“You must know about some things which it might do them good to be reminded of--even if they know them already,” said Polwarth. “I cannot imagine that a man who looks things in the face as you do, the moment they confront you, has not lived at all, has never met with anything in his history which has taught him something other people need to be taught. I profess myself a believer in preaching, and consider that in so far as the church of England has ceased to be a preaching church--and I don’t call nine-tenths of what goes by the name of it PREACHING--she has forgotten a mighty part of her high calling. Of course a man to whom no message has been personally given, has no right to take the place of a prophet--and cannot, save by more or less of simulation--but there is room for teachers as well as prophets, and the more need of teachers that the prophets are so few; and a man may right honestly be a clergyman who teaches the people, though he may possess none of the gifts of prophecy.” “I do not now see well how you are leading me,” said Wingfold, considerably astonished at both the aptness and fluency with which a man in his host’s position was able to express himself. “Pray, what do you mean by PROPHECY?” “I mean what I take to be the sense in which St. Paul uses the word--I mean the highest kind of preaching. But I will come to the point practically: a man, I say, who does not feel in his soul that he has something to tell his people, should straightway turn his energy to the providing of such food for them as he finds feed himself. In other words, if he has nothing new in his own treasure, let him bring something old out of another man’s. If his own soul is unfed, he can hardly be expected to find food for other people, and has no business in any pulpit, but ought to betake himself to some other employment--whatever he may have been predestined to--I mean, made fit for.” “Then do you intend that a man SHOULD make up his sermons from the books he reads?” “Yes, if he cannot do better. But then I would have him read--not with his sermon in his eye, but with his people in his heart. Men in business and professions have so little time for reading or thinking--and idle people have still less--that their means of grace, as the theologians say, are confined to discipline without nourishment, whence their religion, if they have any, is often from mere atrophy but a skeleton; and the office of preaching is, after all, to wake them up lest their sleep turn to death; next, to make them hungry, and lastly, to supply that hunger; and for all these things, the pastor has to take thought. If he feed not the flock of God, then is he an hireling and no shepherd.”