with them. Is it because preachers now-a-days shrink from the labour
of writing sermons for themselves, or is it because they distrust
the quality of what they can themselves produce, that shameless
plagiarism is becoming so common? One cannot but reflect, thus
lazily inclined upon a summer day, what an amount of painful labour
would be saved one if, instead of toiling to see the way through
a subject, and then to set out one's views in an interesting and
(if possible) an impressive manner, one had simply to go to the
volumes of Mr. Melvill or Bishop Wilberforce or Dean Trench; or,
if your taste be of a different order, to those of Mr. Spurgeon,
Mr. Punshon, or Mr. Stowell Brown--and copy out what you want. The
manual labour might be considerable--for one blessing of original
composition is, that it makes you insensible to the mere mechanical
labour of writing,--but the intellectual saving would be tremendous.
I say nothing of the moral deterioration. I say nothing as to
what a mean, contemptible pickpocket, what a jackdaw in peacock's
feathers, you will feel yourself. There is no kind of dishonesty
which ought to be exposed more unsparingly. Whenever I hear a sermon
preached which has been stolen, I shall make a point of informing
every one who knows the delinquent. Let him get the credit which
is his due. I have not read many published sermons, and I seldom
hear any one preach except myself; so that I do not speak from
personal knowledge of the fact alleged by many, that there never
was a period when this paltry lying and cheating was so prevalent.
But five or six times within the last nine years I have listened
to sermons in which there was not merely a manifest appropriation
of thoughts which the preacher had never digested or made his own,
but which were stolen word for word; and I have been told by friends
in whom I have implicit confidence of instances twice five or six.
Generally, this dishonesty is practised by frightful block-heads,