Book Description

Excerpt from Annals of the American Pulpit, or Commemorative Notices of Distinguished American Clergymen of Various Denominations, Vol. 4: From the Early Settlement of the Country to the Close of the Year Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-Five He told me that, in the earlier part of his ministry, his habit was to write the introduction and the application of his sermons with great care, and then to com mit them perfectly to memory. The body of the discourse consisted of a very full analysis of the subject, or of the passage on which the sermon was founded, which he studied as thoroughly as he could, but leaving the language in which his thoughts should find utterance to the inspiration of the moment. He could do this with entire safety, for few men possessed a greater copia fandi. Such was his method of sermonizing at the time of his first visit to London in 1802, and hence his famous Sermon before the London Missionary Society, as well as the many others which his English friends were so urgent to have published, required to be written out in full after delivery. But in later years (except the very last of his ministry) his numerous duties forbade his making even this kind of preparation for the pulpit, and if he had not been compelled by the importunity of friends to reduce to writing what he had already preached, some of his most admired sermons would have been lost forever. Towards the close of his life the failure of memory consequent upon the disease which paralyzed mind and body, obliged him to write his sermons, and even to read them. It was not without a severe mental struggle that he consented to put on this ignoble yoke as he viewed it, for he had all the old Scottish prejudices against readers of the Gospel, and had said as hard things about them as any one. The first time he preached for me in this way was in Spruce Street, Philadelphia, where he. Knew the people had an especial dislike of the paper. He laid his notes on the B'ible, and then said My friends, I must ask your indulgence for adopt ing to-day a practice which through life I have condemned. I must read my sermon - the hand of God is upon me. I must bow to his will. I need not say that the bitterest haters of notes in the audience were melted, and for a time the church was truly a Bochim. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.