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12 THE LUTHERAN VISITOR January 16, 1902 HINTS ON SERMONIZING. Written for Young; Preachers. From Preachers' Journal. II. The Work of Preparation. Having glanced at the necessity of preparation, the next consideration has to do with the method of prepa ration. As to the time when the sermon should be prepated the work ought never to be postponed till Satqrday, for some unexpected call may be made on the preacher that very day, leaving him little or no time to prepare for Sunday; and, besides, his sermon will be all the better if it be the result of work daring some hours of each of the precedings days. Saturday, then, should never be the preacher’s busy day as to any other work which can be avioded, for be, just -toas much as others, needs one day for rest out of every seven, and as he cannot rest on the Christiau Sabbath, he ought to do so on the Jewish Sabbath. The preparation of his sermon, observe—not his sermons, for no man should be ex pected to prepare more than one sermon each week. If he has to minister to the same congregation twice on the Lord’s day he should have a stock of sermons on hand before bis ordination to which he can generally add one every week; or else he should make one of the two services purely devotional, without any sermon at all. Indeed it is too generally forgotten that meeting tdgether on the first day the principal object of Christians’ of the week should be the worship of Qod, rather than to hear a ser mon ; so that a service without a sermon may really be very bene ficial, though perhaps not very instructive. As to preparing more than one sermon a week, a famous preacher of the last generation said^ that if a man were exceedingly clever he might prepare one ser mon for each Sunday ; a man -of ordinary ability might prepare two; a man of very inferior talents could prepare three; and a very foolish man would have no difficulty in preparing half a dozen. Every one accustomed to any sort of literary work knows how much he is influenced by the state of his bodily health. There is such an intimate connection between the body and the mind that they mut- ually affect each other; such a mysterious sympathy between them, that if anything be wrong with either, both are sure to suf fer. Many of us have heard ser mons which must, we should say, have been composed when the preacher was suffering from a slug gish liver, and others which sug gested the thought that the poor man must have bad the tooth-ache —though, mind, all scolding ser mons are not to be thus accounted for, any more than all tristy or distorted sermons are to be account ed for by the preacher composing them when snfferring from an at tack of inflammatory rheumatism. Therefore, when attempting any sort of mental work a healthy con dition of both mind and body is very desirable, and this is especially true when one attempts to prepare a speech or lecture. A sermon is certainly a speech, bnt it is, as we understand it, a speech upon some topic connected with the Christian religion. Hence it shonld be more or less of spiritual char acter; and, therefore, in,preparing it a devout spirit is almost a sine qua non of snccess. Over and over all those qualifications which are requisite for the preparation of what is commonly called a speech some knowledge of the subject to be considered, some acquaitance wife topic, some readiness in the practical use of the rules of gram mar and of rhetoric—the preacher should be spiritually-minded, feel ing the supreme importance of the work he is aoont to engage in and his need of the aid cf God, the Holy Ghost, which, of course, he will seek in earnest pr%er. For some reason or another, which perhaps the devout metaphysician or psychologist may be able to ex plain, a sermon prepared in any other state of mind and heart will fail in effecting the spiritual edifi cation of t he hearers. It may be very orthodox and systematic, it may be suggestive of profound thought and replete with useful in struction, the language may be choice and the style faultless, and with its delivery the elocutionist may be delighted ; but yet, because of the preacher’s own lack of spirit- uslity when preparing it, because he put nothing of his spiritual be ing into it, because he was in such a spiritual state at the time that it was impossible for him to do so, it will fail in what ought to be one great object of preaching to Christ ian people, vis., their spiritual edification. They may go away from chnroh delighted with the preacher’s effort, and even in structed, but they will pot go away with an increased determination that their own actual lives shall, by God's grace, constantly become more and more like the hf.t l* d by the locarnate God as He journeyed from the peaceful home at Nazaretfi to the tragic scenes of Calvary. Supposing, then, the preacher to be in the right state—bodily, men tally, and spiritually—next comes the actual, work of preparing his sermon, and just here it may be well to mention two or three cau tions. First, for material to be used in your sermon, for the know ledge which is necessary, do not pend upon your past studies at either the university or the theo logical seminary. These studies were very necessary as preliminary to your life work, as means of men tal training, both general and par ticular; and in pursuing them you can hardly have avoided accumulat ing stores of useful knowledge. But to be a successful preacher you must be a constant student, always re garding yourself only an under graduate in another aud au incom parably greater university thau your alma mater; and some time, even if it be but an hour a day, should be given regularly to read ing standard works on divinity and cognate subjects. Without this it is useless to expect to be prepared for the work of weekly sermonizing. Neglect regular and systematic reading, and your ser mons will soon be vapid and super ficial,“voxel praeterea nihil;” and the more thoughtful among yonr people, if they come to church to be instructed as well as worship, will soon cease to attend your ser vices, and will go whtre they can hear something which it will not be an insult to their intellect to offer for their consideration. Second caution. Do not preach other men’s sermons; do not even make them your own, as people say, by careful study, and then preach them in substance. Let them, if you choose, form part ef your regular reading; get the sub stance of them into your mind In such a way that it becomes, as it were, assimilated into your intellec tual and theological being; but, when about to prepare a sermon, do not take another man’s sermon and work it up into one of your own. To prepare sermons in the way which is here condemned may at first seem very helpful; but, be sides beintt dishonest, a species of intellectual larceny, it will grad ually dwarf your own power of original tbinkiog, and will at length land you iu abject slavery. True, other men’s serin ms may be much better than any you c-ia yourself compose, and yon may try to justify yourself for using them by saying that your object is to give your people the best you can procure— like a certain clerical friend of the writer of this papir, who used to say, even boasticgly, “I spare no no expense on any sermons; I give my congregation the best that money can buy’’—bnt you may de pend upon it that you will preach your own sermons more earnestly and impressively than another man’s and though for a time they may not be nearly s) good, they will be more effective. Certain observant ana well educated people belonging to a rural congregation once remarked in my hearings’ ' Our parson certainly gives us ex cellent sermone, wherever he gets them; but evidently they are not bis own, for, from the way in which he preaches them, it is plain that he doesn’t understand them ” A soft heart and refined con sideration are not inconsistent with an iron will. There is something radically wrong with the robo t when they are not also tender. A twenty-ton steam hammer has been made with such perfect adjustment of machinery that it will descend so lightly as to scareely crush an egg shell, though at the will of the operator it will flatten vast masses of solid iron and crush out showers of fiery spirks. Under the in fluence of Christ, grea'ness and strength are, when the occasion demands, the gautlest, most generous and sympathetic.—The Cumberland Presbyterian. ^. 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