LUTHER ON PREACHING by Dudley Marvin Canright

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 31, 1868

LUTHER ON PREACHING.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

In Marsh’s Ecclesiastical History, p. 272, he relates the following anecdote of Luther: “Luther had heard the celebrated Bucer preach a sermon, and invited him to supper. After commending the sermon, he said he could preach better than Bucer. Bucer courteously assented, saying, that by universal consent, that praise belonged to Luther. Luther then seriously replied, Do not think that I am vainly boasting; I am conscious of my own slender stores; nor could I preach so learned a sermon as you have done to-day; but my practice is this;—when I ascend the pulpit, I consider what is the character of my hearers, most of whom are rude and uninstructed people, almost Goths and Vandals, and I preach to them what I think they can understand. But you rise aloft and soar into the the

clouds; so that your sermons suit the learned, but are unintelligible to our plain people. I endeavor to copy the mother, who thinks the child better fed with the simple milk of the breast, than with the most costly confections.”

This is a good idea of preaching—one worth remembering. The mass of the people are ignorant of the Bible and spiritual things. Hence we must use simple language and ideas in order to reach them. But the most of the preaching of the day goes clear over their heads—is a sort of a sky gospel. Christ’s preaching was very plain and simple.

D. M. CANRIGHT.