The fourth principle that guided Watkinson was that the preacher should speak from life to life. He must know and love men and women. He ought to know theology, science, and literature, but he must also know the joys and sorrows of the human heart. This means that the preacher must possess and develop his own spiritual life, must understand and feel the truths which he preaches.
"I see no reason why our preaching should not display the same skill that is brought into the artistic world, the same power, the same delivery, the same perfection of finish. If an artist puts all the labor and pains that he does into a picture, should we put any less into our sermons?"
The illustration with Watkinson was always made subservient to the subject. It never became an end in itself. He said: "Too many stories look suspiciously like padding. They remind us of the man who agreed to spend an hour with a friend in prayer, each praying for five minutes, and who was soon gravelled for lack of matter. Petition having failed him he said: 'Now, Lord, we will tell an anecdote.' There are far too many sermons on that principle. Never drag an illustration in. Your illustration must arise naturally out of your argument."
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Here is one example taken from a volume of sermons preached in America. "Watching the Mayflower driven with its sorrowful freight over the wild sea to an unknown world, the troubled spectator might have protested. Where is the justice, wisdom or benign purpose in the permission of this tragedy? What condemnation can be too severe of the government which allows this expatriation, if such government there be? But it is all clear now. The American Republic is the interpretation of the dubious episode of the seventeenth century.
'That fatal and perfidious bark
Built in the eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark,'
turns out to be God's ark, bearing to a new world the germs of a higher civilization and the future of the race. He makes the wrath of man to praise Him, and compels human sin and folly to majestic ends."3
Watkinson had the facility of finding unexpected and sometimes startling texts and subjects. "The Fictions of Sin" is his title for a sermon on "On their heads, as it were, crowns of gold" (Revelation 9:7). A sermon on "As it were the body of heaven in his clearness" (Exodus 24:10) is entitled "Blue Distances." "Be not righteous overmuch" is the text for a sermon on "Strained Piety." A sermon on "The Craft and Cruelty of Sin" is based on "And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions" (Revelation 9:8). The last sermon he preached in 1923 was entitled "The Pharisee of the Fields" and was based on Hebrews 10:24-25.
Here are some examples of his remarkable ability in sermon divisions. A sermon on "Things Undone" had as its text "He left nothing undone of all that the Lord commanded Moses" (Joshua 11:15). It begins with a quotation from the diary of Andrew A. Bonar in reviewing one of the years of his life: "This year omissions have distressed me more than anything." Then the sermon is divided as follows:
