He adds shrewdly, "if a discourse is too elaborate and subtle to be delivered without manuscript, it is certainly too subtle and elaborate to be followed without a paper before the hearers too."9
Gossip is one of the very few writers on preaching who commends the memoriter method of preaching. For the first seven years of his ministry he wrote and rewrote his sermons with a carefulness for which he was thankful later but he discovered that if he had written carefully he could reproduce what he had written, with ease and exactness, by walking up and down and reading it over, passage by passage, three times.
Then came the War, when it was impossible to use even the briefest of notes as a chaplain on the front line. "For years now," he explains, "I have never written a sermon, or more than the briefest of headings, till the Monday after it has been delivered, if even then." This means hard work and absorbed concentration.
If memorizing makes the preacher mechanical or strained, Gossip suggests that he should abandon that method. He advises his student hearers to begin by writing with the utmost care and to keep all they write.
Style is power, and time spent upon it is not wasted, says Gossip. A phrase, an image, an apt adjective, may bring home the truth to some needy soul and bring God very near.
With the majority of people, it is through the imagination (far more than their reason) that the heart and will can be reached. If they are to understand, they must be able to see, almost as if with the bodily eye.
Gossip himself possessed a wise and schooled imagination, as he proved not only in his sermons but by the children's addresses that he gave in his churches (and which were published regularly in The Expository Times).
In the final lecture Gossip speaks of some signposts and danger signals. He deals with the preacher's use of his voice and the value of apt and vivid illustration, which is what people remember. A good quotation helps if it is really appropriate and the name of the author should be given, lest some hearer may wonder who it was that is quoted and so lose the rest of the sermon.
One note was always present in Gossip's preaching: the unchanging validity of the Christian message. Time after time he emphasized the wonder of the works of God in creation, providence, and redemption. He never tired of preaching of the comfort of God to those who sincerely seek Him.
Gossip agreed wholeheartedly with the saying of James Denny that "you cannot in preaching produce at the same time an impression of your own cleverness and that Christ is wonderful."
1. In Christ's Stead, p. 128
2. The Hero in thy Soul, p. 111.
3. Experience Worketh Hope, p. 85-93
4. In Christ's Stead, p. 35
5. Op. cit. p. 54
6. In Christ's Stead, p. 82
7. Op. cit. p. 82
8. Op. cit. p. 149
9. Op. cit. p. 181
