Unnaturalness in Preaching.
By Spurgeon
SYDNEY SMITH tells us: “I went, for the first time in my life, some years ago, to stay at a very grand and beautiful place in the country, where the grounds are said to be laid out with consummate taste. For the first two or three days I was perfectly enchanted; it seemed something so much better than nature that I really began to wish the earth had been laid out according to the latest principles of improvement. . . . In three days’ time I was tired to death; a thistle, a nettle, a heap of dead bushes, anything that wore the appearance of accident and want of intention, was quite a relief. I used to escape from the made grounds, and walk upon an adjacent goose common, where the cart-ruts, gravel-pits, humps, irregularities, coarse ungentlemanlike grass, and all the varieties produced by neglect, were a thousand times more gratifying than the monotony of beauties the result of design, and crowded into unnatural confines.” Now, this is precisely the result produced upon most hearers by a too elaborate style of preaching. At first it astonishes, amazes, and delights; but in the long run it palls upon the mind, and even wearies the ear. The high art displayed in sentences polished into perfect smoothness is certainly very wonderful, but it ere long becomes very wearisome. Men cannot forever look at fireworks, nor pass their days among artificial flowers. The preaching which maintains its attractiveness year after year is after the order of nature, original, unaffected, and full of spontaneous bursts which the laws of rhetoric would scarcely justify. Homely illustrations, a touch of quaintness, a fullness of heart, thorough naturalness, and outspoken manliness, are among the elements which compose a ministry which will wear, and be as interesting at the end of twenty years as at first. Of the refined politeness of a drawing-room, most people have enough in a single evening; to continue such a manner of intercourse for a week would be intolerable; but the familiar communion of the family never tires, home’s genuine and spontaneous fellowship grows dearer every year. The parallel holds good between the deliverances of a grandiloquent elocution and the utterances of a warm heart. The primitive Methodist being asked to return thanks after dining with the squire, thanked God that he did not have such a good dinner every day, or he should be ill; and when we have occasionally listened to some great achievement of rhetoric, we have felt the same grateful sentiment rising to our lips. A whipped cream or a syllabub is an excellent thing occasionally, but it is very easy to grow tired of both of them, while homely fare can be eaten year after year with a relish. If it be natural to a man to be very elegant and rhetorical, let him be so; flamingoes and giraffes are as God made them, and therefore their long legs are the correct thing; but let no man imitate the proficient in an elevated style; for geese and sheep would be monstrous if perched on high. To be sublime is one thing; to be ridiculous is only a step removed, but it is another matter. Many in laboring to escape rusticity have fallen into fastidiousness, and so into utter feebleness. It may be that to recover their strength they will have to breathe their native air, and return to that natural style from which they have so laboriously departed.—Spurgeon.