Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/74

 56 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

For instance, two men use the term &quot; evolution &quot; with quite the same technical significance; but one of them may be in his philosophy a Christian theist and the other a materialistic atheist, and by reason of this different philosophical setting the term will inevitably have a very different atmosphere of meaning in the two minds.

IV. PRACTICAL PROBLEMS INVOLVED

I. The first of these is the problem of understanding. That persons often misunderstand one another is the veriest commonplace of experience, and it constitutes one of the most persistent and serious problems of every-day life. It is important to inquire how the difficulty can be overcome, so that minds sharply differentiated may still be able to understand one another well enough at least to hold profit able intercourse and not to do each other serious injustice by misinterpretation. Fortunately it seems to be true that wide and varied experience, acquaintance with many phases of life and general intellectual culture not only lead to a higher differentiation of individual minds, but seem also to improve the productive or constructive imagination. By a sympathetic use of the constructive imagination a man whose mind is very different in organization from another s can, if he is acquainted with the conditions under which the other has lived, approximately represent to himself his men tal system and thus get the clue to his meanings. Of course, men who are naturally gifted with imagination will always be able to do this with more success than others; but breadth of experience and general culture will greatly aid the highly endowed as well as the mediocre minds.

The first and most urgent problem of the public speaker, whether he be a lawyer before a jury, a statesman before the people or a preacher before his congregation, is to make himself understood. Only the dishonest politician can profit by a confusion of meaning. If in rare cases one may rightly conceal his thought from some of his hearers, as Jesus seems to have done on at least one occasion, it is

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