HERALDS OF GOD
sentences. Not that you need be arid and prosaic: but you must be lucid. Do not be like the writers Quiller-Couch describes, "perpetually shuffling around in the fog and cotton-wool of abstract terms." Canon Liddon was writing a letter to a friend one dark Christmas from Amen Court. "London is just now," he wrote, "buried under a dense fog. This is commonly attributed to Dr. Westcott having opened his study-window at Westminster." That, of course, was quite unfair. But clarity is a consummation so devoutly to be wished that you must be ready to sacrifice almost anything to achieve it.
In thus urging upon you the necessity of lucid and simple language, I am certainly not suggesting that the best preaching is that which makes a minimum demand upon the hearers for mental exertion and hard thinking. Simplicity is a very different thing from shallowness; and if it is bad to preach over people's heads, not to preach to their heads at all is worse. I trust that to your dying day you will "preach the simple Gospel," but it is well to remember that there is nothing which so stretches men's mental horizons as God's revelation in Christ, It was a true insight that led the apostle to declare, "The world by wisdom knew not God": but it is a deplorable attitude which would divorce evangelism from the duty of disciplined thought. There is a type of preaching which apparently regards it as more important to generate heat than to supply light: sermons devoid of any element of positive teaching, compounded of anecdotes, appeals and homiletical
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