If prone to take unfamiliar texts, it was not because of superficial acquaintance with the Bible, for few men have more diligently searched the Scriptures. Preaching was the supreme joy of his life. No sacrifice was too great to make for its effectiveness. In his early days he did much lecturing and was offered large fees but he found that it interfered with his preaching and decided to lecture no more.
In an address to theological students he once said: "Preaching is a subject of which we are never weary; it has for us an abiding charm. For my own part, I love a book on homiletics as much as ever I did in my life. I read with eager expectation the last published lectures on the art of preaching, trusting to know how to do it before I die."
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One wonders why Watkinson was never selected as a lecturer on preaching, for he was an acknowledged master of the art. Every sermon of his was a work of art, to which an incredibly ingenious mind had brought by painful toil every resource of wit and imaginations and the product of wide and extensive reading.
Watkinson was one of the few preachers who could use irony effectively. He did it with the suggestion of a twinkle in his eye and with a genial sniff and none of his hearers was offended. Now and then his gift of humor was a snare to him, but on the whole it was a great source of power. He once said to his friend F. W. Macdonald: "Humor sometimes gets the better of me in the pulpit but I never allow it to appear in my printed sermons."
He was almost entirely self-taught. Hour after hour he toiled in quest of knowledge. He was quite sure that no man gets great things out of life who does not put great things into it. He was a voracious reader of the great books. He had little taste for modern fiction, but of other kinds of reading nothing seemed to come amiss. He read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire three times aloud to himself for the sake of the style.
One day he told the editor of The Christian World that he had been reveling in Nietzsche. "Can you read him with patience?" asked the editor. "I read him with delight," was Watkinson's reply. "He is a perfect tonic to me. He challenges everything I believe and live by. He has made me go all over my fundamentals and make sure that my feet of faith are on rock, not sand."2 He said once: "I don't care what a book is like, if I can get but one thought or illustration from it." In the last year of his life he wrote to a minister friend: "Despite constant illness, I keep on learning how ignorant I am. I have quite a lot of things on hard-science, theology, and general literature."
When Watkinson arrived to stay in a home he laughingly told his hostess that in case of a fire she was to save first of all, not her deeds and will, but his commonplace books that were full of notes and illustrations gleaned from the reading of many years. He entered any picturesque and telling incident or fact in his notebook, under an appropriate heading, with the title of the book and the page, so that he could always verify his references. He wrote his sermons out fully in longhand and would preach them aloud at home before going out to his service.
