He showed true artistry in structure. A preacher must be a builder. He has to construct a work of art. Not merely in the sense of form, but also and chiefly in substance. Judaism is the home beautiful; it fascinates the eye, but it also provides rooms for living. Artom entertained, and he also fed his guests. Out of his sermons you could easily piece together a fine edifice of Judaism. Many of its greatest truths are there, presented very solidly, and for all his decorative art very simply. Artom was not a thinker, he was a believer. Yet, though he never felt a doubt, he always realized that there were people who differed from him. He was thus frequently controversial; he had in mind some other opinions which he was determined to combat. This method impelled him to present religion in relation to the realities of his day. No preacher can be effective, unless he does so; no preacher’s words endure for other times, unless they are first vital for his own. In another respect, Artom’s method justified itself. I refer to his use of rabbinic quotations. He seldom quoted anything else. Here we have, in part, a mere trick, a mechanical device, artificial rather than artistic. Every sermon is headed by two texts, the one scriptural, the other rabbinic. In those olden Jewish homilies called, from their opening formula, _Yelammedenu_ a similar plan was followed, but the rabbinic passage was legal, involving some problem of Halakah or practical laws. Artom’s citations are always homiletical, and rarely add to the effect of the biblical text. Mechanical, too, is the division of each address into a Prologue, followed by three parts, ending with an Epilogue culminating in a prayer. The whole congregation almost invariably rose at the close of the Haham’s sermons, to join in these prayers, spoken with genuine but never unctious fervor. Such severe divisions of the sermon were long _de rigueur_ on the continent. Nowadays, in the reaction against these fetters, sermons tend to lose _form_ altogether. But where Artom showed himself a master was in his use of Midrash in the body of his addresses. He had nothing like the theological profundity of Jellinek, who employed Midrash to enforce fundamental ideas with subtlety. Nor had he Jellinek’s power of “holding the Midrash in chemical solution.” As Mr. Singer--a greater preacher far than Artom--said in his Memoir of Jellinek, midrashic quotations in a sermon are as a rule “stuck clumsily into the discourse, and leave upon the palate the flavour of undissolved spice or sugar in an ill-prepared Sabbath or Festival dish. In Jellinek the assimilation is perfect. It is the bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. Whether the Midrash or the preacher’s theme came first, which went the longer way to meet the other, is often as uncertain to determine as the question, in the case of some of the finest songs, whether the music suggested the words, or the words the music.”