1.G 07. Illustrations provide for Various Hearers

Illustrations provide for Various Hearers. The relation of illustrations to a mixed audience is another point which deserves careful consideration.

I have known ministers who always unconsciously sifted their audience, and preached to nothing but the bolted wheat. Now, you have got a little fine flour in your congregation, and more poor flour; then you have the Graham flour, which is the wheat ground up husk and all; and then you have all the unground wheat, and all the straw, and all the stubble.

You are just as much bound to take care of the bottom as you are of the top. True, it is easier, after you have fallen into the habit of doing it, to preach to those people who appreciate your better efforts. It is easier for you to preach so that the household of cultured and refined people will love to sit down and talk with you on this subtle feeling, and about that wonderful idea you got from the German poet, and so on. But that is self-indulgence, half the time, on the part of a pastor. He follows the path that he likes, the one in which he excels, and he is not thinking of providing for the great masses that are under his care.

You are bound to see that everybody (jets sonictiling every time. There ought not to be a five year-old child that shall go home without something that pleases and instructs him.

How are you going to do that? I know of no other way than by illustration.

I have around my pulpit, and sometimes crowding upon the platform, a good many of the boys and girls of the congregation. I notice that, during the general statements of the sermon and the exegetical parts of it, introducing the main discourse, the children are playing with each other. One will push a hymn-book or a hat toward the other, and they will set each other laughing. That which ought not to be done is, with children, very funny and amusing.

By-and-by I have occasion to use an illustration, arid I happen to turn round and look at the children, and not one of them is playing, but they are all looking up with interest depicted on their faces. I did not think of them in making it, perhaps, but I saw, when the food fell out in that way, that even the children were fed too. You will observe that the children in the congregation will usually know perfectly well whether there is anything in the sermon for them or not. There always ought to be; and there is no way in which you can prepare a sermon for the delectation of the plain people, and the uncultured, and little children, better than by making it attractive and instructive with illustrations.

It & is always the best method to adopt with a mixed audience. And that is the kind of audience for which you must prepare yourselves, too. It is only now and then that a man preaches in a college chapel, where all are students. You are going into parishes where there are old and young and middle-aged people, where there are working men and men of leisure, dull men and sharp men, practised worldlings and spiritual and guileless men; in fact, all sorts of people. And you are to preach so that every man shall have his portion in due season; and thatportion ought to be in every sermon, more or less.

You will scarcely be able to do it in any other way than by illustration. If God has not given you the gift by original endowment, strive to attain it by cultivation.