Did you ever hear a young preacher, just captured, just out of a
factory? Did you ever hear him preach his "maiden sermon"? I wish you
had heard mine. I had a call. At least, I thought I had a call. I think
now I was "short-circuited." The "brethren" waited upon me and told me
I had been "selected": Maybe this was a local call, not long distance.
They gave me six weeks in which to load the gospel gun and get ready
for my try-out. I certainly loaded it to the muzzle.
But I made the mistake I am trying to warn you against. Instead of
going to the one book where I might have gotten a sermon—the book of
my experience, I went to the books in my father's library. "As the poet
Shakespeare has so beautifully said," and then I took a chunk of
Shakespeare and nailed it on page five of my sermon. "List to the poet
Tennyson." Come here, Lord Alfred. So I soldered these fragments from
the books together with my own native genius. I worked that sermon up
into the most beautiful splurges and spasms. I bedecked it with
metaphors and semaphores. I filled it with climaxes, both wet and dry.
I had a fine wet climax on page fourteen, where I had made a little
mark in the margin which meant "cry here." This was the spilling-point
of the wet climax. I was to cry on the lefthand side of the page.
I committed it all to memory, and then went to a lady who taught
expression, to get it expressed. You have to get it expressed.
I got the most beautiful gestures nailed into almost every page. You
know about gestures—these things you make with your arms in the air as
you speak. You can notice it on me yet.
I am not sneering at expression. Expression is a noble art. All life is
expression. But you have to get something to express. Here I made my
mistake. I got a lot of fine gestures. I got an express-wagon and got
no load for it. So it rattled. I got a necktie, but failed to get any
man to hang it upon. I got up before a mirror for six weeks, day by
day, and said the sermon to the glass. It got so it would run itself. I
could have gone to sleep and that sermon would not have hesitated.
Then came the grand day. The boy wonder stood forth and before his
large and enthusiastic concourse delivered that maiden sermon more
grandly than ever to a mirror. Every gesture went off the bat according
to the blueprint. I cried on page fourteen! I never knew it was in me.
But I certainly got it all out that day!
Then I did another fine thing, I sat down. I wish now I had done that
earlier. I wish now I had sat down before I got up. I was the last man
out of the church—and I hurried. But they beat me out—all nine of
them. When I went out the door, the old sexton said as he jiggled the
key in the door to hurry me, "Don't feel bad, bub, I've heerd worse
than that. You're all right, bub, but you don't know nothin' yet."
I cried all the way to town. If he had plunged a dagger into me he
would not have hurt me so much. It has taken some years to learn that
the old man was right. I had wonderful truth in that sermon. No sermon
ever had greater truth, but I had not lived it. The old man meant I did
not know my own sermon.
So, children, when you prepare your commencement oration, write about
what you know best, what you have lived. If you know more about peeling
potatoes than about anything else, write about "Peeling Potatoes," and
you are most likely to hear the applause peal from that part of your
audience unrelated to you.
Out of every thousand books published, perhaps nine hundred of them do
not sell enough to pay the cost of printing them. As you study the
books that do live, you note that they are the books that have been
lived. Perhaps the books that fail have just as much of truth in them
and they may even be better written, yet they lack the vital impulse.
They come out of the author's head. The books that live must come out
of his heart. They are his own life. They come surging and pulsating
from the book of his experience.
The best part of our schooling comes not from the books, but from the
men behind the books.
We study agriculture from books. That does not make us an
agriculturist. We must take a hoe and go out and agricult. That is the
knowing in the doing.
