give the good sermon of another than the middling one by yourself.  Depend upon it, if you have those qualifications of head and heart that fit you for being in the Church at all, your own sermon, however inferior in literary merit, is the better sermon for you to give and for your congregation to hear; it is the better fitted to accomplish the end of all worthy preaching, which, as you know, is not at all to get your hearers to think how clever a man you are.  The simple, unambitious instruction into which you have thrown the teachings of your own little experience, and which you give forth from your own heart, will do a hundred times more good than any amount of ingenuity, brilliancy, or even piety, which you may preach at second-hand, with the feeling that somehow you stand to all this as an outsider.  If you wish honestly to do good, preach what you have felt, and neither less nor more.

But in no way of regarding the case can any excuse be found for persons who steal and stick into their discourses tawdry little bits of bombast, purple patches of thought or sentiment, which cannot be supposed to do any good to anybody, which stand merely instead of a little stolen gilding for the gingerbread which is probably stolen too.  I happened the other day to turn over a volume of discourses (not, I am thankful to say, by a clergyman of either of the national churches), and I came upon a sermon or lecture on Woman.  You can imagine the kind of thing it was.  It was by no means devoid of talent.  The writer is plainly a clever, flippant person, with little sense, and no taste at all.  The discourse sets out with a request that the audience ’would kindly try to keep awake by pinching one another in the leg, or giving some nodding neighbour a friendly pull of the hair;’ and then there is a good deal about Woman, in the style of a Yankee after-dinner speech in proposing such a toast.  After a little we have a highly romantic description of a battle-field after the battle, in which gasping steeds, midnight ravens, spectral bats, moping owls, screeching vultures, howling night wolves appear.  These animals are suddenly startled by a figure going about with a lantern ‘to find the one she loves.’  Of course the figure is a woman; and the paragraph winds up with the following passage:—­