Not Taxing Their Patience

“In order to maintain attention, avoid being too long. An old preacher used to say to a young man who preached an hour, — ‘My dear friend, I do not care what else you preach about, but I wish you would always preach about forty minutes.’ We ought seldom to go much beyond that — forty minutes, or, say, three-quarters of an hour. If a fellow cannot say all he has to say in that time, when will he say it?” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, p. 134).