Pith in Exposition [pp. 619-636]

PITH IN EXPOSITION.
Popular exposition gains both in clearness and interest by
being linked to every-day facts of imagination and the senses.
With many, such facts largely stand in the place of first principles. And always, it is through those objects which all see
alike, through those pictures which are present in every mind,
that people of different types can best be brought into sympathy.
Take something with which everybody is familiar, and point out
in it a meaning which most people have never found there before, and you at once attract attention and gain credence. This
is the process by which the sciences are now becoming popularized. Chemistry in the laboratory, among retorts and strange
apparatus, was one thing; chemistry in sunbeams and in bread
sponge is quite another thing. Mlental and moral philosophy
now concern themselves more with the ordinary phenomena of
the coimmon consciousnesss of the race, and relatively less with
abstract reasonings and strange instances. And we are certainly to be congratulated on this drift of the thinking of our
clay. It is conducive not only to the utilizing of science and
philosophy, but also to their truest progress.
When the Christian expositor falls in with this movement, he
not only wisely adapts himself to circumstances, but conforms his method to that which the divine Master used, as an
example for teachers and all ages. Our homes and our little
ones, our gardens and our streets, our tables and shops and
tools, our courts and caucuses and prisons, our toils and festivi ties, our sinning and repenting, furnish our iest illustrations
of Scripture. As all the daily uses of life ought to be devoted
to G(iod, so we may find in all something which God's word was
designed to meet, and which may therefore serve to explain the
design and bearing of that word. Such exposition will always
be understood, and always awaken interest.
This is peculiarly true when the word is pointed, in the way
of rebuke, at current sins. Exposition in which this character istic is prominent is sure either to be extremely vivacious, or else
to awaken deeper feeling, and in either case it leads men to hear
and remember. But such exposition has its dangers, as well as
its advantages. The bold assailant of wickedness may easily
degenerate into an empty sensationalist, or a bitter, prejudiced
partisan. The man who started out as the champion of what
seemed to him an important truth may be betrayed into the at
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