THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE
by an over-emphatic and hectic delivery; and platitudes which might disclose new meanings if treated quietly become merely tiresome or absurd when shouted and declaimed.
This insistence on being natural applies also to gesture. There is no necessity that the preacher should aim at reproducing the immobility of a graven image; but neither is there any necessity that he should saw the air like a windmill, or behave like a schoolboy with the fidgets. You will be wise, at almost any cost of strenuous self-discipline, to eradicate and eschew all meaningless mannerisms which, so far from adding emphasis to what is being said, serve only to distract. Temperament and individuality play here so large a part that imitation of any kind is bound to be disastrous: the gesture which in one man is right and unexceptionable might be ludicrous in another. Dr. Carnegie Simpson, in his Recollections, has described how once as a youth he heard Spurgeon preaching in the old Metropolitan Tabernacle, on the subject of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. At one point the preacher took up some book into his hands, and crying dramatically, "Here is a work of current science—its day will pass," let the volume drop. "Here," he went on, taking up another book, "is a fashionable novel—it soon will be dead," and it also he let fall. Then, taking the big pulpit Bible bodily off its desk, clutching it in his arms and holding it aloft, he cried, "Here is the Word of God which endureth for ever." Spurgeon could dare the startling gesture, and it would be
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