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HOMILETICS, n. The science of adapting sermons to the spiritual needs, capacities and conditions of the congregation.

Ambrose Bierce

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Ambrose Bierce
Born: 1842
Born: June 24
Aphorist
Journalist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Meigs County
Ohio
Dod Grile
William Herman
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce
Ambrose Bierce
Conditions
Spiritual
Science
Adapting
Needs
Congregation
Capacities
Sermons
Spirituality
Capacity

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ORPHAN, n. A living person whom death has deprived of the power of filial ingratitude . . .
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Education, n.: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
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The quality that distinguishes love without knowledge.
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MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.
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Patriotism: The first resort of a scoundrel.
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PRESIDE, v. To guide the action of a deliberative body to a desirable result. In Journalese, to perform upon a musical instrument as, He presided at the piccolo.
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Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.
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PILGRIM, n. A traveler that is taken seriously. A Pilgrim Father was one who [was] not permitted to sing psalms through his nose [in Europe], followed it to Massachusetts, where he could personate God according to the dictates of his conscience.
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HOMŒOPATHIST, n. The humorist of the medical profession.
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If you would be accounted great by your contemporaries, be not too much greater than they.
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Learning -the kind of ignorance affected by (and affecting) civilized races, as distinguished from ignorance, the sort of learning incurred by savages. See nonsense.
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ROSTRUM, n. In Latin, the beak of a bird or the prow of a ship. In America, a place from which a candidate for office energetically expounds the wisdom, virtue and power of the rabble.
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The clarinet is a musical instrument the only thing worse than which is two.
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UNDERSTANDING, n. A cerebral secretion that enables one having it to know a house from a horse by the roof on the house. Its nature and laws have been exhaustively expounded by Locke, who rode a house, and Kant, who lived in a horse.
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Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues.
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Male, A member of the unconsidered or negligible gender. The male of the human race is commonly known to the female as Mere Man. The Genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers.
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Advice, the smallest current coin.
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Electricity is the power that causes all natural phenomena not known to be caused by something else
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REDRESS, n. Reparation without satisfaction.
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