Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER ffl. The observations contained in the preceding chapter make it sufficiently evident, that the art of extemporaneous speaking, however advantageous to the Christian minister, and however possible to be acquired, is yet attended with embarrassments and difficulties, which are to be removed only by...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER ffl. The observations contained in the preceding chapter make it sufficiently evident, that the art of extemporaneous speaking, however advantageous to the Christian minister, and however possible to be acquired, is yet attended with embarrassments and difficulties, which are to be removed only by long and arduous labor. It is not enough, however, to insist upon the necessity of this discipline. We must know in what it consists, and how it is to be conducted. In completing therefore, the plan I have proposed to myself, I am now to give a few hints respecting the mode in which the study is to be carried on, and obstacles to be surmounted. These hints, gathered partly from experience and partly from observation and books, will be necessarily incomplete; but not, it is hoped, altogether useless to those who are asking some direction. 1. The first thing to be observed is, that the student who would acquire facikity in this art, should bear it constantly in mind, and have regard to it in all his studies, and in his whole mode of study. The reason is very obvious. He that would become eminent in any pursuit, must make it the primary and almost exclusive object of his attention. It must never be long absent from his thoughts, and he must be contriving how to promote it, in every thing he undertakes. It is thus that the miser accumulates, by making the most trifling occurrences the occasions of gain; and thus the ambitious man is on the alert to forward his purposes of advancement by little events which another would pass unobserved. So too he, the business of whose life is preaching, should be on the watch to render every thing subservient to this end. The inquiry should always be, how he can turn the knowledge he is acquiring, the subject he is studying, this mode of reas...