Word: sermonic
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Coffin liked children. If he did not originate, then he made famous the three-minute sermon to children, before the longer, deeper effort. Many of the elders liked the children's sermons best. Once the subject was "The Man that Swallowed Himself." (" . . . the lips of a fool will swallow up himself." Ecclesiastes X:12). "How would you like to be thought of as just a mouth?" the Pastor asked the children, defining fools as boys and girls who bragged, told tales, lied...
...Coffin was having things to say to parents, too; forceful things, revealing, for a layman, an extraordinary acquaintance with current science, literature, philosophy. His sermon on the amphibian is classic. Are we to be sprawlers, floppers, drifters, no better than our amphibian ancestors? Let there be precise, controlled movement. Can you do what you ought, when you ought, whether you want to do it or not? Amphibians . . . the parable, under an orator's magic, progresses...
...alone in his ire. From public print to public print the story went and was made much of, fondled by those who see in college the best kind of news, flutor unfit to print. Last Sunday the trivial little editorial was used as the text for a sermon. Perhaps is was only asking sanctuary, like the hero of Galsworthy's new play. At all events it received little. The gentleman of the clergy was strong in his denunciation. And he was not completely wrong...
...which is separate from his body. Then I switch to religion, saying that I believe Christ, Buddha, Confucius and Mohammed to have had greater influence on mankind than any material scientist. I qualify my regard for Mohammed, who believed in war. I discount Christian ritual, holding for the Sermon on the Mount, the Golden Rule. I discount church services and spoken prayers. I declare there are sermons in thunderstorms, wildflowers, oakleaves, snowflakes, squirrels. I advise religionists to adopt the methods of the scientists: obtain irrefutable, concrete data proving Immortality. Then men will have to believe, if the score is only...
...interested him the most was that of a man who asked why, if Christianity was convincing, the possessors of it lacked contentment. To this he replied that a Christian should desire incessant activity rather than seek smug contentment. The Lord Bishop's personality, which thus permeated his entire sermon, held the congregation's interest quite as much as his theme...