A course of lectures on preaching by RL Dabney (Available from Amazon or free here)
This week Dabney continues giving his essential maxims on persuasion.
Last week we saw his first two maxims. This week we are told:
(i) 'The phenomenon of instinctive sympathy is the orator's right arm in the work of persuasion';
(ii) 'The highest skill of the orator is displayed in employing the great law of suggestion in his hearer's minds, to extend his power over their emotions and to give warmth to their apprehensions of sacred truth'.
Dabney revealed at the end of his discussions of persuasion where true persuasion comes from: 'Of all this art of persuasion he is the greatest master who seems to have none. Let your aim be to persuade men in Christ's name, and not to be praised for skill in persuading. These two distinct ends many preachers confound. You saw that the power over others hearts depends upon your own disinterested and genuine emotion. You must so hunger for the salvation of the souls before you, that you shall desire to make the effect of sacred truth fill them, to the exclusion of yourself. You must be willing to be nothing in their eyes, and to let your effect be everything. He is not the true preacher who sends his hearers home exclaiming, " How eloquent the minister to-day ; how beautiful his imagery; how artful his arrangement; how skilful his argument and his persuasion !" But he is the true sacred orator, who dismisses them so possessed and overpowered by God, that they have forgotten the creature who was the channel of the truth. The message should hide the messenger. To make you masters of the emotions of others, then, self-seeking must be annihilated, and self-renunciation must have its perfect work. It is divine grace which makes the effective minister. '
Real persuasion is done by the grace of God, not by clever rhetoric.
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.
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