inwrought into his style, that they are incapable of being detached and presented to the eye like separate gems. We cominend his productions to the study of all those who aspire to wield the power of tongue or pen, especially to those who are under an inspired injunction to "study to show themselves approved unto God, workmen, needing not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." There are laws of thought and emotion in human souls as definite and changeless as the properties of matter. He who would overcome the spiritual inertia in a depraved heart, must be as familiar with the philosophy of persuasion as the machinist is with the philosophy of dynamics. Oratory is as much an experimental science as civil engineering; it is building a suspension bridge to an insulated mind. Hence the necessity of oratorical rules and models. Such a model is accessible to all our young men who have money enough to purchase the speeches of Demosthenes and mind enough to master them. They will find a Napoleonic strategy in the disposition of his topics, and a sharp discrimination between his arguments. They will observe the consummate art of his compound periods, memorable for unity, perspicuity, and force; his wonderful skill in the management of facts, and his power to digest them into arguments, and to press every point to the utmost by a facility of condensed restatement. They will admire the keenness of his satire, like a razor of polished steel encased in a style of burnished gold; and his delicate and well-timed appeals to the feelings to allay prejudice, and to prepare the mind for the reception of his arguments. His ability to surcharge a single word with an electric power sufficient to prostrate an antagonist by a single shock will awaken surprise. The student of Demosthenes will find his imagination strengthened and chastened by the orator's dramatic grouping of facts, presenting a scene to the eye like a painting -an unrivaled power of graphic delineation, exemplified in modern times by some of Webster's finest descriptive narratives. He will bow before his occasional outbursts of impassioned feeling, and he will tremble for the luckless victim doomed to endure the Alpine avalanches of his invective.

Let us mingle with the Athenian Ekkλŋoía who throng the Pnyx at some great national exigency. A messenger is intro

duced bearing important dispatches. The herald asks, "Who wishes to harangue?" There is no response. After the question has been repeated many times, Demosthenes mounts the bema. His calm countenance gives no indications of the volcanic fires shut up within his soul. He begins with deliberation. He startles by no paradoxes, he excites by no extravagances, he enchains by no novelties, he charms by no subtleties, but, taking the facts which lie around them and the thoughts which repose within them, he proceeds to enforce the duty of the hour. His theme is the peril of the state. The crisis is the last move of the Macedonian upon the great Panhellenic chess-board. Elatea is taken. A few plain sentences place the state of the facts in a clear light before all eyes. A few more sentences let in the sunlight upon the dark purpose of the peace-proposing Philip. Then, in imagination, he makes the Athenians see the conquering squadrons of Macedon desolating Attica. He holds up the dark picture of national overthrow, with the extinction of their boasted democracy in the night of despotism, and the still darker picture of the disgrace which will ever blot the generation which cravenly yielded, without a struggle, to the upstart of Pella, the glorious heritage for which their fathers breasted the Persian myriads at Marathon, Salamis, and Platea. Terror and despair brood over the assembled people, and their hearts sink within them. Should the orator descend now all is lost. Despair paralyzes, hope awakens to effort. The orator continues to speak. A rift appears in the leaden cloud, and the sun streams through and paints the rainbow over Attica. Thebes may be won over to our alliance, the Grecian States may unite and conquer, "and the impending danger may pass away as a cloud." The speaker's voice is drowned in the tumultuous shout, "Lead us to Philip." The orator has triumphed. His countrymen, enervated and demoralized by a love of ease and pleasure, heroically march forth to the unequal conflict of Cheronæa, and fall beneath the tread of the invincible Macedonian phalanx.

5. The triumph of Demosthenes over extraordinary impediments by a vigorous system of self-culture, is an example replete with instruction to aspirants to eminence in the art of public speaking. We must be pardoned for alluding to a subject so

trite as his cure of his hesitating utterance, short respirations, and uncouth gesticulations, by a persistent course of discipline, for we are writing for the special benefit of our clerical brethren, some of whom may be disheartened by similar infirmities. We cannot, therefore, deem this paper complete without asking our readers to visit, with us, the study of the great orator, and to learn the secret of his Herculean strength,

Whose resistless eloquence

Wielded at will that fierce democratie,

Shook the arsenal, and fulminated over Greece

To Macedon, and Artaxerxes' throne."

The goblet on the table is not brimming with the ruby wine. Its owner is a water-drinker, an original tee-totaler, not for conscience' sake, but for eloquence; and he manfully bears the reproach of abstemiousness amid the scoffs of his tippling enemies. Every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things, is a maxim, the wisdom of which was demonstrated by the athletæ, centuries before it was recorded among inspired truths. The illustrious Grecian needs no artificial stimulants to fire him for his coming effort in the popular assembly. Had the fumes of the narcotic weed been, in his day, a fashionable mode of physical defilement and mental stupefaction, we are warranted in the assertion that this prince of orators would have spurned the enslaving opiate. The sword may no longer be suspended from the ceiling to check the ungraceful shrug of his shoulder; the pebbles, with which his respirations were prolonged, may be lying upon the beach of Phalerum, where he practiced his last vocal exercise to the crested waves. But the workman himself is in his workshop forging, link by link, the adamantine chain with which he will bind his country's foes and lead them in triumph. No labor is shunned. Stroke after stroke from that Cyclopean arm rings upon the anvil. Every word is weighed, and every sentence is turned over and over beneath the sledge till it assumes the required shape. No such motto as Orator nascitur non fit is written on the walls of this laboratory. Here it is demonstrated that the proudest laurels of speech are won, not by fitful genius, but by patient toil. Emerson has somewhere said that mediocrity can declaim an oration the fifteenth time more effectively than genius can the first time. This truth may

be rendered more impressive when generalized and formulated after the manner of the algebraist, thus:

Work is the only succedaneum for genius. Drill is the recreator of the man. It is generally supposed that the speaker from memory excludes himself from the highest style of oratorical effect, but the practice of Demosthenes does not sustain this notion; neither does the practice of Whitefield, whose fifteenth public delivery of a sermon, in the judgment of Dr. Franklin, was necessary to develop his maximum power. There is a well-authenticated tradition that the modern pulpitcharmer, Summerfield, who enchained multitudes with his apparently impromptu flights of imagination and outbursts of pathos, was accustomed in his preparation for the pulpit to rehearse his sermons by the clock. Had Dr. Olin unwisely burned his manuscripts he would not only have robbed the world of a rich legacy of sterling, original thought, expressed in a pure and majestic style, but he would have hidden from his brethren the secret staircase by which he mounted to his acknowledged pre-eminence in sacred oratory. But that secret is unvailed by the discovery, after his death, of carefully written copies of all his great sermons, corresponding with verbal exactness with those spoken productions which swayed his hearers as the tornado sways the forest, and which impressed their very words upon the student's memory "as laid in the rock forever." He added to his great natural powers the most laborious study. We are not authorized to say that he preached entirely from memory; but facts do justify the assertion that Demosthenes never more thoroughly prepared himself for the bema than did Olin for the pulpit. He made success a duty, and he made preparation for success a matter of conscience. He abhorred 'slip-shod sermons " and a reliance upon " an inspiration which never comes to help a sluggard in his time of want.

There are few living orators to contest the palm of eloquence with Edward Everett, whose pen patiently records every word of his great speeches, and his memory faithfully transcribes every sentence before his lips become the fountain of mellifluent periods. The rising stars of the Wesleyan pulpit, Arthur and Punshon, whose fitly spoken words are like apples of gold in

pictures of silver, are model extemporizers; and yet, while they disclaim preaching memoriter, they candidly disavow improvised diction, and declare that they have the entire sermon in their "mind's eye" when they announce the text. A perfect verbal memory is a rare gift. Many who are moved by the Holy Spirit to the Christian ministry can never attain it even by the severest discipline; and very few can make it available so frequently as the sacred office demands. For this reason we do not assert that the illustrious son of Athens is in this regard a model for all preachers of the Gospel. Yet we do insist that those endowed with this aptitude should not neglect the gift of God that is in them, and through the influence of a vain expectation of divine inspiration, or of unfounded prejudice, or of culpable indolence, never magnify their high vocation by the application of all their powers to a work "which filled a Saviour's hands."

Every preacher who studies himself and his work will find deficiencies to be supplied and excellences to be acquired affording scope for the most assiduous self-culture. So many elements enter into the perfect orator-posture, gesture, mien, eye, pitch and quantity of voice, pronunciation, intonation, grammar, rhetoric-that he would be the eighth wonder of the world in whom all these excellences in perfection were combined by nature.

Unfounded religious scruples deter many from that elocutionary culture requisite to enhance their usefulness. It is supposed that attention to the manner of preaching is incompatible with reliance upon the Holy Spirit's promised aid in the proclamation of saving truth. But the dispensation of the Spirit is not a dispensation from labor. It is not a license to laziness, but rather a cheering voice arousing to higher effort, crying, Work, for God works with you.

Mr. Wesley, one of the highest authorities in all matters relating to preaching, gives to his young men the following sound advice: "It is more difficult to find out the fault of your gesture than those of your pronunciation; for a man may hear his voice, but he cannot see his own face, neither can he observe the several motions of his own body, at least but imperfectly. To remedy this you may use a large looking-glass as Demosthenes did, and thereby learn to avoid every disagreeable and