people, and
accustomed all their lives to value clear thought and pure diction, in
any case accustomed to carefulness in the matter and manner of the
sermon. You cannot enter into all their mental habits in your own mental
workings; but you can take account of them, and in a loyal and
thoughtful _considerateness_ you can remember them in practice, and
honestly aim so to prepare and to preach as to conciliate the thoughtful
and the elders.

Such considerateness will not mean the stifling of prayerful conviction,
or the failure to be faithful as the messenger of the Lord. But it will
mean a severity upon yourself as regards the tone and spirit of your
thoughts, and also as the manner of your utterance. You will take pains,
even at a heavy cost to self (and such costs are always gains in the
end), so to minister as to attract the attention of the flock, not to
yourself, but to your blessed Master and His Word; preaching "not
yourself, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and _yourself their servant_ for
Jesus' sake." [2 Cor. iv. 5.]

With this aim of Attractiveness, then, in our minds, and with this
motive of Considerateness beside it, let us come to some thoughts in
detail about the matter of preaching.

And here first I must bring in another word to meet the word
"attractive." That word is "faithful."

WRONG KINDS OF ATTRACTIVENESS.

As a matter of most obvious fact (we noticed it in the previous
chapter), there is a false and useless attractiveness, as well as a
true. There is the poor and miserable attractiveness--it draws a certain
class of modern hearers--of mere brevity; the "ten-minute sermon." There
are no doubt exceptional occasions when ten minutes, or even five, may
be the right limit to our utterance; but there is something wrong with
both sermon and audience if in the regular ministration of God's holy
Word the preacher must at once begin to stop. There is again the
specious and spurious attractiveness of excitement and froth of manner,
or of a merely emotional appeal to perhaps not the deepest emotions, an
attraction which has little in it of that divine magnet which draws the
will and lifts the soul in regenerate faith and surrender. There is the
attraction, tempting, but futile for the true purposes of the pulpit,
of the sermon which is after all only a lecture, or a leading article;
full of the topics of the day, of the hour; full perhaps of some
celebrated name just immortalized by death[32]; but not full of