“The most intelligent hearers are those who enjoy most heartily the simplest preaching. It is not they who clamor for superlatively intellectual or aesthetic sermons. Daniel Webster used to complain of some of the preaching to which he listened. "In the house of God" he wanted to meditate "upon the simple varieties, and the undoubted facts of religion;" not upon mysteries and abstractions.”
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Austin Phelps, American Congregational minister and educationalist, was born at West Brookfield, Massachusetts.
He studied theology at Union Theological Seminary, at the Yale Divinity School, and later at Andover. Circa 1840, he was licensed to preach by the Third Presbytery of Philadelphia. During the Autumn of 1842, he married Elizabeth Phelps (nee Stuart, August 13, 1815 - December, 1852). Around the time he got married, he was pastor of the Pine Street (Congregational) Church in Boston. In the Spring of 1848 his family moved to Andover and from then till 1879 was professor of sacred rhetoric and homiletics at Andover Theological Seminary. Later to become president from 1869 to 1879, when his failing health forced him to resign.