HERALDS OF GOD
appeal. The late Viscount Grey once confessed to Lord Bryce the difficulty he experienced in composing speeches. "You need not be disturbed," was the answer, "as long as you feel like that. The time to become alarmed is when you find that you can speak quite easily without having anything to say." If you are gifted with facility of utterance, what Coleridge once shrewdly described as "a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words," beware! If it is your lot to stand on "the slippery floor of a popular pulpit"—to use a phrase of Alexander Whyte's—be doubly on your guard. There will be subtle temptations to scamp the work of preparation. You will be tempted to rationalize your other crowding duties into a justification for relaxing the inexorable discipline of your study-desk. If you are not resolute, the very constitution of the Church itself—its intricate machinery of meetings, committees, conferences, organizations—will seem to aid and abet that weaker, slacker self within which is only too glad to escape the travail of lonely wrestling with the Word of God. If the Church cannot, or will not, break through that vicious circle, you must do it for yourself. You are called to speak to men in the name of God. Dare you think lightly of such an undertaking, or of the stern discipline of heart and mind which it involves? "I earnestly beseech you all," wrote Richard Baxter well-nigh three hundred years ago to his brethren in the ministry, "in the name of God, and for the sake of your peoples' souls, that you will not slightly slubber over this work,
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