1. By studying the great masters of the art of illustration. Beecher, Spurgeon, Dr. Parkhurst, are all worthy of emulation. Beecher testifies that in his early preaching the power to illustrate was only latent. He found that he was not reaching his hearers and he began to search for "likes." He went about his farm, upon the streets, among mechanics, in fact everywhere, with the thought of the next Sunday's sermon in his mind, saying, "What is this like? what will that illustrate?" A glance at his sermons shows them full of side-lights from business, life at sea, from the farm and the home, from mechanical processes, as the cutting and polishing of precious stones, and very often from nature. In a recent sermon Dr. Parkhurst illustrated his single point from botany, physics, physiology, a ship, and from the actual experience of two men engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the same appetite. But the power of these great preachers is only the reflex of the method of Christ himself. No man had greater power in picture-work. In range, fertility, aptness, and result, the word-pictures of Jesus stand alone in the history of teaching, just as in respect of beauty and power they stand alone in literature. 2. The power of picturesque speech is acquired through earnestness and love of truth, as well as through rich experience of nature and of common life. This is hinted at by Emerson: "A man's power to think and to speak depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth.... Picturesque language means that he who employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a picture arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence good writings and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous, provided one have lived sufficiently to fill his mind with the raw materials of such pictures. One bred in the woods shall not lose his lesson in the roar of cities.... At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of power are put into his hands." And as it is with contact with nature, so it is with first hand experience of life in any form.