A course of lectures on preaching - Dabney - XXI - Lecture 22 (Action continued)

Required reading
A course of lectures on preaching by RL Dabney (Available from Amazon or free here) - Read Lecture 22 (Action continued).

My summary
Last week Dabney began to speak about action by dealing with utterance.  This week he finishes the discussion by talking about gesture.

Dabney defines gesture as 'the carrying, the port of the outer man in speaking' and claims that 'the essential requisite of gesture is, that it must be self-prompted: it must be the unpremeditated expression of the speaker's impulse.' 

He then gives some advice on how to learn to use gesture and what not to do.

What grabbed me
I think Dabney made a helpful point about verbalising your sermon aloud when alone: 'The other usage is that of declaiming aloud in solitude the discourse to be delivered. Here again my objection is that the process is unavoidably artificial ; the audience is not present, and the author has not the unaffected emotion which he will feel, if his heart is right before God, in the actual delivery. The only result of his solitary practice is therefore mischievous. The intonations which he so laboriously associates with each particular passage are deficient, heartless, inanimate, or else exaggerated and fantastical ; and when his soul is really thrown into the current of his discourse in its actual delivery, he will find them, if he is to speak at all well, erroneous, and obstructions to be gotten out of the way at the critical moment. If he had devoted all his labour to the preparation of his thought and style, and left the utterance to the prompting of the moment, together with the guidance of his general preparation, the tones would have been fresher and more appropriate. Should not the public speaker have any solitary practice, then, in utterance? I answer, yes; much of it. But it will be better for him to use any other composition whatever for such practice, than the one which he is about to deliver. Oratorical utterance and gesture must be at the moment unstudied, other wise they cannot have the charm of nature. The object of practice in private, then, is only the general culture of the voice, taste and manner. If you attempt by such means to decide in advance precisely how this particular sentence, or that, is to be delivered, you will assuredly decide ill ; because it is a matter which can only be well decided by the natural impulse of the moment.'

Preaching alone is not preaching.  It is a sham.

Next week's reading
Read Lecture 23 (Modes of preparation).

Now it's your turn
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.