Excerpt from The Art of Illustration While we thus commend illustrations for necessary uses, it must be remembered that they are not the strength Of a sermon any more than a window is the strength of a house; and for this reason, among others, they should not be too numerous. Too many openings for light may seriously detract from the stability Of a building. We have known sermons so full of metaphors that they became weak, and we had almost said crazy, structures. Ser mons must not be nosegays of flowers, but sheaves Of wheat. Very beautiful sermons are generally very useless ones. TO aim at elegance is to court failure. It is possible to have too much of a good thing: a glass house is not the most comfortable of abodes, and be sides other Objectionable qualities it has the great fault of being sadly tempting to stone throwers. When a critical adversary attacks our metaphors he generally makes Short work of them. To friendly minds images are argu ments, but to opponents they are opportunities for attack; the enemy climbs up by the win dow. Comparisons are swords with two edges which cut both ways; and frequently what seems a sharp and telling illustration may be wittily turned against you, so as to cause a. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.