Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/274

 256 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

by continual association with our ethical principles may be organized into a sentiment of hatred, not for men, but for all conduct that is low and selfish. The development of this sentiment is one of the great tasks of the preacher. Even in this higher form the emotion of anger is a potent means of fusing a crowd ; and the ability to stir the moral indignation of an audience has been a chief element of power of many great orators, and should be cultivated by all preachers.

What writers on psychology call &quot; the tender emotion &quot; is another which is powerful as a means of melting an as sembly of heterogeneous individuals into a homogeneous psychical mass. The forms in which it is most serviceable to the orator are the love of parents for their children, the love of children for their mothers (the love for fathers tak ing rather the form of reverence), the love of men and women for little children, and the compassion which all normal people feel for the unfortunate, the weak and the helpless victims of injustice. In a general way the order of mention indicates the order in which forms of the tender emotion have historically developed in power. It is prob able that the last three have only in comparatively recent times attained to approximate universality as powerful sentiments, though now one can rarely be found who is not susceptible to these appeals. Such appeals may, of course, be overdone, but they rarely produce unhealthy psychological effects. Persons of weak intellectual organization may easily be overcome and thrown into a mental state from which no rational action can be expected. This, it is to be feared, not un frequently happens in &quot; high pressure &quot; evan gelistic services, when the danger of failing to meet one s mother in heaven is urged too strongly as a motive for con secrating oneself to Christian service. But in general these sentiments are so pure, so free from intermixture with the grosser passions of our nature, that they rarely produce excessive or demoralizing effects. They always tend to in cite men to courses of action which they bdieve to be good; and when the appeal to them is overdone, the cor-

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