Manual of Sacred Rhetoric - Or, How to Prepare a Sermon #263067

Some hold that Preaching is not an art. All your rules of rhetoric, sacred and\ profane, they say, are comprised in the good old American maxim: Fill yourself full of your subject, as though you were a barrel take out the bung; and let nature caper. It is hardly credible that such advice could be given or taken seriously. Yet men, unlikely to make a jest of sacred things, have been known to give it; and sermons heard occasionally in our pulpits prove that it is sometimes followed in prae tice. Nay, often the practice improves on the advice, and dispenses altogether with the filling up process. There must be art in the doing of any work in which complex means have to be employed to do it well; for art is the skill ful use of such means, whether the work be a kitchen table or an epic poem. Now.