Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 64:254 (Apr 1907)
Article: The Value And Uses Of The Imagination In Preaching
Author: Albert Henry Currier

BSac 64:254 (April 1907) p. 201

The Value And Uses Of The Imagination In Preaching

Professor Albert Henry Currier

The most successful preachers of the past and present have been and are, almost without exception, distinguished for their power and use of the imagination. Their sermons glow with light, life, and beauty. The truths they enforce are made clear, attractive, and pungent by appropriate illustrations. The reasons for this are not far to seek. Most people are best taught by object-lessons. Pictures interest alike grown people and children. While abstract propositions and bald statements of truth leave a congregation, generally, dull, listless, and unresponsive; all faces light up with interest and show themselves wide-awake and attentive, when the preacher gives to them an apt illustration. Like an enchanter’s wand, this opens dull ears and arrests careless attention. Only a fraction of the congregation, and the smallest fraction, too, can follow a train of close reasoning; but all of them can appreciate and enjoy a good story, or a simile which happily illustrates the thought. In the one case the preacher appeals to a faculty possessed in different degrees by a limited number; in the other to one that is universal, at least in its receptive capacity. Though one declare and think himself destitute of imagination, this state-

BSac 64:254 (April 1907) p. 202

ment is not strictly true of any one. He may lack the poetic faculty, be incapable of the novelist’s art or story-teller’s power of invention, but not the vision and the faculty divine, which sees and delights in pictorial representations of truth when presented.

This will become more evident upon consideration of the nature and work of the imagination.

What is the imagination? What things are included in the range of its operations? It is the creative, picture-making faculty of the mind. “The imagination,” says Dr. C. C. Everett, “is the power of mental vision, a power which creates that which it beholds.” Its simplest operation is where the mind reproduces for itself the forms which the senses have presented to it before,—as when one recalls the scenes of childhood, or walks along a familiar street in a very dark night. The darkness is so great that his eye sees nothing,—not the houses on the street, nor the breaks and inequalities of the sidewalk; but his mind sees them,—their shape, color, location, and he walks on without hesitation or perplexity, and turns in at the right door. Travelers and artists habituate themselves to this use of the imagination. The summer tourist who has visited Switzerland or England, on his return recalls the striking and sublime mountain scenery of the one, and the cathedrals, palaces, historic monuments, and cities of the other, and de...