Sermons Right and Wrong TiE adjudicators,"Canon Edward Carpenter: of Westminster
Abbey, Dr. S. M. Berry, Secretary of the International Con- gregational Council, and the Editor of the Spectator, have now considered the papers submitted on the two subjects of the message the man in the pulpit has to give, and the sermon the man (or woman) in the pew ,wants to hear. The identity of the verdicts given by each of the three judges independently was notable. After the entries had been thinned down to between twenty and thirty in each category, and denoted by numbers, each judge put in a list of the half-dozen numbers he had selected: Out of these three in each category were found to figure in all three lists, and the judges were unanimous in awarding the first prize in the " man in the pew category to a woman in the pew, whose paper appears below.
The prizes have' been awarded as follows : CATEGORY I: First prize to Canon S. P. Kerr, Cathe- dral Rectory, Lisburn, N. Ireland, whose contribution will be published next week. Second prizes to the Rev. E. W. Price Evans, Crane Street Baptist Church, Pontypool; the Rev. S. H. Cooke, The Rectory, Keinton Mandeville, Somerset.
CATEGORY III: First prize to Mary B. Bruce, 21 College Street, Buckhaven, Fifeshire.
Second prizes to Humphrey Baker, Pitlands, Salcombe Hill, Sidmouth; C. L. Jacques, 64 Queen Elizabeth's Drive, Southgate, N.14.
Uncovenanted awards are being made to the writer of one paper which would almost certainly have received a prize but for the fact that his contribution was so far over the stipulated length as to give him an undue advantage over other competitors, and to a schoolgirl of seventeen, Elizabeth Hutchinson, of Polam Hall School, Darlington, of whose paper all the judges -thought highly, though it did not gain a place in the first three. Many papers which did not secure an award closely approximated-in merit to those which did. Inclusion - unfortunately involves exclusion.
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