THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE
damaging thing about sin being what the Bible calls its unconscious "hardening," its ominous way of blinding a man to its own nature and doping his spiritual perceptions without his knowing that anything of the kind is happening): then indeed you may use the familiar quotation with fresh point and force. For now you are setting it in a new light, "Not worrying about his sins"? No, precisely; for sin's characteristic action is to insensitize the soul, to incapacitate it progressively from seeing that there is anything to worry about. Or take, for another example, the stanza from Omar Khayyam:
Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire.
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
Banal enough in all conscience, if you are using it merely to illustrate the intractability of life or the disillusionment of a pagan ethic. But there is an inspired flash in Professor A. E. Taylor's comment on the lines when he bids us "put the heart itself at the very head of the list of things to be shattered and remade." There the hackneyed stanza of the Eastern rhymester is suddenly redeemed from its banality, and thrust dramatically into the service of the truth.
Profuse and indiscriminate quotation, then, is a mark of bad preaching. On the other hand, to be able to focus the message at the right moment by quoting some memorable and gripping phrase is a real source of strength. You are preaching, let us say, on the
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