1.C 02. How to Meet Differing Minds

How to Meet Differing Minds.

Now, in order to reach and help all these varying phases of your congregation, you must take human nature as you find it, in its broad range. Under stand this, that the same law which led the apostle to make himself a Greek to the Greeks, and a Jew to the Jews, and to put himself under the law with those who were under the law; and that same everlasting good sense of conformity in these things, for the sake of taking hold of men where they can be reached, and lifting them up, requires you to study human nature as it is, and not as people tell you it ought to be. If a man can be saved by pure intellectual preaching, let him have it. If others require a predominance of emotion, provide that for them. If by others the truth is taken more easily through the imagination, give it to them in forms attractive to the imagination. If there arc still others who demand it in the form of facts and rules, see that they have it in that form. Take men as it has pleased God to make them; and let your preaching, so for as concerns the selection of material, and the mode and method by which you are presenting the truth, follow the wants of the persons themselves, and not simply the measure of your own minds.