If you do not believe that religion means happiness, quit the pulpit and raise potatoes. Potatoes feed the body at least. But unfaithful words or speech of needless despair feed nothing at all. It is "east wind." Put beauty, hope, joy, into your preaching, therefore. Make your listeners thrill with gladness that they are Christians. Even the men of the world have wisdom enough to make things profane as attractive as possible.
Note, for example, that most successful books are hopeful books that tell of the beautiful things of human life and character. Especially is this true of novels, the most widely read of all books of transient modern literature. The hero always wins—virtue always triumphs. There are remarkable exceptions no doubt—but they are exceptions. Now and then there are remarkable novels which scourge with the whips of the Furies, as indeed most of Savonarola's sermons flagellated.
With all your faith and the fervor of it, be full of thought. Merely to believe burningly is not enough. Nobody will listen to you declaim the confession and then declaim it over and over again and nothing more. Even pious monotony palls. Bread is the staff of life; and yet too much bread eaten at one time will kill. Food, taken in excess, becomes poison.
I have emphasized the necessity for faith because it will always be the very soul of your influence over your audience. It is the power behind your ideas. Faith is the dynamics of truth. But do not forget that you have got to have ideas. You have got to have truth.
In every word you utter you must be a teacher.
After all, teaching is the only oratory. Luke says of the Master that "he taught the people." In reporting the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew says that "he opened his mouth and taught them." Time and again I have heard hard-headed business men and sturdy farmers say of a particularly instructive sermon: "I like to hear that preacher; I always learn something from him."
And let your discourse be full of "sweet reasonableness." Peter tells you "to be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason for the hope that is within you," although Peter himself seldom gave a reason for anything.
You cannot do this without study. "After you have shot off a gun you have got to load it before you can shoot it off again," said a wise old preacher who retained the hold of his youth upon his congregations. Never cease to renew yourself from every possible source of thought and knowledge.
Books, society, solitude, the woods, the crowded streets—all things in this varied universe have in them replenishings for your mind. Don't become burnt powder. Keep young. That is your problem and life's. For mind and soul that is no hard problem, after all.
Don't repeat your sermons if you can help it. That is hard advice, I know; but to repeat your sermons is a phase of arrested development and a method of bringing it about. It is unfortunate for you that things are so ordered that you must preach a new sermon every Sunday.