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The Official Character of Rev. Nathanael Emmons, D.D.
The Official Character of Rev Nathanael Emmons DD Author:Thomas Williams Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: receives such a charge, for the performance of his duty. 1. That a preacher may teach his people, he must make constant progress in knowledge. However prosper... more »ous may be the moral state of a people and whatever may be their intellectual and spiritual attainments, they will need to be taught the instructions of divine truth. A people, who have been well taught, will come to their teacher with demands for increased instruction. If a people be untaught, it will require more knowledge to instruct their minds, than if they had been well taught. When a people, who have been untaught, begin to learn divine truth, their demands for instruction will be constant and urgent. A preacher, who begins to teach his people, must still teach his people knowledge, if he would meet the views and feelings of saints or sinners, of the friends or foes of divine truth. The friends of truth will demand instruction, that they may maintain and defend what they have learnt and what they love. The foes of truth will oblige a preacher, by their objections, to advance in his instructions; or to retreat and renounce every doctrine and duty he has ever taught. Neither a well-taught nor an untaught people, neither the friends nor the foes of truth, will allow a preacher to stop, decline, or retreat, in his instructions. If he does not advance, his failure will be to his own injury and disgrace, and their intellectual and spiritual detriment. Every degree of knowledge, which a people may obtain, will lay a foundation and produce a necessity for farther instruction. If a preacher does not advance in knowledge, he will be unable to meet the growingdemands of his people. As their demands increase, his ability for their instruction will decline. A painful consciousness of his increasing inability to teach his peop...« less