The Art of Illustration quotes

and for this reason, among others, they should not be too numerous. Too many openings for light may seriously detract from the stability of a building. We have known sermons so full of metaphors that they became weak, and we had almost said crazy, structures.

Sermons must not be nosegays of flowers, but sheaves of wheat.

Very beautiful sermons are generally very useless ones. To aim at elegance is to court failure. It is possible to have too much of a good thing:

and we could wish that those who pour out so many symbols, emblems, figures, and devices would remember that nausea in oratory is not more agreeable than in food.

Enough is as good as a feast; and too many pretty things may be a greater evil than none at all.

It is a suggestive fact that the tendency to abound in metaphor and illustration becomes weaker as men grow older and wiser. Perhaps this may, in a measure, be ascribed to the decay of their imagination;

I am not pronouncing any judgment upon windows adorned with “glass of various colors which shine like meadows decked in the flowers of spring”; I am looking only to my illustration.

Our figures are meant not so much to be seen as to be seen through.

If you take the hearer’s mind away from the subject by exciting his admiration of your own skill in imagery, you are doing evil rather than good. I saw in one of our exhibitions a portrait of a king;

It might be wisdom on their part to shun all figures of speech till they know how to use them; for it is a great pity when illustrations are so confused as both to darken the sense and create diversion.

Muddled metaphors are muddles indeed; let us give the people good illustrations or none at all.

Upon these we would not even by implication hint at a censure; but when we are dealing with others who seem to be somewhat, and are not what they seem, we feel no tenderness; nay, we are even moved to assail their stilted greatness.

If they sneer at anecdotes, we smile at them and their sneers, and wish them more sense and less starch.

Affectation of intellectual superiority and love of rhetorical splendor have prevented many from setting forth gospel truth in the easiest imaginable manner, namely, by analogies drawn from common events.

and this had some effect with the groundlings, until a shrewd Christian woman made the remark that he did shake his head certainly, but that there was nothing in it.

Those who are too refined to be simple need to be refined again.

Luther has well put it in his Table Talk: “Cursed are all preachers that in the church aim at high and hard things;

but if it is not up to your usual average in weight of doctrine, it may not only be excused, but commended, if it prepares the audience to receive that which is to follow.

Ground-bait may catch no fish; but it answers its purpose if it brings them near the bait and the hook.

A congregation which has been well instructed, and is mainly made up of established believers, will not need to be addressed in the same style as an audience gathered fresh from the world, or a meeting of dull, formal churchgoers.

The minister woke them up, and tried to reprove them by saying, “There, you were all asleep except poor Jock the idiot;” but his rebuke was cut short by Jock, who exclaimed,

“And if I had not been an idiot, I should have been asleep too.”

I will leave the moral of that well-known story to speak for itself, and will pass on to my second point, which is, that the use of anecdotes and illustrations renders our preaching lifelike and vivid. This is a most important matter.

Sometimes anecdotes have force in them on account of their appealing to the sense of the ludicrous. Of course, I must be very careful here, for it is a sort of tradition of the fathers that it is wrong to laugh on Sundays.

The eleventh commandment is, that we are to love one another, and then, according to some people, the twelfth is, “Thou shalt pull a long face on Sunday.”

I must confess that I would rather hear people laugh than I would see them asleep in the house of God;

and I would rather get the truth into them through the medium of ridicule than I would have the truth neglected, or leave the people to perish through lack of reception of the truth.

I do believe in my heart that there may be as much holiness in a laugh as in a cry

; and that, sometimes, to laugh is the better thing of the two, for I may weep, and be murmuring, and repining, and thinking all sorts of bitter thoughts against God;

We must not have it truthfully said of our sermons, as was said by a certain lady who, after having heard a clergyman preach, was asked what she thought of the sermon, and whether there was not much spirit in it.

“Oh, yes!” she replied, “it was all spirit; there was no body to it at all.”

There must be some “body” in every discourse, some really sound doctrine, some suitable instruction for our hearers to carry home; not merely stories to amuse them, but solid truth to be received in the heart, and wrought out in the life.

but when the sun of trial arises, and a little heat of temptation cometh upon them, how soon do they reveal their true blackness, and all their surface goodliness melteth away!

The whole world is hung round by God with pictures; and the preacher has only to take them down, one by one, and hold them up before his congregation

, and he will be sure to enlist their interest in the subject he is seeking to illustrate. But he must have his own eyes open, or he will not see these pictures.

Then, sometimes, I may give you neither the subject nor the object, but just say, “Bring me an illustration.” I think we might, in this way, make a set of exercises which would be very useful to you all.

The way to get a mind worth having is to get one well stored with things worth keeping.

Of course, the man who has the most illustrations in his head will be the one who will use the most illustrations in his discourses. There are some preachers who have the bump of illustration fully developed;

but he who truly grows in grace does not say, “Dear me! I can feel that I am growing; bless the Lord! Let’s sing a hymn, ‘I’m a-growing! I’m a-growing!’ ”

I have sometimes felt that I was growing smaller, brethren; I think that is very possible, and a good thing, too.

If we are very great in our own estimation, it is because we have a number of cancers, or foul gatherings, that need to be lanced, so as to let out the bad matter that causes us to boast of our bigness.

If we are very great in our own estimation, it is because we have a number of cancers, or foul gatherings, that need to be lanced, so as to let out the bad matter that causes us to boast of our bigness.

It is a good thing that we do not feel ourselves moving, for, as I before reminded you, we walk by faith, not by sight.

Yet I know that we are moving, and I am persuaded that I shall return, as nearly as the earth’s revolution permits, to this exact spot this day twelvemonth.

And there are some terrestrial comets about, that I know, that go to various towns, and blaze away for a time; but they have no power to disturb the planets revolving there in their regular course.

The power of a man does not consist in rushing to and fro, like a comet, but in steadily shining year after year, like a fixed star.

The astronomer Halley says: “If you were to condense a comet down to the thickness of the ordinary atmosphere, it would not fill a square inch of space.”

It is well to be transparent, brethren; but I hope you will be more substantial than most of the comets of which we have heard.

Comets come with great regularity, though they seem to be very irregular.

Halley prophesied that the comet of 1682, of which little had been previously known, would return at regular intervals of about seventy-five years. He knew that he would not live to see its reappearance;

You will, therefore, very readily see, gentlemen, that the calculations as to the return of a comet are extremely difficult, and yet the astronomers do estimate the time to a nicety.

This science is a very marvelous one, not only for what it reveals, but for the talent which it brings out, and the lessons it continually teaches us about the wonderful works of our great Father.

We have done with the solar system, and even with those interlopers which come to us every now and then from far remote systems, for a comet, I suppose, is only seen for a month, or a week, and then sometimes does not reappear for …