William Carus, Simeon's curate and successor at Holy Trinity, says in his memoir of Simeon, "The intense fervor of his feelings he cared not to conceal or restrain: His whole soul was in his subject, and he spoke and acted just as he felt." He laid great stress on the need for the preacher to make sure that the point went right home. In one of his sermon classes he spoke of screwing the word of truth into the hearers. He went on, "A screw is the most powerful of mechanical forces. The screw as it turns round again and again is forced deeper and deeper and gains such a hold that it is impossible to withdraw it. In my sermons the application is always another turn of the screw."
There were certain principles that Simeon insisted on in his interpretation of the Bible. His great theme was let the Bible speak and let no one misinterpret it. "I am willing that every part of God's Word should speak exactly what it was intended to speak, without adding a single iota to it, or taking from it one particle of its legitimate import." Simeon's hope was to make biblical Christians of his hearers, and the true way to do this was to take each portion for study in its context and to try to discover what the writer had in mind when he wrote it. He said that in his own sermons he had earnestly tried "to give every text its just meaning, its natural bearing, and its legitimate use."
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Simeon would usually take a passage, explain its setting, describe its action, and then drive home the message. On no account would he isolate a text and then hang a sermon on it. This practice he called treating a text as a motto. If a preacher approaches the pulpit with a preconceived sermon in mind and only uses the Bible to find a suitable text to which he can attach it, he still has much to learn from Simeon. "Reading one's own ideas into Scripture is not preaching God's truth but self," he said.
The secret of Simeon's success is that "through evil report and good report he ceased not to preach Thy saving Word," to quote the prayer said in King's College Chapel on the anniversary of his death, November 13, 1836. He was utterly dependent upon God. Gifted though he was in many ways -- with strong personality, clear mind, endless energy -- yet he knew that without God's continual help and grace he could do nothing.