William M. Taylor

In a passage it is said, “The preacher sought to find out acceptable words.” He did not take the first which came; but he selected those which best expressed his meaning, and were most suited to the people whom he was addressing. The relation of style to thought is of the closest kind; and the aim of the preacher should be to get the clearest possible medium for the transmission of his thought. That is the best glass which most fully admits the light. The paintings which the artist produces are very excellent in themselves, but in a window they are out of place一if, that is, the end of the window is to let in the light. So, if the end of language is to transmit thought, then everything in it that withdraws attention from the thought to itself, or dims the lustre of the thought, is a blemish. Hence the preacher’s study should be to have every sentence luminous with the thought which it is designed to express.

But how is that to be secured? Only, in my judgment, by the careful writing of every discourse. I have very strong convictions upon this point, and as a different opinion has been recently advanced by one whose views must be always received with deference and respect, you will forgive me if I seek, with some measure of fullness, to set forth my reasons for the advice which I have ventured to offer.

It seems to me that the importance of the work we are engaged in demands this exactness of written preparation at our hands. We are to speak to men about the most momentous matters that can occupy their attention, and a word thoughtlessly uttered may carry in it consequences of which at the moment we little dreamed. Nor is this an improbable contingency, for the right regulation of the tongue is the last attainment of Christian perfection.

What says the apostle James? “If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man,” and it is surely significant that this assertion of his comes in immediate connection with the injunction, “Be not many masters;” i.e. teachers.* He would dissuade his readers from the consuming ambition to become teachers, by setting before them the difficulty that must ever be felt in regulating the tongue, which is the great instrument which a teacher employs. He, in effect, says that the διδάσκαλοç attempts to perform the most important function, namely, that of instruction, with the most-difficult-to-be-managed-instrument, namely, the tongue. But this suggestion, which was meant to dissuade the incompetent from pushing themselves into the teacher’s office, is valuable also to those already in it, or preparing for it, as indicating to them a danger to which they are peculiarly exposed. It means for you and me, that we should take every possible precaution to secure that our public utterances shall be neither hasty, nor unadvised, nor of such a sort as shall bring reproach on the Gospel whose ministers we are.

Now the surest means of guarding against this danger is the use of the pen. Even those who advocate careful premeditation of the line of thought which the preacher proposes to follow, while yet the language is left to the prompting of the moment, insist that the constant practice of written composition is essential to success. But what is a young minister to write, if he does not write his discourses? He has not, except in very rare instances, the entree into the religious papers, much less into important magazines and reviews. The request to contribute to these publications is commonly the consequence of a success already achieved, and so there is little prospect that he will be able to find continuous employment for his pen in any such way. How, then, is he to obtain it?

Every student knows that while the love of truth may stimulate him to investigation, the incentive of some sort of publication is required to urge him to composition. But what kind of publication has in it more of inspiration for a preacher than that of the pulpit? To say, therefore, that a young minister should refrain from writing his sermons, and yet give himself to other compositions, is to bid him abstain from that which will most effectually furnish him for his work, while you commend him to other pursuits less fitted to give him the discipline he needs. If he does not write his discourses, the result, in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred, will be that he will write nothing at all, and then his sermons will become like Gratiano’s reasons, having about a grain of thought to the bushel of words.

Moreover, as the minister is to speak on special themes, it is in reference to these subjects that he particularly needs to cultivate precision of language. But how will the composition of a literary essay give him definiteness of terminology, say for a doctrinal sermon, or even for a discourse exposing some prevalent evil or enforcing some neglected duty? Facility in sketching is very good, but that alone will not make an architect. To become an adept in that profession, one must study mainly the art of construction. Similarly the practice of composition in other departments will not make a man produce good sermons; that has to be learned by practice, and the thing to be practiced is the making of sermons.

But there is another reason why a sermon should be written out with care. We are able to secure thereby, that each portion of the discourse shall receive its due measure of attention. Even the most skillful extemporizers are in danger of enriching the earlier parts of their sermons at the expense of the later. They do not seem to have got quite above the fear that haunts the young orator, that he will never find enough in his theme to fill out the time allotted for his address, so they put a great deal into the introduction and the sections which immediately follow, and when they come to the closing portions, where all their resources should be brought into operation, they have no time left for the effective presentation even of the thoughts which they have premeditated, and are obligated to hasten over them so rapidly that the hearers lose all sense of their importance.

Repeatedly, as we have listened to such a preacher, we have seemed to ourselves to be driven by him up a long and winding avenue toward a spacious and hospitable mansion. But he has been diverting our attention ever and anon to interesting objects that line the way; here was an umbrageous elm, whose luxuriant foliage carpeted the earth with shade; there was an opening through which a beautiful glimpse of a delightful lake was seen, and yonder was a view of the distant mountains smoking under the sunshine. At length we reach the door of the house, but before we enter we have to survey the entire panorama from the piazza, and even as we pass through the hall we must pause a moment to admire some wonderful picture that hangs there; then, just as we gain a vision of the banquet which is laid out for us in the dining-room, we discover that we have barely time to reach the station so as to obtain the train for our return journey, and we have to leave the good things largely unenjoyed.

In a sermon of an hour’s length I have more than once heard an introduction occupying five and twenty minutes; and on one occasion the preacher, not content with one introduction, made another as long as the first. Now, I do not say that such serious offences against the rule of proportion could not be committed in a written discourse, but I do affirm that they would be discovered, and opportunity would be afforded for their removal before the preacher attempted to submit it to the attention of his auditors.

Again, it ought not to be overlooked, that those extemporizers whose success is most frequently referred to as a reason why sermons should not be written, have generally had something which corresponded to sermon-writing after all. Thus in reference to Robert Hall, this testimony has been borne by Dr. Leifchild, who was his friend and neighbor in Bristol for some years: “I learned from him that most of his great sermons were first worked out in thought, and inwardly elaborated in the very words in which they were delivered. They were thus held so tenaciously in the memory that he could repeat them verbatim at the distance of years. He ridiculed the delusion of those who supposed that the perorations of his sermons were delivered impromptu, observing that they were the most carefully studied parts of the whole discourse.” * Now this was composition of the most difficult kind, and was resorted to, we may believe, because the physical infirmity with which Hall was afflicted made it agony for him to use the pen.

Again, in the case of F.W. Robertson; while it is true that he delivered his sermons without having written them, yet that is only half the truth, for he wrote them out on the Mondays after they had been preached, and thereby he had the “discipline of the pen” as really as if he had written them on the Fridays before they were spoken. If, therefore, his example is to be good for anything, it must be taken as a whole, for there is little doubt that as he looked back on what he had said, he would discover faults from which he would carefully abstain in his subsequent discourses. Nor should we fail to observe that if he had not written them, these wonderful sermons would have been completely lost to the world at large, and could not have been so widely useful as since his death they have become.

Similarly, in conversation with Mr. Spurgeon I once elicited from him the confession that the correcting of the proof of his Sunday morning sermon gave him, on every Tuesday, the same sort of wholesome discipline which we meaner mortals derive from the writing of our discourses. Only it gave it to him in a stronger measure, since faults always appear more glaring in the printed page than in the manuscript. He said that sometimes after he had gone over it with care the proof looked very black indeed, and though on such occasions he was apt to think that the reporter must have been asleep, he commonly discovered that the drowsiness had been in himself, and he was thereby stimulated to greater watchfulness in the future. But all such after-writing or correction is but “a light in the stern of the ship.” The errors have been committed, and careful writing might have prevented their commission.

So again, when I hear my distinguished friend Dr. Storrs affirm concerning himself, that he has no verbal memory, and give that as a reason why in his preparations he cannot premeditate the words—which is only writing without the pen*—I am disposed to question the accuracy of his own self-judgment. I have read as a written article from his pen the very same words which, eighteen months before, I had heard from his lips in an apparently extemporaneous address, and I have heard it told that in a lecture delivered without notes, he gave, without either hesitancy or mistake, such a number of dates, that on the following morning a friend sent him a box of dates, accompanied with a note to the effect that “after the expenditure of the previous evening he judged he must be quite out of the article.” These incidents, therefore, lead me to believe that, unconsciously to himself, that eloquent preacher has in his study so fixed his train of thought in his mind, that he has no difficulty in presenting it to his hearers in the very words in which he had before elaborated it. The recollection is so spontaneous that it seems to be reconstruction. But whether this be so or not, one must have his great mental excellences, and in addition, the drill of writing first-rate sermons for a quarter of a century, if he would faithfully follow the example which he has set.

It is, therefore, with the strongest conviction that I am giving you the best possible advice, that I say to you, write your sermons. This will give precision to your language more effectually than any other process, while when you are in an emergency and compelled to extemporize, some former train of thought will come at your call, clothed in the words in which you had before arrayed it.*

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* The word in the original is διδάσκαλοι
* A memoir of Rev. Dr. Leifchild, by his son, J.R. Leifchild M.A., p. 137.
* See “Conditions of Success in Preaching Without Notes,” by R.S. Storrs, D.D., LL.D.
* “I should lay it down as a rule admitting of no exception, that a man will speak well in proportion as he has written much, and that with equal talents he will be the finest extempore peaker, when not time for preparing is allowed, who has prepared himself most sedulously when he had an opportunity of delivering a premeditated speech.” – Brougham’s Inaugural Address as Lord Rector of Glasgow University

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Taken from The Ministry of the Word by William M. Taylor. Available at Trinity Book Service.