It was Sunday afternoon, and they were sitting together on their favorite boulder. Phillis had christened it her “thinking-stone.”
“I never think to more purpose than when I am sitting here,” she would say.
Nan, who was looking out to sea rather dreamily, intent on her usual vision, Dick, roused herself at this, and began to smile in a lofty way.
“You think yourself very clever, Phillis, and so do I; but sermons are hardly in your province, my dear.”
Phillis shook her head gravely. She dissented from this view of the case.
“Common sense is in every one’s province,” she persisted. “I am a practical woman, and some of my hints would be valuable. Sermons are failures, Nan. They go over people’s heads like a flight of badly-shot arrows. Does not Goulburn say that? Now and then one touches the mark. When they are all let fly hither and thither and anyhow, the preacher shuts up his book, and his hearers cease to yawn.”
“Oh, Phillis, how absurd you are! Suppose Mr. Drummond were to hear you?”
“I should have no objection. But, Nan, seriously, do you not notice how formal and cut-and-dried most sermons are? They come round regularly, like Sunday. People have to bear 280 being preached at, and so the unfortunate parson must hammer it out of his head somehow. He picks out his text, writes out his composition, drags in his learning by the ear, and delivers it in his best fashion; and people listen to it politely, and the best behaved do not yawn.”
“Phillis, you are positively irreverent! I am shocked at you!”
“On the contrary, I am very reverent. Well, in my ‘Hints to the Clergy’ I would say, first, ‘Never preach what you do not feel yourself, or the current of electricity or sympathy, or whatever it is that communicates between preacher and people, will be checked or impeded. Do not preach out of the book: we can read that for ourselves. Preach out of your own head and your own experience, just as much as you can.’ Bless you,” continued Phillis, in a wise, half-sad tone, “half the pulpits would be empty: we should get sometimes no sermons at all!”