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Bible Dictionaries
Preaching: Fruit and Flowers
Spurgeon's Illustration Collection
or
At Hampton Court Palace every one regards with wonder the enormous vine loaded with so vast a multitude of huge clusters: just outside the vine-house is as fine a specimen of the wistaria, and when it is in full bloom, the cluster-like masses of bloom, cause you to think it a flower-bearing vine, as the other is a fruit-bearing vine. Fit emblems these two famous trees of two ministries, both admired, but not equally to be prized; the ministry of oratory, luxuriant in metaphor and poetry, and the ministry of grace, abounding in sound teaching and soul saving-energy. Gay as are the flower-clusters of the wistaria, no one mistakes them for the luscious bunches of the grape; yet, there are many simpletons in spiritual things who mistake sound for sense, and seem to satisfy their hunger not on solid meat, but on the jingle of a musical dinner bell.
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Spurgeon, Charles. Entry for 'Preaching: Fruit and Flowers'. Spurgeon's Illustration Collection. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/fff/p/preaching-fruit-and-flowers.html. 1870.
