Ministers must be educated to work after the divine Model. Many of you love to teach, but you have not taken up the work of teaching in the simplicity of the gospel of Christ. The people will listen to sermons which often are double the length they should be, and they can retain but few points of the discourse because their minds have been all the time on temporal, earthly things. Therefore they hear with such earthly thoughts that the truth of God does not make any impression. It does not reach to the very depths of the soul, and the plowshare of truth does not go deep enough. Then they go from the meeting and fall back where they were before. The sermons being often double the length they ought to be, the words lose their force upon the minds of the hearers. Other things come in to choke the seeds of truth. (VSS 232.4) MC VC