Evans Christmas

DEPRESSING VIEWS OF HIMSELF For several years after this, Mr. Evans entertained painfully depressing views of his Christian character and ministerial talents. He thought every other believer had more light than himself, and every other preacher greater gifts. He called himself “a mass of ignorance and sin.” He imagined his discourses entirely useless to his hearers. This he attributed partly to his habit of repeating them memoriter. Others appeared to him to speak extemporaneously, and he “thought they received their sermons directly from heaven,” while he, by memorizing his, forfeited the aid of the Holy Spirit. “I therefore changed my method,” says he, “and took a text without any premeditation, and endeavored to speak what occurred to me at the time. If bad before, it was worse now. I had neither sense nor life, nothing but a poor miserable tone, which