HERALDS OF GOD
William Cowper pilloried certain preachers of his day whose shoddy sermons belied the dignity of the prophetic vocation and brought it into contempt:
The things that mount the rostrum with a skip,
And then skip down again; pronounce a text;
Cry—hem! and reading what they never wrote,
Just fifteen minutes, huddle up their work,
And with a well-bred whisper close the scene!
Overdrawn? No doubt. Yet the race of "clerical visionaries" is not extinct.
Yours is a task, I repeat, which demands and deserves sheer hard work, sweat of brain and discipline of soul. You must not, for example, allow your week's sermon preparation to be at the mercy of moods. You must not wait for the inspired hour before getting under way. Spurgeon indeed urged his students, when deliberating on the right text to choose, to "wait for that elect word, even if you wait till within an hour of the service." It may have been the wise policy for a Spurgeon; but then Spurgeons are few and far between. Ordinary creatures like ourselves will be well advised to follow the less spectacular and dramatic path of plodding diligence and patience. In any case, you will often find it is as you pursue that hard and apparently thankless way that quite suddenly the fire from heaven begins to fall. Speaking of the art of writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch roundly declared that "solid daily practice is the prescription and 'waiting upon inspiration' a lure. These crests only rise
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