THE PREACHER'S STUDY
lines of the old, a facsimile of the city that had stood there before the divine judgments in history had swept it away. Is that not a real peril still, that men should have their faces to the past rather than to the future, hankering after the social structure or the economic security or the ecclesiastical divisions which their fathers knew? Or again, if you have decided to preach on Isaiah's "Watchman, what of the night?" you might not unfittingly introduce your subject by showing that the watchman is one of the great figures of Scripture, to be descried on page after page, standing on the walls of beleaguered cities, peering through the darkness infested by foes, scanning the horizons for the coming of a deliverer, keeping vigil (as the apostle saw him) over troubled hearts like the sentinel peace of God. Given the saving grace of brevity, and some faculty of historical imagination, much is to be said for the recognized tradition of starting from the Scripture context, and working on from that to the message for to-day.
There is, however, another method which is better adapted to grip your hearers' attention and secure their interest at the very outset, especially in these days when so many of them have the notion—the quite erroneous but stubbornly prevalent notion—that the world of the Bible is remote and alien from their own. This is to start from present-day experience. Begin where your hearers are. Meet them on their own ground. Let us assume, for example, that you are going to preach a sermon on the conquest of depres-
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