Or we might turn to the problem of technique, that professional
equipment for his task as a sermonizer and public speaker which is
partly a native endowment and partly a laborious acquisition on the
preacher's part. Such was President Tucker's course on _The Making
and Unmaking of the Preacher_. Certainly observations on professional
technique, especially if they should include, like his, acute
discussion of the speaker's obligation to honesty of thinking, no less
than integrity of conduct; of the immorality of the pragmatic standard
of mere effectiveness or immediate efficiency in the selection of
material; of the aesthetic folly and ethical dubiety of simulated
extempore speaking and genuinely impromptu prayers, would not be
superfluous. But, on the other hand, we may hope to accomplish
much of this indirectly today. Because there is no way of handling
specifically either the content of the Christian message or the
problem of the immediate needs and temper of those to whom it is to
be addressed, without reference to the kind of personality, and the
nature of the tools at his disposal, which is best suited to commend
the one and to interpret the other.
Hence such a discussion as this ought, by its very scale of values--by
the motives that inform it and the ends that determine it--to condemn
thereby the insincere and artificial speaker, or that pseudo-sermon
which is neither as exposition, an argument nor a meditation but a
mosaic, a compilation of other men's thoughts, eked out by impossibly
impressive or piously sentimental anecdotes, the whole glued together
by platitudes of the Martin Tupper or Samuel Smiles variety.
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