1.C 08. Self-Consciousness

Self-Consciousness. No man will speak long with any interest when he thinks about himself. You may have the very best of sermons, but if your boot pinches or you have a painful corn, you will think about the boot and about the corn, and not about the sermon. A man needs to be brought out of himself as much as possible. You must relieve him from all manner of external embarrassment. Put a man where he is liable, as I have been, standing on the head of a barrel at a political meeting, to go through, and what will he think of? Now, on a little narrow platform one catwalk backward and forward, to be sure, bat if he go toward the edges ever so little, he is in fear of stumbling off. Yet even that is better than a box-pulpit. What has that to do with preaching? What do you want with it? What is it for? This evil is not confined to pulpits merely, but to all places where a speaker has to address a large body of men. I think the matter so important, that I tell the truth, and lie not, when I say that I would not accept a settlement in a very advantageous place, if I was obliged to preach out of one of those old-fashioned swallow s-nests on the wall.