But, now and then, I fall in with a man who
won't let me do any private thinking till he's done. You hear his text
and his introduction, and wonder, how the dickens he is going to
reconcile the two. He carries you on and on and on, till he does it in a
grand whirl at the end, that lifts you up and away with it, like the
culminating arguments of the counsel for the prosecution, or the
peeler's joyful run in of a long-sought gaol-bird. I like that sort of a
parson; the rest are jackdaws."
"Perhaps they suit the average mind?"
"If they did, we ought to have graded churches as well as graded
schools. But they don't, except, in this way, that people have got
accustomed to the bumming. The preachers I like would keep up the
interest of a child. There was one I heard on the text, 'I form the
light and create darkness.' His introduction was, 'God is light and in
Him is no darkness at all.' He jerked us up into the light and banged
us down into the darkness, almost laughing one minute and crying the
next. Then he went to hunt up his man, and found him in the devil and
the devil's own, all fallen creations of God.
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