Chapter 34

LITERARY FELONY.

We have recently seen many elaborate discussions as to whether plagiarism is virtuous or criminal--in other words, whether writers may steal. If a minister can find a sermon better than any one he can make, why not preach it? If an author can find a paragraph for his book better than any he can himself manufacture, why not appropriate it?

That sounds well. But why not go further and ask, if a woman find a set of furs better than she has in her wardrobe, why not take them? If a man find that his neighbor has a cow full Alderney, while he has in his own yard only a scrawny runt, why not drive home the Alderney? Theft is taking anything that does not belong to you, whether it be sheep, oxen, hats, coats or literary material.

Without attempting to point put the line that divides the lawful appropriation of another's ideas from the appropriation of another's phraseology, we have only to say that a literary man always knows when he is stealing. Whether found out or not, the process is belittling, and a man is through it blasted for this world and damaged for the next one. The ass in the fable wanted to die because he was beaten so much, but after death they changed his hide into a drum-head, and thus he was beaten more than ever. So the plagiarist is so vile a cheat that there is not much chance for him, living or dead. A minister who hopes to do good with each burglary will no more be a successful ambassador to men than a foreign minister despatched by our government to-day would succeed if he presented himself at the court of St. James with the credentials that he stole from the archives of those illustrious ex-ministers, James Buchanan or Benjamin Franklin.

What every minister needs is a fresh message that day from the Lord. We would sell cheap all our parchments of licensure to preach. God gives his ministers a license every Sabbath and a new message. He sends none of us out so mentally poor that we have nothing to furnish but a cold hash of other people's sermons. Our haystack is large enough for all the sheep that come round it, and there is no need of our taking a single forkful from any other barrack. By all means use all the books you can get at, but devour them, chew them fine and digest them, till they become a part of the blood and bone of your own nature. There is no harm in delivering an oration or sermon belonging to some one else provided you so announce it. Quotation marks are cheap, and let us not be afraid to use them. Do you know why "quotation" marks are made up of four commas, two at the head of the paragraph adopted and two at the close of it? Those four commas mean that you should stop four times before you steal anything.

If there were no question of morals involved, plagiarism is nevertheless most perilous. There are a great many constables out for the arrest of such defrauders. That stolen paragraph that you think will never be recognized has been committed to memory by that old lady with green goggles in the front pew. That very same brilliant passage you have just pronounced was delivered by the clergyman who preached in that pulpit the Sabbath before: two thieves met in one hen-roost. All we know of Doctor Hayward of Queen Elizabeth's time is that he purloined from Tacitus. Be dishonest once in this respect, and when you do really say something original and good the world will cry out, "Yes, very fine! I always did like Joseph Addison!"

Sermons are successful not according to the head involved in them, but according to the heart implied, and no one can feel aright while preaching a literary dishonesty. Let us be content to wear our own coat, though the nap on it is not quite as well looking, to ride on our own horse, though he do not gallop as gracefully and will "break up" when others are passing. There is a work for us all to do, and God gives us just the best tools to do it. What folly to be hankering after our neighbor's chalk line and gimlet!