The history of the world is full of testimony to prove how much depends upon pastors being industrious; not an eminent orator has lived that isn’t an example of it. Yet, in contradiction to this, the almost universal feeling appears to be that industry can affect nothing, that eminence is the result of accident, and that everyone must be content to remain just what he may happen to be. That's wrong.
Thus multitudes who come forward as teachers and guides, allow themselves to be satisfied with the most indifferent attainments and a miserable mediocrity, without so much as inquiring how they might rise higher, much less making any attempt to rise. For any other art they would have served an apprenticeship, and would be ashamed to practice it in public before they had learned it. If anyone would sing, he attends a master, and is drilled in the very elementary principles, and only after the most laborious process dares to exercise his voice in public.
This he does, though he has scarcely anything to learn but the mechanical execution of what lies in sensible forms before his eyes. But the extemporaneous speaker, who is to invent as well as to speak, to carry on an operation of the mind as well as to produce sound, enters upon the work without preparatory discipline, and then wonders why he fails! If he were learning to play on the flute for public exhibition, what hours and days would he spend in giving practice to his fingers, and attaining the power of the sweetest and most impressive execution!
If he were devoting himself to the church organ, what months and years would he labor, so he might be master of its keys, and be able to draw out, at will, all its various combinations of harmonious sound, and its full richness and delicacy of expression! And yet he will believe that the grandest, the most various, the most expressive of all instruments, which the infinite Creator has fashioned by the union of an intellectual soul with the powers of speech, may be played upon without study or practice; he comes to it a mere uninstructed tyro, and thinks to manage all its stops, and command the whole compass of its varied and comprehensive power. He finds himself a bungler in the attempt, is mortified at his failure, and settles it in his mind forever that the attempt is vain.
Success in every art, whatever may be the natural talent, is always the reward of work and pain. But the instances are many, of men of the finest natural genius, whose beginning has promised much, but who have degenerated wretchedly as time advanced, because, like some who received talents from the King and did nothing with them but bury them, they received their gift of voice, and made no effort to improve them.
That there have never been other men of equal endowments with Demosthenes and Cicero, none would venture to suppose; but who have so devoted themselves to their art, or become equal in excellence? If those great men had been content, like others, to continue as they began, and had never made their persevering efforts for improvement, what would their countries have benefited from their genius, or the world have known of their fame? They would have been lost in the undistinguished crowd that sunk to oblivion around them. Of how many more will the same remark prove true! What encouragement is thus given to the industrious! With such encouragement, how inexcusable is the negligence which suffers the most interesting and important truths to seem heavy and dull, and fall ineffectual to the ground, through mere sluggishness in their delivery!
How unworthy of one who performs the high function of a religious instructor upon whom depend, in a great measure, the religious knowledge, and devotional sentiment, and final character, of many fellow-beings to imagine that he can worthily discharge this great concern by occasionally talking for an hour, he knows not how, and in a manner which he has taken no pains to render correct, impressive, or attractive, and which, simply through the lack of that command over himself which study would give, is immediate , methodical, verbose, inaccurate, feeble, and trifling!
It has been said of the good preacher that "truths divine come from his tongue." Unfortunately, they come forth ruined and worthless from such a man as this. They lose that holy energy by which they are to convert the soul and purify man for heaven, and sink, in interest and efficacy, below the level of those principles which govern the ordinary affairs of this lower world.
It is a great fault with intellectuals, that they do not make sufficient allowance for the different modes of education and habits of mind in people of other pursuits. It is one of the deficiencies of a university education, that a person is there trained in a fictitious scene, where there are interests, associations, feelings, exceedingly diverse from what prevail in the society of the world; and where he becomes so far separated from the habits and sympathies of other men, as to need to acquire a new knowledge of them, before he knows how to address them.
When a young person leaves the seclusion of a student’s life to preach to his fellow human beings, they are likely to speak to them as if they were scholars. The former student imagines them to be capable of appreciating the niceties of method and style, and of being affected by the same sort of sentiment, illustration, and clever remark, which affects those who have been accustomed to be moved and guided by the lifeless pages of a book. He therefore talks to them calmly, is more anxious for correctness than impression, fears to make more noise or to have more motion than the very letters on his manuscript; addressing himself, as he thinks, to the intellectual part of the person; forgetting that the intellectual mind is not very easy of access, that it is barred up, and must be approached through the senses and affections and imagination.
(adapted from an 1824 sermon "Hints On Extemporaneous Preaching," by Rev. Henry Ware, Jr. 1794-1831))
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