HERALDS OF GOD
panionship to keep life calm and strong and undefeated through days of stress and storm. You recall how Joseph Conrad, in The Mirror of the Sea, quotes from a letter of Sir Robert Stopford, who commanded one of the ships with which Nelson chased to the West Indies an enemy fleet nearly double in number. Describing the desperate hardships of that daring adventure, Stopford wrote: "We are half-starved, and otherwise inconvenienced by being so long out of port. But our reward is—we are with Nelson!" How much deeper and more ineffable the serenity of those who through all the hazards and uncertainties of life can say, "We are with Christ!"
The question may well be raised. How is the preacher to obtain an adequate store of illustrative material? I would warn you against being content to allow others to do this garnering for you. Ready-made collections of illustrations are a snare. Omnibus volumes of sermon anecdotes are the last refuge of a bankrupt intelligence. The best illustrations are those which come to you as the harvest of your own reading and observation. In this realm as in others, there is far more zest and thrill in personal discovery than in second-hand borrowing. Be your own anthologist. Little incidents of daily life, significant happenings in the world around you, moving pages in the books you read—all can serve to illuminate the truth committed to your charge. These things are apt to be fugitive and memory precarious: therefore note them down. Elaborate card-indexing of illustrations is a work of
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