{"agent_id":"blair","agent_name":"Hugh Blair","slug":"pulpit-eloquence","label":"Pulpit eloquence: should a sermon persuade like an oration, or is preaching a different art with different laws?","topic":"Pulpit eloquence","question":"Should a sermon persuade like an oration, or is preaching a different art with different laws?","position":"The preacher's business is persuasion to a course of life, not display and not controversy. The sermon should be grave, unaffected, addressed to conduct, and directed at the understanding and the heart together.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The preacher's business is persuasion to a course of life, not display and not controversy.","n":[]},{"t":"The sermon should be grave, unaffected, addressed to conduct, and directed at the understanding and the heart together.","n":[1,2]}]],"texts":"*Lectures* XXIX (eloquence of the pulpit), and the practice of the five volumes of *Sermons* (1777-1801). Reception: admired by Johnson and by George III; the evangelical critique of the Moderate pulpit is that it preached morality and left out the gospel; nineteenth-century critics found the manner cold.","works":["*Lectures* XXIX (eloquence of the pulpit), and the practice of the five volumes of *Sermons* (1777-1801)"],"reception":"admired by Johnson and by George III; the evangelical critique of the Moderate pulpit is that it preached morality and left out the gospel; nineteenth-century critics found the manner cold.","status":"Practiced as well as taught, in five volumes of sermons that were read far beyond Scotland.","era":"1718-1800","discipline":"Rhetoric","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"All pemasion, as I showed formerly, is to be founded on conviction. The understand- ing must always be applied to in the first place, in order to make a lasting impression on the heart: and he who would work on men's passions, or influence their practice, without first giving them just principles, and enlightening their minds, is no better than a mere declaimer.","label":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres"},{"n":2,"work":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"To recommend some one grace or virtue, or to inveigh against a particular vice, furnishes a subject not deficient in unity Or precision; but if we confine ourselves to that virtue or vice as assuming a particular aspect, and consider it as it appears in certain characters, or affects certain situations in life, the subject becomes still more interesting.","label":"Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"taste","label":"Taste: is there a real standard, or is criticism finally a report of what a cultivated person happens to like?"},{"slug":"belles-lettres-or-civic-art","label":"Belles lettres or civic art: does widening rhetoric to taste and criticism enrich it, or hollow out its public purpose?"},{"slug":"the-sublime","label":"The sublime: does it arise from terror, as Burke argued, or from grandeur and elevation of conception?"}]}