THE PREACHER'S STUDY
College exegesis, but a sermon. That is to say, when you sit down to write in your study, you must visualize a gathered congregation. This will give your work those qualities of directness, liveliness, verve and immediacy which are so essential. It will prune drastically your involved, elaborate periods, and sternly repress any addiction to purple passages. It will eliminate irrelevances. It will constrain you to clarify your own ideas. It will urge you to translate abstractions into concrete terms. It will embolden you to use personal forms of address. It will banish the dull stilted tediousness of the sermon-essay. It will keep the dominant notes of urgency and reality, of appeal for a verdict, sounding unmistakably. Roman oratory of the classical age had three rules: placere, docere, movere. To please, in the sense of gripping the hearers' minds and keeping interest alert; to teach and instruct, as distinct from the purveying merely of exhortation and uplift, and the recital of pious platitudes; to move the heart, and sting the will into action is not this the Christian preacher's task? And where is the possibility of its accomplishment unless there stands vividly before his consciousness, as he prepares his sermon in his study, the vision of his waiting congregation, the thought of the men and women, with all their crowding, clamorous needs, to whom as Christ's ambassador he is to speak?
In this connection, let me draw your attention to a striking passage in Jebb's Lectures on The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry, in which the Greek
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