Lecture IV
Where Can We Find Anecdotes and Illustrations?
Dear brethren: After my last lecture to you, upon the uses of anecdotes and illustrations, you are probably quite ready to employ them in your discourses; but some of you may ask, “Where can we get them?” At the very beginning of this afternoon’s talk, let me say that nobody need make anecdotes in order to interest a congregation. I have heard of one who called to see a minister on a Friday, and he was told by the servant that her master could not be seen, for he was up in his study “making anecdotes.” That kind of work will not do for a Christian minister. I would also bid you beware of the many common anecdotes, which are often repeated, but which I half suspect could not be proved to be matters of fact. Whenever I have the slightest suspicion about the truth of a story, I drop it at once; and I think that everyone else should do the same. So long as the anecdotes are current, and are generally believed, and provided they can be used for a profitable purpose, I believe they may be told, without any affirmation as to their truthfulness being made in a court of justice; but the moment any doubt comes across the mind of the preacher as to whether the tale is at least founded on fact, I think he had better look for something else, for he has the whole world to go to as a storehouse of illustration.
If you want to interest your congregation, and keep up their attention, you can find anecdotes and illustrations in many channels, like golden grains glistening among the mountain streams. For instance, there is current history. You may take up the daily newspaper, and find illustrations there. In my little book, The Bible and the Newspaper, I have given specimens of how this may be done; and when I was preparing the present lecture, I took up a newspaper to see if I could find an illustration in it, and I soon found one. There was an account of a man at Wandsworth, who was discovered, with a gun and a dog, trespassing on some gentleman’s preserves, and he said that he was only looking for mushrooms! Can you imagine what the gun and the dog had to do with mushrooms? However, the keeper felt in the man’s pocket, and laying hold of something soft, asked, “What is this!” “Oh,” said the poacher, “it is only a rabbit!” When it was suggested to him that the creature’s ears were too long for a rabbit, he said that it was only a leveret, whereas it proved to be a very fine and plump hare. The man then said that he had found the hare lying near some mushrooms, but his intention was to get the mushrooms only! Now, that is a capital illustration. As soon as ever you lay hold of a man, and begin to accuse him of sin, he says, “Sin, sir! Oh, dear, no! I was only doing a very proper thing, just what I have a perfect right to do; I was looking for mushrooms; I was not poaching!” You press him a little more closely, and try to bring him to conviction of sin; and then he says, “Well, perhaps it was hardly the thing, it may have been a little amiss; but it was only a rabbit!” When the man cannot any longer deny that he is guilty of sin, he says that it was only a very little one; and it is long before you can get him to admit that sin is exceeding sinful; indeed, no human power can ever produce genuine conviction in the heart of a single sinner; it must be the work of the Holy Spirit.
I also read in the same newspaper of a calamitous shipwreck caused through the lack of lights. You could easily turn that incident to account by using it to illustrate the destruction of souls through the want of a knowledge of Christ. I have no doubt, if you were to take up any of this morning’s daily papers, you would very readily find an abundance of illustrations. Mr. Newman Hall, in addressing us once, said that every Christian minister ought to read regularly his Bible and The Times newspaper. I should imagine from the usual mode of his address that he does so himself. Whether you read that particular paper or any other, you should somehow keep yourselves well stored with illustrations taken from the ordinary transactions going on round about you. I pity even a Sunday-school teacher, much more a minister of the gospel, who could not make use of such incidents as the terrible burning of the church at Santiago, the great fire at London Bridge, the entrance into London of the Princess Alexandra, the taking of the census; and, indeed, anything that attracts public attention. There is in all these events an
