Excerpt from Manual of Sacred Rhetoric: Or, How to Prepare a Sermon Some hold that Preaching is not an art. All your rules of rhetoric, sacred and\ profane, they say, are comprised in the good old American maxim: Fill yourself full of your subject, as though you were a barrel take out the bung; and let nature caper. It is hardly credible that such advice could be given or taken seriously. Yet men, unlikely to make a jest of sacred things, have been known to give it; and sermons heard occasionally in our pulpits prove that it is sometimes followed in prae tice. Nay, often the practice improves on the advice, and dispenses altogether with the filling up process. There must be art in the doing of any work in which complex means have to be employed to do it well; for art is the skill ful use of such means, whether the work be a kitchen table or an epic poem. Now. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.