OCR Text |
Show One of the special dangers and defects of preaching in this country is connected with the popular liking for oratory in the pulpit, demand for what is called eloquent preaching. The common American idea of the pulpit eloquence is low and sensational. It means chiefly a rapid and emphatic utterance of sonorous sentences, with something extreme, paradoxical, and violent in the thought presented, though no much thought is required. People demand of the preacher that he shall arouse and excite them, and they enjoy with a kind of voluptuousness the temporary stimulous and thrill of emotion which the preaching causes. It results from the laws of mental action that preaching of this kind does not inspire conscientiousness, nor tend to moral activity. It necessarily produces and fosters mental conditions which are extremely unfavorable to spirituality of character and life. This appetite for eloquence, working with other tendencies of the age, has helped to make the preaching in this country dramatic and entertaining, but in a large measure unspiritual. This, I think, can be rightly regarded only as a calamity, a tendency opposed to the interest of religion, adapted to weaken and subvert it, and to lead the people who are influenced by it into a region where religion will be impossible or regarded as unnecessary. This is one of the most important among the unfavorable tendencies of the age. It has made preaching "more interesting and attractive to the masses," but this has been accomplished by sacrificing much that is essential in religion itself. Atlantic. |