The want of this is one great cause of the
little success, both of our preachers at home, and of our missionaries
abroad. They hide beneath an unseemly veil, a beauty that should strike
all eyes, and win all hearts. Their style is just the opposite of
everything that can instruct, attract, command. And it is vain to expect
much improvement in the present generation of religious teachers. They
could not get a good style without a long and careful study of good
authors, and for this many of them have neither the taste nor the
needful industry. They would have to begin life anew, to be converted
and become as little children, before they could master the task. They
cannot _think_ of religion but in common words. They cannot think there
can be divine truth but in the old phrases. To discontinue them,
therefore, and use others, would in their view, be to become heretics or
infidels. In truth, many of them seem to have no ideas. Their phrases
are not vehicles of ideas, but substitutes for them. If they hear the
ideas which their phrases did once signify, expressed ever so plainly in
other language, they do not recognise them, and instantly suspect the
man who utters them of unsoundness in the faith, and apply to him all
the abusive terms of ecclesiastical reproach.
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