In 1912 John Henry Jowett stood before the divinity students at Yale and told them he had not brought a theory. He was twenty years into a ministry that had carried him from a Birmingham pulpit to Fifth Avenue, and what he had come to hand over were "counsels and warnings which have been born out of my own successes and defeats."The Church of his day was being urged to hurry up, to be current, to be "even a little sensational if they are to catch the interest of men who live in the thick of sensations from day to day." Jowett was fair to that case before he answered it. Then he spent seven lectures showing where the road goes, and he laid the failure not at the door of the age but at the door of the preacher.He will not tell a man how to build a sermon until he has told him what the man building it must be. So these lectures run from the call to the committee room: the perils that thicken around a privileged life, the themes a man must never trade away, the hardest and most fruitful labour in the study, the parts of a service wrongly called preliminaries, the visit to one ordinary house on an ordinary evening, and the plain question of whether a man can be worked with at all.This Student Edition prints the seven lectures unabridged, collated against the 1912 text, with every editorial change marked on the page where it occurs. A foreword, an introduction, and notes at the close of each lecture set out what Jowett argued and what a man can do about it this week.