... God's thoughts are not as our thoughts and He prepares for man such good things as pass man's understanding. ... It becomes painfully obvious that our crosses will never deserve our crowns. If you want to see a wreath and a cross to match it, you must go as far as the empty sepulcher outside Jerusalem.... Look closely at this cross and there you shall see, like a little jewel laid over the intersection of its arms, whatever cross you have faithfully borne for God's sake. Alone, it would not be measurable against the glorious cross, but the great arms of Christ's cross extend the spread of yours and fit it to the heavenly scale.10

Because Farrer's imagination was so fertile, it is somewhat easier to see why he attributed such imagination to the writers of the Revelation and Mark's Gospel.

Farrer was not a preacher who drew his primary inspiration from secular images. Though most of his sermons do not give the particular text from which he preached, many of them do. "Spirit and Form" is based on 2 Kings 4:2, the story of Elisha, the widow, and the inexhaustible supply of oil. Farrer was a High Church Anglican with the warm-hearted piety of an Evangelical or Methodist. Preaching to 2 Kings 4:2, he used it to question the validity of ceremony.

... the elaboration of ceremonies creates in my mind spiritual disquiet, which reaches its most acute when I find myself called upon ... to rehearse something like a pontifical high mass. Here the intricate and absolutely dead etiquette of old Constantinople is draped around the supper of the Lord ... before I know what I am doing I am asking myself whether fixed forms of any kind can really be the vehicle of God's Spirit ... 11

The application of the story of Elisha and the widow's vessel of oil is obvious: the forms and liturgies through which we worship are only valuable if God pours life into them. However, Farrer does not rest with these remarks on public worship. He goes on to show that public worship is only the means to the end that we make God's grace visible in the world. Farrer says that the true worshipper comes to the forms, rites, and ceremonies, and says: "Why did I come to be mended, except that I might hold the Holy Ghost? ... Show me the prayers, the deeds, that follow from it!"12

In "Wise Fools," the sermon on Amos, Farrer made one of the profoundest theological points in any of his sermons. The epistle which must have been read along with the Old Testament text of Amos was 1 Corinthians 1:20-25. Farrer, speaking to a university congregation, asked if St. Paul's and Amos' elevation of simplicity and even foolishness meant that the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of the intellect were all in vain. He denied that:

What is our perplexity? Is it not that the sphere of science and cool rational wisdom claims to embrace the whole world, and there appears no room left for the sphere of faith? ... It is in his potato-patch that the crofter [farmer] is called to be a prophet and a martyr. So the province of faith, and the province of scientific reason, appear to cover one another completely.13