1.G 05. They Stimulate Imagination

They Stimulate Imagination. The effect of illustrations upon ideality is very great. They bring into play the imaginative faculty, which is only another name for ideality. The sense of the invisible and of the beautiful are combined in ideality. Now all great truth is beautiful. It carries in it elements of taste and fitness. The “ beauty of holiness “ we find spoken of in the Word of God, and this is a beauty that does not belong to anything material. God is transcendently a lover of beauty, and all the issues of the Divine Soul are, if we could see them as he sees them, beautiful, just as self-denial and love are beautiful, and as purity and truth and all good things are beautiful.

It is not, therefore, in the interest of truth that a man should sift it down to the merest bare nuggets of statement that it is susceptible of; and this is not best for an audience. It is best that a truth should have argument to substantiate it, and analysis and close reasoning; yet when you come to give it to an audience you should clothe it with flesh, so that it shall be fit for their understandings. In no other way can you so stir up that side of the mind to grasp your statements and arguments easily, and prepare it to remember them. You cannot help your audience in any other way so well as by keeping alive in them the sense of the imagination, and making the truth palpable to them, because it is appealing to the taste, to the sense of the beautiful in imagery as well as to the sense of truth.