"A well-filled mind never wants words. Read, and read, and read; but read, above all, the Holy Scriptures. Never put down your Breviary, but to take up your Bible. Saturate yourself with its words and its spirit. All the best things that are to be found in modern literature are simple paraphrases of Holy Writ. And interweave all your sentences with the Sacred Text. All the temporal prosperity of England comes from the use of the Bible, all its spiritual raggedness and nakedness from its misuse. They made it a fetish. And their commentators are proving, or rather trying to prove, that it is only a little wax and pasteboard--only the literature of an obscure and subjugated race. But, even as literature, it has had a tremendous influence in forming the masculinity of the British character. They are now giving up the Bible and the Sabbath. And the _débâcle_ is at hand. But I often thought we would have a more robust piety, a tenderer devotion, a deeper reverence, if we used the Sacred Scriptures more freely. And our people love the Sacred Writing. A text will hang around them, like a perfume, when all the rest of our preaching is forgotten. Why, look at myself. Forty years ago I attended a certain Retreat. I forget the very name of the Jesuit who conducted it; but I remember his texts, and they were well chosen:-- 'I have seen a terrible thing upon the earth: a slave upon horseback, and kings walking in the mire.' 'You have taken my gold and silver, and made idols unto yourselves.' 'If I am a father, where is my honor?' 'If I am a master, where is my fear?' I have made hundreds of meditations on these words, and preached them many a time. Then, again, our people are naturally poetic; the poetry has been crushed out of their natures by modern education. Yet they relish a fine line or expression. And again, their own language is full of aphorisms, bitter and stinging enough, we know, but sometimes exquisite as befits a nation whose forefathers lived in tents of skins. Now give them a few of the thousand proverbs of Solomon, and they will chew them as a cow chews the cud. But I should go on with this subject forever." "But what about the use of sarcasm, sir? Your allusions to the Gaelic sarcasms reminded me of it. I often heard people say that our congregations dread nothing so much as sarcasm."