CLARENCE MACARTNEY ON PREACHING
Bourdaloue was the court preacher of Louis XIV. Wishing to rebuke the king for his profligate life, he drew in general terms a picture of a great sinner and the doom upon such a transgressor, hoping that the king would recognize the portrait. But perceiving that the pleasure-loving monarch was undisturbed, Bourdaloue suddenly cried out in a voice of thunder, as Nathan had once done to King David, “Thou art the man!” Afterward he said to the startled monarch, “Your majesty must not be angry, for in the pulpit I have no other master than the King of kings.” Delayed once for several hours in the town of Dijon in France, I went into the venerable cathedral there. What I remember now about that cathedral is the finely wrought stone pulpit, and just beneath it the figure of a recording angel, holding a tablet in one hand and a pen in the other, with face upturned toward the pulpit, waiting…
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