Well, then, say that it is not your own. Every one knows that when
a clergyman goes to the pulpit and gives out his text, and then
proceeds with his sermon, the understanding is that he wrote that
sermon for himself. If he did not write it, he is bound in common
honesty to say so. But besides this, I deny the principle on which
some justify the preaching of another man's sermon. I deny that
it is better to give the good sermon of another than the middling
one by yourself. Depend upon it, if you have those qualifications
of head and heart that fit you for being in the Church at all,
your own sermon, however inferior in literary merit, is the better
sermon for you to give and for your congregation to hear; it is
the better fitted to accomplish the end of all worthy preaching,
which, as you know, is not at all to get your hearers to think how
clever a man you are. The simple, unambitious instruction into
which you have thrown the teachings of your own little experience,
and which you give forth from your own heart, will do a hundred
times more good than any amount of ingenuity, brilliancy, or even
piety, which you may preach at second-hand, with the feeling that
somehow you stand to all this as an outsider. If you wish honestly
to do good, preach what you have felt, and neither less nor more.

But in no way of regarding the case can any excuse be found for
persons who steal and stick into their discourses tawdry little bits
of bombast, purple patches of thought or sentiment, which cannot
be supposed to do any good to anybody, which stand merely instead
of a little stolen gilding for the gingerbread which is probably
stolen too. I happened the other day to turn over a volume of
discourses (not, I am thankful to say, by a clergyman of either
of the national churches), and I came upon a sermon or lecture on
Woman. You can imagine the kind of thing it was. It was by no means