Your ShelfYour Projects

Pretty Preaching

33%

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 14, 1863

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 22, No. 7.

Read the full edition

Pretty Preaching

By Robert Hall

Pretty Preaching.—I am tormented with the desire to preach better than I can. But I have no wish to make fine, pretty sermons. Prettiness is well enough, when prettiness is in its place. I like to see a pretty child, and a pretty flower, but in a sermon prettiness is out of place. To my ear it would be anything but commendation should it be said to me, “You have given us a pretty sermon.” If I were upon trial for my life, and an advocate should amuse the jury with his tropes and figures, burying his argument beneath a profusion of the flowers of rhetoric, I would say to him:
“Tut, man; you care more for your vanity than my hanging. Put yourself in my place, speak in view of the gallows, and you will tell your story plainly and earnestly.”—Robert Hall.