Ah! yes, indeed, that is worth while.  Your pews will never be empty if such be the fruit of your lips and the ripeness of your spirit.  The people want to hear about something better than they know or have known.

“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings.”

Nobody likes a scold.  Of course, when it is necessary to scold, go ahead and scold.  But don’t make scolding a practise.  Your congregation will not stand being abused; they will not stand it unless they actually need it, and then they will stand it.  Unconsciously they will know that the stripes you lay upon them are medicine after all, and for their healing.

But ordinarily everybody has such a hard time that they would like to hear about “a good time coming.”  Ordinarily everybody is so tired that they would like to hear something like this:  “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.”

The religion which you preach owes its vitality to the glorious hopefulness of it.  The people want to know that if they do well here joy awaits them hereafter, and here, too, if possible.  They want to hear about the “Father’s house” that has “many mansions,” and about Him who has “gone to prepare a place” for them.

They demand happiness in some form, if only in talk.  If they do not get it in the assurances of religion, who can blame them if they say:  “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.”  For sure enough they do die to-morrow, so far as their world goes.

If you do not believe that religion means happiness, quit the pulpit and raise potatoes.  Potatoes feed the body at least.  But unfaithful words or speech of needless despair feed nothing at all.  It is “east wind.”  Put beauty, hope, joy, into your preaching, therefore.  Make your listeners thrill with gladness that they are Christians.  Even the men of the world have wisdom enough to make things profane as attractive as possible.

Note, for example, that most successful books are hopeful books that tell of the beautiful things of human life and character.  Especially is this true of novels, the most widely read of all books of transient modern literature.  The hero always wins—­virtue always triumphs.  There are remarkable exceptions no doubt—­but they are exceptions.  Now and then there are remarkable novels which scourge with the whips of the Furies, as indeed most of Savonarola’s sermons flagellated.

With all your faith and the fervor of it, be full of thought.  Merely to believe burningly is not enough.  Nobody will listen to you declaim the confession and then declaim it over and over again and nothing more.  Even pious monotony palls.  Bread is the staff of life; and yet too much bread eaten at one time will kill.  Food, taken in excess, becomes poison.

I have emphasized the necessity for faith because it will always be the very soul of your influence over your audience.  It is the power behind your ideas.  Faith is the dynamics of truth.  But do not forget that you have got to have ideas.  You have got to have truth.