^J^jNHfFPR^^ 
 
 Logical sEi*v^ 
 
 BV 4226 .S63 
 
 Spurgeon, C. H. 1834-1892 
 
 The art of illustration 
 
/ 
 
 THE 
 
 ART OF ILLUSTRATION 
 
 * NOV 23 1909 
 
 ^'a 
 
 BY 
 
 'diCSin, 
 
 fi'ML SEH^ 
 
 V 
 
 C. H. SPURGEON 
 
 ^ 
 
 NEW-YORK 
 WILBUR B. KETCHAM 
 
 2 COOPER UNION 
 
Copyright, 1894, 
 By Wilbur B. Ketcham. 
 
PUBLISHER'S NOTE. 
 
 The lectures in this volume were originally 
 delivered to the students of the Pastors' Col- 
 lege, Metropolitan Tabernacle, London, Eng- 
 land. It is the first of his unfinished books to 
 be published, and one to which he had himself 
 given the title, " The Art of Illustration." 
 
 Of the five lectures included in this volume, 
 the first two were revised during Mr. Spur- 
 geon's lifetime. Two were partially revised 
 by him before being redelivered to a later 
 company of students than those who had heard 
 them for the first time. 
 
 The remaining lecture was printed substan- 
 tially as it was taken by the reporter; only 
 such verbal corrections having been made as 
 were absolutely necessary to insure accuracy 
 of statement. Mr. Spurgeon has said of his 
 lectures to his students: "I am as much at 
 home with my young brethren as in the bosom 
 
 3 
 
4 publisher's note. 
 
 of my family, and therefore speak without re- 
 straint. I do not offer that which has cost me 
 nothing, for I have done my best, and taken 
 abundant pains. Therefore, with clear con- 
 science, I place my work at the service of my 
 brethren, especially hoping to have a careful 
 reading from young preachers, whose profiting 
 
 has been my principal aim." 
 
 W. B. K. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Illustrations in Preaching 7 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 Anecdotes from the Pulpit 32 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 The Uses of Anecdotes and Illustrations 57 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 Where can We Find Anecdotes and Illustrations? 103 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 The Sciences as Sources of Illustration — Astron- 
 omy 137 
 
LECTURE L 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS IN PREACHING. 
 
 The topic now before us is the use of illus- 
 trations in our sermons. Perhaps we shall 
 best subserve our purpose by working out an 
 illustration in the present address; for there 
 is no better way of teaching the art of pottery 
 than by making a pot. Quaint Thomas Fuller 
 says, " Reasons are the pillars of the fabric of ^ 
 a sermon; but similitudes are the windows 
 which give the best lights." The comparison 
 is happy and suggestive, and we will build up 
 our discourse under its direction. 
 
 The chief reason for the construction of 
 windows in a house is, as Fuller says, to let in 
 light. Parables, similes, and metaphors have 
 that effect ; and hence we use them to illustrate 
 our subject, or, in other words, to " brighten it 
 with light,^^ for that is Dr. Johnson's literal ren- 
 dering of the word illustrate. Often when di- 
 dactic speech fails to enlighten our hearers we 
 may make them see our meaning by opening 
 a window and letting in the pleasant light of 
 
8 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 analogy. Our Saviour, who is the light of the 
 world, took care to fill his speech with simili- 
 tudes, so that the common people heard him 
 gladly ; his example stamps with high author- 
 it}^ the practice of illuminating heavenly in- 
 struction with comparisons and similes. To 
 every preacher of righteousness as well as to 
 Noah, wisdom gives the command, "A window 
 shalt thou make in the ark." You may build 
 up laborious definitions and explanations and 
 yet leave your hearers in the dark as to your 
 meaning ; but a thoroughly suitable metaphor 
 will wonderfully clear the sense. The pictures 
 in an illustrated paper give us a far better idea 
 of the scenery which they represent than could 
 be conveyed to us by the best descriptive letter- 
 press ; and it is much the same with scriptural 
 teaching: abstract truth comes before us so 
 much more vividly when a concrete example 
 is given, or the doctrine itself is clothed in 
 figurative language. There should, if possible, 
 be at least one good metaphor in the shortest 
 address ; as Ezekiel, in his vision of the tem- 
 ple, saw that even to the little chambers there 
 were windows suitable to their size, [if we are 
 faithful to the spirit of the gospel we labor to 
 make things plain : it is our study to be sim- 
 ple and to be understood by the most illiterate 
 of our hearers ; let us, then, set forth many a 
 
ILLUSTKATIONS IN PREACHING. ^ 
 
 metaphor and parable before the people. He 
 wrote wisely who said, " The world below me 
 is a glass in which I may see the world above. 
 The works of God are the shepherd's calendar 
 and the plowman's alphabet." Having noth- 
 ing to conceal, we have no ambition to be ob- 
 scure. Lycophron declared that he would 
 hang himself upon a tree if he found a person 
 who could understand his poem entitled " The 
 Prophecy of Cassandra." Happily no one 
 arose to drive him to such a misuse of timber. 
 We think we could find brethren in the min- 
 istry who might safely run the same risk in 
 connection with their sermons. Still have we 
 among us those who are like Heraclitus, who 
 was called '^ the Dark Doctor " because his lan- 
 guage was beyond all comprehension. Certain 
 mystical discourses are so dense that if light 
 were admitted into them it would be extin- 
 guished like a torch in the Grotta del Cane: 
 they are made up of the palpably obscure and 
 the inexplicably involved, and all hope of un- 
 derstanding them may be abandoned. This 
 style of oratory we do not cultivate. We are 
 of the same mind as Joshua Shute, who said : 
 *' That sermon has most learning in it that has 
 most plainness. Hence it is that a great 
 scholar was wont to say, *" Lord, give me learn- 
 ing enough, that I may preach plain enough.' " 
 
 i/ 
 
10 THE AKT OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 Windows greatly add to the pleasure and 
 agreeableness of a habitation, and so do illus- 
 trations make a sermon pleasurable and inter- 
 esting. A building without windows would be 
 a prison rather than a house, for it would be 
 quite dark, and no one would care to take it 
 upon lease ; and, in the same way, a discourse 
 without a parable is prosy and dull, and in- 
 volves a grievous weariness of the flesh. The 
 preacher in Solomon's Ecclesiastes " sought to 
 find out acceptable words," or, as the Hebrew 
 has it, " words of delight " : surely, figures and 
 comparisons are delectable to our hearers. Let 
 us not deny them the salt of parable with the 
 meat of doctrine. Our congregations hear us 
 with pleasure when we give them a fair mea- 
 sure of imagery: when an anecdote is being told 
 they rest, take breath, and give play to their 
 imaginations, and thus prepare themselves for 
 the sterner work which lies before them in lis- 
 tening to our profounder expositions. Riding 
 in a third-class carriage some ^^ears ago in the 
 eastern counties, we had been for a long time 
 without a lamp ; and when a traveler lighted 
 a candle, it was pleasant to see how all eyes 
 turned that way, and rejoiced in the light: 
 such is frequently the effect of an apt simile 
 in the midst of a sermon ; it lights up the whole 
 matter, and gladdens every heart. Even the 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS IN PREACHING. 11 
 
 little children open their eyes and ears, and a 
 smile brightens up their faces as we tell a 
 story ; for they, too, rejoice in the light which 
 streams in through our windows. We dare 
 say they often wish that the sermon were all 
 illustrations, even as the boy desired to have a 
 cake made all of plums ; but that must not be : 
 there is a happy medium, and we must keep to 
 it by making our discourse pleasant hearing, 
 but not a mere pastime. No reason exists 
 why the preaching of the gospel should be a 
 miserable operation either to the speaker or to 
 the hearer. Pleasantly profitable let all our 
 sermons be. A house must not have thick 
 walls without openings, neither must a dis- 
 course be all made up of solid slabs of doctrine 
 without a window of comparison or a lattice 
 of poetry ; if so, our hearers will gradually for- 
 sake us, and prefer to stay at home and read 
 their favorite authors, whose lively tropes and 
 vivid images afford more pleasure to their 
 minds. 
 
 Every architect will tell you that he looks 
 upon his windows as an opportunity for intro- 
 ducing ornament into his design. A pile may 
 be massive, but it cannot be pleasing if it is 
 not broken up with windows and other de- 
 tails. The palace of the popes at Avignon is 
 an immense structure ; but the external win- 
 
12 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 dows are so few that it has all the aspect of a 
 colossal prison, and suggests nothing of what a 
 palace should be. Sermons need to be broken 
 up, varied, decorated, and enlivened ; and noth- 
 ing can do this so well as the introduction of 
 types, emblems, and instances. Of course, or- 
 nament is not the main point to be considered ; 
 but still many little excellences go to make up 
 perfection, and this is one of the many, and 
 therefore it should not be overlooked. When 
 Wisdom built her house she hewed out her 
 seven pillars, for glory and for beauty, as well 
 as for the support of the structure ; and shall 
 we think that any rough hovel is good enough 
 for the beauty of holiness to dwell ml Cer- 
 tainly a gracious discourse is none the better 
 for being bereft of every grace of language. 
 Meretricious ornament we deprecate, but an 
 appropriate beauty of speech we cultivate. 
 Truth is a king's daughter, and her raiment 
 should be of wrought gold ; her house is a pal- 
 ace, and it should be adorned with " windows 
 of agate and gates of carbuncle." 
 
 lUustrations tend to enliven an audience and 
 quicken attention. Windows, when they will 
 open — which, alas! is not often the case in 
 our places of worship — are a great blessing 
 by refreshing and reviving the audience with 
 a little pure air, and arousing the poor mor- 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS IN PREACHING. 13 
 
 tals who are rendered sleepy by the stagnant 
 atmosphere. A window should, according to 
 its name, be a wind-door, through which a 
 breath of air may visit the audience; even 
 so, an original figure, a noble image, a quaint 
 comparison, a rich allegory, should open 
 upon our hearers a breeze of happy thought, 
 which will pass over them like life-giving 
 breath, arousing them from their apathy, and 
 quickening their faculties to receive the truth. 
 Those who are accustomed to the soporific ser- 
 monizings of certain dignified divines would 
 marvel greatly if they could see the enthusi- 
 asm and lively delight with which congrega- 
 tions listen to speech through which there 
 flows a quiet current of happy, natural illus- 
 tration. Arid as a desert are many volumes 
 of discourses which are to be met with upon 
 the booksellers' dust-covered shelves; but if 
 in the course of a thousand paragraphs they 
 contain a single simile, it is as an oasis in the 
 Sahara, and serves to keep the reader's soul 
 alive. In fashioning a discourse think little 
 of the bookworm, which will be sure of its por- 
 tion of meat however dry your doctrine, but 
 have pity upon those hungering ones imme- 
 diately around you who must find life through 
 your sermon or they will never find it at all. 
 If some of your hearers sleep on they will of 
 
14 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 necessity wake up in eternal perdition, for 
 they hear no other helpful voice. 
 
 While we thus commend illustrations for 
 necessary uses, it must be remembered that 
 they are not the strength of a sermon any 
 more than a window is the strength of a house ; 
 and for this reason, among others, they should 
 not he 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. Ser- v 
 mons 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 : a glass house 
 is not the most comfortable of abodes, and be- 
 sides other objectionable qualities it has the 
 great fault of being sadly tempting to stone- 
 throwers. When a critical adversary attacks 
 our metaphors he generally makes short work 
 of them. To friendly minds images are argu- 
 ments, but to opponents they are opportunities 
 for attack ; the enemy climbs up by the win- 
 dow. Comparisons are swords with two edges 
 which cut both ways; and frequently what 
 seems a sharp and telling illustration may be 
 wittily turned against you, so as to cause a 
 
ILLUSTEATIONS IN PREACHING. 15 
 
 laugh at your expense : therefore do not rely 
 upon your metaphors and parables. Even a 
 second-rate man may defend himself from a 
 superior mind if he can dexterously turn his 
 assailant's gun upon himself. Here is an in- 
 stance which concerns myself, and I give it 
 for that reason, since these lectures have all 
 along been autobiographical. I give a cut- 
 ting from one of our religious papers: "Mr. 
 Beecher was neatly tripped up in ' The Sword 
 and the Trowel.' In his ' Lectures on Preach- 
 ing' he asserts that Mr. Spurgeon has suc- 
 ceeded * in spite of his Calvinism ' ; adding the 
 remark that Hhe camel does not travel any 
 better, nor is it any more useful, because of 
 the hump on its back.' The illustration is not 
 a felicitous one, for Mr. Spurgeon thus retorts : 
 ^Naturalists assure us the camel's hump is 
 of great importance in the eyes of the Arabs, 
 who judge of the condition of their beasts by 
 the size, shape, and firmness of their humps. 
 The camel feeds upon his hump when he tra- 
 verses the wilderness, so that in proportion as 
 the animal travels over the sandy wastes, and 
 suffers from privation and fatigue, the mass 
 diminishes ; and he is not fit for a long journey 
 till the hump has regained its proportions. 
 Calvinism, then, is the spiritual meat which 
 enables a man to labor on in the ways of Chris- 
 
16 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 tian service ; and, thougli ridiculed as a hump 
 by those who are only lookers-on, those who 
 traverse the weary paths of a wilderness ex- 
 perience know too well its value to be willing 
 to part with it, even if a Beecher's splendid 
 talents could be given in exchange.' " 
 
 Illustrate, by all means, but do not let the 
 sermon be all illustrations, or it will be only 
 suitable for an assembly of simpletons. A 
 volume is all the better for engravings, but a 
 scrap-book which is all woodcuts is usually 
 intended for the use of little children. Our 
 house should be built up with the substantial 
 masonry of doctrine, upon the deep founda- 
 tion of inspiration; its pillars should be of 
 solid scriptural argument, and every stone of 
 truth should be carefully laid in its place ; and 
 then the windows should be ranged in due 
 order, " three rows " if we will : " light against 
 light," like the house of the forest of Lebanon. 
 But a house is not erected for the sake of the 
 windows, nor may a sermon be arranged with 
 the view of fitting in a favorite apologue. A 
 window is merely a convenience subordinate 
 to the entire design, and so is the best illus- 
 tration. We shall be foolish indeed if we 
 compose a discourse to display a metaphor; 
 as foolish as if an architect should build a 
 cathedral with the view of exhibiting a stained- 
 
ILLUSTKATIONS IN PKEACHING. 17 
 
 glass window. We are not sent into the world 
 to build a Crystal Palace in which to set out 
 works of art and elegancies of fashion ; but as 
 wise master-builders we are to edify a spiritual 
 house for the divine inhabiting. Our building 
 is intended to last, and is meant for every-day 
 use, and hence it must not be all crystal and 
 color. We miss our way altogether, as gospel 
 ministers, if we aim at flash and finery. 
 
 It is impossible to lay down a rule as to how 
 much adornment shall be found in each dis- 
 course : every man must judge for himself in 
 that matter. True taste in dress could not be 
 readily defined, yet every one knows what it 
 is ; and there is a literary and spiritual taste 
 which should be displayed in the measur- 
 ing out of tropes and figures in every public 
 speech. " Ne quid nimis " is a good caution : 
 do not be too eager to garnish and adorn. 
 Some men seem never to have enough of met- 
 aphors : each one of their sentences must be a 
 flower. They compass sea and land to find a 
 fresh piece of colored glass for their windows, 
 and they break down the walls of their dis- 
 courses to let in superfluous ornaments, till 
 their productions rather resemble a fantastic 
 grotto than a house to dwell in. They are 
 grievously in error if they think that thus 
 they manifest their own wisdom, or benefit 
 
18 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 their hearers. I could almost wish for a re- 
 turn of the window-tax if it would check these 
 poetical brethren. The law, I believe, allowed 
 eight windows free from duty, and we might 
 also exempt " a few, that is eight " metaphors 
 from criticism; but more than that ought to 
 pay heavily. Flowers upon the table at a 
 banquet are well enough ; but as nobody can 
 live upon bouquets, they will become objects 
 of contempt if they are set before us in lieu of 
 substantial viands. The difference between a 
 little salt with your meat and being compelled 
 to empty the salt-cellar is clear to all ; 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 de- 
 cay of their imagination ; but it also occurs at 
 the same time as the ripening of their under- 
 standing. Some may have to use fewer figures 
 of necessity, because they do not come to them 
 as aforetime ; but this is not always the case. 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS IN PREACHING. 19 
 
 I know that men who still possess great facil- 
 ity in imagery find it less needful to employ 
 that faculty now than in their earlier days, for 
 they have the ear of the people, and they are 
 solemnly resolved to fill that ear with instruc- 
 tion as condensed as they can make it. When 
 you begin with a people who have not heard 
 the gospel, and whose attention you have to 
 win, you can hardly go too far in the use of 
 figure and metaphor. Our Lord Jesus Christ 
 used very much of it ; indeed, " without a par- 
 able spake he not unto them"; because they 
 were not educated up to the point at which 
 they could profitably hear pure didactic truth. 
 It is noticeable that after the Holy Ghost had 
 been given, fewer pai*ables were used, and the 
 saints were more plainly taught of God. When 
 Paul spoke or wrote to the churches in his 
 epistles he employed few parables, because he 
 addressed those who were advanced in grace 
 and willing to learn. As Christian minds 
 made progress the style of their teachers be- 
 came less figurative, and more plainly doctri- 
 nal. We seldom see engravings in the classics 
 of the college ; these are reserved for the spell- 
 ing-books of the dame-school. This should 
 teach us wisdom, and suggest that we are to be 
 bound by no hard and fast rules, but should 
 
 J 
 
20 THE ABT OF ILLUSTKATION. 
 
 use more or less of any mode of teaching ac- 
 cording to our own condition and that of our 
 people. 
 
 Illustrations should really cast light upon the 
 subject in hand, otherwise they are sham win- 
 dows, and all shams are an abomination. When 
 the window-tax was still in force many people 
 in country houses closed half their lights by 
 plastering them up, and then they had the 
 plaster painted to look like panes; so that 
 there was still the appearance of a window, 
 though no sunlight could enter. Well do I 
 remember the dark rooms in my grandfather's 
 parsonage, and my wonder that men should 
 have to pay for the light of the sun. Blind 
 windows are fit emblems of illustrations which 
 illustrate nothing, and need themselves to be 
 explained. Grandiloquence is never more char- 
 acteristic than'in its figures; there it disports 
 itself in a very carnival of bombast. We could 
 quote several fine specimens of sublime spread- 
 eagleism and magnificent nonsense. 
 
 A piece of high-flown oratory sheds light 
 upon nothing, and does not in the faintest 
 degree enable us to understand the reasons. 
 The object of language of this kind is not to 
 instruct the hearer, but to dazzle him, and, if 
 possible, to impress him with the idea that his 
 minister is a wonderful orator. He who con- 
 
n^LOSTRATlONS IK PREACHING. 21 
 
 descends to use clap-trap of any kind deserves 
 to be debarred the pulpit for the term of his 
 natural life. Let your figures of speech really 
 represent and explain your meaning, or else 
 they are dumb idols, which ought not to be 
 set up in the house of the Lord. 
 
 It may be well to note that illustrations 
 should not he too prominent, or, to pursue our 
 figure, they should not be painted windows, 
 attracting attention to themselves rather than 
 letting in the clear light of day. 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 3^our own skill in imagery, you 
 are doing evil rather than good. I saw in one 
 of our exhibitions a portrait of a king; but 
 the artist had surrounded his majesty with a 
 bower of flowers so exquisitely painted that 
 every one's eye was taken away from the royal 
 figure. All the resources of the painter's art 
 had been lavished upon the accessories, and 
 the result was that the portrait, which should 
 have been all in all, had fallen into a secondary 
 
22 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 place. This was surely an error in portrait- 
 painting, even though it might be a success in 
 art. We have to set foi-th Christ before the 
 people, " evidently crucified among them," and 
 the loveliest emblem or the most charming 
 image which calls the mind away from our di- 
 vine subject is to be conscientiously forsworn. 
 Jesus must be all in all: his gospel must be 
 the beginning and end of all our discoursing ; 
 parable and poesy must be under his feet, and 
 eloquence must wait upon him as his servant. 
 Never by any possibility must the minister's 
 speech become a rival to his subject ; that were 
 to dishonor Christ, and not to glorify him. 
 Hence the caution that the illustrations be not 
 too conspicuous. 
 
 Out of this last observation comes the fur- 
 ther remark that illustrations are best ivhen they 
 are natural and groiv out of the subject. They 
 should be like those well-arranged windows 
 which are evidently part of the plan of a struc- 
 ture, and not inserted as an afterthought, or 
 for mere adornment. The cathedral of Milan 
 inspires my mind with extreme admiration ; it 
 always appears to me as if it must have grown 
 out of the earth like a colossal tree, or rather 
 like a forest of marble. From its base to its 
 loftiest pinnacle every detail is a natural out- 
 growth, a portion of a well-developed whole, 
 
ILLUSTKATIONS IN PREACHING. 23 
 
 essential to the main idea; indeed, part and 
 parcel of it. Sucli should a sermon be; its 
 exordium, divisions, arguments, appeals, and 
 metaphors should all spring out of itself ; noth- 
 ing should be out of living relation to the 
 rest; it should seem as if nothing could be 
 added without being an excrescence, and noth- 
 ing taken away without inflicting damage. 
 There should be flowers in a sermon, but the 
 bulk of them should be the flowers of the soil ; "^ 
 not dainty exotics, evidently imported with 
 much care from a distant land, but the natu- 
 ral upspringing of a life natural to the holy 
 ground on which the preacher stands. Fig- 
 ures of speech should be congruous with the 
 matter of the discourse ; a rose upon an oak 
 would be out of place, and a lily springing 
 from a poplar would be unnatural : everything 
 should be of a piece and have a manifest rela- 
 tionship to the rest. Occasionally a little bar- 
 baric splendor may be allowed, after the man- 
 ner of Thomas Adams and Jeremy Taylor and 
 other masters in Israel, who adorn truth with 
 rare gems and gold of Ophir, fetched from 
 far. Yet I would have you note what Dr. 
 Hamilton says of Taylor, for it is a warning 
 to those who aim at winning the ear of the 
 multitude: "Thoughts, epithets, incidents, 
 images ♦came trooping round with irrepressi- 
 
24 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 ble profnsion, and they were all so apt and 
 beautiful that it was hard to send any of them 
 away. And so he tried to find a place and use 
 for all — for ' flowers and wings of butterflies,' 
 as well as ^ wheat ' ; and if he could not fabri- 
 cate links of his logical chain out of ' the little 
 rings of the vine ' and ^ the locks of a new- 
 weaned boy,' he could at least decorate his 
 subject with exquisite adornments. The pas- 
 sages from his loved Austin and Chrysostom, 
 and not less beloved Seneca and Plutarch, the 
 scholar knows how to pardon. The squirrel 
 is not more tempted to carry nuts to his hoard 
 than the bookish author is tempted to trans- 
 fer to his own pages fine passages from his 
 favorite authors. Alas ! he little knows how 
 flat and meaningless they are to those who 
 have not traversed the same walks, and shared 
 the delight with which he found great spoil. 
 To him each polished shell recalls its autumnal 
 tale of woods, and groves, and sunshine show- 
 ering through the yellow leaves; but to the 
 quaint collection ^the general public' very 
 much prefer a pint of filberts from a huck- 
 ster's barrow." No illustrations are half so 
 telling as those which are taken from familiar 
 objects. Many fair flowers grow in foreign 
 lands, but those are dearest to the heart which 
 bloom at our own cottage door. 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS IN PREACHING. 25 
 
 Elahoration into minute points is not com- 
 mendable when we are using figures. The best 
 Hght comes in through the clearest glass : too 
 much paint keeps out the sun. God's altar of 
 old was to be made of earth, or of unhewn 
 stone, '' for," said the Word, '' if thou lift up 
 thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it " (Ex. 
 XX. 25). A labored, artificial style, upon which 
 the graver's tool has left abundant marks, 
 is more consistent with human pleadings in 
 courts of law, or in the forum, or in the sen- 
 ate, than with prophetic utterances delivered 
 in the name of God and for the promotion of 
 his glory. Our Lord's parables were as simple 
 as tales for children, and as naturally beautiful 
 as the lilies which sprang up in the valleys 
 where he taught the people. He borrowed no v 
 legend from the Talmud, nor fairy tale from 
 Persia, neither fetched he his emblems from 
 beyond the sea ; but he dwelt among his own 
 people, and talked of common things in homely 
 style, as never man spake before, and yet as 
 any observant man should speak. His para- 
 bles were like himself and his surroundings, 
 and were never strained, fantastic, pedantic, 
 or artificial. Let us imitate him, for we shall 
 never find a model more complete, or more 
 suitable for the present age. Opening our 
 eyes, we shall discover abundant imagery all 
 
 y 
 
26 THE AKT OF ILLUSTKATIOH. 
 
 around. As it is written, " The word is nigh 
 thee," so also is the analog}^ of that word near 
 at hand : 
 
 ^'AU things around me, whate'er they be, 
 That I meet as the chance may come. 
 Have a voice and a speech in them all — 
 Birds that hover and bees that hum ; 
 The beast of the field or the stall ; 
 The trees, leaves, rushes, and grasses ; 
 The rivulet running away ; 
 The bird of the air as it passes, 
 Or the mountains that motionless stay , 
 And yet those immovable masses 
 Keep changing, as dreams do, all day." * 
 
 There will be little need to borrow from 
 the recondite mysteries of human ai't, nor 
 to go deep into the theories of science ; for 
 in nature golden illustrations lie upon the 
 surface, and the purest is that which is upper- 
 most and most readily discerned. Of natural 
 history in all its branches we may well say, 
 "The gold of that land is good": the illustra- 
 ^ tions furnished by e very-day phenomena seen 
 by the plowman and the wagoner are the very 
 best which earth can yield. An illustration is 
 not like a prophet, for it has most honor in 
 its own country ; and those who have oftenest 
 
 * Slightly altered from ^' Fables in Song," by Robert 
 Lord Lvtton. 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS IK PREACHING. 27 
 
 seen the object are those who are most gi-ati- 
 fied by the figure drawn from it. 
 
 I trust that it is scarcely necessary to add 
 that iUustrations must never he low or mean. 
 They may not be high-flown, but they should 
 always be in good taste. They may be homely, 
 and yet chastely beautiful; but rough and 
 coarse they should never be. A house is dis- 
 honored by having dirty windows, cobwebbed 
 and begrimed, patched with brown paper, or 
 stuffed up with rags : such windows are the 
 insignia of a hovel rather than a house. About 
 our illustrations there must never be even the 
 slightest trace of anything that would shock 
 the most delicate modest}^ We like not that 
 window out of which Jezebel is looking. Like 
 the bells upon the horses, our lightest expres- 
 sions must be holiness unto the Lord. Of that 
 which suggests the groveling and the base we 
 may say with the Apostle, '' Let it not be once 
 named among you, as becometh saints." All 
 our windows should open toward Jerusalem, 
 and none toward Sodom. We will gather our 
 flowers always and only from Emmanuel's 
 land, and Jesus. himself shall be their savor 
 and sweetness, so that when he lingers at the 
 lattice to hear us speak of himself he may say, 
 "Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honey- 
 comb : honey and milk are under thy tongue." 
 
28 THE ART or ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 That which grows beyond the border of purity 
 and good repute must never be bound up in 
 our garlands, nor placed among the decorar- 
 tions of our discourses. That which would 
 be exceedingly clever and telling in a stump 
 orator's speech, or in a cheap- jack's harangue, 
 would be disgusting from a minister of the 
 gospel. Time was when we could have found 
 far too many specimens of censurable coarse- 
 ness, but it would be ungenerous to mention 
 them now that such things are on all hands 
 condemned. 
 
 Gentlemen, take care that your windows are 
 not broken, or even cracked : in other words, 
 guard against confused metaphors and limping 
 illustrations. Sir Boyle Roche is generally 
 credited with some of the finest specimens of 
 metaphorical conglomerate. We should im- 
 agine that the passage is mythical in which 
 he is represented as saying, " I smell a rat ; I 
 see it floating in the air ; Pll nip it in the bud." 
 Minor blunderings are frequent enough in tlie 
 speech of our own countrymen. An excellent 
 temperance advocate exclaimed, "Comrades, 
 let us be up and doing ! Let us take our axes 
 on our shoulders, and plow the waste places 
 till the good ship Temperance sails gaily over 
 the land." We well remember, years ago, hear- 
 ing a fervent Irish clergyman exclaim, " Gari- 
 
ILLUSTKATIONS IN PKEACHING. 29 
 
 baldi, sir, lie is far too great a man to play 
 second fiddle to such a wretched luminary as 
 "Victor Emmanuel." It was at a public meet- 
 ing, and therefore we were bound to be proper ; 
 but it would have been a great relief to our 
 soul if we might have indulged in a hearty 
 laugh at the spectacle of Graribaldi with a 
 fiddle, playing to a luminary; for a certain 
 nursery rhyme jingled in our ears, and sorely 
 tried our gravity. A poetic friend thus en- 
 couragingly addresses us : 
 
 '^ March on, however rough the road, 
 Though foes obstruct thy way, 
 Deaf to the harking curs that ivould 
 Ensnare thy feet astray.''^ 
 
 The other evening a brother expressed his 
 desire that we might " all be winners of souls, 
 and bring the Lord's blood-bought jewels to 
 cast their crowns at his feet.^ The words had 
 such a pious ring about them that the audience 
 did not observe the fractured state of the ex- 
 pression. One of your own number hoped 
 " that every student might be enabled to sound 
 the gospel trumpet with such a clear and cer- 
 tain sound that the hl'md might see^ Perhaps 
 he meant that they should open their eyes with 
 astonishment at the terrific blast ; but the fig- 
 ure would have been more congruous if he 
 
30 THE ART OF ILLUSTEATION. 
 
 had said " that the deaf should hear." A Scotch 
 writer, in referring to a proposal to use an 
 organ in divine service, says : " Nothing will 
 stem this avalanche of will-worship and gross 
 sin but the falling hack on the Word of Gody 
 
 The Daily NewSj in reviewing a book written 
 by an eminent minister, complained that his 
 metaphors were apt to be a little unmanage- 
 able, as when he spoke of something which 
 had remained a secret until a strangely potent 
 key was inserted among the hidden wards of 
 the parental heart, and a rude wrench flung 
 wide the floodgates and set free the imprisoned 
 stream. However, there is no wonder that 
 ordinary mortals commit blunders in figura- 
 tive speech, when even his late Infallible Holi- 
 ness Pius IX. said of Mr. Gladstone that he 
 " had suddenly come forward like a viper as- 
 sailing the bark of St. Peter." A viper assail- 
 ing a bark is rather too much for the mo^t 
 accommodating imagination, although some 
 minds are ready for any marvels. 
 
 One of those reviews which reckon them- 
 selves to be the cream of the cream took pains 
 to inform us that the Dean of Chichester, be- 
 ing the select preacher at St. Mary's, Oxford, 
 "seized the opportunity to smite the Ritual- 
 ists hip and thigh, with great volubility and 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS IN PREACHING. 31 
 
 vivacity.'''' Samson smote his foes with a great 
 slaughter ; but language is flexible. 
 
 These blunders are to be quoted by the page : 
 I have given enough to let you see how read- 
 ily the pitchers of metaphor may be cracked, 
 and rendered unfit to carry our meaning. The 
 ablest speaker may occasionally err in this 
 direction ; it is not a very serious matter, and 
 yet, like a dead fly, it may spoil sweet oint- 
 ment. A few brethren of my acquaintance 
 are always off the lines ; they muddle up every 
 figure they touch, and as soon as they approach 
 a metaphor we look for an accident. 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 con- 
 fused as both to darken the sense and create 
 diversion. Muddled metaphors are muddles 
 indeed; let us give the people good illustra- 
 tions or none at all. 
 
LECTUEE II. 
 
 ANECDOTES FEOM THE PULPIT. 
 
 It is pretty generally admitted that sermons 
 may wisely be adorned with a fair share of 
 illustrations; but anecdotes used to that end 
 are still regarded by the prudes of the pulpit 
 with a measure of suspicion. They will come 
 down low enough to quote an emblem, they 
 will deign to use poetic imagery; but they 
 cannot stoop to tell a simple, homely story. 
 They would probably say in confidence to 
 their younger brethren, "Beware how you 
 lower yourselves and your sacred office by re- 
 peating anecdotes, which are best appreciated 
 by the vulgar and uneducated." We would 
 not retort by exhorting all men to abound in 
 stories, for there ought to be discrimination. 
 It is freely admitted that there are useful and 
 admirable styles of oratory which would be 
 disfigured by a rustic tale ; and there are hon- 
 ored brethren whose genius would never allow 
 them to relate a story, for it would not appear 
 suitable to their mode of thought. Upon these 
 
 32 
 
ANECDOTES FROM THE PULPIT. 33 
 
 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 supe- 
 riority and love of rhetorical splendor have 
 prevented many from setting forth gospel 
 truth in the easiest imaginable manner, name- 
 ly, by analogies drawn from common events. 
 Because they could not condescend to men of 
 low estate, they have refrained from repeat- 
 ing incidents which would have accurately ex- 
 plained their meaning. Fearing to be thought 
 vulgar, they have lost golden opportunities. 
 As well might David have refused to sling 
 one of the smooth stones at Goliath's brow 
 because he found it in a common brook. 
 
 From individuals so lofty in their ideas 
 nothing is likely to flow down to the masses 
 of the people but a glacial eloquence — a river 
 of ice. Dignity is a most poor and despicable 
 consideration unless it be the dignity of turn- 
 ing many to righteousness; and yet divines 
 who have had scarcely enough of real dignity 
 to save themselves from contempt have swol- 
 len "huge as high Olympus" through the 
 
34 THE AET OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 affectation of it. A young gentleman, after 
 delivering an elaborate discourse, was told that 
 not more than five or six in the congregation 
 had been able to understand him. This he 
 accepted as a tribute to his genius ; but I take 
 leave to place him in the same class with an- 
 other person who was accustomed to shake 
 his head in the most profound manner, that 
 he might make his prelections the more im- 
 pressive; 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 tvas 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 ; 
 and neglecting the saving health of the poor 
 unlearned people, seek their own honor and 
 praise, and therefore try to please one or two 
 great persons. When I preach I sink myself 
 deep doivn.''^ It may be superfluous to remind 
 you of the oft-quoted passage from George 
 Herbert's "Country Parson," and yet I cannot 
 omit it, because it is so much to my mind : 
 " The Parson also serves himself of the judg- 
 ments of God, as of those of ancient times, so 
 especially of the late ones; and those most 
 which are nearest to his parish ; for people are 
 
ANECDOTES FKOM THE PULPIT. 35 
 
 very attentive at such discourses, and think it 
 behooves tliem to be so when God is so near 
 them, and even over their heads. Sometimes 
 he tells them stories and sayings of others, 
 according as his text invites him; for them 
 also men heed, and remember better than ex- 
 hortations ; which, though earnest, yet often 
 die with the sermon, especially with country 
 people, which are thick and heavy, and hard 
 to raise to a point of zeal and fervency, and 
 need a mountain of fire to kindle them, but 
 stories and sayings they will well remember." 
 
 It ought never to be forgotten that the great 
 God himself, when he would instruct men, 
 employs histories and biographies. Our Bible 
 contains doctrines, promises, and precepts; 
 but these are not left alone — the whole book is 
 vivified and illustrated by marvelous records 
 of things said and done by God and by men. 
 He who is taught of God values the sacred 
 histories, and knows that in them there is a 
 special fulness and forcibleness of instruction. 
 Teachers of Scripture cannot do better than 
 instruct their fellows after the manner of the 
 Scriptures. 
 
 Our Lord Jesus Christ, the great teacher of 
 teachers, did not disdain the use of anecdotes. 
 To my mind it seems clear that certain of his 
 parables were facts and, consequently, anec- 
 
36 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 dotes. May not the story of the Prodigal Son 
 have been a literal truth? Were there not 
 actual instances of an enemy sowing tares 
 among the wheat? May not the rich fool who 
 said, "Take thine ease," have been a photo- 
 graph taken from life? Did not Dives and 
 Lazarus actually figure on the stage of his- 
 tory? Certainly the story of those who were 
 crushed by the fall of the tower of Siloani, and 
 the sad tragedy of the Galileans, " whose blood 
 Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices," were 
 matters of current Jewish gossip, and our 
 Lord turned both of them to good account. 
 What HE did we need not be ashamed to do. 
 That we may do it with all wisdom and pru- 
 dence let us seek the guidance of the Divine 
 Spirit which rested upon him so continually. 
 
 I shall make up this present address by 
 quoting the examples of great preachers, be- 
 ginning with the era of the Eeformation, and 
 following on without any very rigid chrono- 
 logical order down to our own day. Exam- 
 ples are more powerful than precepts; hence 
 I quote them. 
 
 First, let me mention that grand old preach- 
 er, Hugh Latimer^ the most English of all our 
 divines, and one whose influence over our land 
 was undoubtedly most powerful. Southey 
 says, " Latimer more than any other man pro- 
 
ANECDOTES FROM THE PULPIT. 37 
 
 moted the Reformation by his preaching ; ^ 
 and in this he echoes the more important ut- 
 terance of Eidley, who wrote from his prison, 
 '*I do think that the Lord hath placed old 
 father Latimer to be his standard-bearer in 
 our age and country against his mortal foe, 
 Antichrist." If you have read any of his ser- 
 mons, you must have been struck with the 
 number of his quaint stories, seasoned with a 
 homely humor which smacks of that Leicester- 
 shire farmhouse wherein he was brought up 
 by a father who did yeoman's service, and a 
 mother who milked thirty kine. No doubt we 
 may attribute to these stories the breaking 
 down of pews by the overwhelming rush of 
 the people to hear him, and the general inter- 
 est which his sermons excited. More of such, 
 preaching, and we should have less fear of the 
 return of popeiy. The common people heard 
 him gladly, and his lively anecdotes accounted 
 for much of their eager attention. A few of 
 these narratives one could hardly repeat, for 
 the taste of our age has happily improved in 
 delicacy; but others are most admirable and 
 instructive. Here are two of them : 
 
 The Friar's Man and the Ten Commandments. — T 
 will tell you now a pretty story of a friar, to refresh you 
 withal. A limiter of the Gray Friars in the time of his 
 limitation preached many times, and had but one ser- 
 
38 THE ART OP ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 mon at all times; which sermon was of the Ten Com- 
 mandments. And because this friar had preached this 
 sermon so often, one tliat heard it before told the friar's 
 servant that his master was called " Friar John Ten Com- 
 mandments " } wherefore the servant showed the friar his 
 master thereof, and advised him to preach of some other 
 matters; for it grieved the servant to hear his master 
 derided. Now, the friar made answer saying, " Belike, 
 then, thou canst say the Ten Commandments well, seeing 
 thou hast heard them so many a time." " Yea," said the 
 servant, *' I warrant you." '' Let me hear them," saith the 
 master. Then he began : '' Pride, covetousness, lechery," 
 and so numbered the deadly sins for the Ten Command- 
 ments. And so there be many at this time which be weary 
 of the old gospel. They would fain hear some new things, 
 they think themselves so perfect in the old, when they be 
 no more skilful than this servant was in his Ten Com- 
 mandments. 
 
 Saint Anthony and the CoBBLER.^Weread a pretty 
 story of Saint Anthony, which, being in the wilderness, 
 led there a very hard and straight life, insomuch as none 
 at that time did the like, to whom came a voice from 
 heaven saying, "Anthony, thou art not so perfect as is a 
 cobbler that dwelleth at Alexandria." Anthony hearing 
 this rose up forthwith and took his staff and went tUl 
 he came to Alexandria, where he fouud the cobbler. The 
 cobbler was astonished to see so reverend a father to come 
 into his house. Then Anthony said unto him, " Come and 
 tell me thy whole conversation and how thou spendest thy 
 time." '* Sir," said the cobbler, " as for me, good works I 
 have none, for my life is but simple and slender. I am 
 but a poor cobbler. In the morning when I arise I pray 
 for the whole city wherein I dwell, especially for all such 
 neighbors and poor friends as I have. After, I set me at 
 my labor, where I spend the whole day in getting of my 
 
ANECDOTES FKOM THE PULPIT. 39 
 
 living, and keep me from all falsehood, for I hate nothing 
 so much as I do deeeitfulness. Wherefore, when I make 
 to any man a promise I keep it and do it truly, and so 
 spend my time poorly with my wife and children, whom I 
 teach and instruct, as far as my wit will serve me, to fear 
 and dread God. This is the sum of mj- simple life." 
 
 In this story you see how God loveth those that follow 
 their vocation and live uprightly without any falsehood 
 in their dealing. This Anthony was a great and holy man, 
 yet this cobbler was as much esteemed before God as he. 
 
 Let US take a long leap of about a century, 
 and we come to Jeremy Taylor, another bishop, 
 whom I mention immediately after Latimer be- 
 cause he is apparently such a contrast to that 
 homely divine, while yet in very truth he has 
 a measure of likeness to him as to the point 
 now in hand. They both rejoiced in figure 
 and metaphor, and equally delighted in inci- 
 dent and narrative. True, the one would talk 
 of John and William, and the other of Anex- 
 agoras and Scipio ; but actual scenes were the 
 delight of each. In this respect Jeremy Taylor 
 may be said to be Latimer turned into Latin. 
 Jeremy Taylor is as full of classical allusions 
 as a king's palace is full of rare treasures, and 
 his language is of the lofty order which more 
 becomes a patrician audience than a popular 
 assembly ; but when you come to the essence 
 of things, you see that if Latimer is homely, 
 so also Taylor narrates incidents which are 
 
40 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 homely to him; but Ms home is among philoso- 
 phers of Greece and senators of Rome. This 
 being understood, we venture to say that no 
 one used more anecdotes than this splendid 
 poet-preacher. His biographer truly says: 
 " It would be hard to point out a branch of 
 learning or of scientific pursuit to which he 
 does not occasionally allude; or any author 
 of eminence, either ancient or modern, with 
 whom he does not evince himself acquainted. 
 He more than once refers to obscure stories 
 in ancient writers, as if they were of necessity 
 as familiar to all his readers as to himself ; as, 
 for instance, he talks of ^ poor Attillius Avi- 
 ola,' and again of ^ the Libyan lion that brake 
 loose into his wilderness and killed two Roman 
 boys.' " In all this he is eminently select and 
 classical, and therefore I the more freely intro- 
 duce him here ; for there can be no reason why 
 our anecdotes should all be rustic; we, too, 
 may rifle the treasures of antiquity, and make 
 the heathen contribute to the gospel, even as 
 Hiram of Tyre served under Solomon's direc- 
 tion for the building of the temple of the 
 Lord. 
 
 I am no admirer of Taylor's style in other 
 respects, and his teaching seems to be at times 
 semi-popish ; but in this place I have only to 
 deal with him upon one particular, and of that 
 
ANECDOTES FROM THE PULPIT. 41 
 
 matter he is an admirable example. He lav- 
 ishes classic stories even as an Asiatic queen 
 bedecks herself with countless pearls. Out of 
 a sermon I extract the following, which may 
 suffice for our purpose : 
 
 Students Progressing Backward.— Menedemus was 
 wont to say '^ that the young boys that went to Athens 
 the first year were wise men, the second year philosophers, 
 the third orators, and the fonrtli were but plebeians, and 
 understood nothing- but their o^^'n ignorance." And just 
 so it happens to some in the progresses of religion. At 
 first tliey are violent and active, and then they satiate all 
 the appetites of religion ; and that which is left is that 
 they were soon wearj^ and sat down in displeasure, and 
 return to the world and dwell in the business of pride or 
 money; and by this time they understand that their re- 
 ligion is declined, and passed from the heats and follies 
 of youth to the coldness and infirmities of old age. 
 
 Diogenes and the Young Man. — Diogenes once spied 
 a young man coming out of a tavern or place of enter- 
 tainment, who, perceiving himself observed by the phi- 
 losopher, with some confusion stepped back again, that 
 he might, if possible, preserve his fame with that severe 
 person. But Diogenes told him, *' Quanto magis intraveris, 
 tanto magis eris in caupona^'' ('' The more you go back the 
 longer you are in the place where you are ashamed to be 
 seen"). He that conceals his sin still retains that which 
 he counts his shame and burden. 
 
 No examples will have greater weight with 
 you than those taken from among the Puri- 
 tans, in whose steps it is our desire to walk, 
 though, alas ! we follow with feeble feet. Cer- 
 
42 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 tain of them abounded in anecdotes and sto- 
 ri.es. Thomas Brooks is a signal instance of the 
 wise and wealthy use of holy fancy. I put 
 him first, because I reckon him to be the first 
 in the special art which is now under consider- 
 ation. He hath dust of gold ; for even in the 
 margins of his books there are sentences of 
 exceeding preciousness, and hints at classic 
 stories. His style is clear and full; he never 
 so exceeds in illustration as to lose sight of 
 his doctrine. His floods of metaphor never 
 drown his meaning, but float it upon their 
 surface. If you have never read his works I 
 almost envy you the joy of entering for the 
 first time upon his ^' Unsearchable Riches," 
 trying his " Precious Remedies," tasting his 
 "Apples of Gold," communing with his " Mute 
 Christian," and enjoying his other masterly 
 writings. Let me give you a taste of his qual- 
 ity in the way of anecdotes. Here are two 
 brief ones ; but he so abounds with them that 
 you may readily cull scores of better ones for 
 yourselves. 
 
 Mr. Welch Weeping. — A soul under special mani- 
 festations of love weeps that it can love Christ no more. 
 Mr. Welch, a Suffolk minister, weeping at table, and 
 being asked the reason of it, answered it was because he 
 could love Christ no more. The true lovers of Christ can 
 never rise high enough in their love to Christ. They 
 count a little love to be no love, great love to be but little, 
 
ANECDOTES PROM THE PULPIT. 43 
 
 strong love to be but weak, and the highest love to be 
 infinitely below the worth of Christ, the beauty and glory 
 of Christ, the fulness, sweetness, and goodness of Christ. 
 
 fThe top of their misery in this life is that they love so little 
 though they are so much beloved. 
 
 Submissive Silence. — Such was the silence of Philip 
 the Second, King of Spain, that when his Invincible Ar- 
 mada, that had been three years a -fitting, was lost, he 
 gave command that all over Spain they should give 
 thanks to God and the saints that it was no more 
 gi'ievous. 
 
 Thomas Adants, the Conforming Puritan, 
 whose sermons are full of rugged force and 
 profound meaning, never hesitated to insert 
 a story when he felt that it would enforce his 
 teaching. His starting-point is ever some 
 Biblical sentence, or scriptural history; and 
 this he works out with much elaboration, 
 bringing to it all the treasures of his mind. 
 As Stowell says, " Fables, anecdotes, classical 
 poetry, gems from the fathers and other old 
 writers, are scattered over almost every page." 
 His anecdotes are usually rough-and-ready 
 ones, and might be compared to those of Lati- 
 mer, only they are not so genial ; their humor 
 is generally grim and caustic. The following 
 may serve as fair specimens : 
 
 The Husband and His Witty Wife. — The husband 
 told his wife that he had one ill quality — he was given to \ 
 be angry without cause. She wittily replied that she 
 
44 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 would keep him from that fault, for she would give him 
 cause enough. It is the folly of some that they will be 
 offended without cause, to whom the world promises that 
 they shall have causes enough — " In the world ye shall 
 have tribulation." 
 
 The Servant at the Sermon. — It is ordinary with 
 many to commend the lecture to others' ears, but few 
 commend it to their own hearts. It is morally true what 
 the Christian Tell- Truth relates: A servant coming from 
 church praiseth the sermon to his master. He asks him 
 what was the text. "Nay," quoth the servant, ''it was 
 begun before I came in." " What, then, was his conclu- 
 sion ?" He answered, '' I came out before it was done." 
 " But what said he in the midst?" " Indeed I was asleep 
 in the midst." Many crowd to get into the church, but 
 make no room for the sermon to get into them. 
 
 WilUmn GuniaU, the author of " The Chris- 
 tian in Complete Armor," must surely have 
 been a relater of pertnient stories in his ser- 
 mons, since even in his set and solid writings 
 they occur. Perhaps I need not have made 
 the distinction between his writings and his 
 preaching, for it appears from the preface 
 that his " Christian in Complete Armor " was 
 preached before it was printed. In vivid im- 
 agery every page of his famous book abounds, 
 and whenever this is the case we are sure to 
 light upon short narratives and striking inci- 
 dents. He is as profuse in illustration as 
 either Brooks, Watson, or Swinnock. Happy 
 Lavenham, to have been served by such a 
 
ANECDOTES FKOM THE PULPIT. 45 
 
 pastor! By the way, this "Complete Ar- 
 mor " is beyond all others a preacher's book : 
 I should think that more discourses have been 
 suggested by it than by any other uninspired 
 volume. I have often resorted to it when my 
 own fire has l)een burning low, and I have 
 seldom failed to find a glowing coal upon Gur- 
 nall's hearth. John Newton said that if he 
 might rea,d only one book beside the Bible, he 
 would choose " The Christian in Complete 
 Armor," and Cecil was of much the same 
 opinion. J. C. Ryle has said of it, " You will 
 often find in a line and a half some great 
 truth, put so concisely, and yet so fully, that 
 you really marvel how so much thought could 
 be got into so few words." One or two stories 
 from the early part of his great work must 
 suffice for our purpose. 
 
 Bird Safe in a Man's Bosom. — A heathen coiild say 
 when a bird (feared ])y a hawk) flew into his bosom, " I 
 will not betray thee unto thine enemy, seeing thon comest 
 for sanctuary unto me." How much less will God yield 
 up a soul unto its enemy when it takes sanctuary in his 
 name, saying", " Lord, I am hunted with such a tempta- 
 tion, dogged with such a lust ; either thou must pardon 
 it, or I am damned ; mortify it, or I shall be a slave to it ; 
 take me into the bosom of thy love for Christ's sake ; 
 castle me in the arras of thy everlasting strength. It is 
 in thy power to save me from or give me up into the 
 hands of my enemy. I have no confidence in myself or 
 any other. Into thy hands I commit my cause, my life, 
 
46 THE AET OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 and rely on thee." This dependence of a soul undoubt- 
 edly will awaken the almighty power of God for such a 
 one's defense. He hath sworn the greatest oath that can 
 come out of his blessed Hps, even by himself, that such as 
 '^ flee for refuge" to hope in him shall have " strong con- 
 solation " (Heb. vi. 17, 18). 
 
 The Prince with His Fajviily in Danger.— Suppose 
 a king's son should get out of a besieged city where he 
 hath left his wife and children, whom he loves as his own 
 soul, and these all ready to die by sword or famine, if sup- 
 ply come not the sooner. Could this prince, when arrived 
 at his father's house, please himself with the delights of 
 the court and forget the distress of his family'? or rather 
 would he not come post to his father, having their cries 
 and groans always in his ears, and before he ate or drank 
 do his errand to his father, and entreat him if he ever 
 loved him that he would send aU the force of his kingdom 
 to raise the siege rather than any of his dear relations 
 should perish ? Surely, sirs, though Christ be in the top 
 of his preferment and out of the storm in regard of his 
 own person, yet his children, left behind in the midst of 
 sin's, Satan's, and the world's batteries, are in his heart, 
 and shall not be forgotten a moment by him. The care 
 he takes in our business appeared in the speedy despatch 
 he made of his spirit to his apostles' supply, which, as soon 
 almost as he was warm in his seat at his Father's right 
 hand, he sent, to the incomparable comfort of his apos- 
 tles and us that to this day — yea, to the end of the world 
 — do or shall believe on him. 
 
 John Flavel was greatest in metaphor and 
 allegory; but in the matter of anecdote his 
 preaching is a fine example. It was said of 
 his ministry that he who was unaffected by it 
 
ANECDOTES FROM THE PULPIT. 47 
 
 must either have had a very soft head or a 
 very hard heart. He had a fund of striking 
 incidents, and a faculty of happy illustration, 
 and as he was a man in whose manner cheer- 
 fulness was blended with solemnity, he was 
 popular in the highest degree both at home and 
 abroad. He sought out words which might 
 suit the sailors of Dartmouth and farmers of 
 Devon, and therefore he has left behind him 
 his " Navigation Spiritualized," and his " Hus- 
 bandry Spiritualized," a legacy for each of the 
 two orders of men who plow the sea and the 
 land. He was a man worth making a pilgrim- 
 age to hear. What a crime it was to silence 
 his heaven-touched lips by the abominable Act 
 of Uniformity ! Instead of quoting several 
 jiassages from his sermons, each one contain- 
 ing an anecdote, I have thought it as well to 
 give a mass of stories as we find them in his 
 prelections upon 
 
 Providence in Conversion.— A scrap of paper acci- 
 dentally coming to view hath been used as an occasion of 
 conversion. This was the case of a minister of Wales who 
 had two livings but took little care of either. He, being 
 at a fair, bought something at a peddler's standing, and 
 rent off a leaf of Mr. Perkins' catechism to wrap it in, and 
 reading a line or two of it, God sent it home so as it did 
 the work. 
 
 The marriage of a godly man into a carnal family hath 
 been ordered by Providence for the conversion and sal- 
 
48 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 vation of many therein. Thus we read in the life of that 
 renowned EngUsh worthy, Mr. John Bruen, that in his 
 second match it was agreed that he should have one year's 
 diet in his mother-in-law's house. During his abode there 
 that year, saith Mr. Clark, the Lord was pleased by his 
 means graciously to work upon her soul, as also upon his 
 wife's sister and half-sister, their brothers, Mr. William 
 and Mr. Thomas Fox, with one or two of the servants in 
 that family. 
 
 Not only the reading of a book or hearing of a minis- 
 ter, but— which is most remarkable — the very mistake or 
 forgetfulness of a minister hath been improved by Provi- 
 dence for this end and purpose. Augustine, once preach- 
 ing to his congregation, forgot the argument which he 
 first proposed, and fell upon the errors of the Maiiichees 
 beside his first intention, by which discourse he converted 
 one Firmus, his auditor, who fell down at his feet weep- 
 ing and confessing he had lived a Manichee many years. 
 Another I knew who, going to preach, took up another 
 Bible than that he had designed, in which, not only miss- 
 ing his notes but the chapter also in which his text lay, 
 was put to some loss thereby. But after a short pause he 
 resolved to speak about any other Scripture that might be 
 presented to him, and accordingly read the text, '^The 
 Lord is not slack concerning his promise " (2 Pet. iii. 9) ; 
 and though he had nothing prepared, yet the Lord helped 
 him to speak both methodically and pertinently from it, 
 by which discourse a gracious change was wrought upon 
 one in the congregation, who hath since given good evi- 
 dence of a sound conversion, and acknowledged this ser- 
 mon to be the first and only means thereof. 
 
 George Swinnock, for some years chaplain to 
 Hampden, had the gift of illustration largely 
 developed, as his works prove. Some of his 
 
ANECDOTES FROM THE PULPIT. 49 
 
 similes are far-fetched, and the growth of 
 knowledge has rendered certain of them obso- 
 lete ; but they served his purpose, and made 
 his teaching attractive. After deducting all 
 his fancies, which in the present age would be 
 judged to be strained, there remains "a rare 
 amount of sanctified wit and wisdom"; and 
 sparkling here and there we spy out a few 
 telling stories, mostly of classic origin. 
 
 The Prayer of Paulinus.— It was the speech of Paul- 
 inus when his city was taken by the liarbarians, ^^Bomine, 
 ne excrucier oh anriim et argent urn''' ("Lord, let me not he 
 troubled for my silver and gold which I have lost, for thou 
 art aU things"). As Noah, when the whole world was 
 overwhelmed with water, had a fair epitome of it in the 
 ark, having all sorts of beasts and fowls there, so he that 
 in a deluge hath God to be his God hath the original of 
 all mercies. He who enjoyetli the ocean may rejoice^ 
 though some drops are taken from him. 
 
 Queen Elizabeth and the Milicviaid.— Queen Ehza- 
 beth envied the milkmaid when she was in prison, but had 
 she known the glorious reign which she was to have for 
 forty-four years she would not have repined at the poor 
 happiness of so mean a person. Christians are too prone 
 to envy the husks which wandering sinners fill themselves 
 with here below ; but would they set before them their 
 glorious hopes of a heaven, how they must reign with 
 Christ forever and ever, they would see little reason for 
 their repining. 
 
 The Believing Child.— I have read a story of a little 
 child about eight or nine years old, that, being extremely 
 pinched with hunger, looked one day pitifully necessitous 
 
50 THE AET OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 on her mother, and said, " Mother, do you think that Grod 
 will starve us?" The mother answered, ''No, child j he 
 will not." The child replied, " But if he do, yet we must 
 love him and serve him." Here was language that spake 
 a well-grown Christian. For, indeed, God brings us to 
 want and misery to try us whether we love him for his 
 own sake or for our own sakes, for those excellencies that 
 are in him or for those mercies we have from him, to see 
 whether we will say with the cynic to Antisthenes, ^'Nul- 
 lus tarn durus erit baculus,^^ etc. (" There should be no cud- 
 gel so crabbed as to beat me from thee "). 
 
 Thomas Watson was one of the many Puri- 
 tan preachers who won the popular ear by 
 their frequent illustrations. In the clear flow- 
 ing stream of his teaching we find pearls of 
 anecdote very frequently. No one ever grew 
 weary under such pleasant yet weighty dis- 
 course as that which we find in his "Beati- 
 tudes." Let two quotations serve to show his 
 skill: 
 
 The Vestal and the Bracelets. — Most men think 
 because God hath blessed them with an estate therefore 
 they are blessed. Alas ! God often gives these things in 
 anger. He loads his enemies with gold and silver: as 
 Plutarch reports of Tarpeia, a Vestal nun, who bargained 
 with the enemy to betray the Capitol of Rome to them in 
 case she might have the golden bracelets on their left 
 hands, which they promised ; and being entered into the 
 Capitol, they threw not only their bracelets but their 
 bucklers, too, upon her, through the weight whereof she 
 was pressed to death. God often lets men have the 
 golden bracelets of worldly substance, the weight where- 
 
ANECDOTES FROM THE PULPIT. 51 
 
 of sinks them into hell. Oh, let us, superna anhelare, get 
 our eyes "fixed" and our hearts "united" to God the 
 supreme good. This is to pursue blessedness as in a 
 chase. 
 
 Hedgehog and Conies. — The Fabulist tells a story of 
 the hedgehog that came to the cony-burrows in stormy 
 weather and desired harbor, promising that he would be 
 a quiet guest 5 but when once he had gotten entertain- 
 ment he did set up his prickles, and did never leave till 
 he had thrust the poor conies out of their burrows. So 
 covetousness, though it hath many fair pleas to insinuate 
 and wind itself into the heart, yet as soon as you have let 
 it in, this thorn will never cease pricking till it hath choked 
 all good beginnings and thrust all religion out of your 
 hearts. 
 
 I think this must suffice to represent the 
 men of the Puritanic period, who added to 
 their profound theology and varied learning 
 a zeal to be understood, and a skill in setting 
 forth truth by the help of every-day occur- 
 rences. The age which followed them was 
 barren of spiritual life, and was afflicted by a 
 race of rhetorical divines, whose words had 
 little connection with the Word of life. The 
 scanty thought of the Queen Anne dignitaries 
 needed no aid of metaphor or parable: there 
 was nothing to explain to the people ; the ut- 
 most endeavor of these divines was to hide 
 the nakedness of their discourses with the fig- 
 leaves of Latinized verbiage. Living preach- 
 ing was gone, spiritual life was gone, and con- 
 
52 THE ABT OF ILLUSTBATION. 
 
 sequently a pulpit was set up which had no 
 voice for the common people ; no voice, indeed, 
 for anybody except the mere formalist, who is 
 content if decorum be observed and respecta- 
 bility maintained. Of course, our notion of 
 making truth clear by stories did not suit the 
 dignified death of the period, and it was only 
 when the dry bones began to be stirred that 
 the popular method was again brought to the 
 front. 
 
 The illustrious George Whitefield stands, with 
 Wesley, at the head of that noble army who 
 led the Revival of the last century. It is not 
 at this present any part of my plan to speak 
 of his matchless eloquence, unquenchable ear- 
 nestness, and incessant labor ; but it is quite 
 according to the run of my lecture to remind 
 you of his own saying, "I use market lan- 
 guage." He employed pure, good, flowing 
 English ; but he was as simple as if he spoke 
 to children. Although by no means abound- 
 ing in illustration, yet he always employed it 
 when needed, and he narrated incidents with 
 great power of action and emphasis. His 
 stories were so told that they thrilled the peo- 
 ple : they saw as well as heard, for each word 
 had its proper gesture. One reason why he 
 could be understood at so great a distance 
 was the fact that the eye helped the ear. As 
 
ANECDOTES FROM THE PULPIT. 53 
 
 specimens of his anecdotes I have selected 
 two, which follow : 
 
 The Two Chaplains.— You cannot do without the 
 grace of God when you come to die. There was a noble- 
 man that kept a deistical chaplain and his lady a Chris- 
 tian one. When he was dying he says to his chaplain, " I 
 liked you very well when I was in health, but it is my 
 lady's chaplain I must have when I am sick." 
 
 Never Satisfied.— My dear hearers, there is not a 
 single soul of you all that is satisfied in your station. 
 Is not the language of your hearts when apprentices, We 
 think we shall do very well when journeymen ; when jour- 
 neymen, that we shall do very well when masters ; when 
 single, that we shall do well when married ? And, to be 
 sui*e, you think you shall do well when you keep a car- 
 riage. I have heard of one who began low. He first 
 wanted a house j then, says he, '^I want two, then four, 
 then six." And when he had them he said, ^' I think I 
 want nothing else." '^Yes," says his friend, '^you will 
 soon want another thing; that is a hearse-and-six to 
 carry you to your grave." And that made him tremble. 
 
 Fearing that the quotation of any more ex- 
 amples might prove tedious, I would only re- 
 mind you that such men as Berridge, Rowland 
 Hill, Matthew Wilks, Christmas Evans, William 
 Jay, and others who have but lately departed 
 from us, owed much of their attractiveness to 
 the way in which they aroused their audiences, 
 and flashed truth into their faces by well- 
 chosen anecdotes. Time calls upon me to 
 have done, and how can I come to a better 
 
54 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 close than by mentioning one living man, who, 
 above all others, has in two continents stirred 
 the masses of the people? I refer to D. L. 
 Moody. This admirable brother has a great 
 aversion to the printing of his sermons; and 
 well he may have, for he is incessantly preach- 
 ing, and has no time allowed him for the prep- 
 aration of fresh discourses; and therefore it 
 would be great unwisdom on his part to print 
 at once those addresses with which he is work- 
 ing through a campaign. We hope, however, 
 that when he has done with a sermon he will 
 never suffer it to die out, but give it to the 
 church and to the world through the press. 
 Our esteemed brother has a lively, telling style, 
 and he thinks it wise frequently to fasten a 
 nail with the hammer of anecdote. Here are 
 three extracts from the little book entitled 
 " Arrows and Anecdotes by D. L. Moody .'^ 
 
 The Idiot's Mother. — I know a mother wlio has an 
 idiot child. For it she gave up all society — almost every- 
 thing — and devoted her whole life to it. **And now," 
 said she, *' for fourteen years I have tended it and loved 
 it, and it does not even know me. Oh, it is breaking my 
 heart ! " Oh, how the Lord must say this of hundreds 
 here ! Jesus comes here, and goes from seat to seat ask- 
 ing if there is a place for him. Oh, will not some of you 
 take him into your hearts *? 
 
 Surgeon and Patient. — When I was in Belfast I 
 knew a doctor who had a friend, a leading surgeon there. 
 
ANECDOTES FROM THE PULPIT. 55 
 
 and he told me that the surgeon's custom was, before per- 
 forming any operation, to say to the patient, ^* Take a 
 good look at the wound and then fix youi' eyes on me, and 
 don't take them off till I get through the operation." I 
 thought at the time that was a good illustration. Sinner, 
 take a good look at the wound to-night, and then fix your 
 eyes on Christ and don't take them off. It is better to 
 look at the remedy than at the wound. 
 
 The Roll- Call. — A soldier lay on his dying couch 
 during our last war, and they heard him say, '' Here ! " 
 They asked him what he wanted, and he put up his hand 
 and said, "Hush! They are calUng the roll of heaven, 
 and I am answering to my name." And presently he 
 whispered, '^ Here ! " and he was gone. 
 
 I will weary you no longer. You may safe- 
 ly do what the most useful of men have done 
 before you. Copy them not only in their use 
 of illustration, but in their wisely keeping it 
 in subservience to their design. They were 
 not story-tellers, but preachers of the gospel ; 
 they did not aim at the entertainment of the 
 people, but at their conversion. Never did 
 they go out of their way to drag in a telling 
 bit which they had been saving up for display, 
 and never could any one say of their illustra- 
 tions that they were 
 
 Windows that exclude the light, 
 And passages that lead to nothing. 
 
 Keep you the due proportion of things lest I 
 do worse than lose my labor, by becoming the 
 
56 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 cause of your presenting to the people strings 
 of anecdotes instead of sound doctrines, for 
 that would be as evil a thing as if you offered 
 to hungry men flowers instead of bread, and 
 gave to the naked gauze of gossamer instead 
 of woolen cloth. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 THE USES OF ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 The uses of anecdotes and illustrations are 
 manifold ; but we may reduce them to seven, 
 so far as our present purposes are concerned, 
 not for a moment imagining that this will be 
 a complete list. 
 
 We use them, first, to interest the mind and 
 secure the attention of our hearers. We cannot 
 endure a sleepy audience. To us, a slumber- 
 ing man is no man. Sydney Smith observed 
 that, although Eve was taken out of the side 
 of Adam while he was asleep, it was not pos- 
 sible to remove sin from men's hearts in that 
 manner. We do not agree with Hodge, the 
 hedger and ditcher, who remarked to a Chris- 
 tian man with whom he was talking, " I loikes 
 Sunday, I does ; I loikes Sunday." " And what 
 makes you like Sunday?" "'Cause, you see, 
 it's a day of rest: I goes down to the old 
 church, I gets into a pew, and puts my legs 
 up, and I thinks o' nothin'. " It is to be feared 
 
 57 
 
58 THE AET OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 that in town as well as in country this think- 
 ing of nothing is a very usual thing. But 
 your regard for the sacred day, and the minis- 
 try to which you are called, and the worship- 
 ing assembly, will not allow you to give your 
 people the chance of thinking of nothing. You 
 want to arouse every faculty in them to receive 
 the Word of God, that it may be a blessing to 
 them. 
 
 We want to win attention at the commence- 
 ment of the service, and to hold it till the 
 close. With this aim, many methods may be 
 tried; but possibly none will succeed better 
 than the introduction of an interesting story. 
 This sets Hodge listening, and although he 
 will miss the fresh air of the fields, and begin 
 to feel drowsy in your stuffy chapel, another 
 tale will stir him to renewed attention. If he 
 hears some narrative in connection with his vil- 
 lage or county, you will have him " all there," 
 and you may then hope to do him good. 
 
 The anecdote in the sermon answers the 
 purpose of an engraving in a book. Every- 
 body knows that people are attracted by vol- 
 umes with pictures in them ; and that, when a 
 child gets a book, although it may pass over 
 the letterpress without observation, it is quite 
 sure to pause over the woodcuts. Let us not 
 be too great to use a method which many 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 59 
 
 have found successful. We must have atten- 
 tion. In some audiences we cannot get it if 
 we begin with solid instruction ; they are not 
 desirous of being taught, and consequently 
 they are not in a condition to receive the truth 
 if we set it before them nakedly. Now for a 
 bunch of flowers to attract these people to our 
 table, for afterward we can feed them with 
 the food they so much need. Just as the Sal- 
 vation Army goes trumpeting and drumming 
 through the streets to draw the people into 
 the barracks, so may an earnest man spend 
 the first few minutes with an unprepared con- 
 gregation in waking the folks up, and enticing 
 them to enter the inner chamber of the truth. 
 Even this awakening prelude must have in it 
 that which is worthy of the occasion ; but if it 
 is not up to your usual average in weight of 
 doctrine, it may not only be excused, but com- 
 mended, 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 congi^egation which has been well in- 
 structed, 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 church- 
 goers. Your common sense will teach you to 
 
60 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 suit your manner to your audience. It is pos- 
 sible to maintain profound and long-continued 
 attention without the use of an illustration ; 
 I have frequently done so in the Tabernacle 
 when it has been mainly filled with chui'ch- 
 members ; but when my own people are away, 
 and strangers fill their places, I bring out all 
 my store of stories, similes, and parables. 
 
 I have sometimes told anecdotes in the pul- 
 pit, and very delicate and particular people 
 have expressed their regret and horror that I 
 should say such things ; but when I have found 
 that God has blessed some of the illustrations 
 I have used, I have often thought of the story 
 of the man with a halberd, who was attacked 
 by a nobleman's dog, and, of course, in defend- 
 ing himself, he killed the animal. The noble- 
 man was very angry, and asked the man how 
 he dared to kill the dog ; and the man replied 
 that if he had not killed it the dog would have 
 bitten him and torn him in pieces. " Well," 
 said the nobleman, " but you should not have 
 struck it on the head with the halberd ; why 
 did you not hit it with the handle?" "My 
 lord," answered the man, " so I would if it had 
 tried to bite me with its tail." So, when I 
 have to deal with sin, some people say, " Why 
 don't you address it delicately? Why don't 
 you speak to it in courtly language ? " And I 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 61 
 
 answer, *^ So I would if it would bite me with 
 its tail ; but as long as ever I find that it deals 
 roughly with me, I will deal roughly with it ; 
 and any kind of weapon that will help to slay 
 the monster, I shall not find unfitted to my 
 hand." 
 
 We cannot afford in these days to lose any 
 opportunity of getting hold of the public ear. 
 We must use every occasion that comes in 
 our way, and every tool that is likely to help 
 us in our work ; and we must rouse up all our 
 faculties, and put forth all our energies, if that 
 by any means we may get the people to heed 
 that which they are so slow to regard, the 
 great story of righteousness, temperance, and 
 judgment to come. We shall need to read 
 much, and to study hard, or else we shall not 
 be able to influence our day and generation 
 for good* I believe that the greatest industry 
 is necessary to make a thoroughly efficient 
 preacher, and the best natural ability, too; 
 and it is my firm conviction that, when you 
 have the best natural ability, you must sup- 
 plement it with the greatest imaginable indus- 
 try, if you are really to do much service for God 
 among this crooked and perverse generation. 
 
 The fool in Scotland who got into the pulpit 
 before the preacher arrived was requested by 
 the minister to come down. " Nay, nay," an- 
 
62 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 swered the man, " you come up, too, for it will 
 take both of us to move this stiff-necked gen- 
 eration." It will certainly take all the wisdom 
 that we can obtain to move the people among 
 whom our lot is cast; and if we do not use 
 every lawful means of interesting the minds 
 of our hearers, we shall find that they will be 
 like a certain other congregation, in which the 
 people were all asleep except one poor idiot. 
 The minister woke them up, and tried to re- 
 prove them by saying, " There, you were all 
 asleep except poor Jock the idiot ; " but his re- 
 buke 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 anec- 
 dotes and illustrations renders our preaching 
 lifelike and vivid. This is a most important 
 matter. Of all things that we have to avoid, 
 one of the most essential is that of giving our 
 people the idea, when we are preaching, that 
 we are acting a part. Everything theatrical 
 in the pulpit, either in tone, manner, or any- 
 thing else, I loathe from my very soul. Just 
 go into the pulpit and talk to the people as 
 you would in the kitchen, or the drawing- 
 room, and say what you have to tell them in 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTEATIONS. 63 
 
 your ordinary tone of voice. Let me conjure 
 you, by everything that is good, to throw 
 away all stilted styles of speech, and anything 
 approaching affectation. Nothing can succeed 
 with the masses except naturalness and sim- 
 plicity. Why, some ministers cannot even give 
 out a hymn in a natural manner! "Let us 
 sing to the praise and glory of God " (spoken 
 in the tone that is sometimes heard in churches 
 or chapels) — who would ever think of speak- 
 ing like that at the tea-table? "I shall be 
 greatly obliged if you will kindly give me an- 
 other cup of tea " (spoken in the same unnatu- 
 ral way) — you would never think of giving 
 any tea to a man who talked like that ; and if 
 we preach in that stupid style, the people will 
 not believe what we say ; they will think it is 
 our business, our occupation, and that we are 
 doing the whole thing in a professional man- 
 ner. We must shake off professionalism of 
 every kind, as Paul shook off the viper into 
 the fire ; and we must speak as God has or- 
 dained that we should speak, and not by any 
 strange, out-of-the-way, new-fangled method 
 of pulpit oratory. 
 
 Our Lord's teaching was amazingly lifelike 
 and vivid ; it was the setting out of truth be- 
 fore the eye, not as a flat picture, but as in a 
 stereoscope, making it stand up, with all its 
 
64 THE AKT OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 lines and angles of beauty in lifelike reality. 
 That was a fine living sermon when he took a 
 little child, and set him in the midst of the 
 disciples ; and that was another powerful dis- 
 course when he preached about abstaining 
 from carking cares, and stooped down and 
 plucked a lily (as I suppose he did) and said, 
 "Consider the lilies of the field, how they 
 grow ; they toil not, neither do they spin." I 
 can readily suppose that some ravens were 
 flying just over his head, and that he pointed 
 to them, and said, " Consider the ravens ; for 
 they neither sow nor reap ; which neither have 
 storehouse nor barn ; and God feedeth them." 
 There was a lifelikenessj you see, a vividness, 
 about the whole thing. We cannot always 
 literally imitate our Lord, as we have mostly 
 to preach in places of worship. It is a bless- 
 ing that we have so many houses of prayer, 
 and I thank God that there are so many of 
 them springing up all around us ; yet I should 
 praise the Lord still more if half the ministers 
 who preach in our various buildings were 
 made to turn out of them, and to speak for 
 their Master in the highways and byways, and 
 anywhere that the people would go to listen to 
 them. We are to go out into all the world, 
 and preach the gospel to every creature — not 
 to stop in our chapels waiting for every crea- 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 65 
 
 ture to come in to hear what we have to say. 
 A sportsman who should sit at his parlor win- 
 dow, with his gun loaded all ready for shoot- 
 ing partridges, would probably not make up a 
 very heavy bag of game. No ; he must put on 
 his buskins, and tramp off over the fields, and 
 then he will get a shot at the birds he is seek- 
 ing. So must we do, brethren ; we must al- 
 ways have our buskins ready for field work, 
 and be ever on the watch for opportunities of 
 going out among the souls of men, that we 
 may bring them back as trophies of the power 
 of the gospel we have to proclaim. 
 
 It might not be wise for us to try to make 
 our sermons lifelike and vivid in the style in 
 which quaint old Matthew Wilks sometimes 
 did ; as when, one Sabbath morning, he took 
 into the pulpit a little box, and after a while, 
 opened it, and displayed to the congregation 
 a small pair of scales, and then, turning over 
 the leaves of the Bible with great deliberation, 
 held up the balances, and announced as his 
 text, " Thou art weighed in the balances, and 
 art found wanting." I think, however, that 
 was puerile rather than powerful. I like Mat- 
 thew Wilks better when, on another occasion, 
 his text being, " See that ye walk circum- 
 spectly," he commenced by saying, " Did you 
 ever see a tom-cat walking on the top of a 
 
66 THE ART OF ILLUSTEATION. 
 
 high wall that was covered with bits of broken 
 glass bottles? If so, you had just then an 
 accurate illustration of what is meant by the 
 injunction, ' See that ye walk circumspectly.' " 
 There is the case, too, of good " Father Tay- 
 lor," who, preaching in the streets in one of 
 the towns of California, stood on the top of 
 a whisky-barrel. By way of illustration, he 
 stamped his foot on the cask and said, " This 
 barrel is like man's heart, full of evil stuff; 
 and there are some people who say that if sin 
 is within you, it may just as well come out." 
 " No," said the speaker, " it is not so ; now here 
 is this whisky that is in the barrel under my 
 foot : it is a bad thing ; it is a damnable thing ; 
 it is a devilish thing ; but as long as it is kept 
 tightly bunged up in the barrel, it certainly 
 will not do the hurt that it will if it is taken 
 over to the liquor-bar, and sold out to the 
 drunkards of tlie neighborhood, sending them 
 home to beat their wives or kill their children. 
 So, if you keep your sins in your own heart, 
 they will be evil and devilish, and God will 
 damn you for them ; but they will not do so 
 much hurt to other people, at any rate, as if 
 they are seen in public." Stamping his foot 
 again on the barrel, the preacher said, " Sup- 
 pose you try to pass this cask over the boun- 
 daries of the country, and the custom-house 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 67 
 
 officer comes and demands the duty upon its 
 contents. You say that you will not let any 
 of the whisky get out ; but the officer tells you 
 that he cannot allow it to pass. So, if it were 
 possible for us to abstain from outward sin, 
 yet, since the heart is full of all manner of 
 evil, it would be impossible for us to pass the 
 frontiers of heaven, and to be found in that 
 holy and happy place." That I thought to be 
 somewhat of a lifelike illustration, and a cap- 
 ital way of teaching truth, although I should 
 not like always to have a whisky-barrel for a 
 pulpit, for fear the head might fall in, and I 
 might fall in, too. 
 
 I should not recommend any of you to be 
 so lifelike in your ministry as that notable 
 French priest, who, addressing his congrega- 
 tion, said, "As to the Magdalenes and those 
 who commit the sins of the flesh, such persons 
 are very common ; they abound even in this 
 church ; and I am going to throw this mass- 
 book at a woman who is a Magdalene," where- 
 upon all the women in the place bent down 
 their heads. So the priest said, " No, surely 
 you are not all Magdalenes ; I hardly thought 
 that was the case ; but you see how your sin 
 finds you out ! " Nor should I even recom- 
 mend you to follow the example of the clergy- 
 man, who, when a collection was to be made 
 
68 THE AET OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 for lighting and warming the church, after he 
 had preached some time, blew out the candles 
 on both sides of the pulpit, saying that the 
 collection was for the lights and the fires, and 
 h^ did not require any light, for he did not read 
 his sermon, ^'but," he added, "when Roger 
 gives out the psalm presently, you will want 
 a light to see your books ; so the candles are 
 for yourselves. And as for the stove, I do not 
 need its heat, for my exercise in preaching is 
 sufficient to keep me warm ; therefore you see 
 that the collection is wholly for yourselves on 
 this occasion. Nobody can say that the clergy 
 are collecting for themselves this time, for on 
 this Sunday it is wholly for your own selves." 
 I thought the man was a fool for making such 
 remarks, though I find that his conduct has 
 been referred to as being a very excellent in- 
 stance of boldness in preaching. 
 
 There is a story told about myself, which, 
 like very many of the tales told about me, is a 
 story in two senses. It is said that in order to 
 show the way in which men backslide, I once 
 slid down the banisters of the pulpit. I only 
 mention this, in passing, because it is a re- 
 markable fact that, at the time the story was 
 told, my pulpit was fixed in the wall, and there 
 was no banister, so that the reverend fool 
 (which he would have been if he had done 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 69 
 
 what people said) could not have performed 
 the antic if he had been inclined to attempt it. 
 But the anecdote, although it is not true, serves 
 all the purposes of the lifelikeness I have tried 
 to describe. 
 
 You probably recollect the instance of 
 Whitefield depicting the blind man, with his 
 dog, walking on the brink of a precipice, and 
 his foot almost slipping over the edge. The 
 preacher's description was so graphic, and the 
 illustration so vivid and lifelike, that Lord 
 Chesterfield sprang up and exclaimed, " Good 
 God, he's gone ! " but Whitefield answered, 
 " No, my lord, he is not quite gone ; let us hope 
 that he may yet be saved." Then he went on 
 to speak of the blind man as being led by his 
 reason, which is only like a dog, showing that 
 a man led only by reason is ready to fall into 
 hell. How vividly one would see the love of 
 money set forth in the story told by our ven- 
 erable friend, Mr. Rogers, of a man who, when 
 he lay a-dying, would put his money in his 
 mouth because he loved it so and wanted to 
 take some of it with him ! How strikingly is 
 the non-utility of worldly wealth, as a comfort 
 to us in our last days, brought before us by 
 the narrative in which good Jeremiah Bur- 
 roughes speaks of a miser who had his money- 
 bags laid near his hand on his dying-bed ! He 
 
70 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 kept taking them up, and saying, " Must I 
 leave you ? Must I leave you ! Have I lived 
 all these years for you, and now must I leave 
 you 1 " And so he died. There is a tale told of 
 another, who had many pains in his death, and 
 especially the great pain of a disturbed con- 
 science. He also had his money-bags brought, 
 one by one, with his mortgages, and bonds, and 
 deeds, and putting them near his heart, he 
 sighed, and said, " These won't do ; these .won't 
 do ; these won't do ; take them away ! What 
 poor things they all are when I most need 
 comfort in my dying moments ! " 
 
 How distinctly love to Christ is brought out 
 in the story of John Lambert, fastened to the 
 stake, and burning to death, yet clapping his 
 hands as he was burning, and crying out, 
 " None but Christ ! None but Christ ! " until 
 his nether extremities were burned, and he 
 fell from the chains into the fire, still ex- 
 claiming in the midst of the flames, "None 
 but Christ ! None but Christ ! " How clearly 
 the truth stands out before you when you 
 hear such stories as these ! You can realize 
 it almost as well as if the incident happened 
 before your eyes. How well you can see the 
 folly of misunderstanding between Christians 
 in Mr. Jay's story of two men who were walk- 
 ing from opposite directions on a foggy night ! 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 71 
 
 Each saw what he thought was a terrible mon- 
 ster moving toward him, and making his heart 
 beat with terror ; as they came nearer to each 
 other, they found that the dreadful monsters 
 were brothers. So, men of different denomi- 
 nations are often afraid of one another; but 
 when they get close to each other, and know 
 each other's hearts, they find out that they 
 are brethren after all. The story of the negro 
 and his master well illustrates the need of be- 
 ginning at the beginning in heavenly things, 
 and not meddling with the deeper points of 
 our holy religion till we have learned its ele- 
 ments thoroughly. A poor negro was labor- 
 ing hard to bring his master to a knowledge 
 of the truth, and was urging him to exercise 
 faith in Christ, when he excused himself be- 
 cause he could not understand the doctrine of 
 election. "Ah ! Massa," said the negro, " don't 
 you know what comes before de Epistle to de 
 Romans? You must read de Book de right 
 wa}^ ; de doctrine ob election is in Romans, 
 and dere is Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, 
 first. You are only in Matthew yet; dat is 
 about repentance ; and when you get to John, 
 you will read where de Lord Jesus Christ said 
 dat God so loved de world, dat he gave his 
 only begotten Son, dat whosoever believeth 
 in him should not perish, but hab everlasting 
 
72 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 life." So, brethren, you can say to your hear- 
 ers, " You will do better by reading the four 
 Gospels first than by beginning to read in 
 Romans; first study Matthew, Mark, Luke, 
 and John, and then you can go on to the 
 Epistles." 
 
 But I must not keep on giving you illustra- 
 tions, because so many will suggest them- 
 selves. I have given you sufficient to show 
 that they do make our preaching vivid and 
 lifelike ; therefore, the more you have of them, 
 the better. At the same time, gentlemen, I 
 must warn you against the danger of having 
 too many anecdotes in any one sermon. You 
 ought, perhaps, to have a dish of salad on the 
 table ; but if you ask your friends to dinner, 
 and give them nothing but salad, they wiU 
 not fare very well, and will not care to come 
 to your house again. 
 
 Thirdly, anecdotes and illustrations may be 
 used to explain either doctrines or duties to dull 
 tinder standing 8. They may, in fact, be the 
 very best form of exposition. A preacher 
 should instance, and illustrate, and exemplify 
 his subject, so that his hearers may have real 
 acquaintance with the matter he is bringing 
 before them. If a man attempted to give me 
 a description of a piece of machinery, he would 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTKATIONS. 73 
 
 possibly fail to make me comprehend what it 
 was like ; but if he will have the goodness to 
 let me see a drawing of the various sections, 
 and then of the whole machine, I will, some- 
 how or other, by hook or by crook, make out 
 how it works. The pictorial representation 
 of a thing is always a much more powerful 
 means of instruction than any mere verbal 
 description ever could be. It is just in this 
 way that anecdotes and illustrations are so 
 helpful to our hearers. For instance, take 
 this anecdote as illustrating the text, " Thou, 
 /yrhen thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and 
 jiwhen thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy 
 iFather which is in secret." A little boy used 
 to go up into a hay-loft to pray ; but he found 
 ^hat, sometimes, persons came up and disturbed 
 Mm ; therefore, the next time he climbed into 
 the loft, he pulled the ladder up after him. 
 Telling this story, you might explain how the 
 •boy thus entered into his closet and shut the 
 koor. The meaning is not so much the literal 
 entrance into a closet, or the shutting of the 
 door, as the getting away from earthly sources 
 of distraction, pulling up the ladder after us, 
 and keeping out anything that might come in 
 to hinder our secret devotions. I wish we 
 could always pull the ladder up after us when 
 we retire for private prayer ; but many things 
 
74 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 try to climb that ladder. The devil himself 
 will come up to disturb us if he cau ; and he 
 can get into the hay-loft without any ladder. 
 
 What a capital exposition of the fifth com- 
 mandment was that which was given by Cor- 
 poral Trim, when he was asked, " What dost 
 thou mean by honoring thy father and thy 
 mother?" and he answered, "Please, your 
 honor, it is allowing them a shilling a week"' 
 out of my pay when they grow old." Thaf' 
 was an admirable explanation of the meaning ' 
 of the text. Then, if you are trying to show'^' 
 how we are to be doers of the Word, and not ^. 
 hearers only, there is a story of a woman who, / ~ 
 when asked by the minister what he had said 
 on Sunday, replied that she did not remember 
 the sermon ; but it had touched her conscience, 
 for when she got home she burned her bushel, 
 which was short measure. There is another 
 story which also goes to show that the gospel 
 may be useful even to hearers who forget what 
 they have heard. A woman is called upon by 
 her minister on the Monday, and he finds her 
 washing wool in a sieve, holding it under the 
 pump. He asks her, " How did you enjoy last 
 Sabbath's discourses ! " and she says that they 
 did her much good. "Well, what was the 
 text ? " She does not recollect. " What was 
 the subject?" " Ah, sir, it is quite gone from 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 75 
 
 me ! " says the poor woman. Does she remem- 
 ber any of the remarks that were made 1 No, 
 they are all gone. " Well, then, Mary," says 
 the minister, "it could not have done you 
 much good." Oh ! but it had done her a great 
 deal of good ; and she explained it to him by 
 saying, " I will tell you, sir, how it is ; I put 
 this wool in the sieve under the pump, I pump 
 on it, and all the water runs through the sieve, 
 but then it washes the wool. So it is with 
 your sermon ; it comes into my heart, and 
 then it runs right through my poor memory, 
 which is like a sieve, but it washes em clean, 
 sir." You might talk for a long while about 
 the cleansing and sanctifying power of the 
 Word, and it would not make such an impres- 
 sion upon your hearers as that simple story 
 would. 
 
 What finer exposition of the text, "Weep 
 with them that weep," can you have than this 
 pretty anecdote f " Mother," said little Annie, 
 " I cannot make out why poor Widow Brown 
 likes me to go in to see her; she says I do 
 comfort her so; but, mother, I cannot say 
 anything to comfort her, and as soon as she 
 begins crying, I put my arms round her neck, 
 and I cry too, and she says that that comforts 
 her." And so it does ; that is the very essence 
 of the comfort, the sympathy, the fellow-feel- 
 
76 THE AKT OF ILLUSTKATION. 
 
 ing that moved the little girl to weep with the 
 weeping widow. Mr. Hervey thus illustrates- 
 the great truth of the different appearance of 
 sin to the eye of Grod and the eye of man. He 
 says that you may take a small insect, and 
 with the tiniest needle make a puncture in it 
 so minute that you can scarcely see it with the 
 naked eye ; but when you look at it through 
 a microscope, you see an enormous rent, out 
 of which there flows a purple stream, making 
 the creature seem to you as though it had been 
 smitten with the ax that killeth an ox. It is 
 but a defect of our vision that we cannot see 
 things correctly; but the microscope reveals 
 them as they really are. Thus you may ex- 
 plain to your hearers how God's microscopic 
 eye sees sin in its true aspects. Suppose that 
 you wanted to set forth the character of Caleb, 
 who followed the Lord fully ; it would greatly 
 help many of your people if you said that the 
 name Caleb signifies a dog, and then showed 
 how a dog follows his master. There is his 
 owner em horseback, riding along the miry 
 roads ; but the dog keeps as close to him as 
 he can, no matter how much mud and dirt are 
 splashed upon him, and not heeding the kicks 
 he might get from the horse's heels. Even so 
 should we follow the Lord. If you wish to 
 exemplify the shortness of time, you might 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 77 
 
 bring in the poor seamstress, with her little 
 piece of candle, stitching away to get her work 
 done before the light went out. 
 
 Many preachers find the greatest diificulty 
 in getting suitable metaphors to set forth sim- 
 ple faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. There is 
 a capital anecdote of an idiot who was asked 
 by the minister, who was trying to instruct 
 him, whether he had a soul. To the utter 
 consternation of his kind teacher, he replied, 
 " No, I have no soul." The preacher said he 
 was greatly surprised, after he had been taught 
 for years, that he did not know better than 
 that ; but the poor fellow thus explained him- 
 self, "I had a soul once, but I lost it; and 
 Jesus Christ came and found it, and now I let 
 him keep it, for it is his, it does not belong to 
 me any longer." That is a fine picture of the 
 way of salvation by simple faith in the siab- 
 stitution of the Lord Jesus Christ; and the 
 smallest child in the congregation might be 
 able to understand it through the story of the 
 poor idiot. 
 
 Fourthly, there is a kind of reasoning in anec- 
 dotes and illustrations, which is very clear to 
 illogical minds ; and many of our hearers, un- 
 fortunately, have such minds, yet they can 
 understand illustrative instances and stubborn 
 
78 THE AKT OF ILLUSTKATION. 
 
 facts. Truthful anecdotes are facts, and facts 
 are stubborn things. Instances, when suffi- 
 ciently multiplied, as we know by the induc- 
 tive philosophy, prove a point. Two instances 
 may not prove it ; but twenty may prove it to 
 a demonstration. Take the very important 
 matter of answers to prayer. You can prove 
 that God answers prayer by quoting anecdote 
 after anecdote, that you know to be authentic, 
 of instances in which God has really heard 
 and answered prayer. Take that capital little 
 book by Mr. Prime on the " Power of Prayer " ; 
 there I believe you have the truth upon this 
 subject demonstrated as clearly as you could 
 have it in any proposition in Euclid. I think 
 that, if such a number of facts could be in- 
 stanced in connection with any question relat- 
 ing to geology or astronomy, the point would 
 be regarded as settled-. The writer brings 
 such abundant proofs of God's having heard 
 prayer, that even men who reject inspiration 
 ought, at least, to acknowledge that this is a 
 marvelous phenomenon for which they cannot 
 account by any other explanation than the 
 one which proclaims that there is a God who 
 sitteth in heaven, and who hath respect unto 
 the cry of his people upon the earth. 
 
 I have heard of some persons who have had 
 objections to labor for the conversion of their 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTKATIONS. 79 
 
 .^lildren, on the ground that God would save 
 / his own without any effort on our part. I re- 
 I member making one man wince who held this 
 I view, by telling him of a father who would 
 j never teach his child to pray, or have him in- 
 structed' even as to the meaning of prayer. 
 He thought it was wrong, and that such work 
 i ought to be left to God's Holy Spirit. The 
 boy fell down and broke his leg, and had to 
 have it taken off ; and all the while the sur- 
 geon was amputating it the boy was cursing 
 and swearing in the most frightful manner. 
 The good surgeon said to the father, "You 
 see, you would not teach your boy to pray, but 
 the devil evidently had no objection to teach 
 him to swear." That is the mischief of it ; if 
 we do not try our best to bring our children to 
 Christ, there is another who will do his worst 
 to di'ag them down to hell. A mother once 
 said to her sick son, who was about to die, and 
 was in a dreadful state of mind, " My boy, I 
 am sorry you are in such trouble ; I am sure 
 I never taught you any hurt." " No, mother," 
 he answered, " but you never taught me any 
 good; and therefore there was room for all 
 sorts of evil to get into me." All these stories 
 will be to many people the very best kind of 
 argument that you could possibly use with 
 them. You bring to them facts, and these 
 
80 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 facts reach their conscience, even though it is 
 embedded in several inches of callousness. 
 
 I do not know of any reasoning that would 
 explain the need of submission to the will of 
 God better than the telling of the story, which 
 Mr. Gilpin gives us in his Life, of his being 
 called in to pray with a woman whose boy 
 was very ill. The good man asked that God 
 would, if it were his will, restore the dear child 
 to life and health, when the mother interrupted 
 him, and said, '^ No, I cannot agree to such a 
 prayer as that ; I cannot put it in that shape ; 
 it must be God's will to restore him. I cannot 
 bear that my child should die ; pray that he 
 may live whether it is God's will or not." He 
 answered, "Woman, I cannot pray that prayer, 
 but it is answered; your child will recover, 
 but you will live to rue the day that you made 
 such a request." Twenty years after, there 
 was a woman carried away in a fainting fit 
 from under a drop at Tyburn, for her son had 
 lived long enough to bring himself to the gal- 
 lows by his crimes. The mother's wicked 
 prayer had been heard, and God had answered 
 it. So, if you want to prove the power of the 
 gospel, do not go on expending words to no 
 purpose, but tell the stories of cases you have 
 met with that illustrate the truth you are en- 
 forcing, for such anecdotes will convince your 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTKATIONS. 81 
 
 hearers as no other kmd of reasoning can. I 
 think that is clear enough to every one of you. 
 /Anecdotes are useful, also, because they 
 '^often appeal very forcibly to human nature. 
 In order to rebuke those who profane the 
 Sabbath, tell the story of the gentleman who 
 had seven sovereigns, and who met with a 
 poor fellow, to whom he gave six out of the 
 seven, and then the wicked wretch turned 
 round and robbed him of the seventh. How 
 clearly that sets forth the ingratitude of our 
 / sinful race in depriving God of that one day 
 / out of the seven which he has set apart for his 
 I own service! This story appeals to nature, 
 M;00. Two or three boys come round one of 
 their companions, and they say to him, "Let 
 us go and get some cherries out of your 
 father's garden." " No," he replies, " I cannot 
 steal, and my father does not wish those cher- 
 ries to be picked." " Oh, but then your father 
 is so kind, and he never beats you ! " "Ah, I 
 know that is true ! " answers the boy, "and that 
 is the very reason why I would not steal his 
 cherries." This would show that the grace 
 and goodness of God do not lead his children 
 to licentiousness ; but, on the contrary, they 
 restrain them from sin. This story, also, ap- 
 peals to human nature, and shows that the 
 fathers of the church are not always to be 
 
82 THE AET OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 depended upon as fountains of authority. A 
 nobleman had heard of a certain very old man, 
 who lived in a village, and he sought out and 
 found him, and ascertained that he was sev- 
 enty years of age. He was talking with him, 
 supposing him to be the oldest inhabitant, 
 when the man said, " Oh, no, sir, I am not the 
 oldest; I am not the father of the village; 
 there is an older one — my father — who is still 
 alive." So, I have heard of some who have 
 said that they turned away from "the fathers" 
 of the church to the very old fathers, that is, 
 away from what are commonly called "the 
 patristic fathers," back to the apostles, who 
 are the true fathers and grandfathers of the 
 Christian Church. ^^^ 
 
 Sometimes anecdotes have force in them 
 on account of their appealing to the sense of 
 the ludicrous. Of course, I must be very care- 
 ful 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 Grod ; and I would 
 rather get the truth into them through the 
 medium of ridicule than I would have the 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS, 80 
 
 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, some- 
 times, to laugh is the better thing of the two, 
 for I may weep, and be murmuring, and repin- 
 ing, and thinking all sorts of bitter thoughts 
 against God; while, at another time, I may 
 laugh the laugh of sarcasm against sin, and so 
 evince a holy earnestness in the defense of the 
 truth. I do not know why ridicule is to be 
 given up to Satan as a weapon to be used 
 against us, and not to be employed by us as a 
 weapon against him, I will venture to affirm 
 that the Reformation owed almost as much to 
 the sense of the ridiculous in human nature 
 as to anything else, and that those humorous 
 squibs and caricatures that were issued by the 
 friends of Luther, did more to open the eyes 
 of G-ermany to the abominations of the priest- 
 hood than the more solid and ponderous argu- 
 ments against Romanism. I know no reason 
 why we should not, on suitable occasions, try 
 the same style of reasoning. " It is a danger- 
 ous weapon," it will be said, " and many men 
 will cut their fingers with it." Well, that is 
 their own lookout; but I do not know why 
 we should be so particular about their cutting 
 their fingers, if they can, at the same time, cut 
 
84 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 the throat of sin, and do serious damage to the 
 great adversary of souls. 
 
 Here is a story that I should not mind tell- 
 ing on a Sunday for the benefit of certain 
 people who are good at hearing sermons and 
 attending prayer-meetings, but who are very 
 bad hands at business. They never work on 
 Sundays because they never work on any day 
 of the week ; they forget that part of the com- 
 mandment which says, " Six days shalt thou 
 labor," which is just as binding as the other 
 part, " The seventh day is the sabbath of the 
 Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any 
 work." To these people who never labor be- 
 cause they are so heavenly-minded, I would 
 tell the story of a certain monk, who entered 
 a monastery, but who would not work in the 
 fields, or the garden, or at making clothes, or 
 anything else, because, as he told the superior, 
 he was a spiritually-minded monk. He won- 
 dered, when the dinner-hour approached, that 
 there came to him no summons from the re- 
 fectory. So he went down to the prior, and 
 said, " Don't the brethren eat here ! Are you 
 not going to have any dinner!" The prior 
 said, " We do, because we are carnal ; but you 
 are so spiritual that you do not work, and 
 therefore you do not require to eat; that is 
 why we did not call you. The law of this 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTKATIONS. 85 
 
 monastery is, that if any man will not work, 
 neither shall he eat." 
 
 That is a good story of the boy in Italy who 
 had his Testament seized, and who said to the 
 f/endarme, " Why do you seize this book ? Is it 
 a bad book ? " " Yes," was the answer. "Aire 
 you sure the book is bad f " he inquired ; and 
 again the reply was, " Yes." " Then why do 
 you not seize the Author of it if it is a bad 
 book ! " That was a fine piece of sarcasm at 
 those who had a hatred of the Scriptures, and 
 yet professed to have love to Christ. That is 
 another good story of our friend the Irishman, 
 who, when he was asked by the priest what 
 warrant an ignorant man such as he was had 
 for reading the Bible, said, "Truth, but I 
 have a search-warrant ; for it says, ^ Search 
 the Scriptures ; for in them ye think ye have 
 eternal life : and they are they which testify 
 of me.' " 
 
 This story would not be amiss, I think, as 
 a sort of ridiculous argument showing what 
 power the gospel ought to have over the hu- 
 man mind. Dr. Moffat tells us of a certain 
 Kaffir, who came to him one day. saying that 
 the New Testament, which the missionary had 
 given him a week before, had spoiled his dog. 
 The man said that his dog had been a very 
 good hunting-dog, but that he had torn the 
 
86 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 Testament to pieces, and eaten it up, and now 
 he was quite spoiled. " Never mind," said Dr. 
 Moffat, " I will give you another Testament." 
 " Oh ! " said the man, " it is not that that trou- 
 bles me, I do not mind the dog spoiling the 
 book, for I could buy another ; but the book 
 has spoiled the dog." " How is that ! " inquired 
 the missionary ; and the Kaifir replied, " The 
 dog will be of no use to me now, because he 
 has eaten the Word of God, and that will 
 make him love his enemies, so that he will be 
 of no good for hunting." The man supposed 
 that not even a dog could receive the New 
 Testament without being sweetened in temper 
 thereby ; that is, in truth, what ought to be 
 the case with all who feed upon the gospel of 
 Christ. I should not hesitate to tell that story 
 after Dr. Moffat, and I should, of course, use 
 it to show that, when a man has received the 
 truth as it is in Jesus, there ought to be a 
 great change in him, and he ought never to 
 be of any use to his old master again. 
 
 When the priests were trying to pervert the 
 natives of Tahiti to Romanism, they had a fine 
 picture which they hoped would convince the 
 people of the excellence of the Church of Rome. 
 There were certain dead logs of wood : whom 
 were they to represent ! They were the here- 
 tics, who were to gO into the fire. And who 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 87 
 
 were these small brandies of tlie tree ? They 
 were the faithful. Who were the larger ones ? 
 They were the priests. And who were the 
 next ? They were the cardinals. And who 
 was the trunk of the tree? Oh, that was the 
 pope ! And the root, whom did that set forth I 
 Oh, the root was Jesus Christ ! So the poor 
 natives said, " Well, we do not know anything 
 about the trunk or the branches ; but we have 
 got the root, and we mean to stick to that, 
 and not give it up." If we have the root, if 
 we have Christ, we may laugh to scorn all the 
 pretensions and delusions of men. 
 
 These stories may make us laugh, but they 
 may also smite error right through the heart, 
 and lay it dead ; and they may, therefore, law- 
 fully be used as weapons with which we may 
 go forth to fight the Lord's battles. 
 
 Fifthly, another use of anecdotes and illus- 
 trations lies in the fact that they help the mem- 
 ory to grasp the truth. There is a story told — 
 though I will not vouch for the truth of it — of 
 a certain countryman, who had been persuaded 
 by some one that all Londoners were thieves ; 
 and, therefore, on coming to London for the 
 first time, he tried to secure his watch by put^ 
 ting it into his waistcoat pocket, and then 
 covering it all over with fish-hooks. " Now," 
 
88 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 lie thought, " if any gentleman tries to get my 
 watch, he will remember it." The story says 
 that, as he was walking along, he desired to 
 know the time himself, and put his own hand 
 into his pocket, forgetting all about the fish- 
 hooks. The effect produced upon him can 
 better be imagined than described. Now, it 
 seems to me that a sermon should always be 
 like that countrjnnan's pocket, full of fish- 
 hooks, so that, if anybody comes in to listen 
 to it, he will get some forget-me-not, some re- 
 membrancer, fastened in his ear, and, it may 
 be, in his heart and conscience. Let him drop 
 in just at the end of the discourse, there should 
 be something at the close that will strike and 
 stick. As when we walk in our farmer friends' 
 fields there are certain burrs that are sure to 
 cling to our clothes ; and, rush as we may, some 
 of the relics of the fields remain upon our gar- 
 ments ; so there ought to be some burr in every 
 sermon that will stick to those who hear it. 
 
 What do you remember best in the dis- 
 courses you heard years agof I will ven- 
 ture to say that it is some anecdote that the 
 preacher related. It may possibl}^ be some 
 pithy sentence ; but it is more probable that 
 it is some striking story which was told in the 
 course of the sermon. Rowland Hill, a little 
 while before he died, was visiting an old friend. 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTBATIONS. 89 
 
 who said to him, " Mr. Hill, it is now sixty-five 
 years since I first heard you preach; but I 
 remember your text, and a part of your ser- 
 mon." " Well," asked the preacher, " what part 
 of the sermon do you recollect f " His friend 
 answered, " You said that some people, when 
 they went to hear a sermon, were very squeam- 
 ish about the delivery of the preacher. Then 
 you said, ^ Supposing you went to hear the 
 will of one of your relatives read, and you 
 were expecting a legac)^ from him ; you would 
 hardly think of criticizing the manner in which 
 the lawyer read the will ; but you would be all 
 attention to hear whether anything was left to 
 you, and if so, how much ; and that is the way 
 to hear the gospel.'" Now, the man would 
 not have recollected that for sixty-five years 
 if Mr. Hill had not put the matter in that illus- 
 trative form. If he had said, " Dear friends, 
 you must listen to the gospel for its own sake, 
 and not merely for the charms of the preach- 
 er's oratory, or those delightful soaring periods 
 which gratify your ears," if he had put it in 
 the very pretty manner in which some people 
 can do the thing, I will be bound to say that 
 the man would have remembered it as long 
 as a duck recollects the last time it went into 
 the water, and no longer ; for it would have 
 been so common to have spoken in that way ; 
 
90 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 but putting the truth in the striking manner 
 that he did, it was remembered for sixty-five 
 years. 
 
 A gentleman related the following anecdote, 
 which just answers the purpose I have in 
 view, so I will pass it on to you. He said: 
 " When I was a boy, I used to hear the story 
 of a tailor who lived to a great age, and be- 
 came very wealthy, so that he was an object 
 of envy to all who knew him. His life, as all 
 lives will, drew to a close ; but before he passed 
 away, feeling some desire to benefit the mem- 
 bers of his craft, he gave out word that, on a 
 certain day, he would be happy to communi- 
 cate to all the tailors of the neighborhood the 
 secret by which they might become wealthy. 
 A great number of knights of the thimble 
 came, and while they waited in anxious silence 
 to hear the important revelation, he was raised 
 up in his bed, and with his expiring breath 
 uttered this short sentence, 'Always put a knot 
 in your threa(V^ That is why I recommend 
 you, brethren, to use anecdotes and illustra- 
 tions, because they put knots in the thread of 
 your discourse. What is the use of pulling 
 the end of your thread through the material 
 on which you are working? Yet, has it not 
 been the case with very many of the sermons 
 to which we have listened, or the discourses 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTKATIONS. 91 
 
 we have ourselves delivered? The bulk of 
 what we have heard has just gone through 
 our minds without leaving any lasting im- 
 pression, and all we recollect is some anecdote 
 that was told by the preacher. 
 
 There is an authenticated case of a man 
 being converted by a sermon eighty-five years 
 after he had heard it preached. Mr. Flavel, at 
 the close of a discourse, instead of pronounc- 
 ing the usual benediction, stood up, and said, 
 " How can I dismiss you with a blessing, for 
 many of you are ' Anathema Maranatha,' be- 
 cause you love not the Lord Jesus Christ?" 
 A lad of fifteen heard that remarkable utter- 
 ance ; and eighty-five years afterward, sitting 
 under a hedge, the whole scene came vividly 
 before him as if it had been but the day be- 
 fore ; and it pleased God to bless Mr. FlavePs 
 words to his conversion, and he lived three 
 years longer to bear good testimony that he 
 had felt the power of the truth in his heart. 
 
 Sixthly, anecdotes and illustrations are use- 
 ful because they frequently arouse the feelings. 
 They will not do this, however, if you tell the 
 same stories over and over again ever so many 
 times. I recollect, when I first heard that won- 
 derful story about '^ There is another man," I 
 cried a good deal over it. Poor soul, just res- 
 
92 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 cued, half -dead, witli only a few rags on him, 
 and yet he said, " There is another man," need- 
 ing to be saved. The second time I heard the 
 story, I liked it, but I did not think it was 
 quite so new as at first ; and the third time I 
 heard it, I thought that I never wanted to hear 
 it again. I do not know how many times I 
 have heard it since ; but I can always tell when 
 it is coming out. The brother draws himself 
 up, and looks wonderfully solemn, and in a 
 sepulchral tone says, " There is another man," 
 and I think to myself, ^' Yes, and I wish there 
 had not been," for I have heard that story 
 till I am sick and tired of it. Even a good 
 anecdote may get so hackneyed that there is 
 no force in it, and no use in retailing it any 
 longer. 
 
 Still, a live illustration is better for appeal- 
 ing to the feelings of an audience than any 
 amount of description could possibly be. What 
 we want in these times is not to listen to long 
 prelections upon some dry subject, but to hear 
 something practical, something matter-of-fact, 
 that comes home to our every-day reasoning ; 
 and when we get this then our hearts are soon 
 stirred. 
 
 I have no doubt that the sight of a death- 
 bed would move men much more than that 
 admirable work called " Drehncourt on Death," 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 93 
 
 a book which, I should think, nobody has ever 
 been able to read through. There may have 
 been instances of persons who have attempted 
 it ; but I believe that, long before they have 
 reached the latter end, they have been in a 
 state of asphyxia or coma, and have been 
 obliged to be rubbed with hot flannels ; and 
 the book has had to be removed to a distance 
 before they could recover. If you have not 
 read " Drelincourt on Death," I believe I know 
 what you have read — that is, the ghost story 
 that is stitched in at the end of the book. The 
 work would not sell, the whole impression was 
 upon the shelves of the bookseller, when Defoe 
 wrote the fiction entitled, "A True Relation of 
 the Apparition of Mrs. Veal, after her Death, 
 to Mrs. Bargrave," in which " Drelincourt on 
 Death " is recommended by the apparition as 
 the best book on the subject. This story had 
 not a vestige or shadow of truth in it, it was 
 all a piece of imagination ; but it was put in 
 at the end of the book, and then the whole 
 edition was speedily cleared out, and more 
 were wanted. It may be something like that 
 very often with your sermons ; only you must 
 tell the people of what has actually occurred, 
 and so you will retain their attention and reach 
 their hearts. 
 Many have been moved to self-sacrifice by 
 
94 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 the story of the Moravians in South Africa 
 who saw a large inclosed space of ground, in 
 which there were persons rotting away with 
 leprosy, some without arms and some without 
 legs ; and these Moravians could not preach to 
 the poor lepers without going in there them- 
 selves for life to rot with them, and they did 
 so. Two more of the same noble band of 
 brethren sold themselves into slavery in the 
 West Indies, in order that they might be al- 
 lowed to preach to the slaves. When you 
 can give such instances as these of missionary 
 disinterestedness and devotedness, it will do 
 more to arouse a spirit of enthusiasm for for- 
 eign missions than all your closely reasoned 
 arguments could possibly do. 
 
 Who has not heard and felt the force of the 
 story of the tw^o miners, when the fuse was 
 burning, and only one could escape, and the 
 Christian man cried out to his unconverted 
 companion, " Escape for your life, because, if 
 you die, you are lost ; but if I die, it is all right 
 with me ; so you go." 
 
 The fooPs plan, too, I have sometimes used 
 as a striking illustration. There was a little 
 boat which got wrecked, and the man in it 
 was trying to swim to shore, but the current 
 was too strong for him. After he had been 
 drowned an hour, a man said, " I could have 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 95 
 
 saved him ; " and when they asked him how 
 he could have saved him, he described a plan 
 that seemed to be most excellent and feasible, 
 by which the man might, no doubt, have been 
 saved ; but then, unfortunately, by that time 
 he was drowned ! So, there are some who 
 are always wise just too late, some who may 
 have to say to themselves, when such and such 
 a one is gone the way of all living, "What 
 might I not have done for him if I had but 
 taken him in time ! " Brethren, let that anec- 
 dote be a reminder to us all that we should 
 seek to be wise in winning souls before it 
 is too late to rescue them from everlasting 
 destruction. 
 
 Seventhly, and lastly, anecdotes and illus- 
 trations are exceedingly useful because tlieti 
 catch the ear of the utterly careless. Something 
 is wanted in every sermon for this class of 
 people ; and an anecdote is well calculated to 
 catch the ear of the thoughtless and the un- 
 godly. We really desire their salvation, and 
 we would bait our trap in any way possible 
 by which we might catch them for Christ. We 
 cannot expect our young people to come and 
 listen to learned doctrinal disquisitions that 
 are not at all embellished with anything that 
 interests their immature minds. Nay, even 
 
96 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 grown-up people, after the toils of the week, 
 some of them busy till early on the Sunday 
 morning, cannot be expected to attend to long 
 prosaic discourses which are not broken by a 
 single anecdote. 
 
 Oh, dear, dear, dear ! How I do pity those 
 unpractical brethren who do not seem to know 
 to whom they are preaching ! " Ah," said a 
 brother once, "whenever I preach, I do not 
 know where to look, and so I look up at the 
 ventilator ! " Now, there is not anybody up in 
 the ventilator; there cannot be supposed to 
 be anybody there, unless the angels of heaven 
 are listening there to hear the words of truth. 
 A minister should not preach before the peo- 
 ple, but he should preach right at them ; let 
 him look straight at them ; if he can, let him 
 search them through and through, and take 
 stock of them, as it were, and see what they 
 are like, and then suit his message to them. 
 
 I have often seen some poor fellow standing 
 in the aisle at the Tabernacle. Why, he looks 
 just like a sparrow that has got into a churcli 
 and cannot get out again ! He cannot make 
 out what sort of servi<!e it is; he begins to 
 count how many people sit in the front row in 
 the gallery, and all kinds of ideas pass through 
 his mind. Now I want to attract his atten- 
 tion ; how shall I do it ? If I quote a text of 
 
ANECDOTES AND n^LUSTKATIONS. 97 
 
 Scripture, he may not know what it means, 
 and may not be interested in it. Shall I put 
 a bit of Latin into the sermon, or quote the 
 original Hebrew or Greek of my text? That 
 will not do for such a man. What shall I do ? 
 Ah, I know a story that will, I believe, just 
 fit him ! Out it comes, and the man does not 
 look up at the gallery any more; but he is 
 wondering whatever the preacher is at. Some- 
 thing is said that so exactly suits his case that 
 he begins to ask himself who has been telling 
 the minister about him, and he thinks, " Why, 
 I know ; my wife comes to hear this man some- 
 times, so she has been telling him all about 
 me ! " Then he feels curious to hear more, and 
 while he is looking up at the preacher, and 
 listening to the truth that is being proclaimed, 
 the first gleam of light on divine things dawns 
 upon him; but if we had kept on with our 
 regular discourse, and had not gone out of our 
 way, what might have become of that man I 
 cannot tell. " They say I ramble," said Eow- 
 land Hill, in a sermon I have been reading 
 this afternoon ; " they say I ramble, but it is 
 because you ramble, and I am obliged to ram- 
 ble after you. They say I do not stick to myj 
 subject ; but, thank God, I always stick to myj 
 object, which is, the winning of your souls,' 
 and bringing you to the cross of Jesus Christ !" 
 
98 THE AET OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 Mr. Bertram aptly illustrates tlie way in 
 which men are engrossed in worldly cares by 
 telling the story of the captain of a whaling 
 ship, whom he tried to interest in the things 
 of God, and who said, " It is no use, sir ; your 
 conversation will not have any effect upon 
 me. I cannot hear what you are saying, or 
 understand the subject you are talking about. 
 I left my home to try to catch whales ; I have 
 been a year and nine months looking for 
 whales, sir, and I have not caught a whale yet. 
 I have been plowing the deep in search of 
 whales ; when I go to bed I dream of whales ; 
 and when I get up in the morning, I wonder 
 if there will be any whales caught that day ; 
 there is a whale in my heart, sir, a whale in 
 my brain, and it is of no use for you to talk 
 to me about anything else but whales." So, 
 your people have their business in their heads 
 and in their hearts; they want to make a 
 fortune and retire ; or else they have a family 
 of children to bring up, and Susan must be 
 married, and John must be got into a situa- 
 tion, and it is no use for you to talk to them 
 about the things of God unless you can drive 
 away the whales that keep floundering and 
 splashing about. 
 
 There is a merchant, perhaps, who has just 
 thought of some bad bill; or another has 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 99 
 
 looked across the building and noticed a piece 
 of ribbon of a particular color, and he thinks, 
 "Yes, I ought to have had a larger stock of 
 that kind of thing, I see that it is getting 
 fashionable ! " or it may be that one of the 
 hearers has caught sight of his neighbor, and 
 he thinks he must pay him a visit on the 
 morrow; and so people'.s thoughts are occu- 
 pied with all sorts of subjects besides that of 
 which the preacher is speaking. You ask me 
 how I know that this is the case. Well, I know 
 because I have been guilty of the same offense 
 myself ; I find this occur when I am listening 
 to another brother preaching. I do not think, 
 when I am preaching, that I get on very well ; 
 but sometimes, when I go into the country, 
 and take the morning and evening services, 
 and then hear some one else in the afternoon, 
 I think, "Well, really, when I was up there, I 
 thought I was a stick : but noiv! I only wish 
 I had my turn again ! " Now, this is very 
 wrong, to let such thoughts come into our 
 minds ; but, as we are all very apt to wander, 
 the preacher should carry anecdotes and illus- 
 trations into the pulpit, and use them as nails 
 to fasten the people's attention to the subject 
 of his sermon. 
 
 Mr. Paxton Hood once said in a lecture that 
 I heard him deliver, " Some preachers expect 
 
100 THE AET OF ILLUSTEATION. 
 
 too much of their hearers ; they take a number 
 of truths into the pulpit as a man might carry- 
 up a box of nails; and then, supposing the 
 congregation to be posts, they take out a nail, 
 and expect it to get into the post by itself. 
 Now, that is not the way to do it. You must 
 take your nail, hold it up against the post, 
 hammer it in, and then clinch it on the other 
 side ; and then it is that you may expect the 
 great Master of assemblies to fasten the nails 
 so that they will not fall out." We must try 
 thus to get the truth into the people, for it will 
 never get in of itself ; and we must remember 
 that the hearts of our hearers are not open, 
 like a church door, so that the truth may go 
 in, and take its place, and sit upon its throne 
 to be worshiped there. No, we have often to 
 break open the doors with great effort, and to 
 thrust the truth into places where it will not 
 at first be a welcome guest, but where, after- 
 ward, the better it is known, the more it will 
 be loved. 
 
 Illustrations and anecdotes will greatly help 
 to make a way for the truth to enter ; and they 
 will do it by catching the ear of the careless 
 and the inattentive. We must try to be like 
 Mr. Whitefield, of whom a shipbuilder said, 
 "When I have been to hear anybody else 
 preach, I have always been able to lay down 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTKATIONS. 101 
 
 a ship from stem to stern ; but when I hsten 
 to Mr. Whitefield, I cannot even lay the keel." 
 And another, a weaver, said, " I have often, 
 when I have been in church, calculated how 
 many looms the place would hold ; but when 
 I listen to that man, I forget my weaving al- 
 together." You must endeavor, brethren, to 
 make your people forget matters relating to 
 this world by interweaving the whole of divine 
 truth with the passing things of every day, 
 and this you will do by a judicious use of 
 anecdotes and illustrations. 
 
 Now, gentlemen, these seven reasons — that 
 they interest the mind and secure the atten- 
 tion of our hearers, that they render the teach- 
 ing vivid and lifelike, that they explain some 
 difficult passages to dull understandings, that 
 they help the reasoning faculties of certain 
 minds, that they aid the memory, that they 
 arouse the feelings, and that they catch the 
 ear of the careless — have reconciled me for 
 many a day to the use of anecdotes and illus- 
 trations, and I think it is very likely that they 
 will reconcile you to the use of them, too. 
 
 At the same time, I must repeat what I be- 
 fore said : we must take care that we do not let 
 our anecdotes and illustrations be like empty 
 casks that carry nothing. We must not have 
 
102 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 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 dis- 
 course, some really sound doctrine, some suit- 
 able 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. If this be so with your ser- 
 mons, my dear brethren, I shall not have 
 spoken to you in vain upon the uses of anec- 
 dotes and illustrations. 
 
LECTUEE IV. 
 
 WHERE CAN WE FIND ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRA- 
 TIONS 1 
 
 Dear brethren: After my last lecture to 
 you, upon the uses of anecdotes and illustra- 
 tions, you are probably quite ready to employ 
 them in your discourses; but some of you 
 may ask, " Where can we get thenif' At the 
 very beginning of this afternoon's talk, let me 
 say that nobody need make anecdotes in order 
 to interest a congregation. I have heard of 
 one who called to see a minister on a Friday, 
 and he was told by the servant that her master 
 could not be seen, for he was up in his study 
 " making anecdotes." That kind of work will 
 not do for a Christian minister^ I would also 
 bid you beware of the many common anec- 
 dotes, which are often repeated, but which I 
 half suspect could not be proved to be matters 
 of fact. Whenever I have the slightest sus- 
 picion about the truth of a story, I drop it at 
 once ; and I think that every one else should 
 do the same. So long as the anecdotes are 
 
 103 
 
104 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 current, and are generally believed, and pro- 
 vided they can be used for a profitable pur- 
 pose, I believe they may be told, without any 
 affirmation as to their truthfulness being made 
 in a court of justice; but the moment any 
 doubt comes across the mind of the preacher 
 as to whether the tale is at least founded on 
 fact, I think he had better look for something 
 else, for he has the whole world to go to as a 
 storehouse of illustration. 
 
 \/ If you want to interest your congregation, 
 and keep up their attention, you can find 
 anecdotes and illustrations in many channels, 
 like golden grains glistening among the moun- 
 tain streams. For instance, there is current 
 history. You may take up the daily news- 
 paper, and find illustrations there. In my 
 little book, "The Bible and the Newspaper," 
 I have given specimens of how this may be 
 done ; and when I was preparing the present 
 lecture, I took up a newspaper to see if I could 
 find an illustration in it, and I soon found 
 one. There was an account of a man at 
 Wandsworth, who was discovered, with a gun 
 and a dog, trespassing on some gentleman's 
 preserves, and he said that he was only look- 
 ing for mushrooms I Can you imagine what 
 the gun and the dog had to do with mush- 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 105 
 
 rooms? However, the keeper felt in the 
 man's pocket, and laying hold of something- 
 soft, asked, "What is this!" ''Oh," said the 
 poacher, " it is only a rabbit ! " When it was 
 suggested to him that the creature's ears were 
 too long for a rabbit, he said that it was only 
 a leveret, whereas it proved to be a very fine 
 and plump hare. The man then said that he 
 had found the hare lying near some mush- 
 rooms, but his intention was to get the mush- 
 rooms only ! Now, that is a capital illustra- 
 tion. As soon as ever you lay hold of a man, 
 and begin to accuse him of sin, he says, " Sin, 
 sir ! Oh, dear, no ! I was only doing a very 
 proper thing, just what I have a perfect right 
 to do ; I was looking for mushrooms ; I was 
 not poaching ! " You press him a little more 
 closely, and try to bring him to conviction of 
 sin ; and then he says, " Well, perhaps it was 
 hardly the thing, it may have been a little 
 amiss ; but it was only a rabbit ! " When the 
 man cannot any longer deny that he is guilty 
 of sin, he says that it was only a very little 
 one ; and it is long before you can get him to 
 admit that sin is exceeding sinful ; indeed, no 
 human power can ever produce genuine con- 
 viction in the heart of a single sinner ; it must 
 be the work of the Holy Spirit. 
 
 I also read in the same newspaper of a ca- 
 
106 THE AKT OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 lamitous shipwreck caused through the lack 
 of lights. You could easily turn that incident 
 to account by using it to illustrate the destruc- 
 tion of souls through the want of a knowledge 
 of Christ, I have no doubt, if you were to 
 take up any of this morning's daily papers, 
 you would very readily find an abundance of 
 illustrations. Mr. Newman Hall, in addressing 
 us once, said that every Christian minister 
 ought to read regularly his Bible and The 
 Times newspaper^ I should imagine from the 
 usual mode of his address that he does so him- 
 self. Whether you read that particular paper 
 or any other, you should somehow keep your» 
 selves well stored with illustrations taken from 
 the ordinary transactions going on round about 
 you, I pity even a Sundaj^-school teacher, 
 j much more a minister of the gospel, who could 
 \ not make use of such incidents as the terrible 
 /burning of the church at Santiago, the great 
 «<■ fire at London Bridge, the entrance into Lon- 
 jdon of the Princess Alexandra, the taking of 
 ithe census ; and, indeed, anything that attracts 
 / public attention. There is in all these events 
 I an illustration, a simile, an allegory, which 
 Saaay point a moral and adorn a tale. 
 
 You may sometimes adapt local history to 
 the illustration of your subject. When a min- 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 107 
 
 ister is preaching in any particular district he 
 will often find it best to catch the ears of the 
 people, and engross their attention, by relating 
 some anecdote that relates to the place where 
 they live. Whenever I can, I get the histories 
 of various counties ; for, having to go into all 
 sorts of country towns and villages to preach, 
 I find that there is a great deal of useful mate- 
 rial to be dug out of even dull, dry, topograph- 
 ical books. They begin, perhaps, with the 
 name of John Smith, laborer, the man who 
 keeps the parish register, and winds up the 
 parish clock, and makes mouse-traps, and 
 catches rats, and does fifty other useful things ; 
 but if you have the patience to read on, you 
 will find much information that you could 
 get nowhere else, and you will probably meet 
 with many incidents and anecdotes that you 
 can use as illustrations of the truth you are 
 seeking to set forth. 
 
 Preaching at Winslow, in Buckinghamshire, 
 it would not be at all amiss to introduce the 
 incident of good Benjamin Keach, the pastor 
 of the Baptist church in that town, standing 
 in the pillory in the market-place in the year 
 1664, " for writing, printing, and publishing a 
 schismatical book entitled, ^The Child's In- 
 structor ; or, a New and Easy Primmer.' " I 
 do not think, however, that if I were preaching 
 
108 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 at Wapping I should call the people " Wapping 
 sinners," as Rowland Hill is said to have done, 
 when he told them that " Christ could save 
 old sinners, great sinners, yea, even Wapping 
 sinners ! " At Craven Chapel it would be most 
 appropriate to tell the story of Lord Craven, 
 who was packing up his goods to go into the 
 country at the time of the Great Plague of 
 London, when his servant said to him, "My 
 lord, does your God live only in the country?" 
 " No," replied Lord Craven, " he is here as well 
 as there." " Well, then," said the servant, " if 
 I were your lordship, I think I would stop 
 here ; you will be as safe in the city as in the 
 country ; " and Lord Craven did stop there, re- 
 lying upon the good providence of God. 
 
 Besides this, brethren, you have the marvel- 
 ous storehouse of ancient and modern history — 
 Roman, Greek, and English — with which, of 
 course, you are seeking to become well ac- 
 quainted. Who can possibly read the old 
 classic tales without feeling his soul on fire? 
 As you rise from their perusal, you will not 
 merely be familiar with the events which hap- 
 pened in " the brave days of old," but you will 
 have learned many lessons that may be of ser- 
 vice in your preaching to-day. For instance, 
 there is the story of Phidias and the statue of 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 109 
 
 ^he god which he had carved. After he had 
 'finished it, he had chiseled in the corner, in 
 small letters, the word '' Phidias," and it was 
 objected that the statue could not be worshiped 
 as a god, nor considered sacred, while it bore 
 the sculptor's name. It was even seriously 
 questioned whether Phidias should not be 
 stoned to death because he had so desecrated 
 the statue. How could he dare, they asked, to 
 put his own name on the image of a god I So, 
 some of us are very apt to want to put our 
 little names down at the bottom of any work 
 which we have done for God, that we may be 
 remembered, whereas we ought rather to up- 
 braid oiu'selves for wishing to have any of 
 the credit of that which God the Holy Ghost 
 enables us to do. 
 
 Then there is that other story of an ancient 
 sculptor, who was about to put the image of a 
 god into a heathen temple, although he had 
 not finished that portion of the statue which 
 was to be embedded in the wall. The priest 
 demurred, and declared that the statue was 
 not completed. The sculptor said, " That part 
 of the god will never be seen, for it will be 
 built into the wall." " The gods can see in 
 the wall," answered the priest. In like man- 
 ner, the most private parts of our life — those 
 secret matters that can never reach the human 
 
110 THE AET OF ILLUSTKATION. 
 
 eye — are still under the ken of the Almighty, 
 and ought to be attended to with the greatest 
 care. It is not sufficient for us to maintain 
 our public reputation among our fellow-crea- 
 tures, for our God can see in the wall ; he no- 
 tices our coldness in the closet of communion, 
 and he perceives our faults and failures in the 
 family. 
 
 Trying once to set forth how the Lord Jesus 
 Christ delights in his people because they are 
 his own handiwork, I found a classic story of 
 Cyrus extremely useful. When showing a 
 foreign ambassador round his garden, Cyrus 
 said to him, " You cannot possibly take such 
 an interest in these flowers and trees as I do, 
 for I laid out the whole garden myself, and 
 every plant here I planted with my own hand. 
 I have watered them, and I have seen them 
 grow, I have been a husbandman to them, and 
 therefore I love them far better than you can." 
 So, the Lord Jesus Christ loves the fair garden 
 of his church, because he laid it all out, and 
 planted it with his own gracious hand, and he 
 has watched over every plant, and nourished 
 and cherished it. 
 
 The days of the Crusaders are a peculiarly 
 rich period for noble stories that will make 
 good illustrations. We read that the soldiers 
 of Godfrey de Bouillon, when they came within 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTKATIONS. Ill 
 
 sight of the city of Jerusalem, were so charmed 
 with the view that they fell on their faces, 
 and then rose to their feet, and clapped their 
 hands, and made the mountains ring with their 
 shouts of joy. Thus, when we get within sight 
 of the New Jerusalem, our happy home on 
 high, whose name is ever dear to us, we will 
 make our dying-chamber ring with hallelujahs, 
 and even the angels shall hear our songs of 
 praise and thanksgiving. It is also recorded, 
 concerning this same Godfrey, that, when he 
 had entered Jerusalem at the head of his vic- 
 torious army, he refused to wear the crown 
 with which his soldiers wanted to deck his 
 brow. ^' For," said he, " why should I wear a 
 crown of gold in the city where my Lord wore 
 a crown of thorns ! " This is a good lesson for 
 us to learn for ourselves, and to teach to our 
 people. In the world where Christ was de- 
 spised and rejected of men, it would be un- 
 seemly for a Christian to be seeking to win 
 earthly honors, or ambitiously hunting after 
 fame. The disciple must not think of being 
 above his Master, nor the servant above his 
 Lord. 
 
 Then you might easily make an illustration 
 out of that romantic story, which may or may 
 not be true, of Queen Eleanor sucking the 
 poison out of her husband's wounded arm. 
 
112 THE AKT OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 Many of us, I trust, would be willing, as it 
 were, to suck out all the slander and venom 
 from the arm of Christ's church, and to bear 
 any amount of suffering ourselves, so long as 
 the church itself might escape and live. Would 
 not any one of you, my brethren, gladly put 
 his lips to the envenomed wounds of the church 
 to-day, and suffer even unto death, sooner than 
 let the doctrines of Christ he impugned, and 
 the cause of God be dishonored I 
 
 What a fine field of illustration lies open to 
 you in religwus hisforf/f It is difficult to tell 
 where to begin digging in this mine of precious 
 treasure. The story of Luther and the Jew 
 might be used to set forth the evil of sin, and 
 how to avoid it. A Jew was seeking an 
 opportunity of stabbing the Reformer; but 
 Luther received a portrait of the would-be 
 murderer, so that, wherever he went, he was 
 on his guard against the assassin. Using this 
 fact himself as an illustration, Luther said: 
 '' God knows that there are sins that would 
 destroy us, and he has therefore given us por- 
 traits of them in his Word, so that, wherever 
 we see them, we may say, ^ That is a sin that 
 would stab me; I must beware of that evil 
 thing, and keep out of its way.'" 
 
 Stout Hugh Latimer, in that famous story 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 113 
 
 of an incident in his trial before several bish- 
 ops, brings out very clearly the omnipresence 
 and omniscience of God, and the care that we 
 ought to exercise in the presence of One who 
 can read our most secret thoughts and imagi- 
 nations. He says : " I was once in examina- 
 tion before five or six bishops, where I had 
 much trouble; thrice every week I came to 
 examinations, and many traps and snares 
 were laid to get something. ... At last I 
 was brought forth to be examined in a cham- 
 ber hung with arras, where I was wont to be 
 examined ; but now at this time the chamber 
 was somewhat altered. For whereas, before, 
 there was wont always to be a fire in the 
 chimney, now the fire was taken away, and 
 arras hung over the chimney, and the table 
 stood near the fireplace. There was, among 
 the bishops who examined me, one with whom 
 I had been very familiar, and took him for my 
 great friend, an aged man, and he sat next to 
 the table's end. Then, among all other ques- 
 tions, he put forth a very subtle and crafty 
 one, and such a one, indeed, as I could not 
 think so great danger in. And when I should 
 make answer, ' I pray you, Mr. Latimer,' said 
 one, * speak out ; I am very thick of hearing, 
 and there may be many that sit far off.' I 
 marveled at this, that I was bid to speak out, 
 
114 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 and began to suspect, and give an ear to the 
 chimney ; and there I heard a pen writing in 
 the chimney behind the cloth. They had ap- 
 pointed one there to write all mine answers, 
 for they made sure that I should not start from 
 them ; and there was no starting from them. 
 God was my good Lord, and gave me answer, 
 else I could never have escaped." Preaching, 
 some years afterward, Latimer himself told 
 the story, and applied the illustration. " My 
 hearer," said he, " there is a recording pen al- 
 ways at work behind the arras, taking down 
 all thou sayest, and noting all thou doest: 
 therefore be thou careful that thy words and 
 acts are worthy of record in God's Book of 
 Remembrance." 
 
 You might aptly illustrate the doctrine of 
 God's special providential care of his servants 
 by relating the story of John Knox, who, one 
 evening, refused to sit in his usual seat, though 
 he did not know any particular reason for so 
 acting. No one was allowed to occupy that 
 chair, and during the evening a shot came in 
 through the window, and struck a candlestick 
 that stood immediately opposite where John 
 Knox would have been sitting if he had taken 
 his. accustomed place. There is also the case 
 of the godly minister, who, in escaping from 
 his persecutors, went into a hay-loft, and hid 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTKATIONS. 115 
 
 himself in the hay. The soldiers went into 
 the place, pricking and thrusting with their 
 swords and bayonets, and the good man even 
 felt the cold steel touch the sole of his foot, 
 and the scratch which was made remained for 
 years : yet his enemies did not discover him. 
 Afterward a hen came and laid an egg every 
 day hard by the place where he was hidden, 
 and so he was sustained as well as preserved 
 until it was safe for him to leave his hiding- 
 place. It was either the same minister, or one 
 of his persecuted brethren, who was providen- 
 tially protected by such a humble agent as a 
 spider. This is the story as I have read it : 
 "Receiving friendly warning of an intended 
 attempt to apprehend him, and finding men 
 were on his track, he took refuge in a malt- 
 house, and crept into the empty kiln, where 
 he lay down. Immediately after, he saw a 
 spider lower itself across the narrow entrance 
 by which he had got in, thus fixing the first 
 line of what was soon wrought into a large 
 and beautiful web. The weaver and the web, 
 placed directly between him and the light, were 
 very conspicuous. He was so much struck 
 with the skill and diligence of the spider, and 
 so much absorbed in watchmg her work, that 
 he forgot his own danger. By the time the 
 network was completed^ crossing and re-cross- 
 
116 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 ing the mouth of the kihi in every direction, 
 his pursuers came into the malt-house to search 
 for him. He noted their steps, and Kstened to 
 their cruel words while they looked about. 
 Then they came close to the kiln, and he over- 
 heard one say to another, * It's no use to look 
 in there ; the old villain can never be there : 
 \y' look at that spidefs weh ; he could never have 
 got in there without breaking it.'' Without fur- 
 ther search they went to seek elsewhere, and 
 he escaped safely out of their hands." 
 
 There is another story I have somewhere 
 met with, of a prisoner, during the American 
 war, who was put into a cell in which there 
 was a little slit, through which a soldier\s eye 
 always watched him day and night. What- 
 ever the prisoner did, whether he ate, or drank, 
 or slept, the sentinel's eye was perpetually gaz- 
 ing at him ; and the thought of it, he said, was 
 perfectly dreadful to him, it almost drove him 
 mad ; he could not bear the idea of having that 
 man's eye always scrutinizing him. He could 
 scarcely sleep; his very breathing became a 
 misery, because, turn which way he would, he 
 could never escape from the gaze of that sol- 
 dier's eye. That story might be used as an 
 illustration of the fact that God's omniscient 
 eye is always looking at every one of us. 
 I remember making two or three of my con- 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 117 
 
 gregation speak out pretty loudly by telling 
 them this story, which I read iu a tract. I 
 suppose it may be true ; I receive it as reliable, 
 and I wish I could tell it as it is printed. A 
 Christian minister, residing near the back- 
 woods, took a walk one evening for silent 
 meditation. He went much farther than he 
 intended, and, missing the track, wandered 
 away into the woods. He kept on, endeavor- 
 ing to find the road to his home ; but failed to 
 do so. He was afraid that he would have to 
 spend the night in some tree ; but suddenly, 
 as he was going forward, he saw the glimmer 
 of lights in the distance, and therefore pressed 
 on, hoping to find shelter in a friendly cottage. 
 A strange sight met his gaze ; a meeting was 
 being held in a clearing in the middle of the 
 woods, the place being lit up with blazing 
 pine-torches. He thought, *^Well, here are 
 some Christian people met to worship God ; I 
 am glad that what I thought was an awkward 
 mistake in losing my way has brought me 
 here ; I may, perhaps, both do good and get 
 good." 
 
 To his horror, however, he found that it 
 was an atheistical gathering, and that the 
 speakers were venting their blasphemous 
 thoughts against Grod with very great bold- 
 ness and determination. The minister sat 
 
118 THE ART OF ILLUSTEATION. 
 
 down full of grief. A young man declared 
 that he did not believe in the existence of Grod, 
 and dared Jehovah to destroy him then and 
 there if there was such a Grod. The good 
 man's heart was meditating how he ought to 
 reply, but his tongue seemed to cleave to the 
 roof of his mouth ; and the infidel orator sat 
 down amid loud acclamations of admiration 
 and approval. Our friend did not wish to be 
 a craven, or to hold back in the day of battle, 
 and therefore he was almost inclined to rise 
 and speak, when a hale, burly man, who had 
 passed the meridian of life, but who was still 
 exceedingly vigorous, and seemed a strong, 
 muscular clearer of the backwoods, rose and 
 said, " I should like to speak if you will give 
 me a hearing. I am not going to say any- 
 thing about the topic which has been dis- 
 cussed by the orator who has just sat down ; 
 I am only going to tell you a fact : will you 
 hear me ? " " Yes, yes," they shouted ; it was 
 a free discussion, so they would hear him, es- 
 pecially as he was not going to controvert. 
 " A week ago," he began, "" I was working up 
 yonder, on the river's bank, felling trees. You 
 know the rapids down below. Well, while I 
 was at my employment, at some little distance 
 from them, I heard cries and shrieks, mingled 
 with prayers to Grod for help. I ran down to 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. Il9 
 
 the water's edge, for I guessed what was the 
 matter. There I saw a young man, who could 
 not manage his boat ; the current was getting 
 the mastery of him, and he was drifting down 
 the stream, and ere long, unless some one had 
 interposed, he would most certainly have been 
 swept over the falls, and carried down to a 
 dreadful death. I saw that young man kneel 
 down in the boat, and pray to the Most High 
 God, by the love of Christ, and by his precious 
 blood, to save him. He confessed that he had 
 been an infidel; but said that, if he might but 
 be delivered this once, he would declare his 
 belief in God. I at once sprang into the river. 
 My arms are not very weak, I think, though 
 they are not so strong as they used to be. I 
 managed to get into the boat, turned her 
 round, brought her to the shore, and so I saved 
 that young man's life ; and that young man is 
 the one who has just sat down, and who has 
 been denying the existence of God, and dar- 
 ing the Most High to destroy him ! " Of 
 course I used that story to show that it was 
 an easy thing to brag and boast about holding- 
 infidel sentiments in a place of safety; but 
 that, when men come into peril of their lives, 
 then they talk in a very different fashion. 
 
 There is a capital story, which exemplifies 
 the need of going up to the house of God, not 
 
120 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 merely to listen to the preacher, but to seek 
 the Lord. A certain lady had gone to the com- 
 munion in a Scotch church, and had greatly 
 enjoyed the service. When she reached her 
 home, she inquired who the preacher was, and 
 slie was informed that it was Mr. Ebenezer 
 Erskine. The lady said that she would go 
 again, the next Sabbath, to hear him. She 
 went, but she was not profited in the least ; the 
 sermon did not seem to have any unction or 
 power about it. She went to Mr. Erskine, and 
 told him of her experience at the two services. 
 " Ah, madam," said he, *' the first Sabbath you 
 came to meet the Lord Jesus Christ, and you 
 had a blessing ; but the second Sabbath you 
 came to hear Ebenezer Erskine, and you had 
 no blessing, and you had no right to expect 
 any." You see, brethren, a preacher might 
 talk to the people, in general terms, about 
 coming to worship Gotl, and not merely to 
 hear the minister, yet no effect might be pro- 
 duced by his words, for there might not be 
 anything sufficiently striking to remain in the 
 memory ; but after such an anecdote as this one 
 about Mr. Erskine and the lady, who could for- 
 get the lesson that was intended to be taught I 
 
 Well, now, supposing that you have ex- 
 hausted all the illustrations to be found in 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 121 
 
 current history, in local history, in ancient and 
 modern history, and in religious history — 
 which I do not think you will do unless you 
 are yourselves exhausted — you may then turn 
 to natural history^ where you will find illustra- 
 tions and anecdotes in great abundance ; and 
 you need never feel any qualms of conscience 
 about using the facts of nature to illustrate 
 the truths of Scripture, because there is a 
 sound philosophy to support the use of such 
 illustrations. It is a fact that can easily be 
 accounted for, that people will more readily 
 receive the truth of revelation if you link it 
 with some kindred truth in natural history, or 
 anything that is visible to the eye, than if you 
 give them a bare statement of the doctrine 
 itself. Besides, there is this important fact 
 that must not be forgotten : the God who is 
 the Author of revelation is also the Author 
 of creation, and providence, and history, and 
 everything else from which you ought to 
 draw your illustrations. When you use natu- 
 ral history to illustrate the Scriptures, you are 
 only explaining one of God's books by another 
 volume that he has written. 
 
 It is just as if you had before you two works 
 by one author, who had, in the first place, 
 written a book for children ; and then, in the 
 second place, had prepared a volume of more 
 
122 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 profound instruction for persons of riper years 
 and higher culture. At times, when you found 
 obscure and difficult passages in the work 
 meant for the more advanced scholars, you 
 would refer to the little book which was in- 
 tended for the younger folk, and you would 
 say, " We know that this means so-and-so, be- 
 cause that is how the matter is explained in 
 the book for beginners.^ So creation, provi- 
 dence, and history are all books which God 
 has written for those to read who have eyes, 
 written for those who have ears to hear his 
 voice in them, written even for carnal men to 
 read, that they may see something of God 
 therein. But the other glorious Book is writ- 
 ten for you who are taught of God, and made 
 spiritual and holy. Oftentimes, by turning to 
 the primer, you will get something out of that 
 simple narrative which will elucidate and il- 
 lustrate the more difficult classic, for that is 
 what the Word of God is to you. 
 
 There is a certain type of thought which 
 God has followed in all things. What he 
 made with his Word has a similarity to the 
 Word itself by which he made it; and the 
 visible is the symbol of the invisible, because 
 the same thought of God runs through it all. 
 There is a touch of the divine finger in all that 
 God has made ; so that the things which are 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 123 
 
 apparent to our senses have certain resem- 
 blances to the things which do not appear. 
 That which can be seen, and tasted, and 
 touched, and handled is meant to be to us the 
 outward and visible sign of a something which 
 we find in the Word of God, and in our spirit- 
 ual experience, which is the inward and the 
 spiritual grace ; so that there is nothing forced 
 and unnatural in bringing nature to illustrate 
 grace ; it was ordained of Grod for that very 
 purpose. Range over the whole of creation 
 for your similes ; do not confine yourself to 
 any particular branch of natural history. The 
 congregation of one very learned doctor com- 
 plained that he gave them spiders continuously 
 by way of illustration. It would be better to 
 give the people a spider or two occasionally, 
 and then to vary the instruction by stories, 
 and anecdotes, and similes, and metaphors 
 drawn from geology, astronomy, botany, or 
 any of the other sciences which will help to 
 shed a side-light upon the Scriptures. 
 
 If you keep your eyes open, you will not see 
 even a dog following his master, nor a mouse 
 peeping up from his hole, nor will you hear 
 even a gentle scratching behind the wainscot 
 without getting something to weave into your 
 sermons if your faculties are all on the alert. 
 When you go home to-night, and sit by your 
 
124 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 fireside, you ouglit not to be able to take up 
 your domestic cat without finding that which 
 will furnish you with an illustration. How 
 soft are pussy's pads, and yet, in a moment, if 
 she is angered, how sharp will be her claws ! 
 How like to temptation, soft and gentle when 
 first it cometh to us, but how deadl}^, how 
 danniable the wounds it causeth ere long ! 
 
 I recollect using, with very considerable 
 effect in a sermon, an incident that occurred 
 in my own garden. There was a dog which 
 was in the habit of coming through the fence 
 and scratching in my flower beds, to the man- 
 ifest spoiling of the gardener's toil and temper. 
 Walking in the garden one Saturday afternoon, 
 and preparing my sermon for the following 
 day, I saw the four-footed creature — rather a 
 scurvy specimen, by the by — and having a 
 walking-stick in my hand, I threw it at him 
 with all my might, at the same time giving 
 him some good advice about going home. 
 Now, what should my canine friend do but 
 turn round, pick up the stick in his mouth, 
 and bring it, and lay it down at my feet, 
 wagging his tail all the while in expectation 
 of my thanks and kind words? Of course, 
 you do not suppose that I kicked him, or 
 threw the stick at him any more. I felt quite 
 ashamed of myself, and I told him that he was 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 125 
 
 welcome to stay as long as he liked, and to 
 come as often as he pleased. There was an 
 instance of the power of non-resistance, sub- 
 mission, patience, and trust, in overcoming 
 even righteous anger. I used that illustration 
 in preaching the next day, and I did not feel 
 that I had at all degraded myself by telling 
 the story. 
 
 Most of us have read Alphonse Karr's book, 
 " A Tour Round my Garden." Why does not 
 somebody write " A Tour Round my Dining- 
 Table," or, " A Tour Round my Kitchen " ! I 
 believe a most interesting volume of the kind 
 might be written by any man who had his 
 eyes open to see the analogies of nature. I 
 remember that, one day, when I lived in Cam- 
 bridge, I wanted a sermon very badly ; and I 
 could not fix upon a subject, when, all at once, 
 I noticed a number of birds on the slates of 
 the opposite house. As I looked closely at 
 them, I saw that there was a canary, which 
 had escaped from somebody's house, and a lot 
 of sparrows had surrounded it, and kept peck- 
 ing at it. There was my text at once : " Mine 
 heritage is unto me as a speckled bird, the 
 birds round about are against her." 
 
 Once more, brethren, if you cannot find il- 
 lustrations in natural history, or any of the 
 
126 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 other histories I have mentioned, find them 
 anyivhere. Anything that occurs around you, 
 if you have but brains in your head, will be of 
 service to you ; but if you are really to interest 
 and profit your congregations, you will need 
 to keep your eyes open, and to use all the 
 powers with which the Lord has endowed you. 
 If you do so, you will find that, in simply 
 walking through the streets, something or 
 other will suggest a passage of Scripture, or 
 will help you, when you have chosen your 
 text, to open it up to the people so as really to 
 arrest their attention, and convey the truth 
 to their minds and hearts. 
 
 For instance, the snow to-day covered all the 
 ground, and the black soil looked fair and 
 white. It is thus with some men under tran- 
 sient reformations ; they look as holy, and as 
 heavenly, and as pure as though they were 
 saints ; 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 be- 
 fore 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 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTKATIONS. 127 
 
 open, or he will not see these pictures. Solo- 
 mon said, " The wise man's eyes are in his 
 head," and addressing such a man, he wrote, 
 " Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine 
 eyelids look straight before thee." Why does 
 he speak of seeing with the eyelids I I think 
 he means that the eyelids are to shut in what 
 the eyes have perceived. You know that there 
 is all the difference in the world between a 
 man with eyes and one with no eyes. One 
 sits down by a stream, and sees much to in- 
 terest and instruct him ; but another, at the 
 same place, is like the gentleman of whom 
 Wordsworth wrote : 
 
 A primrose by a river's brim 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more. 
 
 If you find any difficulty in illustrating your 
 subject, I should strongly recommend you to 
 try to teach children whenever you can get an 
 opportunity of doing sOo I do not know a 
 better way of schooling your own mind to the 
 use of illustrations than frequently to take a 
 class in the Sunday-school, or to give addresses 
 to the scholars as often as you can ; because, 
 if you do not illustrate tliere^ you will have 
 your lesson or your address illustrated for you 
 very strikingly. You will find that the chil- 
 
128 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 dren will do it by their general worry and 
 inattention, or by their talk and play. I used 
 to have a class of boys when I was a Sunday- 
 school teacher, and if I was ever a little dull, 
 they began to make wheels of themselves, 
 twisting round on the forms on which they 
 sat. That was a very plain intimation to me 
 that I must give them an illustration or an 
 anecdote; and I learned to tell stories partly 
 by being obliged to tell them. One boy whom 
 I had in the class used to say to me, " This is 
 very dull, teacher ; can't you pitch us a yarn ? " 
 Of course he was a naughty boy, and you may 
 suppose that he went to the bad when he grew 
 up, though I am not at all sure that he did ; 
 but I used to try and pitch him the yarn that 
 he wanted in order to get his attention again. 
 And I dare say that some of our hearers, if 
 they were allowed to speak out during the 
 sermon, would ask us to pitch them a yarn 
 — that is, to give them something to interest 
 them. I believe that one of the best things 
 you can do to teach either the old or the young 
 is to give them plenty of anecdotes and illus- 
 trations. 
 
 I think it would be very useful to some of 
 you who are not yet adepts at the art of illus- 
 tration if you were to read hooks in which there 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 129 
 
 is an abundance- of metaphor, simile, and em- 
 blem. I am not going fully into that subject 
 on this occasion, because this lecture is only 
 preliminary to the next two that I hope to de- 
 liver, in which I will try to give you a list of 
 cyclopedias of anecdotes and illustrations, and 
 books of fables, emblems, and parables ; but I 
 advise you to study such works as GurnalPs 
 " Christian in Complete Armor," or Matthew 
 Henry's " Commentary," with the distinct view 
 of noticing all the illustrations, emblems, met- 
 aphors, and similes that you can find. I should 
 even select wo^^-comparisons ; I like Reach's 
 " Metaphors," where he points out the disparity 
 between the type and the Antitype. Some- 
 times, the contrasts between different persons 
 or objects will be as instructive as their re- 
 semblances. 
 
 When you have read the book once, and 
 tried to mark all the figures, go through it 
 again, and note all the illustrations you missed 
 in your first reading. You will probably have 
 missed many ; and you will be surprised to 
 find that there are illustrations even in the words 
 themselves. How frequently a word is itself a 
 picture ! Some of the most expressive words 
 that are found in human language are like rich 
 gems, which have passed before your eye very 
 often, but you have not had time to handle or 
 
130 THE AET OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 to value them. In your second examination 
 of the book, you will notice, perhaps, what 
 eluded you the first time, and you will find 
 many illustrations which are merely hinted at, 
 instead of being given at length. Do as I have 
 recommended with a great many books. Get 
 copies that you can afford to mark with a col- 
 ored pencil, so that you will be sure to see the 
 illustrations readily ; or put them down in one 
 of your note-books. 
 
 I am sure that those brethren who begin 
 early to keep a record of such things act wisely. 
 The commonplace-books of the old Puritans 
 were invaluable to them. They would never 
 have been able to have compiled such marvel- 
 ous works as they did if they had not been 
 careful in collecting and arranging their matter 
 under different heads ; and thus, all that they 
 had ever read upon any subject was embalmed 
 and preserved, and they could readily refer to 
 any point that they might require, and refresh 
 their memories and verify their quotations. 
 Some of us, who are very busy, may be ex- 
 cused from that task; we must do the best 
 we can ; but some of you, who go to smaller 
 charges, in the country especially, ought to 
 keep a commonplace-book, or else I am afraid 
 you will get to be very commonplace your- 
 selves. 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 131 
 
 Your selection of similes, metaphors, para- 
 bles, and emblems will not be complete unless 
 you also search the Scriptures to find the illus- 
 trations that are recorded there. Biblical allu- 
 sions are the most effective methods of illus- 
 trating and enforcing the truths of the gospel ; 
 and the preacher who is familiar with his Bible 
 will never be at a loss for an instance of that 
 which " is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, 
 for correction, for instruction in righteous- 
 ness." The Lord must have meant us thus to 
 use his Word, otherwise he would not have 
 given us, in the Old Testament, such a number 
 of types and symbols of truths .to be after- 
 ward more fully revealed under the gospel 
 dispensation. 
 
 Such a collection of illustrations as I have 
 suggested will come very handy to you in fu- 
 ture days, and you will be reminded, by the 
 comparisons and figures used by others, to 
 make comparisons and figures for yourself. 
 Familiarity with anything makes us aufait at 
 it; we can learn to do almost anything by 
 practice. I suppose that I could, by degrees, 
 learn to make a tub if I spent my time with a 
 man engaged in that business. I should know 
 how to put the staves and the hoops if I stayed 
 long enough in the cooper's yard ; and I have 
 no doubt that any of you could learn anything 
 
132 THE AET OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 you desired provided you had sufficient time 
 and opportunity. So, if you search for illus- 
 trations, you will learn to make them for your- 
 selves. 
 
 That brings me to my last point. I began 
 this lecture by warning you against the prac- 
 tice of making anecdotes ; I close it by advis- 
 ing you often to set yourself the task of making 
 illustrations. Try to make comparisons from 
 the things round about you. I think it would 
 be well, sometimes, to shut the door of your 
 study, and say to yourself, " I will not go out 
 of this room until I have made at least half a 
 dozen good illustrations.'' The Chinese say 
 that the intellect lies in the stomach, and that 
 the affections are there too. I think they are 
 right on the latter point, because, you know, 
 if you are ever very fond of anybody — your 
 wife, for instance — you say that you could eat 
 her ; and you also say that such and such a 
 person is very sweet. So, too, the intellect 
 may lie in the stomach; and consequently, 
 when you have been shut in for two or three 
 hours, and begin to want your dinner or tea, 
 you may be quickened into the making of the 
 six illustrations I have mentioned as a min- 
 imum . Your study would be a veritable prison 
 if you could not make as many useful compar- 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. Ido 
 
 isons as that from the different objects in the 
 room. I should say that a prison itself would 
 furnish suggestions for making many met- 
 aphors. I do not wish you to go to prison for 
 that purpose ; but if you ever do get there, you 
 ought to be able to learn how to preach in an 
 interesting manner upon such a passage as this 
 — " Bring my soul out of prison ; " or this, " He 
 was there in the prison. But the Lord was 
 with Joseph." 
 
 If you cannot get your brains to work in the 
 house, you might take a walk, and say to your- 
 self, " I will wander over the fields, or I will 
 get into the garden, or I will stroll in the wood, 
 and see if I cannot find some illustration or 
 other." You might even go and look in at a 
 shop-window, and see if there are not some 
 illustrations to be discovered there. Or you 
 might stand still a little while, and hear what 
 people say as they go by ; or stop where there 
 is a little knot of idlers, and try to hear what 
 they are talking about, and see what symbol 
 you can make out of it. You should also spend 
 as much time as you can visiting the sick ; that 
 will be a most profitable thing to do, for in that 
 sacred service you will have many opportuni- 
 ties of getting illustrations from the tried chil- 
 dren of God as you hear their varied experi- 
 ences. It is wonderful what pages of a new 
 
134 THE ART OF ILLUSTRA.TION. 
 
 cyclopedia of illustrative teaching you might 
 find written out with indelible ink if you went 
 visiting the sick, or even in talking with chil- 
 dren. Many of them will say things that you 
 will be able to quote with good effect in your 
 sermons. At any rate, do make up your mind 
 that you will attract and interest the people 
 by the way in which you set the gospel before 
 them. Half the battle lies in making the at- 
 tempt, in coming to this determined resolution, 
 " God helping me, I will teach the people by 
 parables, by similes, by illustrations, by any- 
 thing that will be helpful to them ; and I will 
 seek to be a thoroughly interesting preacher 
 of the Word." 
 
 I earnestly hope you will practise the art of 
 making illustrations. I will try to prepare a 
 little set of exercises for you to do week by 
 week. I shall give you some subject and some 
 object, between which there is a likeness ; and 
 I shall get you to try to see the resemblance, 
 and to find out what comparisons can be in- 
 stituted between them. I shall also, if I can, 
 give you some subject without an object, and 
 then say to you, " Illustrate that ; tell us, for 
 instance, what virtue is like." Or, sometimes, 
 I may give you the object without the subject, 
 thus — "A diamond; how will you use that 
 as an illustration ? " Then, sometimes, I may 
 
ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTKATIONS. 135 
 
 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 ex- 
 ercises 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 illustra- 
 tions 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 il- 
 lustration fully developed ; they are sure to 
 illustrate their subject, they cannot help it. 
 There are some men who always see " likes " ; 
 they catch a comparison long before others see 
 it. If any of you say that you are not good 
 at illustrating, I reply, " My brother, you must 
 try to grow horns if you have not any on your 
 head." You may never be able to develop any 
 vast amount of imagination or fancy if you do 
 not possess it at the first — just as it is hard to 
 make a cheese out of a millstone — but by dili- 
 gent attention to this matter you may improve 
 upon what you now are. I do believe that 
 some fellows have a depression in their cra- 
 niums where there ought to be a bump. I knew 
 a young man, who tried hard to get into this 
 college ; but he never saw how to join things 
 together unless he tied them by their tails. 
 He brought out a book ; and when I read it, I 
 
136 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 found at once that it was full of my stories and 
 illustrations ; that is to say, every illustration 
 or story in the book was one that I had used, 
 but there was not one of them that was related 
 as it ought to have been. This man had so 
 told the story that it was not there at all ; the 
 very point which I had brought out he had 
 carefully omitted, and every bit of it was told 
 correctly except the one thing that was the es- 
 sence of the whole. Of course, I was glad that 
 I did not have that brother in the college ; he 
 might have been an ornament to us by his 
 deficiencies, but we can do without such orna- 
 ments, indeed, we have had enough of them 
 already. 
 
 Finally, dear brethren, do try with all your 
 might to get the power to see a parable, a 
 simile, an illustration, wherever it is to be 
 seen ; for to a great extent this is one of the 
 most important qualifications of the man who 
 is to be a public speaker, and especially of the 
 man who is to be an efficient preacher of the 
 gospel of Christ. If the Lord Jesus made such 
 frequent use of parables, it must be right for 
 us to do the same. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 THE SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 Astronomy. 
 
 I PROPOSE, brethren, if I am able to do it — 
 and I am somewhat dubious upon that point 
 — to give you a set of lectures at intervals upon 
 The Various Sciences as Sources of Illus- 
 tration. It seems to me that every student 
 for the Christian ministrj^ ought to know at 
 least something of every science; he should 
 intermeddle with every form of knowledge 
 that may be useful in his life's work. God 
 has made all things that are in the world to 
 be our teachers, and there is something to be 
 learned from every one of them; and as he 
 would never be a thorough student who did 
 not attend all classes at which he was expected 
 to be present, so he who does not learn from 
 all things that God has made will never gather 
 all the food that his soul needs, nor will he be 
 likely to attain to that perfection of mental 
 
 137 
 
138 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 manhood which will enable him to be a fully- 
 equipped teacher of others. 
 
 I shall commence with the science of As- 
 tronomy ; and you will, at the beginning, un- 
 derstand that I am not going to deliver an as- 
 tronomical lecture, nor to mention all the grand 
 facts and details of that fascinating science ; 
 but I intend simply to use astronomy as one of 
 the many fields of illustration that the Lord has 
 provided for us. Let me say, however, that 
 the science itself is one which ought to receive 
 much attention from all of us. It relates to 
 many of the greatest wonders in nature, and 
 its effect upon the mind is truly marvelous. 
 The themes on which astronomy discourses 
 are so grand, the wonders disclosed by the tele- 
 scope are so sublime, that, very often, minds 
 that have been unable to receive knowledge 
 through other channels have become remark- 
 ably receptive while thej^ have been studying 
 this science. There is an instance of a brother 
 who was one of the students in this college, and 
 who seemed to be a dreadful dolt ; we really 
 thought he never would learn anything, and 
 that we should have to give him up in despair. 
 But I introduced to him a little book called 
 " The Young Astronomer " ; and he afterward 
 said that, as he read it, he felt just as if some- 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 139 
 
 thing had cracked inside his head, or as if some 
 string had been snapped. He had laid hold 
 of such enlarged thoughts that I believe his 
 cranium did actually experience an expansion 
 which it ought to have undergone in his child- 
 hood, and which it did undergo by the marvel- 
 ous force of the thoughts suggested by the 
 study of even the elements of astronomical 
 science. 
 
 This science ought to be the special delight 
 of ministers of the gospel, for surely it brings 
 us into closer connection with God than al- 
 most any other science does. It has been said 
 that an undevout astronomer is mad. I should 
 say that an undevout man of any sort is mad 
 — with the worst form of madness ; but, cer- 
 tainly, he who has become acquainted with the 
 stars in the heavens, and who yet has not found 
 out the great Father of lights, the Lord who 
 made them all, must be stricken with a dire 
 madness. Notwithstanding all his learning, 
 he must be afflicted with a mental incapacity 
 which places him almost below the level of the 
 beasts that perish. 
 
 Kepler, the great mathematical astronomer, 
 who has so well explained many of the laws 
 which govern the universe, closes one of his 
 books — his '^Harmonics" — with this reverent 
 and devout expression of his feelings : " I give 
 
140 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 thee thanks, Lord and Creator, that thou hast 
 given me joy through thy creation ; for I have 
 been ravished with the work of thy hands. I 
 have revealed unto mankind the glory of thy 
 works, as far as my limited spirit could conceive 
 their infinitude. Should I have brought for- 
 ward anything that is unworthy of thee, or 
 should I have sought my own fame, be gra- 
 ciously pleased to forgive me." And you know 
 how the mighty Newton, a very prince among 
 the sons of men, was continually driven to his 
 knees as he looked upward to the skies, and 
 discovered fresh wonders in the starry heavens. 
 Therefore, the science which tends to bring 
 men to bow in humility before the Lord should 
 always be a favorite study with us whose busi- 
 ness it is to inculcate reverence for God in all 
 who come under our influence. 
 
 The science of astronomy would never have 
 become available to us in many of its remark- 
 able details if it had not been for the discovery 
 or invention of the telescope. Truth is great, 
 but it does not savingly affect us till we become 
 personally acquainted with it. The knowledge 
 of the gospel, as it is revealed to us in the Word 
 of God, makes it true to us ; and oftentimes 
 the Bible is to us what the telescope is to the 
 astronomer. The Scriptures do not make the 
 
SCIENCES AS SOUKCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 141 
 
 truth; but they reveal it in a way in which 
 our poor, feeble intellect, when enlightened by 
 the Holy Spirit, is able to behold and compre- 
 hend it. 
 
 From a book* to which I am indebted for 
 many quotations in this lecture, I learn that 
 the telescope was discovered in this singular 
 manner: "A maker of spectacles at Middle- 
 burg stumbled upon the discovery owing to 
 his children directing his attention to the 
 enlarged appearance of the weathercock of a 
 church, as accidentally seen through two spec- 
 tacle-glasses, held between the fingers some 
 distance apart. This was one of childhood's 
 inadvertent acts ; and seldom has there been a 
 parallel example of mighty results springing 
 out of such a trivial circum stance. It is strange 
 to reflect upon the playful pranks of boyhood 
 being connected in their issue, and at no dis- 
 tant date, with enlarging the known bounds of 
 the planetary system, resolving the nebula of 
 Orion, and revealing the richness of the firma- 
 ment." In a similar way, a simple incident 
 has often been the means of revealing to men 
 the wonders of divine grace. What a certain 
 individual only meant to be trifling with divine 
 things, God has overruled for his soul's salva- 
 
 * " The Heavens and the Earth," by Thomas Milner, 
 M.A., F.R.G.S. 
 
142 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 tion. He stepped in to hear a sermon as he 
 might have gone to the theater to see a play ; 
 but God's Spirit carried the truth to his heart, 
 and revealed to him the deep things of the 
 kingdom, and his own personal interest in 
 them. 
 
 I think that incident of the discovery of the 
 telescope might be usefully employed as an il- 
 lustration of the connection between little 
 causes and great results, showing how the 
 providence of God is continually making small 
 things to be the means of bringing about won- 
 derful and important revolutions. It may 
 often happen that what seems to us to be a 
 matter of pure accident, with nothing at all 
 notable about it, may really have the effect of 
 changing the entire current of our life, and it 
 may be influential also in turning the lives of 
 many others in quite a new direction. 
 
 When once the telescope had been dis- 
 covered, then the numbers and position and 
 movements of the stars became increasingly 
 visible, until at the present time we are able 
 to study the wonders of the stellar sky, and 
 continually to learn more and more of the 
 marvels that are there displayed by the hand 
 of God. The telescope has revealed to us much 
 more of the sun, and the moon, and the stars 
 than we could ever have discovered without 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 143 
 
 its aid. Dr. Livingstone, on account of his 
 frequently using the sextant when he was 
 traveling in Africa, was spoken of by the 
 natives as the white man who could bring 
 down the sun, and carry it under his arm. 
 That is what the telescope has done for us, 
 and that is what faith in the gospel has done 
 for us in the spiritual heavens ; it has brought 
 down to us the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
 Spirit, and given us the high eternal things to 
 be our present possession and our perpetual 
 Joy. 
 
 Thus, you see, the telescope itself may be 
 made to furnish us with many valuable illus- 
 trations. We may also turn to good account 
 the lessons to be learned by the study of the 
 stars for the purpose of navigation. The mar- 
 iner, crossing the trackless sea, by taking as- 
 tronomical observations, can steer himself with 
 accuracy to his desired haven. Captain Basil 
 Hall tells us, in the book I have previously 
 mentioned, that " he once sailed from San Bias, 
 on the West Coast of Mexico ; and, after a voy- 
 age of eight thousand miles, occupying eighty- 
 nine days, he arrived off Rio de Janeiro, hav- 
 ing in this interval passed through the Pacific 
 Ocean, rounded Cape Horn, and crossed the 
 South Atlantic, without making land, or see- 
 ing a single sail except an American whaler. 
 
144 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 When within a week's sail of Rio, he set ser- 
 iously about determining, by lunar observa- 
 tions, the position of his ship, and then steered 
 his course by those common principles of nav- 
 igation which may be safely employed for short 
 distances between one known station and an- 
 other. Having arrived within what he consid- 
 ered, from his computations, fifteen or twenty 
 miles of the coast, he hove to, at four o'clock 
 in the morning, to await the break of day, and 
 then bore up, proceeding cautiously on account 
 of a thick fog. As this cleared away, the crew 
 had the satisfaction of seeing the great Sugar- 
 Loaf Rock, which stands on one side of the 
 harbor's mouth, so nearly right ahead that 
 they had not to alter their course above a point 
 in order to hit the entrance of the port. This 
 was the first land they had seen for nearly 
 three months, after crossing so many seas, and 
 being set backward and forward by innumer- 
 able currents and foul winds. The effect upon 
 all on board was electric ; and, giving way to 
 their admiration, the sailors greeted the com- 
 mander with a hearty cheer." 
 
 In a similar manner, we also sail by guidance 
 from the heavenly bodies, and we have for a 
 long season no sight of land, and sometimes 
 do not even see a passing sail ; and yet, if we 
 take our observations correctly, and follow the 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 145 
 
 track which they point out, we shall have the 
 great blessing, when we are about to finish our 
 voyage, of seeing, not the great Sugar-Loaf 
 Rock, but the Fair Haven of Glory right 
 straight before us. We shall not have to alter 
 our course even a single point ; and, as we sail 
 into the heavenly harbor, what songs of joy 
 will we raise, not in glorification of our own 
 skill, but in praise of the wondrous Captain 
 and Pilot who has guided us over life's stormy 
 sea, and enabled us to sail in safety even where 
 we could not see our way ! 
 
 Kepler makes a wise remark, when speaking 
 about the mathematical system by which the 
 course of a star could be predicted. After 
 describing the result of his observations, and 
 declaring his firm belief that the will of the 
 Lord is the supreme power in the laws of na- 
 ture, he says : " But if there be any man who 
 is too dull to receive this science, I advise that, 
 leaving the school of astronomy, he follow his 
 own path, and desist from this wandering 
 through the universe ; and, lifting up his natu- 
 ral eyes, with which he alone can see, pour him- 
 self out in his own heart, in praise of God the 
 Creator; being certain that he gives no less 
 worship to God than the astronomer, to whom 
 God has given to see more clearly with his 
 inward eye, and who, for what he has him- 
 
146 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 self discovered, both can and will glorify 
 God." 
 
 That is, I think, a very beautiful illustration 
 of what you may say to any poor illiterate 
 man in your congregation : " Well, my friend, 
 if you cannot comprehend this system of the- 
 ology which I have explained to you, if these 
 doctrines seem to you to be utterly incompre- 
 hensible, if you cannot follow me in my criti- 
 cism upon the Greek text, if you cannot quite 
 catch the poetical idea that I tried to give you 
 just now, which is so charming to my own 
 mind, nevertheless, if you know no more than 
 that your Bible is true, that you yourseK are a 
 sinner, and that Jesus Christ is your Saviour, 
 go on your way, and worship and adore, and 
 think of God as you are able to do. Never 
 mind about the astronomers, and the tele- 
 scopes, and the stars, and the sun, and the 
 moon ; worship the Lord in your own fashion. 
 Altogether apart from my theological know- 
 ledge, and my explanation of the doctrines re- 
 vealed in the Scriptures, the Bible itself, and 
 the precious truth you have received into your 
 own soul, through the teaching of the Holy 
 Spirit, will be quite enough to make you an 
 acceptable worshiper of the Most High God." 
 
 I suppose you are all aware that among the 
 old systems of astronomy was one which placed 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 147 
 
 the earth in the center, and made the sun, and 
 the moon, and the stars revolve around it. 
 "Its three fundamental principles were the 
 immobility of the earth, its central position, 
 and the daily revolution of all the heavenly 
 bodies around it in circular orbits." 
 
 Now, in a similar fashion, there is a way of 
 making a system of theology of which man is 
 the center, by which it is implied that Christ 
 and his atoning sacrifice are only made for 
 man's sake, and that the Holy Spirit is merely 
 a great Worker on man's behalf, and that even 
 the great and glorious Father is to be viewed 
 simply as existing for the sake of making man 
 happy. Well, that may be the system of the- 
 ology adopted by some; but, brethren, we 
 must not fall into that error, for, just as the 
 earth is not the center of the universe, so man 
 is not the grandest of all beings. God has been 
 pleased highly to exalt man ; but we must re- 
 member how the psalmist speaks of him: 
 "When I consider thy heavens, the work of 
 thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which 
 thou has ordained ; what is man, that thou art 
 mindful of him ; and the son of man, that thou 
 visitest him ! " In another place, David says, 
 " Lord, what is man, that thou takest know- 
 ledge of him ! or the son of man, that thou 
 makest account of him ! Man is like to van- 
 
148 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 ity: his days are as a shadow that passeth 
 away." Man cannot be the center of the theo- 
 logical universe ; he is altogether too insignifi- 
 cant a being to occupy such a position, and the 
 scheme of redemption must exist for some 
 other end than that of merely making man 
 happy, or even of making him holy. The sal- 
 vation of man must surely be first of all for 
 the glory of God ; and you have discovered the 
 right form of Christian doctrine when you 
 have found the system that has God in the 
 center, ruling and controlling according to the 
 good pleasure of his will. Do not dwarf man 
 so as to make it appear that God has no care 
 for him ; for if you do that, you slander God. 
 Give to man the position that God has assigned 
 to him ; by doing so, you will have a system 
 of theology in which all the truths of revela- 
 tion and experience will move in glorious order 
 and harmony around the great central orb, the 
 Divine Sovereign Ruler of the universe, God 
 over all, blessed forever. 
 
 You may, however, any one of you, make 
 another mistake by imagining yourself to be 
 the center of a system. That foolish notion is 
 a good illustration, I think. There are some 
 men whose fundamental principles are, first 
 of all, their own immobility : what they are, 
 they always are to be, and they are right, and 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 149 
 
 no one can stir them ; secondly, their position 
 is central, for them suns rise and set, and 
 moons do wax and wane. For them their 
 wives exist ; for them their children are born ; 
 for them everything is placed where it ap- 
 pears in God's universe; and they judge all 
 things according to this one rule, " How will 
 it benefit me f " That is the beginning and the 
 end of their grand system, and they expect 
 the daily revolution, if not of all the heav- 
 enly bodies, certainly of all the earthly bodies 
 around them. The sun, the moon, and the 
 eleven stars are to make obeisance to them. 
 Well, brethren, that is an exploded theory so 
 far as the earth is concerned, and there is no 
 truth in such a notion with reference to our- 
 selves. We may cherish the erroneous idea ; 
 but the general public will not, and the sooner 
 the grace of God expels it from us, the better, 
 so that we may take our proper position in a 
 far higher system than any of which we can 
 ever be the center. 
 
 The Sun, then, not the earth, is the center 
 of the solar system ; which system, mark you, 
 is probably only one little insignificant corner 
 of the universe, although it includes such a 
 vast space that if I could give you the actual 
 figures you would not be able to form the 
 
150 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 slightest idea of what they really represented. 
 Yet that tremendous system, compared with 
 the whole of God's universe, may be only like 
 a single grain of dust on the sea-shore, and 
 there may be myriads upon myriads of sys- 
 tems, some of which are made up of innumer- 
 able systems as large as ours, and the great 
 sun himself may only be a planet revolving 
 round a greater sun, and this world only a 
 little satellite to the sun, never yet observed 
 by the astronomers who, it may be, live in 
 that remoter sun still farther off. It is a mar- 
 velous universe that God has made ; and how- 
 ever much of it we may have seen, we must 
 never imagine that we have discovered more 
 than a very small portion of the worlds upon 
 worlds that God has created. 
 
 The earth, and all the planets, and all the 
 solid matter of the universe, are controlled, as 
 you know, b}^ the force of attraction. We are 
 kept in our place in the world, in going round 
 the sun, by two forces, the one called centrip- 
 etal, which draws us toward the sun, and the 
 other called centrifugal, which is generally il- 
 lustrated by the tendency of drops of water on 
 a trundled mop to fly off at a tangent from the 
 circle they are describing. 
 
 Now, I believe that, in like manner, there 
 are two forces which are ever at work upon 
 
SCIENCES AS SOtRCES OF ILLUSTRATION. l5l 
 
 all of US, the one which draws us toward God, ^^^^j^^Sil^ 
 and the other which drives us away from him, j^ o \ 
 and we are thus kept in the circle of life ; but, 
 for my part, I shall be very glad when I can 
 pass out of that circle, and get away from the 
 influence of the centrifugal force. I believe 
 that, the moment I do so — as soon as ever the 
 attraction which draws me away from God is" 
 gone — I shall be with him in heaven ; that I 
 do not doubt. Directly one or other of the 
 two forces which influence human life shall 
 be exhausted, we shall have either to drift 
 away into the far-off space, through the cen- 
 trifugal force — which God forbid ! — or else we 
 shall fly at once into the central orb, by the 
 centripetal force, and the sooner that glorious 
 end of life comes, the better will it be for us. 
 With Augustine, I would say, " All things are 
 drawn to their own center. Be thou the Center 
 of my heart, O God, my Light, my only Love ! " 
 The sun himself is an enormous body ; he 
 has been measured, but I think I will not bur- 
 den you with the figures, since they will con- 
 vey to you no adequate idea of his actual size. 
 Suffice it to say that, if the earth and the moon 
 were put inside the sun, there would be abun- 
 dance of room for them to go on revolving in 
 their orbits just as they are now doing ; and 
 there would be no fear of their knocking 
 
152 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 against that external crust of the sun which 
 would represent to them the heavens. 
 
 It takes about eight minutes for light to 
 reach us from the sun. We may judge of the 
 pace at which that light comes when we reflect 
 that a cannon-ball, rushing with the swiftest 
 possible velocity, would take seven years to 
 get there, and that a train, traveling at the rate 
 of thirty miles an hour, and never stopping 
 for refreshments, would require more than 
 three hundred and fifty years before it would 
 reach the terminus. You may thus form some 
 slight idea of the distance that we are from the 
 sun; and this, I think, furnishes us with a 
 good illustration of faith. There is no man 
 who can know, except by faith, that the sun 
 exists. That he did exist eight minutes ago, 
 I know, for here is a ray of light that has just 
 come from him, and told me that ; but I can- 
 not be sure that he is existing at this moment. 
 There are some of the fixed stars, that are at 
 such a vast distance from the earth, that a ray 
 of light from them takes hundreds of years to 
 reach us ; and, for aught we know, they may 
 have been extinct long ago. Yet we still put 
 them down in our chart of the heavens, and 
 we can only keep them there by faith, for as, 
 " through faith we understand that the worlds 
 were framed by the Word of God," so it is only 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 153 
 
 by faith that we can know that any of them 
 now exist. When we come to examine the 
 matter closely, we find that our eyesight, and 
 all our faculties and senses, are not sufficient 
 to give us positive conviction with regard to 
 tliese heavenly bodies ; and therefore we still 
 have to exercise faith ; so is it to a high degree 
 in spiritual affairs, we walk by faith, not by 
 sight. 
 
 That the sun has spots upon his face, is a 
 fact which everybody notices. Just so; and 
 if you are suns, and are never so bright, yet 
 if you have any spots upon you, you will find 
 that people will be very quick to notice them, 
 and to call attention to them. There is often 
 much more talk about the sun's spots than 
 there is about his luminous surface ; and, after 
 the same fashion, more will be said about any 
 spots and imperfections that men may discover 
 in our character than about any excellences 
 that they may see in us. It was for some time 
 asserted that there were no spots or specks 
 whatever on the sun. Many astronomers, with 
 the aid of the telescope, as well as without it, 
 discovered tliese blemishes and patches on the 
 face of the sun ; but they were assured by men 
 who ought to have known — namely, by the 
 reverend fathers of the church, that it was 
 impossible that there could be anything of 
 
154 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 the kind. The book I have previously quoted 
 says: "Upon Seheiner, a German Jesuit, re- 
 porting the evidence of his senses to his pro- 
 vincial superior, the latter positively refused 
 to believe him. ' I have read,' said he, ^ Aris- 
 totle's writings from end to end many times, 
 and I can assure you that I have nowhere found 
 in them anything similar to what you mention. 
 Go, my son, and tranquilize yourself: be as- 
 sured that what you take for spots in the sun 
 are the faults of your glasses, or of your eyes.' " 
 So, brethren, we know the force of bigotry, 
 and how men will not see what is perfectly 
 plain to us, and how, even when facts are 
 brought before them, they cannot be made to 
 believe in them, but will attribute them to 
 anything but that which is the real truth. I 
 am afraid that the Word of God itself has often 
 been treated just in that way. Truths that 
 are positively and plainly revealed there are 
 stoutly denied, because they do not happen to 
 fit in with the preconceived theories of unbe- 
 lievers. 
 
 There have been a great many attempts to 
 explain what the spots upon the sun really are. 
 One theory is, that the solar orb is surrounded 
 by a luminous atmosphere, and that the spots 
 are open spaces in that atmosphere through 
 which we see the solid surface of the sun. I 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 155 
 
 cannot see any reason wliy that theory should 
 not be the truth ; and, if it be so, it seems to 
 me to explain the first chapter of Genesis, 
 where we are told that God created the light 
 on the first day, though he did not make the 
 sun until the fourth day. Did he not make 
 the light first, and then take the sun, which 
 otherwise might have been a dark world, and 
 put the light on it as a luminous atmosphere 1 
 The two things certainly might very well fit in 
 with each other ; and if these spots are really 
 openings in the luminous atmosphere through 
 which we see the dark surface of the sun, they 
 are admirable illustrations of the spots that 
 men see in us. We are clothed with holiness 
 as with a garment of light ; but every now and 
 then there is a rift through which observers 
 can see down into the dark body of natural 
 depravity that still is in the very best of us. 
 
 It is a dangerous thing to look at the sun 
 with unprotected eyes. Some have ventured 
 to look at it with glasses that have no coloring 
 in them, and they have been struck blind. 
 There have been several instances of persons 
 who have inadvertently neglected to use a 
 proper kind of glass before turning the tele- 
 scope to the sun, and so have been blinded. 
 This is an illustration of our need of a Media- 
 tor, and of how necessary it is to see God 
 
156 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 tlirongli the medium of Christ Jesus our Lord ; 
 else might the excessive glory of the Deity 
 utterly destroy the faculty of seeing God at 
 all. 
 
 The effect of the sun upon the eai'th, I shall 
 not dwell upon now, as that may rather con- 
 cern another branch of science than astronomy. 
 It will suffice to say that living plants will 
 sometimes grow without the sun, as you may 
 have seen them in a dark cellar; but how 
 blanched they are when existing under such 
 circumstances ! What must have been the 
 pleasure with which Humboldt entered into 
 the great subterranean cave called the Cueva 
 del Guacharo, in the district of Caraccas ! It 
 is a cavern inhabited by nocturnal, fruit-eat- 
 ing birds, and this was what the great natu- 
 ralist saw : " Seeds, carried in by the birds to 
 their young, and dropped, had sprung up, pro- 
 ducing tall, blanched, spectral stalks, covered 
 Avith half -formed leaves ; but it was impossible 
 to recognize the species from the change in 
 form, color, and aspect, which the absence 
 of light had occasioned. The native Indians 
 gazed upon tliese traces of imperfect organiza- 
 tion with mingled curiosity and fear, as if they 
 were pale and disfigured phantoms banished 
 from the face of the earth." 
 
 So, brethren, think what you and I would 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 157 
 
 be without the light of God's countenance. 
 Picture a church growing, as some churches 
 do grow, without any light from heaven, a cav- 
 ern full of strange birds and blanched vegeta- 
 tion. What a terrible place for any one to 
 visit ! There is a cave of that sort at Eome, 
 and there are others in various parts of the 
 earth ; but woe unto those who go to live in 
 such dismal dens ! 
 
 What a wonderful effect the light of God's 
 countenance has upon men who have the di- 
 vine life in them, but who have been living in 
 the dark ! Travelers tell us that, in the vast 
 forests of the Amazon and the Orinoco, you 
 may sometimes see, on a grand scale, the in- 
 fluence of light in the coloring of the plants 
 when the leaf -buds are developing. One says : 
 " Clouds and rain sometimes obscure the at- 
 mosphere for several days together, and dur- 
 ing this time the buds expand themselves into 
 leaves. But these leaves have a pallid hue till 
 the sun appears, when, in a few hours of 
 clear sky and splendid sunshine, their color is 
 changed to a vivid green. It has been related 
 that, during twenty days of dark dull weather, 
 the sun not once making his appearance, the 
 leaves were expanded to their full size, but 
 were almost white. One forenoon the sun 
 began to shine in full brightness, when the 
 
158 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 color of tlie forest changed so rapidly that its 
 progress might be marked. By the middle of 
 the afternoon, the whole, for many miles, pre- 
 sented the usual summer dress." 
 
 That is a beautiful illustration, it seems to 
 me, that does not want any opening up ; you 
 can all make the application of it to the Lord 
 Jesus for yourselves. As Dr. Watts sings — 
 
 In the darkest shades if he appear, 
 
 My dawning is begun , 
 He is my soul's sweet morning star, 
 
 And he my rising sim. 
 
 Then we begin to put on all sorts of beauty, 
 as the leaves are painted by the rays of the 
 sun. We owe every atom of color that there 
 is in any of our virtues, and every trace of 
 flavor that there is in any of our fruits, to 
 those bright sunbeams that come streaming 
 down to us from the Sun of Righteousness, 
 who carries many other blessings besides heal- 
 ing beneath his wings. 
 
 The effect of the sun upon vegetation can 
 be observed among the flowers in your own 
 garden. Notice how they turn to him when- 
 ever they can ; the sunflower, for instance, fol- 
 lows the sun's course as if he were himself the 
 sun's son, and lovingly looked up to his father's 
 face. He is very much like a sun in appear- 
 
SCIENCES AS SOUKCES OF ILLUSTKATION. 159 
 
 ance, and I think that is because he is so fond 
 of turning to the sun. The innumerable leaves 
 of a clover field bend toward the sun ; and all 
 plants, more or less, pay deference to the sun- 
 light to which they are so deeply indebted. 
 Even the plants in the hothouse, you can ob- 
 serve, do not grow in that direction you would 
 expect them to do if they wanted warmth, 
 that is, toward the stovepipe, whence the heat 
 comes, nor even to the spot where most air is 
 admitted ; but they will always, if they pos- 
 sibly can, send out their branches and their 
 flowers toward the sun. That is how we ought 
 to grow toward the Sun of Eighteousness ; it 
 is for our soul's health that we should turn 
 our faces toward the Sun, as Daniel prayed 
 with his windows open toward Jerusalem. 
 Where Jesus is, there is our Sun ; toward him 
 let us constantly incline our whole being. 
 
 Not very long ago I met with the following 
 remarkable instance of the power of rays of 
 light transmitted from the sun : some divers 
 were working at Plymouth Breakwater ; they 
 were down in the diving-bell, thirty feet below 
 the surface of the water ; but a convex glass, in 
 the upper part of the bell, concentrated the sun's 
 rays full upon them, and burned their caps. 
 As I read this story, I thought it was a capital 
 illustration of the power there is in the gospel 
 
160 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ. Some of our hearers 
 are fully thirty feet under the waters of sin, if 
 they are not even deeper down than that ; but, 
 by the grace of God, we will yet make them 
 feel the blessed burning power of the truths 
 we preach, even if we do not succeed in setting 
 them all on fire with this powerful glass. Per- 
 haps, when you were a boy, you had a burning- 
 glass, and when you were out with a friend 
 who did not know what you had in your pock- 
 et, while he was sitting very quietly by your 
 side, you took out your glass, and held it for 
 a few seconds over the back of his hand until 
 he felt something rather hot just there. I like 
 the man who, in preaching, concentrates the 
 rays of the gospel on a sinner till he burns him. 
 Do not scatter the beams of light; you can 
 turn the glass so as to diffuse the rays instead 
 of concentrating them; but the best way of 
 preaching is to focus Jesus Christ, the Sun of 
 Righteousness, right on a sinner's heart. It is 
 the best way in the world to get at him ; and 
 if he is thirty feet under the water, this burn- 
 ing-glass will enable you to reach him ; only 
 mind that you do not use your own candle in- 
 stead of the Sun, for that will not answer the 
 same purpose. 
 
 Sometimes the sun suffers eclipse, as you 
 know. The moon intrudes between us and 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 161 
 
 the sun, and then we cannot see the great orb 
 of day. I suppose we have all seen one total 
 eclipse, and we may see another. It is a very 
 interesting sight; but it appears to me that 
 people take a great deal more notice of the sun 
 when he is eclipsed than they do when he is 
 shining clearly. They do not stand looking 
 at him, day after day, when he is pouring forth 
 his bright beams in unclouded glory ; but as 
 soon as ever he is eclipsed, then they are out 
 in their thousands, with their glasses, and 
 every little boy in the street has a fragment 
 of smoked glass through which he watches the 
 eclipse of the sun. 
 
 Thus, brethren, I do not believe that our 
 Lord Jesus Christ ever receives so much at- 
 tention from men as when he is set forth as the 
 suffering Saviour, evidently crucified among 
 them. When the great eclipse passed over the 
 Sun of Righteousness, then all eyes were fixed 
 upon him, and well they might be. Do not 
 fail to tell your hearers continually about that 
 awful eclipse on Calvary ; but mind that you 
 also tell them all the effects of that eclipse, 
 and that there will be no repetition of that 
 stupendous event. 
 
 Lo ! the sun's eclipse is o'er j 
 Lo ! he sets in blood no more. 
 
162 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 Speaking of eclipses reminds me that there 
 is, in the book I have mentioned, a striking 
 description of one given by a correspondent 
 who wrote to the astronomer Halley. He took 
 his stand at Haradow Hill, close to the east 
 end of the avenne of Stonehenge, a very cap- 
 ital place for observation, and there he watched 
 the eclipse. He says of it : " We were now en- 
 veloped in a total and palpable darkness, if I 
 may be allowed the expression. It came on 
 rapidly, bnt I watched so attentively that I 
 could perceive its progress. It came upon us 
 like a great black cloak thrown over us, or like 
 a curtain drawn from that side. The horses 
 we held by the bridle seemed deeply struck by 
 it, and pressed closely to us with marks of ex- 
 treme surprise. As well as I could perceive, 
 the countenances of my friends wore a horrible 
 aspect. It was not without an involuntary 
 exclamation of wonder that I looked around 
 me at this moment. It was the most awful 
 sight I had ever beheld in my life.'' 
 
 So, I suppose, it must be in the spiritual 
 realm. When the Sun of this great world 
 suffered eclipse, then were all men in dark- 
 ness ; and when any dishonor comes upon the 
 cross of Christ, or upon Christ himself, then 
 is each Christian himself in darkness of a hor- 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 163 
 
 rible kind. He cannot be in the light if his 
 Lord and Master is in the shade. 
 
 One observer describes what he saw in Aus- 
 tria, where, it appears, all the people made the 
 eclipse a time for keeping holiday, and turned 
 out together on the plain with various modes 
 of observing the wonderful sight. This writer 
 says : " The phenomenon, in its magnificence, 
 had triumphed over the petulance of youth, 
 over the levity which some persons assume as 
 a sign of superiority, over the noisy indiffer- 
 ence of which soldiers usually make profession. 
 A profound stillness also reigned in the air ; 
 the birds had ceased to sing." The more cur- 
 ious thing is that, in London, after an eclipse, 
 when the cocks found that the sun shone out 
 again, they all began crowing as though they 
 joyfully thought that the daylight had broken 
 through the gloom of night. 
 
 Yet this wonderful phenomenon does not 
 appear to have always attracted the attention 
 of all persons who might have witnessed it. 
 History says that, at one time, there was a 
 battle being fought, I think, in Greece, and, 
 during its progress, there came on a total 
 eclipse of the sun ; but the warriors went on 
 fighting all the same, indeed, they never noticed 
 the extraordinary occurrence. That shows us 
 
164 THE AET OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 how strong passions may make us forget sur- 
 rounding circumstances, and it also teaches us 
 how a man's engagements on earth may make 
 him oblivious of all that is transpiring in the 
 heavens. We read, just now, of how those 
 horses, that were standing idly on Salisbury 
 Plain, trembled during the eclipse ; but another 
 writer tells us that the horses in Italy, that 
 were busily occupied in drawing the carriages, 
 do not appear to have taken the slightest notice 
 of the phenomenon, but to have gone on their 
 way the same as usual. Thus, the engage- 
 ments of a worldly man are often so engross- 
 ing in their character that they prevent him 
 from feeling those emotions which are felt by 
 other men whose minds are more at liberty to 
 meditate upon them. 
 
 I met with a very pretty story concerning 
 an eclipse, which you will probably like to hear. 
 A poor little girl, belonging to the commune 
 of Sieyes, in the Lower Alps, was tending her 
 flock on the mountain-side at six o'clock on a 
 bright summer morning. The sun had risen, 
 and was dissipating the vapors of the night, 
 and every one thought that there would be a 
 glorious, unclouded -day ; but gradually the 
 light darkened until the sun had wholly disap- 
 peared, and a black orb took the place of the 
 glowing disk, while the air became chill, and a 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 165 
 
 mysterious gloom pervaded the whole region. 
 The little child was so terrified by the circum- 
 stance, which was certainly unusual, that she 
 began to weep, and cried out loudly for help. 
 Her parents, and other friends, who came at 
 her call, did not know anything about an 
 eclipse, so they were also astounded and 
 alarmed; but they tried to comfort her as 
 best they could. After a short tiuje, the dark- 
 ness passed away from the face of the sun, and 
 it shone out as before, and then the little girl 
 cried aloud, in the patois of the district, " O 
 beautiful sun ! " and well she might. When I 
 read the story, I thought that, when my heart 
 had suffered eclipse, and the presence of 
 Christ had gone for a while, and then had 
 come back again, how beautiful the Sun 
 seemed to me, even more bright and fair than 
 before the temporary darkness. Jesus seemed 
 to shine on me with a brighter light than 
 ever before, and my soul cried out in an 
 ecstasy of delight, " O beautiful Sun of Right- 
 
 eousness 
 
 f " 
 
 That story must, I think, close our illus- 
 trations derived from the sun; for we want 
 also to learn all we can from his planets, 
 and if we intend to pay a visit to them 
 all, we shall have to travel far, and to travel 
 fast, too. 
 
166 THE AET OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 The nearest planet that revolves around the 
 sun is Mercury, which is about 37,000,000 miles 
 from the great luminary. Mercury, therefore, 
 receives a far greater allowance of light and 
 heat from the sun than comes to us upon the 
 earth. It is believed that, even at the poles of 
 Mercury, water would always boil ; that is to 
 say, if the planet is constituted at all as this 
 world is. None of us could possibly live there ; 
 but that is no reason why other people should 
 not, for God could make some of his creatures 
 to live in the fire just as well as he could make 
 others to live out of it. I have no doubt that, 
 if there are inhabitants there, they enjoy the 
 heat. In a spiritual sense, at any rate, we 
 know that men who live near to Jesus dwell 
 in the divine flame of love. 
 
 Mercury is a comparatively small planet ; its 
 diameter is about 2960 miles, while that of the 
 earth is 7975. Mercury rushes round the sun 
 in eighty-eight days, traveling at the rate of 
 nearly 110,000 miles in an hour, while the earth 
 traverses only 65,000 miles in the same time. 
 Fancy crossing the Atlantic in about two or 
 three minutes ! It is an instance of the wis- 
 dom of God that Mercury appears to be the 
 densest of the planets. You see, that part of 
 a machine in which there is the most rapid 
 whirl, and the greatest wear and tear, ought 
 
SCIENCES AS SOUBCES OF ILLUSTKATION. 167 
 
 to be made of the strongest material ; and Mer- 
 cury is made very strong in order to bear the 
 enormous strain of its swift motion, and the 
 great heat to which it is subjected. 
 
 This is an iUustration of how God fits every 
 man for his place ; if he means me to be Mer- 
 cury — the messenger of the gods, as the an- 
 cients called him — and to travel swiftly, he 
 will give me a strength proportioned to my 
 day. In the formation of every planet, adapt- 
 ing it to its peculiar position, there is a won- 
 derful proof of the power and forethought of 
 God ; and in a similar manner does he fit human 
 beings for the sphere they are each called to 
 occupy. 
 
 I like to see in Mercury a picture of the child 
 of God who is full of grace. Mercury is al- 
 ways near the sun ; indeed, so near that it is 
 itself very seldom seen. I think Copernicus 
 said that he never did see it, although he had 
 long watched for it with great care, and he 
 deeply regretted that he had to die without 
 having ever seen this planet. Others have 
 observed it, and it has been quite a treat for 
 them to be able to watch its revolutions. 
 
 Mercury is usually lost in the rays of the 
 sun ; and that is where you and I ought to be, 
 so close to Christ, the Sun of Righteousness, 
 in our life and in our preaching, that the people 
 
168 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION, 
 
 who are trying to observe our movements can 
 scarcely see us at all. PauPs motto must be 
 ours— "Not I, but Christ." 
 
 Mercury, also, in consequence of being so 
 near the sun, is apparently the least under- 
 stood of any of the planets. It has, perhaps, 
 given more trouble to the astronomers than 
 any other member of the heavenly family ; they 
 have paid great attention to it, and tried to 
 find out all about it ; but they have had a very 
 difficult task, for it is generally lost in the solar 
 glory, and never seen in a dark portion of the 
 heavens. So, I believe, brethren, that the 
 nearer we live to Christ, the greater mystery 
 shall we be to all mankind. The more we are 
 lost in his brightness, the less will they be able 
 to understand us. 
 
 If we were always what we should be, men 
 would see in us an illustration of the text, " Ye 
 are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in 
 God." Like Mercury, we ought also to be so 
 active in our appointed orbit that we should 
 not give observers time to watch us in any 
 one position ; and next, we should be so ab- 
 sorbed in the glory of Christ's presence, that 
 they would not be able to perceive us. 
 
 When Mercury is seen from the earth, it is 
 never visible in its brightness, for its face is 
 always turned toward the sun. I am afraid 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 169 
 
 that, whenever any of us are seen very much, 
 we usually appear only as black spots ; when 
 the preacher is very prominent in a sermon, 
 there is always a darkness. I like gospel 
 preaching to be all Christ, the Sun of Right- 
 eousness, and no black spot at all ; nothing of 
 ourselves, but all of the Lord Jesus. If there 
 are any inhabitants of Mercury, the sun must 
 appear to them four or five times as large as 
 he does to us; the brightness would be insuf- 
 ferable to our eyes. It would be a very 
 splendid sight if one could gaze upon it ; and 
 thus, the nearer you get to Christ, the more 
 you see of him, and the more he grows in 
 your esteem. 
 
 The next planet to Mercury is Venus ; it is 
 about 66,000,000 miles from the sun, and is a 
 little smaller than the earth, its diameter being 
 7510 miles, compared with our 7975. Venus 
 goes round the sun in 225 days, traveling at 
 the rate of 80,000 miles an hour. When the 
 Copernican system of astronomy was fairly 
 launched upon the world, one of the objections 
 to it was stated thus : " It is clear that Venus 
 does not go round the sun, because, if it does, 
 it must present the same aspect as the moon — 
 namely, it must sometimes be a crescent, at 
 other times a half -moon, or it must assume the 
 
170 THE AllT OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 form known as gibbous^ and sometimes it must 
 appear as a complete circle. But," said the ob- 
 jector, pointing to Venus, " she is always the 
 same size ; look at her, she is not at all like the 
 moon." This was a difficulty that some of the 
 earlier astronomers could not explain; but 
 when Galileo was able to turn his newly made 
 telescope to the planet, what did he discover? 
 Why, that Venus does pass through similar 
 phases to those of the moon ! We cannot al- 
 ways see the whole of it enlightened, yet I sup- 
 pose it is true that the light of Venus always 
 appears about the same to us. You will per- 
 ceive in a moment why that is; when the 
 planet's face is turned toward us, * t is at the 
 greatest distance from the earth ; consequently, 
 the light that reaches us is no more than when 
 it is closer, but has its face at least partly turned 
 away from us. To my mind, the two facts are 
 perfectly reconcilable ; and so is it, I believe, 
 with some of the doctrines of grace that per- 
 plex certain people. They say, " How do you 
 make these two things agree ? " I reply, " I do 
 not know that I am bound to prove how they 
 agree. If God had told me I would tell you ; 
 but as he has not done so, I must leave the 
 matter where the Bible leaves it." I may not 
 have discovered the explanation of any appar- 
 ent difference between the two truths, and yet. 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 171 
 
 for all that, the two things may be perfectly 
 consistent with each other. 
 
 Venus is both the morning star and *'the 
 star of the evening, beautiful star." It has 
 been called Lucifer, and Phosphorus, the light- 
 bringer, and also Hesperus, the vesper star. 
 You perhaps remember how Milton, in ^' Par- 
 adise Lost," refers to this double character and 
 office of Venus : 
 
 Fairest of stars ! last in the train of night, 
 
 If better thou belong not to the dawn ; 
 
 Sure pledge of day, that crown'st the smiling morn 
 
 With thy bright circlet : praise him in thy sphere, 
 
 While day arises, that sweet hour of prime. 
 
 Our Lord Jesus Christ calls himself "the bright 
 and morning star." Whenever he comes into 
 the soul, he is the sure harbinger of that ever- 
 lasting light which shall go no more down for- 
 ever. Now that Jesus, the Sun of Righteous- 
 ness, has gone from the gaze of man, you 
 and I must be like evening stars, keeping as 
 close as we can to the great central Sun, and 
 letting the world know what Jesus was like by 
 our resemblance to him. Did he not say to 
 his disciples, " Ye are the light of the world " f 
 
 The next little planet that goes round the 
 sun is The Earth. Its distance from the sun 
 
172 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 varies from about ninety-two to ninety-five 
 millions of miles. Do not be discouraged, 
 gentlemen, in your hopes of reaching the sun, 
 because you are nothing like so far away as 
 the inhabitants of Saturn ; if there are any res- 
 idents there, they are about ten times as far 
 from the sun as we are. Still, I do not suppose 
 you will ever take a seat in Sol's fiery chariot ; 
 at least not in your present embodied state ; 
 it is far too warm a place for you to be at home 
 there. The earth is somewhat larger than 
 Venus, and it takes much longer to go round 
 the sun ; it is twelve months on its journey, or, 
 speaking exactly, 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, 
 and 10 seconds. This world is a slow-going 
 concern ; and I am afraid it is less to the glory 
 of God than any other world that he has made. 
 I have not seen it from a distance ; but I should 
 suspect that it never shines anything like so 
 brightly as Venus ; for, through sin, a cloud of 
 darkness has enveloped it. I suppose that, in 
 the millennial days, the curtain will be drawn 
 back, and a light will be thrown upon the earth, 
 and that it will then shine to the glory of God 
 like its sister stars that have never lost their 
 pristine brightness. I think there have been 
 some curtains drawn up already ; every sermon, 
 full of Christ, that we preach, rolls away some 
 of the mists and fogs from the surface of the 
 
SCIENCES AS SOUKCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 173 
 
 planet ; at any rate, morally and spiritually, if 
 not naturally. 
 
 Still, brethren, though the earth travels slow- 
 ly, when compared with Mercury and Venus, 
 yet, as Galileo said, it does move, and at a 
 pretty good rate, too. I dare say, if you were 
 to walk for twenty minutes, and you knew 
 nothing about the speed at which the earth is 
 traveling, you would be surprised if I assured 
 you that you had in that short space of time 
 gone more than 20,000 miles ; but it would be 
 a fact. This book, which has already given us 
 much useful information, says : " It is a truly 
 astonishing thought that, ^ awake, asleep, at 
 home, abroad,' we are constantly carried round 
 with the terrestrial mass, at the rate of eleven 
 miles a minute, and are, at the same time, 
 traveling with it in space with a velocity of 
 sixty-six thousand miles an hour. Thus, dur- 
 ing the twenty miDutes consumed in walking 
 a mile from our thresholds, we are silently con- 
 veyed more than twenty thousand miles from 
 one portion of space to another ; and, during a 
 night of eight hours' rest, or tossing to and fro, 
 we are unconsciously translated through an 
 extent equal to twice the distance of the lunar 
 world." 
 
 We do not take any notice of this movement, 
 and so it is that little things, which are near 
 
174 THE AKT OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 and tangible, often seem more notable than 
 great things which are more remote. This 
 world impresses many men with far greater 
 force than the world to come has ever done, 
 because they look only upon the things that 
 are seen and temporal. "But," perhaps you 
 say, " we do not feel ourselves moving." No, 
 but you are moving, although you are not con- 
 scious of it. So, I think that, sometimes, when 
 a believer in Christ does not feel himself ad- 
 vancing in divine things, he need not fret on 
 that account ; I am not certain that those who 
 imagine themselves to be growing spiritually 
 are really doing so. Perhaps they are only 
 growing a cancer somewhere ; and its deadly 
 fibers make them fancy there is a growth with- 
 in them. Alas ! so there is ; but it is a growth 
 unto destruction. 
 
 When a man thinks that he is a full-grown 
 Christian, he reminds me of a poor boy whom 
 I used to see. He had such a splendid head 
 for his body that he had often to lay it on a 
 pillow, for it was too weighty for his shoulders 
 to carry, and his mother told me that, when he 
 tried to stand up, he often tumbled down, over- 
 balanced by his heavy head. There are some 
 people who appear to grow very fast, but they 
 have water on the brain, and are out of due 
 proportion ; but he who truly grows in grace 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTEATION. 175 
 
 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 num- 
 ber 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 our- 
 selves 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 revolu- 
 tion permits, to this exact spot this day twelve- 
 month. If they are looking down at me from 
 Saturn, they will spy me out somewhere near 
 this same place, unless the Lord should come 
 in the meantime, or he should call me up to be 
 with him. 
 
 If we did feel the world move, it would prob- 
 ably be because there was some obstruction 
 in the heavenly road ; but we go on so softly, 
 and gently, and quietly that we do not per- 
 ceive it. I beheve that growth in grace is very 
 much after the same fashion. A babe grows, 
 and yet does not know that he grows ; the seed 
 unconsciously grows in the earth, and so we 
 
176 THE AKT OF ILLUSTKATION. 
 
 are developing in the divine life until we come 
 to the fulness of the stature of men in Christ 
 Jesus. 
 
 Waiting upon the earth is The Moon. In 
 addition to her duty as one of the planets re- 
 volving round the sun, she has the task of at- 
 tending upon the earth, doing much useful ser- 
 vice for it, and at night lighting it with her 
 great reflector-lamp, according to the allowance 
 of oil she has available for shedding her beams 
 upon us. The moon also operates upon the 
 earth by her powers of attraction ; and as the 
 water is the more mobile part of our planet, 
 the moon draws it toward herself, so making 
 the tides; and those tides help to keep the 
 whole world in healthful motion ; they are a 
 sort of life-blood to it. 
 
 The moon undergoes eclipse, sometimes very 
 frequently, and a great deal more often than 
 the sun ; and this phenomenon has occasioned . 
 much terror. Among some tribes, an eclipse 
 of the moon is an occasion for the greatest 
 possible grief. Sir R. Schomberg thus de- 
 scribes a total lunar eclipse in San Domingo : 
 " I stood alone upon the flat roof of the house 
 which I inhabited, watching the progress of 
 the eclipse. I pictured in imagination the 
 lively and extraordinary scene which I once 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 177 
 
 witnessed in the interior of Guiana, among the 
 untutored and superstitious Indians, how they 
 rushed out of their huts when the first news 
 of the ecHpse came, gibbered in their tongue, 
 and, with violent gesticulations, threw up their 
 clenched fists toward the moon. When, as on 
 this occasion, the disk was perfectly eclipsed, 
 they broke out in moanings, and sullenly 
 squatted upon the ground, hiding their faces 
 between their hands. The females remained, 
 during this strange scene, within their huts. 
 When, shining like a sparkling diamond, the 
 first portion of the moon, that had disencum- 
 bered itself from the shadow, became visible, 
 all eyes were turned toward it. They spoke 
 to each other with subdued voices ; but their 
 observations became louder and louder, and 
 they quitted their stooping position as the light 
 increased. When the bright disk announced 
 that the monster which wanted to stifle the 
 Queen of Night had been overcome, the great 
 joy of the Indians was expressed in that pecu- 
 liar whoop which, in the stillness of the night, 
 may be heard for a great distance." 
 
 Want of faith causes the most extraordinary 
 fear, and produces the most ridiculous action. 
 A man who believes that the moon, though 
 temporarily hidden, will shine forth again, 
 looks upon an eclipse as a curious phenomenon 
 
178 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 worthy of his attention, and full of interest ; 
 but the man who really fears that God is blow- 
 ing out the light of the moon, and that he shall 
 never see its bright rays any more, feels in a 
 state of terrible distress. Perhaps he will act 
 as the Hindus and some of the Africans do 
 during an eclipse : they beat old drums, and 
 blow bullocks' horns, and make all manner of 
 frightful noises, to cause the dragon who is 
 supposed to have swallowed the moon to vomit 
 it up again. That is their theory of an eclipse, 
 and they act accordingly ; but once know the 
 truth, and know especially the glorious truth 
 that " all things work together for good to 
 them that love God, to them that are the called 
 according to his purpose," and we shall not be 
 afraid of any dragon swallowing the moon, nor 
 of anything else that the fears of men have 
 made them imagine. If we are ignorant of the 
 truth, every event that occurs, which may be 
 readily enough accounted for from God's point 
 of view, may cause the utmost terror, and drive 
 us, perhaps, into the- wildest follies. 
 
 The next planet to the earth is Mars ; fiery 
 Mars, generally shining with a ruddy light. It 
 used to be thought that the color of Mars's 
 " blood-red shield " was caused by the absorp- 
 tion of the solar rays ; but this idea has been 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTEATION. 179 
 
 refuted, and it is now believed to be due to the 
 color of its soil. According to the former idea, 
 an angry man, who is like Mars, the god of 
 war, must be one who has absorbed all other 
 colors for his own use, and only shows the red 
 rays to others ; while the more modern notion, 
 that the soil of the planet gives it its distinctive 
 color, teaches us that, where there is a fiery 
 nature, there will be a warlike exhibition of it 
 unless it is restrained by grace. Mars is about 
 140,000,000 miles from the sun ; it is much 
 smaller than our earth, its equatorial diameter 
 being 4363 miles. Traveling at the rate of 
 53,600 miles an hour, it takes 687 days to com- 
 plete its revolution round tlie sun. 
 
 Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter there 
 is a wide zone, in which, for many centuries, 
 no planets were visible ; but the astronomers 
 said within themselves, "There must surely 
 be something or other between Mars and Ju- 
 piter." They could not find any great plan- 
 ets ; but as telescopes became larger and more 
 powerful, they observed that there was a great 
 number of Asteroids or Planetoids, as some 
 term them. 1 do not know how many there 
 are, for they are like some of our brethren's 
 families, they are daily increasing. Some hun- 
 dreds of them have already been discovered ; 
 
180 THE AET OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 and by the aid of telescopic photography, we 
 may expect to hear of the finding of many 
 more. The first asteroid was identified on the 
 first day of the present century, and was 
 named Ceres. Many of them have been called 
 by female mythological names, I suppose be- 
 cause they are the smaller planets, and it is 
 considered gallant to give them ladies' names. 
 They appear to vary from about 20 to 200 miles 
 in diameter ; and many have thought that they 
 are the fragments of some planet that once re- 
 volved between Mars and Jupiter, but that has 
 been blown up, and gone to pieces in a general 
 wreck. 
 
 Those meteoric stones, which sometimes fall 
 to the earth, but which much more frequently, 
 at certain seasons of the year, are seen shooting 
 across the midnight sky, may also be fragments 
 of the aforesaid world which has perished. At 
 all events, since the fathers fell asleep, all things 
 have not continued as they were ; there have 
 been changes in the starry world to let men 
 know that other changes will yet come. These 
 blocks of meteoric matter are flying through 
 space, and when they get within the range of 
 our atmosphere, there is an opposing medium, 
 they have to drive through it at an enormous 
 rapidity, and so they become burning hot, and 
 thus they become visible. And, in like man- 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 181 
 
 ner, I believe that there are plenty of good 
 men in the world who are invisible till they 
 get to be opposed, and being opposed, and hav- 
 ing the love of God driving them on with 
 tremendous momentum, they become red-hot 
 with holy fervor, they overcome all opposition, 
 and then they become visible to the eye of man- 
 kind. For my part, I rather like to pass 
 through an opposing medium. I think that 
 we all want to travel in that kind of atmo- 
 sphere just to give us the sacred friction that 
 will fully develop the powers with which we 
 have been intrusted. If God has given us 
 force, it is not at all a bad thing for us to be 
 put where there is opposition, because we shall 
 not be stopped by it, but shall by that very 
 process be made to shine all the brighter as 
 lights in the world. 
 
 Beyond the space which is occupied by the 
 asteroids is the magnificent planet, Jupiter, 
 the brightest star which we see, except Yenus ; 
 and yet he is very, very far away. His mean 
 distance from the sun is about 475,000,000 
 miles ; that is, more than five times as far off 
 as we are. Even here, we are so far away that 
 we do not often see the sun ; but Jupiter is five 
 times as far from the sun, and it takes him 
 4333 days, or nearly twelve of our years, to go 
 
182 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 round the great luminary, traveling at a speed 
 of 27,180 miles an hour. The reason why Ju- 
 piter is so bright is, partly, because of his great 
 size, for he is nearly 90,000 miles in diameter, 
 while the earth is less than 8000, and it may 
 be partly because he is better constituted for 
 reflecting, or else, at that distance, his magni- 
 tude would not avail him. And brethren, if 
 you and I are put in difficult positions, where 
 we seem to be unable to shine to the glory of 
 God, we must ask the Lord specially to consti- 
 tute us so that we can better reflect his bright- 
 ness, and so produce as good an effect as our 
 brethren who are placed in more favorable 
 positions. 
 
 Jupiter is attended by four moons.* These 
 satellites were discovered soon after the inven- 
 tion of the telescope ; yet there were several 
 persons who would not believe in their exis- 
 tence, and one of our excellent friends, the 
 Jesuits, of course, was strongest in his deter- 
 mination that he never would, by any process, 
 be convinced of that which others knew to be 
 a fact. He was asked to look through a tele- 
 scope in order to see that it was really so ; but 
 he declined because he said that, perhaps, if 
 he did so, he would be obliged to believe it ; 
 
 * In 1892 a fifth satellite was discovered through the 
 great telescope at the Lick Observatory in California. 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. l83 
 
 and as he liad no desire to do so, he refused 
 to look. Are there not some who act thus 
 toward the truths of revelation! Some time 
 after, the Jesuit fell under the anger of good 
 Kepler, and being convinced that he was in 
 the wrong, he went to the astronomer and 
 begged his pardon. Kepler told him that he 
 would forgive him, but he would have to in- 
 flict a penance upon him. " What will it be f " 
 he inquired. ^' Why," said Kepler, " you must 
 look through that telescope." That was the 
 direst punishment the Jesuit could possibly 
 receive ; for, when he looked through the in- 
 strument, he was obliged to say that he did see 
 what he had formerly denied, and he was 
 obliged to express his conviction of the truth 
 of the astronomer's teaching. So, sometimes, 
 to make a man see the truth is a very severe 
 penalty to him. If he does not want to see it, 
 it is a good thing to compel him to look at it. 
 There are a great many brethren, who are not 
 Jesuits, and who yet are not anxious to know 
 the whole truth ; but I hope that you and I, 
 brethren, will always desire to learn all that 
 the Lord has revealed in his Word. 
 
 This was the argument of Sizzi, an astron- 
 omer of some note, who tried to prove that 
 Jupiter's moons could not exist. I wonder 
 whether vou can see the flaw in it : " There are 
 
184 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 seven windows given to animals in the domicile 
 of the head, through which the air is admitted 
 to the tabernacle of the body, to enlighten, to 
 warm, and to nourish it; which windows are 
 the principal parts of the microcosm, or little 
 world, two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and 
 one mouth. So, in the heavens, as in a micro- 
 cosm, or great world, there are two favorable 
 stars, Jupiter and Yenus; two unpropitious. 
 Mars and Saturn ; two luminaries, the sun and 
 the moon ; and Mercur}^ alone undecided and 
 indifferent, from which, and from many other 
 phenomena of nature, such as the seven metals, 
 etc., which it were tedious to enumerate, we 
 gather that the number of planets is necessarily 
 seven. Moreover, the satellites are invisible 
 to the naked eye, and therefore can exercise 
 no influence over the earth, and therefore 
 would be useless, and therefore do not exist. 
 Besides, as well the Jews and other ancient 
 nations, as modern Europeans, have adopted 
 the division of the week into seven days, and 
 have named them from the seven planets. 
 Now, if we increase the number of the planets, 
 this whole s^^stem falls to the ground." 
 
 I think, brethren, that I have heard the 
 same kind of argument advanced many times 
 with reference to spiritual matters ; that is, an 
 argument from theory against fact ; but facts 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 185 
 
 will always overturn theories all the world 
 over, only that, sometimes, it takes a good 
 while before the facts can be absolutely proved. 
 
 It is a singular thing, and another instance 
 of the power and wisdom of God, that though 
 the satelhtes of Jupiter are constantly being 
 eclipsed, as is natural enough from their rapid 
 revolutions around him, yet they are never all 
 eclipsed at one time. One moon may be 
 eclipsed, and perhaps another, or even three 
 out of the four ; but there is always one left 
 shining ; and, in like manner, God never takes 
 away all the comfort of his people at once, 
 there is always some ray of light to cheer them. 
 
 There is a great deal more to be learned from 
 Jupiter ; but having introduced you to him, I 
 will leave you to examine him for yourselves, 
 and to get all you can out of him. 
 
 Far, far beyond Jupiter is Saturn. That 
 respectable planet has been very much slan- 
 dered, but I am happy to inform you that he 
 does not deserve such treatment. He is nearly 
 900,000,000 miles from the sun. I wonder 
 whether any brother here, with a large mind, 
 has any idea of what a million is; I do not 
 suppose that he has, and I am sure that I have 
 not. It takes a vast deal of thinking to com- 
 prehend what a miUion means ; but to realize 
 
186 • THE AET OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 what is meant by a million miles is altogether 
 beyond one's mental grasp. A million pins 
 would be something enormous ; but a million 
 miles ! And here we are talking of nine hun- 
 dred millions of miles; well, I give up all 
 thought of understanding what that is so long- 
 as I am in this finite state. Why, when you 
 speak of nine hundred millions, you might as 
 well say nine hundred billions at once ; for the 
 one term is almost as incomprehensible as the 
 other; and yet, please to recollect that this 
 vast space is to our great God only a mere 
 hand's-breadth compared with the immeasur- 
 able universe that he has created. 
 
 I said that Saturn had been greatly slan- 
 dered, and so he has. You know that we 
 have, in our English language, the word " sat- 
 urnine," as a very uncomplimentary descrip- 
 tion of certain individuals. When a man is 
 praised for being very hearty and genial, he is 
 said to be jovial, in allusion to Jove, or Jupi- 
 ter, the brightly shining planet ; but a person 
 of an opposite temperament is called saturnine, 
 because it is supposed that Saturn is a dull 
 planet, dreadfully dreary, and that his influ- 
 ences are malignant and baneful. If you have 
 read some of the astrological books which I 
 have had the pleasure of studying, you have 
 there been told that, if you had been born 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 187 
 
 under the influence of Saturn, you might al- 
 most as well have been born under the influ- 
 ence of Satan, for it will come to about the 
 same thing in the end. He is supposed to be 
 a very slow sort of individual, his symbol is 
 the hieroglyphic of lead ; but he is really a very 
 light and buoj^ant personage. His diameter is 
 about nine times as great as that of the earth, 
 and while in volume he is equal to 746 worlds 
 as large as ours, his weight is equal to only 92 
 such globes. The densities of the planets ap- 
 pear to diminish according to their distance 
 from the sun, not in regular proportion, but 
 still very largely so ; and there seems to be no 
 reason why those which are most remote, and 
 travel slowly, should be made so dense as those 
 which are nearer the central orb, and revolve 
 more quickly around him. 
 
 This useful volume, from which I have al- 
 ready given you several extracts, says: "In- 
 stead, therefore, of sinking like lead in the 
 mighty waters, he would float upon the liquid, 
 if an ocean could be found sufficiently capa- 
 cious to receive him. John Goad, the well- 
 known astro-meteorologist, declared the planet 
 not to be such a * plumbeous, blue-nosed fel- 
 low' as all antiquity had believed and the 
 world still supposed. But it was the work of 
 others to prove it. For six thousand years or 
 
188 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 SO Saturn concealed his personal features, in- 
 teresting family, and strange appurtenances — 
 tlie magnificent out-buildings of his house — 
 from the knowledge of mankind. But he was 
 caught at last by a little tube, pointed at him 
 from a slope of the Apennines, the holder of 
 which, in invading his privacy, cared not to 
 ask leave, and deemed it no intrusion." When 
 that " little tube " was turned upon him he was 
 found to be a most beautiful planet, one of the 
 most varied and most marvelous of all the 
 planetary worlds. 
 
 Take that as an illustration of the falseness 
 of slander, and of how some persons are very 
 much bemired and bespattered because people 
 do not know them. This planet, which was 
 so despised, turned out to be a very beautiful 
 object indeed ; and, instead of being very dull, 
 and what the word saturnine usually means, 
 he is bright and glorious. Saturn also has no 
 less than eight satellites to attend him ; and, 
 in addition, he has three magnificent rings, of 
 which Tennyson has sung : 
 
 Still as, while Saturn whirls, his steadfast shade 
 Sleeps on his luminous rings. 
 
 Saturn has only about a hundredth part of 
 the light from the sun as compared with what 
 we receive ; and yet, I suppose, the atmosphere 
 
SCIENCES AS SOUKCES OF ELLUSTKATION. 189 
 
 might be so arranged that he might have as 
 much solar light as we have ; but even if the 
 atmosphere is of the same kind as ours, Saturn 
 would still have as much light as we have in 
 an ordinary London fog. " I am speaking, of 
 course, of the light from the sun ; but then we 
 cannot tell what illuminating power the Lord 
 may have put in the planet himself ; and be- 
 side that, he has his eight moons, and his three 
 shining rings, which have a brilliance that we 
 cannot either imagine or describe. What must 
 it be to see a marvelous arch of light rising to 
 a height of 37,570 miles above the planet, and 
 having the enormous span of 170,000 miles ! 
 If you were at the equator of Saturn, you 
 would only see the rings as a narrow band of 
 light; but if you could journey toward the 
 poles, you would see above you a tremendous 
 arch, blazing with light, like some of the vast 
 reflectors that you see hung up in large build- 
 ings where they cannot get sufficient sunlight. 
 The reflector helps to gather up the rays of 
 light, and throw them where they are needed ; 
 and I have no doubt that these rings act like 
 reflectors to Saturn. It must be a wonderful 
 world to live in if there are inhabitants there ; 
 they get compensations which fully make up 
 for their disadvantages in being so far away 
 from the sun. So is it in the spii^itual world, 
 
190 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 what the Lord withholds in one direction he 
 makes up in another ; and those who are far 
 removed from the means of grace and Chris- 
 tian privileges have an inward light and joy, 
 which others, with greater apparent advan- 
 tages, might almost envy. 
 
 Journeying again in the heavens, far, far 
 beyond Saturn, we come to Uranus, or Her- 
 SCHEL, as it is sometimes called, after the as- 
 tronomer who discovered it in 1781. The 
 mean distance of Uranus from the sun is be- 
 lieved to be about 1,754,000,000 miles; I give 
 you the figures, but neither you nor I can have 
 the slightest conception of the distance they 
 represent. To an observer standing on Uranus, 
 the sun would probably appear only as a far- 
 away speck of light ; yet the planet revolves 
 around the sun at about 15,000 miles an hour, 
 and occupies about eighty-four of our years in 
 completing one journey. Uranus is said to be 
 equal in volume to seventy-three or seventy- 
 four earths, and to be attended by four moons. 
 I do not know much about Uranus, therefore 
 I do not intend to say much about him. 
 
 That may serve as an illustration of the les- 
 son that a man had better say as little as pos- 
 sible concerning anything of which he knows 
 only a little ; and that is a lesson which many 
 
SCIENCES AS SOUKCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 191 
 
 people need to learn. For instance, there are 
 probably more works on the Book of Revela- 
 tion than upon any other part of the Scrip- 
 tures, and, with the exception of just a few, 
 they are not worth the paper on which they 
 are printed. Then, next to the Book of Rev- 
 elation, in this respect, is the Book of Daniel ; 
 and because it is so difficult to explain, many 
 men have written upon it, but as a rule the 
 result of their writing has been that they have 
 onl}^ confuted and contradicted one another. 
 Let us, brethren, preach what we know, and 
 say nothing of that of which we are ignorant. 
 
 We have gone a long way, in imagination, 
 in traveling to the planet Uranus ; but we have 
 not yet completed our afternoon's journey. It 
 was observed by certain astronomers that the 
 orbit of Uranus sometimes deviated from the 
 course they had marked in their chart of the 
 heavens; and this convinced them that there 
 was another planetary body, not then discov- 
 ered, which was exerting an unseen but power- 
 ful influence upon Uranus. 
 
 This fact, that these huge worlds, with so 
 many millions of miles of space between them, 
 do retard or accelerate one another's move- 
 ments, is to me a beautiful illustration of the 
 influence that you and I have upon our fellow- 
 
192 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 men. Whether consciously or unconsciously, 
 we either impede a man's progress in the path 
 that leads to God, or else we quicken his march 
 along the heavenward way. " None of us liveth 
 to himself." 
 
 The astronomers came to the conclusion that 
 there must be another planet, previously un- 
 known to them, that was disturbing the mo- 
 tion of Uranus. Unknown to each other, an 
 Englishman, Mr. Adams, of Cambridge, and a 
 Frenchman, M. Leverrier, set to work to find 
 out the position in which they expected the 
 heavenly body to be discovered, and their cal- 
 culations brought them to almost identical re- 
 sults. When the telescopes were pointed to 
 that part of the heavens where the mathemati- 
 cal astronomers believed the planet would be 
 found, it was at once discovered, shining with 
 a pale and yellow light, and we now know it 
 by the name of Neptune. 
 
 The volume before me thus speaks of the 
 two methods of finding a planet, the one worker 
 using the most powerful telescope, and the 
 other making mathematical calculations : " To 
 detect a planet by the eye, or to track it to its 
 place by the mind, are acts as incommensu- 
 rable as those of muscular and intellectual 
 power. Recumbent on his easy-chair, the 
 practical astronomer has but to look through 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 193 
 
 the cleft in his revolving cupola in order to 
 trace the pilgrim star in its course ; or, by the 
 application of magnifying power, to expand its 
 tiny disk, and thus transfer it from among its 
 sidereal companions to the planetary domains. 
 The physical astronomer, on the contrary, has 
 no such auxiliaries : he calculates at noon, when 
 the stars disappear under a meridian sun ; he 
 computes at midnight, when clouds and dark- 
 ness shroud the heavens ; and from within that 
 cerebral dome which has no opening heaven- 
 ward, and no instrument but the eye of reason, 
 he sees in the disturbing agencies of an unseen 
 planet, upon a planet by him equally unseen, 
 the existence of the disturbing agent, and from 
 the nature and amount of its action he com- 
 putes its magnitude and indicates its place." 
 
 What a grand thing is reason ! Far above 
 the mere senses, and then faith is high above 
 reason ; only, in the case of the mathematical 
 astronomer of whom we are thinking, reason 
 was a kind of faith. He argued : " God's 
 laws are so-and-so and so-and-so. This planet 
 Uranus is being disturbed, some other planet 
 must have disturbed it, so I will search and 
 find out where he is ; " and when his intricate 
 calculations were completed, he put his finger 
 on Neptune as readily as a detective lays his 
 hand on a burglar, and a great deal sooner ; in- 
 
194 THE AKT OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 deed, it seems to me that it is often easier to 
 find a star than to catch a thief. 
 
 Neptune had long been shining before he 
 was discovered and named; and you and I, 
 brethren, may remain unknown for years, and 
 possibly the world may never discover us ; but 
 I trust that our influence, like that of Neptune, 
 will be felt and recognized, whether we are seen 
 of men or only shine in solitary splendor to 
 the glory of God. 
 
 Well, we have traveled in thought as far as 
 Neptune, which is about 2,748,000,000 miles 
 from the sun; and, standing there, we look 
 over into space, and there are myriads, and 
 myriads, and myriads of miles in which there 
 appear to be no more planets belonging to the 
 solar system. There may be others that have 
 not been discovered yet; but, as far as we 
 know, beyond Neptune there is a great gulf 
 fixed. 
 
 There are, however, what I may call " 1 cap- 
 ers " in the system, which, without the use of 
 a pole, are able to cross this gulf ; they are The 
 Comets. These comets are, as a rule, so thin 
 — a mere filmy mass of vapor — that when they 
 come flashing into our system, and rushing 
 out again, as they do, tliey never disturb the 
 motion of a planet. And there are some ter- 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 195 
 
 restrial 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 re- 
 volving 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 astron- 
 omer 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." So thin is a comet that you might 
 look through five thousand miles of it, and see 
 just as easily as if it were not there. 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 proph- 
 esied 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 re- 
 appearance; but he expressed the hope that 
 when it did return his prophecy might be re- 
 membered. Various astronomers were looking 
 out for it, and they hoped it might arrive at 
 the time foretold, because, otherwise, ignorant 
 people would not believe in astronomy. But 
 the comet came back all right ; so their minds 
 
196 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 were set at rest, and Halley's prediction was 
 verified. 
 
 Among the stories concerning comet- watch- 
 ing, there is one that contains an illustration 
 and a lesson also. " Messier, who had acquired 
 the name of ' the comet-hunter,' from the num- 
 ber he discovered, was particularly anxious 
 upon the occasion. Of great simplicity of 
 character, his zeal after comets was often dis- 
 played in the oddest manner. While attend- 
 ing the death-bed of his wife, and necessarily 
 absent from his observatory, the discovery of 
 one was snatched from him by Montaigne de 
 Limoges. This was a grievous blow. A visi- 
 tor began to offer him consolation on account 
 of his recent bereavement, when Messier, 
 thinking only of the comet, answered, ^ I had 
 discovered twelve; alas, to be robbed of the 
 thirteenth by that Montaigne ! ' But instantly 
 recollecting himself, he exclaimed, ' Ah ! cette 
 pauvre femme ! ' and went on deploring wife 
 and comet together." He evidently lived so 
 much in the heavens that he forgot his wife ; 
 and if science can sometimes carry a man away 
 from all the trials of this mortal life, surely 
 our heavenly life ought to lift us up above all 
 the distractions and cares that afflict us. 
 
 The return of a comet is frequently an- 
 nounced with great certainty. This paragraph 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 197 
 
 appeared in a newspaper : " On the whole, it 
 may be considered as tolerably certain that 
 the comet will become visible in every part of 
 Europe about the latter end of August, or the 
 beginning of September next. It will most 
 probably be distinguishable by the naked eye, 
 like a star of the first magnitude, but with a 
 duller light than that of a planet, and sur- 
 rounded with a pale nebulosity, which will 
 slightly impair its splendor. On the night of 
 the 7th of October the comet will approach the 
 well-known constellation of the Great Bear; 
 and between that and the 11th it will pass 
 directly through the seven conspicuous stars 
 of that constellation. Toward the close of 
 November the comet will plunge among the 
 rays of the sun and disappear, and not issue 
 from them, on the other side, until the end of 
 December. This prospectus of the movements 
 of a body, invisible at the time, millions of 
 miles away, is nearly as definite as the early 
 advertisements of coaching between London 
 and Edinburgh. Let us now place the obser- 
 vations of the eye alongside the anticipations 
 of science, and we shall find that science has 
 proved almost absolutely correct." 
 
 Just think of the calculations, gentlemen, 
 that were necessary ; for, though a comet does 
 not interfere with the course of a planet, a 
 
198 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 planet interferes very considerably with the 
 course of a comet; so that, in their calcula- 
 tions, the astronomers had to recollect the 
 track in which the comet would have to travel. 
 Thinking of him as a way-worn traveler, we 
 remember that he will have to go by Neptune's 
 bright abode, and Neptune will be sure to give 
 him a cup of tea ; then he will journey on as 
 far as Uranus, and put up for the night there ; 
 in the morning he will pay an early visit to 
 Saturn, and he will stay there for breakfast ; 
 he will dine with Jupiter ; by and by he will 
 reach Mars, and there will be sure to be a row 
 there; and he will be glad when he gets to 
 Venus, and, of course, he will be detained by 
 her charms. 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 contin- 
 ually 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 reap- 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 199 
 
 pear for hundreds of years. Where have they 
 gone all that while? Well, they have gone 
 somewhere, and they are serving the purpose 
 of the God who made them, I dare say ; but, 
 for my own part, I would not like to be a 
 comet in God's system. I would like to have 
 my fixed place, and keep on shining for the 
 Lord there. I have lived in London for a good 
 many years, and I have seen many comets 
 come and go during that time. Oh, the great 
 lights I have seen rush by ! They have gone 
 off into some unknown sphere, as comets 
 usually do. I have generally noticed that, 
 when men are going to do so much more than 
 everybody else, and they are so amazingly 
 pompous over it, their history is usually pretty 
 accurately described by that simple simile of 
 going up like a rocket and coming down like a 
 stick. 
 
 I do not know whether you can, in imagina- 
 tion, lean over the battlements of this little 
 solar system, and see what there is beyond it. 
 Do not narrow your minds, gentlemen, to a few 
 hundred millions of miles ! If you look out 
 for a long way indeed, you will begin to see a 
 star I should only be uttering meaningless 
 words if I told you its distance from us ; yet 
 there are others, of those that we are able to 
 
200 THE AKT OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 see, that are almost im»ieasurably farther 
 away. They have taken a deal of trouble to 
 Send us a ray of light such a vast distance, to 
 inform us that they are getting on very well, 
 and that, though they are at such a distance 
 from us, they still enjoy themselves as best they 
 can in our absence. 
 
 These stars, as the common people look at 
 them, seem to be scattered about in the heav- 
 ens, as we say, " anyhow." I always admire 
 that charming variety ; and I am thankful to 
 God that he has not set the stars in straight 
 lines, like rows of street-lamps. Only think, 
 brethren, how it would be if we looked up at 
 night, and saw the stars all arranged in rows, 
 like pins on a paper ! Bless the Lord, it is not 
 so ! He just took a handful of bright worlds, 
 and scattered them about the sky, and they 
 dropped into most beautiful positions, so that 
 people say, ^' There is the Great Bear ; " and, 
 " That is Charles's Wain," and every country- 
 man knows the Reaping-hook. Have you not 
 seen it, brethren? Others say, "That is the 
 Virgin, and that is the Eam, and that is the 
 Bull," and so on. 
 
 I think that naming of the various constel- 
 lations is very like a good deal of mystical 
 preaching that there is nowadays. The preach- 
 ers say, " That is so-and-so, and that is so-and- 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 201 
 
 SO." Well, perhaps it is so ; but I do not see 
 it. You may imagine anything you like in 
 the constellations of the heavens. I have pic 
 tured a fortress in the fire, and watched it be> 
 ing built up, and seen little soldiers come and 
 pull it all down. You can see anything in the 
 fire, and in the sky, and in the Bible, if you 
 like to look for it in that way ; you do not see 
 it in reality, it is only a freak of your imagi- 
 nation. There are no bulls and bears in the 
 heavens. There may be a virgin, but she is 
 not to be worshiped as the Romanists teach. 
 I hope you all know the pole-star ; you ought 
 also to know the pointers ; they point to the 
 pole-star, and that is just what we ought to do, 
 to direct the poor slaves of sin and Satan to 
 the true Star of liberty, our Lord and Saviour, 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 Then there are the Pleiades ; almost anybody 
 can tell you where they are. They are a cluster 
 of apparently little stars, but they are intensely 
 bright. They teach me that, if I am a very 
 little man, I must try to be very bright ; if I 
 cannot be like Aldebaran, or some of the 
 brightest gems of the sky, I must be as bright 
 as I can in my own particular sphere, and be 
 as useful there as if I were a star of the first 
 magnitude. Then, on the other side of the 
 globe, they look up to the Southern Cross. I 
 
202 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 dare say one of our brethren from Australia 
 will give you a private lecture upon that con- 
 stellation. It is very beautiful to think of the 
 Cross being the guide of the mariner ; it is the 
 best guide any one can have, either this side 
 of the tropics or the other. 
 
 Besides the stars, there are vast luminous 
 bodies which are called Nebula. In some 
 parts of the heavens there are enormous 
 masses of light-matter; they were supposed 
 by some to be the material out of which worlds 
 were made. These were the lumps of mortar, 
 out of which, according to the old atheistic 
 theory, worlds grew by some singular process 
 of evolution ; but when Herschel turned his 
 telescope upon them, he very soon put the 
 nose of that theory out of joint, for he dis- 
 covered that these nebulae were simply enor- 
 mous masses of stars, such myriads upon myr- 
 iads of miles away that, to our sight, they 
 looked just like a little dust of light. 
 
 There are many wonderful things to be 
 learned about the stars, to which I hope you 
 will give your earnest attention as you have 
 the opportunity. Among the rest is this fact, 
 that some stars have ceased to be visible to us. 
 Tycho Brahe said that on one occasion he found 
 
SCIENCES AS SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 203 
 
 a number of villagers looking up at the sky ; 
 and on asking them why they were gazing at 
 the heavens, they told him that a new star had 
 suddenly appeared. It shone brightly for a 
 few months, and then vanished. Many times 
 a starry world has seemed to turn red, as if it 
 were on fire; it has apparently burned, and 
 blazed away, and then disappeared. Kepler, 
 writing concerning such a phenomenon, says : 
 " What it may portend is hard to determine ; 
 and thus much only is certain, that it comes 
 to tell mankind either nothing at all, or high 
 and weighty news, quite beyond human sense 
 and understanding." In allusion to the opin- 
 ions of some, who explained the novel object 
 by the Epicurean doctrine of a fortuitous com- 
 bination of atoms, he remarks, with character- 
 istic oddity, yet good sense, '^ I will tell these 
 disputants—my opponents — not my opinion, 
 but my wife's. Yesterday, when weary with 
 writing, and my mind quite dusty with con- 
 sidering these atoms, I was called to supper, 
 and a salad that I had asked for was set before 
 me. ^It seems, then,' said I aloud, Hhat if 
 pewter dishes, leaves of lettuce, grains of salt, 
 drops of water, vinegar, and oil, and slices of 
 egg, had been flying about in the air from all 
 eternity, it might at last happen, by chance, 
 that there would come a salad.' * Yes,' says 
 
204 THE ART OF ILLUSTRATION. 
 
 my wife, ^ but not one so nice or well dressed 
 as this which I have made for you.' " 
 
 So I should think ; and if the fortuitous com- 
 bination of atoms could not make a salad, it is 
 not very likely that they could make a world. 
 I once asked a man who said that the world 
 was a fortuitous concourse of atoms, "Have 
 you ever chanced to have no money, and to be 
 away where you knew nobody who would give 
 you a dinner!" He replied, "Yes, I have." 
 " Well, then," said I, " did it ever happen to 
 you that a fortuitous concourse of atoms made 
 a leg of mutton for you, with some nice boiled 
 turnips, and caper sauce, for your dinner?" 
 "No," he said, "it has not." ^"Well," I an- 
 swered, "a leg of mutton, at any rate, even 
 with turnips and caper sauce included, is an 
 easier thing to make than one of these worlds, 
 like Jupiter or Venus." 
 
 We are told, in the Word of God, that one 
 star differeth from another star in glory ; yet 
 one that is small may give more light to us 
 than a larger star which is farther away. Some 
 stars are what is called variable, they appear 
 larger at one time than another. Algol, in the 
 head of Medusa, is of this kind. We are told 
 that " the star, at the brightest, appears of the 
 second magnitude, and remains so for about 
 two days, fourteen hours. Its light then di- 
 
SCIENCES AS SOUKCES OF ILLUSTRATION. 205 
 
 minishes, and so rapidly that in three and a half 
 hours it is reduced to the fourth magnitude. 
 It wears this aspect rather more than fifteen 
 minutes, then increases, and in three and a 
 half hours more resumes its former appear- 
 ance." I am afraid that many of us are vari- 
 able stars ; if we do sometimes wax dim, it will 
 be well if we regain our brightness as quickly 
 as Algol does. Then there are thousands of 
 double stars. I hope that you will each get a 
 wife who will always shine with you, and never 
 eclipse you, for a double star may be very 
 bright at one time, and sometimes be eclipsed 
 altogether. There are also triple stars, or sys- 
 tems, and quadruple systems, and there are, in 
 some cases, hundreds or thousands all spinning 
 round one another, and around their central 
 luminaries. Wonderful combinations of glory 
 and beauty may be seen in the stellar sky ; and 
 some of these stars are i-ed, some blue, some 
 yellow ; all the colors of the rainbow are repre- 
 sented in them. It would be very wonderful 
 to live in one of them, and to look across the 
 sky, and see all the glories of the heavens that 
 God has made. On the whole, however, for 
 the present, I am quite content to abide upon 
 this little planet, especially as I am not able 
 to change it for another home, until God so 
 wills it. 
 
SUNDAY-SCHOOL AS AN INSTITUTION, What Shall We Do 
 With The— By George Lansing Taylor, O.D. Fourth 
 edition. Square 16nio, cloth, 30 cents. Paper. 20 
 cents. 
 
 THE CENTRAL METHODIST says: "This is the clearest 
 and most yigorous protestation of the whole Sunday-School 
 question in a nutshell we have seen. It is a work that ought 
 to be in the hands of all preachers, since its practical treatment 
 of the difficulties of our present system, and the proper remedy 
 to be applied make it valuable to them." 
 
 PREACHER'S MAGAZINE, THE.-Edited by Revs. Mark Guy 
 Pearse and Arthur E. Gregory. Published Monthly, 
 $1.50 per year. Single copy, 15 cents. No free 
 samples. Bound volumes, net $2.50. Cloth covers, 
 for binding net, 35 cents. 
 
 REV. C. H. SPURGEON says: "This unpretentious 
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 Each number is a capital return for the money." 
 
 GREAT THOUGHTS OF THE BIBLE.By Rev. John Reid. 12mo. 
 cloth, 318 pp. $1.50. 
 
 The author has just gone far enough in the subject not to 
 he tiresome, believing that compact thought is the want of the 
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 THE NEW YORK CHRISTIAN ADVOCATE says: "Itisabook 
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 THE CHRISTIAN AT WORK says: *' It is a book which will 
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iVATURE AND THE BIBLE ; A Course of Lectures on the Morse 
 Foundation of the Union Theological Seminary.— By 
 J. W. Dawson, LL D. 12nio. cloth, 258 pp. Illustrated. 
 $1.75. 
 
 THE INTERIOR says: ''Professor Dawson discusses his 
 topic from the various standpoints of a student of nature, not 
 from the single standpoint which has mostly heen occupied by 
 theologians. The book is not a partisan publication. It will 
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 mitting difficulties in their full force, and not seeking to evade, 
 misinterpret, or exaggerate any fact or argument." 
 
 CONCESSIONS OF "LIBERALISTS" TO ORTHODOXY.-By 
 Daniel Oorchester, 0.0. IZmo. cloth, 344 pp. $1.50. 
 
 The book is worthy all commendation for the extensive 
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 cardinal topics : The Diety of Christ, the Atonement, and End- 
 less Punishment. 
 
 THE WESTERN CHRISTIAN ADVOCATEsays ; "A book that 
 should be in every minister's library. The doctor's style is 
 singularly pure and candid, and the diction and dignity, 
 scholarship and research is manifest in every page." 
 
 QOSPEL OF COMMON SENSE, THE, As contained In the Gan- 
 nonical Epistle of James— By Charles F. Deems, D. D., 
 LL. D. 12mo. cloth, 320 pp. $1.50. 
 
 JOSEPH COOK says : "Dr. Deems eminent common sense 
 never appeared more profitable than in his fresh, incisive and 
 most timely discussion of St. James' Epistle as the Gospel of 
 Common Sense. The book is at once popular and scholarly, 
 broad and deep, radical and conservative." 
 
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 book i% racy and most readable. It ought to be read at every 
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 ^circulation of this capital volume." 
 
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