It is in the fourth lecture on the making of the sermon that Gossip lets us into his study and reveals his own methods of preparation. He found little difficulty in choosing texts; indeed, he had so many clamoring for attention that it was hard to choose between them. Often in reading the Bible at a service, texts for the next week would leap out of the pages.
His ordinary reading furnished him with abundant ideas. Sometimes something that gripped him would leap at a kindred or an opposing text, and at once his sermon began to form itself. Ideas for sermons or texts that appeal should be written down in a book, he said, with some indication of the line the preacher means to follow. This will help in lean days when the preacher's mind is a blank.
Having found his subject, Gossip would start on it at once, early in the week. On Tuesday he would make a rough outline of the road he meant to take and work at it in the mornings in his study. He kept thinking about it as he went visiting. To delay beginning work on the sermon until late in the week, says Gossip, makes for an unhealthy life and feverish work.
The Bible should always be treated honestly and reverently. "Preach not doctrines but Christ. Let them see that wonderful Figure, and as you talk of Him, they will grasp what you think about Him, and if you are successful, will agree with you. Whereas, if you preach doctrinally, in the sense of handing out cold slabs of abstract theorizing, they will cease to listen, or get lost."
On the matter of sermon heads, Gossip confesses himself to be a heretic. It is a mere pulpit illusion, he says, that by the natural law of things all truth, like all Gaul, falls into three parts. It is very convenient when it does.
One kind of sermon has simply one dominant idea, speeding straight to its goal like an arrow in its flight and this needs no heads. Another takes a central theme and muses on it, turning it round and round and always at the end of every section pressing it home and on the hearers. Another method -- which appealed most of all to Gossip when he sat in the pew -- was like a full mind unrolling itself, throwing in heaps of things but always moving on to a definite goal, leading the hearer further and deeper until God came very near. This is an exact description of his own way of preaching.
As a rule heads are needed, but they ought to be kept out of sight as much as possible. To announce them seemed to him poor psychology. Still, the preacher should have his own heads in his mind, to preserve proportion and balance.
When Gossip preached he often gave the impression that his preaching was wholly spontaneous, the inspired utterance of the occasion as the Spirit led him on, for he preached without any notes. The truth was that he had taken the advice which he gives in these lectures, "that the wisest method in sermon-making is that a man should first write in order that things should not be vague or unwieldy and disorderly, and then mainly, not verbally, get it by heart."
