If you find any difficulty in illustrating your subject, I should strongly recommend you to _try to teach children_ whenever you can get an opportunity of doing so. I do not know a better way of schooling your own mind to the use of illustrations than frequently to take a class in the Sunday-school, or to give addresses to the scholars as often as you can; because, if you do not illustrate _there_, you will have your lesson or your address illustrated for you very strikingly. You will find that the children will do it by their general worry and inattention, or by their talk and play. I used to have a class of boys when I was a Sunday-school teacher, and if I was ever a little dull, they began to make wheels of themselves, twisting round on the forms on which they sat. That was a very plain intimation to me that I must give them an illustration or an anecdote; and I learned to tell stories partly by being obliged to tell them. One boy whom I had in the class used to say to me, "This is very dull, teacher; can't you pitch us a yarn?" Of course he was a naughty boy, and you may suppose that he went to the bad when he grew up, though I am not at all sure that he did; but I used to try and pitch him the yarn that he wanted in order to get his attention again. And I dare say that some of our hearers, if they were allowed to speak out during the sermon, would ask us to pitch them a yarn--that is, to give them something to interest them. I believe that one of the best things you can do to teach either the old or the young is to give them plenty of anecdotes and illustrations. * * * * * I think it would be very useful to some of you who are not yet adepts at the art of illustration if you were to _read hooks in which there is an abundance of metaphor, simile, and emblem_. I am not going fully into that subject on this occasion, because this lecture is only preliminary to the next two that I hope to deliver, in which I will try to give you a list of cyclopedias of anecdotes and illustrations, and books of fables, emblems, and parables; but I advise you to study such works as Gurnall's "Christian in Complete Armor," or Matthew Henry's "Commentary," with the distinct view of noticing all the illustrations, emblems, metaphors, and similes that you can find. I should even select _non_-comparisons; I like Keach's "Metaphors," where he points out the disparity between the type and the Antitype. Sometimes, the contrasts between different persons or objects will be as instructive as their resemblances.