"Plagiarism is a nasty sin. It would be nasty in anybody, but it is doubly nasty in a preacher. What kind of ethical sensitivity has a man who takes somebody else's work and passes it off as his own? From a man set apart to divide the word of truth it is dishonorable indeed.
The heartiness of our condemnation makes it necessary, however, to be plain what we mean by "plagiarism." A man is clearly no plagiarist (literally, abductor, kidnapper) who takes a sermon and tells his congregation from whose volume he has taken it. No congregation of author would resent that on rare occasions, especially if the sermon expounded some difficult theme, and the preacher felt unequal to the subject himself. Nor is a man a plagiarist who seeks stimulation for his mind from the work of other men. In that sense of the word Shakespeare would be a plagiarist. So many of his stories are borrowed; the lustrous garments are all his own. To cut a piece of cloth off another man's roll is not, I think, a sin in literature of homiletics, but to steal the suit that he has made and parade it as one's own is plain theft. The robber might as well have put his hand in our pocket and taken our purse.
Years ago I was on holiday at Tighnabruaich in the lovely Kyles of Bute. I went to worship on the Sunday evening and sat under the ministrations of a visiting preacher. When he announced his text, I was arrested at once, having preached on the same text myself two or three weeks before. I was still more arrested when he began with a flat contradiction of the text -- as I began myself. Word for word my sermon came out out -- just as it had appeared in a verbatim report from a religious journal which had published it without permission. The central illustration was a personal experience of mine. He gave it as his own. My children sitting beside me in the pew remembered the sermon and looked at me in astonishment. I blushed for the cloth. If I had been preaching in the pulpit a week later and had repeated my sermon, I should have been suspected of plagiarism.
But that salutary experience taught me something else. Nobody can steal like that and really make it his own. The whole thing lacked a certain conviction. It wasn't his! The experience he was describing had not been beaten out in his own life, and he said things I had learned in sorrow as though he was mildly inquiring of someone's cold in the head. On his lips that message did not do the work it was made to do. He was not behind it. If there were no ethics involved in plagiarism, it would still be a thing to avoid. One secret of power in preaching is to know the truth of what you are saying and believe it utterly. There are senses in which everyone can say with Paul, "my gospel," for there is something of himself in every message the preacher honestly prepares. You are false, and you feel false, when you steal another man's message and offer it as your own."
W.E. Sangster, The Craft of Sermon Construction, pp. 199-201
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