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Savonarola was not merely the expounder of righteousness. He claimed to be a prophet revealing things which, to use his own words, "are beyond the scope of the knowledge which is natural to any creature." This element would have been a sign of weakness, if it had not been associated with a great personality, bent on noble ends. The severity of his warnings was often so fearful that the preacher himself shrank back from delivering them. On one occasion, he spent the entire night in vigils and prayer that he might be released from the duty of making known a message, but in vain. The sermon, he then went forth to preach, he called a terrific sermon.
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Philip Schaff, and David Schley Schaff, in History of the Christian Church, Vol. V (1910), p. 689

 

Girolamo Savonarola

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I don't know what this so-called pure gospel is. Was the preaching of John the Baptist pure? He did not say only, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!" (Matthew 3:2). He also "rebuked [Herod]...for all the evils which Herod had done" (Luke 3:19). He was beheaded because he didn't confine himself to abstract teaching. Jesus did not preach only the "pure" Sermon on the Mount, but also what some actual church leaders would have called a negative sermon: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!...Serpents, brood of vipers!" (Matthew 23:27,33). It is for such "impure" preaching that He was crucified. The Pharisees would not have bothered about the Sermon on the Mount.

 

Richard Wurmbrand

 

The sermon was based on what he claimed was a well-known fact, that there were no Atheists in foxholes. I asked Jack what he thought of the sermon afterwards, and he said, "There's a Chaplain who never visited the front."

 

Kurt Vonnegut

 

A leading Welsh minister — and Welsh ministers are, I think, among the best preachers — was invited to preach an anniversary sermon before one of the great societies in London. Naturally anxious to disregard no propriety, he consulted the proper authority, the secretary. "Should I read my sermon?" "Oh, it is no matter, only bring some of your Welsh fire with you." " But you cannot, my dear sir, carry fire on paper." "No, that is true; but you may use the paper to kindle the fire."

 

John (Presbyterian pastor) Hall

 

The preacher himself was burning with religious passion. He felt deeply and he was a man of deep devotion. He had the eye of the mystic and saw beneath the external and ritual to the inner movements of spiritual power.
The biblical element was also a conspicuous feature of his preaching. Defective as Savonarola's exegesis was, the biblical element was everywhere in control of his thought and descriptions. … He insisted upon the authority of Scripture. "I preach the regeneration of the Church," he said, "taking the Scriptures as my sole guide."

 

Girolamo Savonarola

 

A good sermon is an engineering operation by which a chasm is bridged so that the spiritual goods on one side — the "unsearchable riches of Christ" — are actually transported into personal lives upon the other. Here lies the difference between a sermon and a lecture.

 

Harry Emerson Fosdick