But you must excuse me, my insufficient young lecturer, if I yawn over your imperfect sentences, your repeated phrases, your false pathos, your drawlings and denouncings, your humming and hawing, your oh-ing and ah-ing, your black gloves and your white handkerchief.

To me, it all means nothing; and hours are too precious to be so wasted--if one could only avoid it.
And here I must make a protest against the pretence, so often put forward by the working clergy, that they are overburdened by the multitude of sermons to be preached.

We are all too fond of our own voices, and a preacher is encouraged in the vanity of making his heard by the privilege of a compelled audience.

His sermon is the pleasant morsel of his life, his delicious moment of self-exaltation.
"I have preached nine sermons this week," said a young friend to me the other day, with hand languidly raised to his brow, the picture of an overburdened martyr.

"Nine this week, seven last week, four the week before.