HERALDS OF GOD
on the ponderous—is really the best adapted for conveying to your hearers' minds a Gospel urgent and glorious and amazing beyond all other tidings in the world.
In tone, no less than in speed, variety is essential. It is strange that so often the effect of standing in a pulpit should be that a man's natural speaking voice is immediately transformed into something forced and artificial and monotonous. Savonarola declared that many a Gospel hearer had "become like unto a rook on a steeple, that, at the first stroke of the church bell, takes the alarm and hath fear, but then, when accustomed to the sound, percheth quietly on the bell, however loudly it be rung." Learn to modulate the voice, and avoid like the plague the conventional pulpit monotone; lest your people, "accustomed to the sound," cease to heed the message. Always begin quietly. Even when your theme, as it develops, takes hold of you irresistibly (as it ought to do if you are truly preaching), bring yourself back again and again deliberately to the conversational level. As Hamlet put it to the players, "In the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness." Never bellow! Remember Savonarola's rook perching disdainfully on the bell, "however loudly it be rung." Let yourself go occasionally if the Spirit moves you; but clamour is not necessarily inspiration, and shouting saves no souls. A good sermon can have its total effect reduced fifty per cent
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