1.C 00. THE PERSONAL ELEMENT IN ORATORY

    Chapter 3: THE PERSONAL ELEMENT IN ORATORY.

February 7, 1872. SHALL talk to you to-day on the general subject of Personalism, as affecting your success in reaching men with the truth, including various modes of bringing your selves to hear on others, from the pulpit, and the helps and hindrances in doing so, both on the mental and spiritual side, and on the physical or material side. No man ever preaches, all the time thinking of producing specific effects, without very soon being made conscious that men are so different from each other that no preaching will be continuously effective which is not endlessly various; and that not for the sake of arresting attention, but because all men do not take in moral teaching by the same sides of their minds. I remember when it was the custom, and it was supposed a proper thing to do, for ministers to hold up a regular system of moral truth, sermon by sermon, and chapter by chapter, until the received average views of the day had been spread out before the congregation; and then it was hoped that a Divine Sovereignty would apply these truths to men’s hearts. Experience ought to have shown them that there is a class of hearers in every intelligent community that will never be led except through their reason. They will require that the path he laid down for them, and that they sec it before they follow. They will not be content to receive the truth in any other mode than by the idea form. If they cannot get it in one church, they will go to another; and if still they cannot find it, they will go nowhere. Yet, if you shape your preaching, as often literary men in the pulpit are accustomed to do, to the distinctively intellectual men in the community, you will very soon fill them full and starve the rest of your congregation; because, right alongside of them, there are natures just as noble as theirs, but not accustomed to receive their food through the mouth of reason, except in an incidental and indirect way. We all use our reason, more or less, in all processes; but then there are a great many persons who want the truth presented in emotive forms.