preaching. The connection of many a so-called “sermon” with the Word is fictitious or factitious; the robe of a tawdry rhetoric is substituted for a divine simplicity of speech; for lack of specific gravity, specific levity abounds, and the pulpit becomes a place for secular entertainment, if not for clownish buffoonery. A lecture may be popular and even profitable and yet unfit for the pulpit. Preaching is the unfolding of a “Thus saith the Lord.” The true preacher thinks God’s thoughts after God,