ELOQUENT PREACHING

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 20, 1881

ELOQUENT PREACHING.

ONE of the special dangers and defects of preaching in this country is connected with the popular liking of oratory in the pulpit, the demand for what is called eloquent preaching. The common American idea of pulpit eloquence is low and sensational. It means a chiefly rapid and emphatic utterance of sonorous sentences, with something extreme, violent, and paradoxical in the thought presented, though not much thought is required. People demand of the preacher that he shall arouse and excite them, and they enjoy with a kind of voluptuousness, the temporary stimulus and thrill of emotion which the preaching always causes. It results from the laws of mental action that preaching of this kind does not inspire consciousness nor tend to practical moral activity. It necessarily produces and fosters mental conditions which are extremely unfavorable to spirituality of character and life.

This appetite for eloquence, working with other tendencies of the age, has helped to make the preaching in this country dramatic and entertaining, but, in large measure, unspiritual. This, I think, can be rightly regarded only as a calamity, a tendency opposed to the interests of a religion, adapted to weaken and subvert it, and to lead the people who are influenced by it into a region where religion will be impossible or regarded as unnecessary. This is one of the most important among the unfavorable tendencies of the age. It has made preaching more attractive and interesting to the masses, but this has been accomplished by sacrificing much that is essential in religion itself.—Atlantic Monthly.