# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1857_S357
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Compilation of the Reports on Exordia.   357

he will not be able to spend any time at all on a special introduction, but will rather enter at once in mediam rem."

The reporter's opinion does not agree with this. Time-consuming the exordia can be only when they do not serve the sermon but stand in its way. In the opposite case they are as little time-consuming as hymn and prayer. To be sure, such introductions as do not lead in but lead out, where something is dragged in by the hair, whether it fits or not, and which therefore scatter the minds and turn them to all sorts of other things — such introductions are indeed time-consuming, to the detriment of the sermon. But from this it by no means follows that real introductions, which do what their name says, have the above quality. On the contrary, if the introduction serves me so that in the treatment I can steer all the more undisturbedly toward one goal and direct all the hearers' hearts thither, then it is not only not time-consuming and harmful to the sermon, but on the contrary highly conducive to it; for example, when in the introduction I refute all sorts of objections against the truth to be set forth in the sermon, or present its opposite in a few sharp strokes, then in the treatment I can go forward on one road all the more unhindered, without having to say now here, now there: but, beloved hearers, you must not misunderstand this — or without having to make one excursus after another. Thus the introduction contributes precisely to keeping the hearers' thoughts well together and to impressing upon them the principal propositions of the text; and that surely cannot happen to the detriment of the sermon.

Concerning the separation of the exordium from the peroratio by a pulpit hymn stanza I can give myself no account. Without doubt the pulpit stanzas were originally meant to serve for separating the introductions — which themselves formed a little sermon and usually expounded a passage out of the Old Testament — from the actual explanation of the evangelical pericope, since the latter was of quite another content; wherefore they certainly scatter more than they gather. —

That the exordia are on this account to be rejected, because we in any case for the most part preach too long already, and the text is in itself too rich for it to be sufficiently exhausted — of that there is no doubt; but whence comes it that we mostly preach too long? It comes from this, that we do not work out our sermons thoroughly enough, that we do not mercilessly cut away everything that does not directly serve the matter, that we use too many tautologies. We think that if we do not give a long and broad explanation the people will not understand, whereas by that very means we often veil the matter, weary the hearers, and preach long without need. But if we were to present everything in short, measured expressions, we should in a shorter time draw considerably more out of the text. That we preach too long is no virtue, but a