This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 Excerpt: ...There is an extravagance of expression and a garishness of illustration that is worse than tameness. Some sensational preachers court the ears of a curious crowd by lowering the style of pulpit address to the level of the opira bouffe. The mania for "wild and whirling words" is contagious, and not a few of the ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 Excerpt: ...There is an extravagance of expression and a garishness of illustration that is worse than tameness. Some sensational preachers court the ears of a curious crowd by lowering the style of pulpit address to the level of the opira bouffe. The mania for "wild and whirling words" is contagious, and not a few of the preachers, imagining that ' the pulpit is losing its power, ' believe they can demonstrate the contrary by stunning the senses of their hearers with flaming superlatives and rhetorical rockets. Simplicity must never degenerate into silliness, nor must flash be mistaken for force. "The expressions of thought," M. Jules Claretie has somewhere said, "should be a little like lightning, --rapid, luminous and electric, and the more of this rapidity and electricity it has, the longer--unlike the lightning--it will last. Few things are more effective than anecdote when brief and pithy; few more demoralizing when wrongly used. Christ used anecdote as well as other forms of illustration, but how apt, how luminous! The abuse of anecdote in these days of abundant lay evangelism is a conspicuous evil; its effective use is a matter of keen discrimination and of true oratorical tact. Illustrations in general are like windows to a house, but they should be such as let in and let out uncolored light. They should not be fanciful, or farfetched, or foreign to the hearers' appreciation. Nature in her infinite variety, human nature in its familiar traits, social life, current events, every-day objects of the home, the shop, the farm, the street, are more easily comprehended and more effective than those from the realm of history, science or literature. The latter are, however, eminently appropriate to a well-educated congregation; and, indeed, may b...
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