"You people in the sunshine may believe the faith," he said, "but we in the shadow must believe it. We have nothing else."2
His sermons were always delivered with a great intensity and there was a freshness in their presentation. His style was as headlong as a Highland torrent. Principal John Mauchline of Trinity College, in a memorial tribute to his colleague in The Expository Times, said: "He often spoke in breathless sentences in which clause was piled on clause, and the bonds of syntax were strained in a way no grammarian would have allowed; and yet each clause added its own quota to fan the fires of eloquence until every heart in a congregation was warmed to a generous glow.
"It may be that for a congregation's weekly spiritual sustenance Gossip provided too rich fare. It may be that his greatest influence was upon those who heard him from time to time, so that, as it were, they kept with him high festival."
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He had rather a weak voice -- which made it somewhat difficult to hear -- and a strong accent. His gestures were often ungainly but there was an indefinable something about his preaching which cut through every obstacle to find and grip and hold the hearers to the last word.
His sermons were a revelation of the worth to a preacher of a well-stored mind. His hearers felt themselves in the presence of a mind that did its own thinking, that was never content with the thoughts of other men's minds but which yet had gathered from many fields a rich harvest.
Gossip not only had the power to see: he knew how, by apt and telling quotation, to interpret and make fast what he had seen. There was in his words a certain dramatic intensity, a certain tingling quality which got home. No one could help but feel the freshness and aptness of the phrasing, the color and music of his words.
He was a master of illustration. With the devotional literature of our language he was intimately acquainted, and he drew upon it with telling effect. Gossip also drew on an astonishingly-wide range of literature: poetry, fiction, biography and letters. In one sermon in his last book, "When Christ and you come face to face what then?" he quotes from Browning, Matthew Arnold, Josiah Royce, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, C. E. Montague, Walter Lippmann, T. S. Eliot, Lammenais, Plato, Jung, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Raymond Lull.3
Gossip published four volumes of sermons in T. & T. Clark's "The Scholar as Preacher" series. The first appeared in 1924. It was entitled "From the Edge of the Crowd," and modestly claimed to be the musings of a pagan mind on Jesus Christ. Plainly Gossip had looked on his Master with fresh, keen eyes, and wrote about Him with rare insight, controlled passion and sometimes with overwhelming power.
In 1926 "The Galilean Accent" appeared. These sermons were studies in the Christian life and cast the same spell on many readers. There was usually the striking opening sentence, an approach to the text from an unexpected angle: the sweep of his mind, the torrential outpouring of meaningful and newly-minted language. Gossip had no use for what he called "slatternly, flat-footed English."
