answer to the question "What was your best sermon?" is: "The one
I took the most pains with." His labour at the desk was the
precise measure of his success in the pulpit. The French have a
proverb, "_Tout vaut ce qu'il coute_." ("Everything is worth what
it costs.")

See how laymen put our lethargy and its apologists to shame. Look
at the author with pallid cheek and fevered brow, half starving
in an attic, perfecting his style, polishing his periods. There
is the actor, haggard, jaded, toiling for hours at a single
passage, that he may interpret its meaning and enchain his
audience. While the world is dreaming the barrister is studying
his brief, ransacking tomes, wading through statutes, in search
of one to support his contention, knitting his defence in logical
terseness, cudgeling his brains for ingenious appeals to move a
jury. The lives of eminent lawyers are records of appalling
drudgery.

Turn to the great doctors of the church. After preaching for
thirty years, St. Augustine did not consider himself free from
the obligation of writing his sermons. He prepared, he tells us,
_cum magno labore_. "I have," says St. John Chrysostom,
"traversed land and ocean to acquire the art of rhetoric." If
giants so laboured, who are we to expect exemption? Ah! if our
bread entirely depended on our sermons, as a lawyer's on his
briefs or an actor's on his parts, what a revolution we should
behold! Yet how humiliating the thought! Every time you go into
the pulpit it is to plead a brief for Christ. The destiny of many
a soul hangs on your effort. Will you permit yourself to be
outdone in generous toil by the lawyer, who consumes his night