the same sermon cause it to grow flat? Listen to the actor on his
hundredth night, and see have he and his words grown weary of
each other. Wesley wrote every sermon, and repeatedly preached
the same discourse, with the result that so far from losing by
repetition it gained; and Benjamin Franklin, who was the American
ambassador in England at the time, assures us he never became
truly eloquent with a sermon till he had preached it thirty
times. The following graphic picture of the effects produced by
the preaching of Wesley and his two companions will scarcely help
to support the theory that a sermon preached frequently becomes
fruitless:--"He looked down from the top of a green knoll at
Kingswood on twenty thousand colliers, grimy from the Bristol
coalpits, and saw, as he preached, the tears making white
channels down their blackened cheeks. . . . The terrible sense of
a conviction of sin, a new dread of hell, a new hope of heaven,
took forms at once grotesque and sublime."[2]

[2] Green--"Short History of the English People."

We have heard preachers from whose lips each thought fell as
fresh and as hot as if that moment only it welled up from the
fountains of the heart; yet each rounded and chiselled sentence,
that seemed to flow so spontaneously, cosily nestled between the
covers of their manuscripts. We have watched the varied gestures,
the cadences of voice and facial expression to harmonize with and
so express the sense of the words that one seemed to grow out of
the other; still these graces of elocution, that looked so
artless and so charming, were the fruit of long years of study.
All was fresh! All was natural! All palpitated with the blood of
life, yet all were the products of previous toil. It is nonsense,