A Lawyer on Preaching

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 12, 1865

A Lawyer on Preaching.

I HAVE been a listener to sermons for fifty years, and either I have changed or there has been a change for the worse in the delivery of the gospel message. There is less earnestness, less directness, less logical power, and less study than there was thirty years ago; and as a necessary consequence, the general style has become diffuse, if not superficial, and the result less efficient. If I am right in this, we have an important fact to be dealt with, and it ought to be removed, greatly modified, and that immediately.

What is the remedy? Let the ministers of the gospel review their past history, and return, as soon as it is possible, to the good old paths of their fathers, and preach the Bible in all its simplicity and grandeur.

No pulpit orator can hope to orator much into his audience unless he follows his text closely, and he must advance nothing that does not tend directly to illustrate his main proposition; and, when his argument is finished, he should not spend half an hour, more or less, in restating his propositions.

Many ministers deliver finely written, and even classical sermons, on very solemn subjects, but they are essays merely; and their effect is to lower the standard of Christian character and the dignity and glory of the ministry.