Yale Lectures on Preaching Author:Henry Ward Beecher 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: a vitality he will give to his church ! How strongly it will swell! How it will grow ! What an effect it will produce in the community! It is the living force wi... more »thin him that does it. It is the manhood in him; it is the Spirit of God dwelling in him, that is the occasion of such a success. There is no church, in my experience, more successful than the Methodist Church in the West. I worked beside that church for fifteen years, and saw the whole operation, and knew the men that were in the church. They were not men largely equipped with theology. I knew Elder Havens when he began to preach. He knew so little, had so little culture, that he had to count' the chapters to tell what chapter it was, and then count the verses to tell what verse it was; yet afterwards he became no mean scholar. I knew-hundreds of men there that were stammerers in learning. Yet, on the whole, they nad eminent power. They did no institutional work ; but they had zeal, fervor, personal feeling; and by that, little as their knowledge was, small as was the area of the thoughts they brought to bear, they transformed communities. They wore real preachers. They had the right idea of preaching, and they succeeded in spite of their ignorance. Their personal experience was very strong, and their feelings were outspoken, demonstrative. They brought to bear the truth of God in their souls upon the masses of mankind, and the effect corresponded to the cause. GENERAL ADVANTAGES OF DIRECTNESS. This view also will discriminate between sermons, — those which seek direct effects definitely aimed at, andthose that are institutional sermons. There are sermons for preaching, and there are sermons also for teaching and confirming. I do not say you should not preach these secondary sermons; but if that is the whole styl...« less