THE PREACHER'S STUDY
hearers' interest at the outset. Those first two or three minutes are vitally important. But now we pass to the main body of the sermon. Is the time-honoured usage of divisions—"heads," as they are called—to be recommended? My advice would be to avoid any slavish bondage to tradition at this point. It is certainly not necessary that all sermons, like Gaul, should be divided into three parts. There is no intrinsic sanctity in the tripartite sermon division, nor is it (as some appear to hold) a prerequisite of sound doctrine and essential to salvation. Sometimes your discourse may have six heads, sometimes none. Vary your methods deliberately. Cultivate flexibility. It is bad to cast all your sermons in one mould, so that people know infallibly in advance what shape they will be. Principal Rainy once spoke of sermons to which congregations listened "with respectful resignation, foreseeing clearly how it was all to be, and conscious that mental consuetude had superseded mental life." Refuse to allow any one form of sermon structure to dominate your preaching. In any case, a sermon ought to be a living thing of flesh and blood: do not, therefore, let the bones of the skeleton obtrude themselves unduly. It is the finished building men want to see, not the builder's scaffolding. "The well is deep and you must have something to draw with. But there is no need," says Dr. W. R. Maltby, "to make people drink out of the bucket, still less to chew the rope."
The value of heads is, of course, that they drive home to your hearers' minds the truth for whose
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