that this one shall be a third-rate affair, just to get the Sunday over; and thus accumulate material for use in days when thoughts will not come so readily, and when the hand must write tremblingly and slow. Don't be misled by any clap-trap about the finer thing being to have the mental machine always equal to its task. You cannot have that. The mind is a wayward, capricious thing. The engine which did its sixty miles an hour to-day, may be depended on (barring accident) to do as much to-morrow. But it is by no means certain that because you wrote your ten or twenty pages to-day, you will be able to do the like on another day. What educated man does not know, that when he sits down to his desk after breakfast, it is quite uncertain whether he will accomplish an ordinary task, or a double task, or a quadruple one? Dogged determination may make sure, on almost every day, of a decent amount of produced material: but the quality varies vastly, and the quantity which the same degree and continuance of strain will produce is not a priori to be calculated. And a spinning-jenny will day by day produce thread of uniform quality: but a very clever man, by very great labour, will on some days write miserable rubbish. And no one will feel that more bitterly than himself. I pass from thinking of these things to a matter somewhat connected with them. Is it because preachers now-a-days shrink from the labour of writing sermons for themselves, or is it because they distrust the quality of what they can themselves produce, that shameless plagiarism is becoming so common? One cannot but reflect, thus lazily inclined upon a summer day, what an amount of painful labour would be saved one if, instead of toiling to see the way through a subject, and then to set out one's views in an interesting and (if possible) an impressive manner, one had simply to go to the volumes of Mr. Melvill or Bishop Wilberforce or Dean Trench; or, if your taste be of a different order, to those of Mr. Spurgeon, Mr. Punshon, or Mr. Stowell Brown--and copy out what you want. The manual labour might be considerable--for one blessing of original composition is, that it makes you insensible to the mere mechanical labour of writing,--but the intellectual saving would be tremendous. I say nothing of the moral deterioration. I say nothing as to what a mean, contemptible pickpocket, what a jackdaw in peacock's feathers, you will feel yourself. There is no kind of dishonesty which ought to be exposed more unsparingly. Whenever I hear a sermon preached which has been stolen, I shall make a point of informing every one who knows the delinquent. Let him get the credit which is his due. I have not read many published sermons, and I seldom hear any one preach except myself; so that I do not speak from personal knowledge of the fact alleged by many, that there never was a period when this paltry lying and cheating was so prevalent. But five or six times within the last nine years I have listened