his own powers. a speaker has more knowledge or power than they of the kind he purposes to exhibit or they would not come to hear him. And even if he does go beyond their intelligence now and then they will hardly resent it, for it is rather gratifying than otherwise to the average man to have it assumed that he knows somewhat more than he actually does. Only, the speaker must guard against excursions and flights in which his audience will wholly fail to follow him. The intricacies of politics and theology, the technicalities of science, and the abstractions of philosophy, would clearly be out of place before a mixed assemblage.

An audience naturally assumes that

This may be said further: In general, the higher the intelligence of the auditors the more averse will they be to rant and bombast, the more quickly will they resent any attempt to influence their judgment by emotional appeals, the more will they care for simple facts and dispassionate reason. Not that they are necessarily less emotional, or take less pleasure in giving play to their emotional natures, only they realize that action should be governed by wisdom and judgment rather than by mere impulse. If they wish to satisfy the cravings of this emotional nature they know they have other resources, the drama, for instance, and poetry, where there is little or no persuasion to positive and immediate action.

Pulpit oratory is peculiarly apt to be of the emotional type. If religion is a matter of sentiment, of the feelings purely, there certainly can be no objection to this. But people are beginning to demand a reason for everything they do, and to suspect any religious movement,

as they would suspect any political movement, which does not invite full intellectual investigation; and so simple exhortation in the pulpit is more and more giving place to exposition and argument.

A good example of the first kind of preaching may be found in the second chapter of George Eliot's Adam Bede. The following example of pulpit oratory is taken from the opening and close of a sermon by the Rev. Dr. Talmage:

There are ten thousand ways of telling a lie. A man's entire life may be a falsehood, while with his lips he may not once directly falsify. There are those who state what is positively untrue, but afterward say "may be" softly. These departures from the truth are called white lies, but there is really no such thing as a white lie. The whitest lie that was ever told was as black as perdition. There are men high in church and state, actually useful, self-denying, and honest in many things, who, upon certain subjects and in certain spheres, are not at all to be depended upon for veracity. Indeed, there are multitudes of men who have their notion of truthfulness so thoroughly perverted that they do not know when they are lying. With many it is a cultivated sin; with some it seems a natural infirmity. I have known people who seemed to have been born liars. The falsehoods of their lives extended from cradle to grave. Prevarication, misrepresentation, and dishonesty of speech, appeared in their first utterances and were as natural to them as any of their infantile diseases, and were a sort of moral croup or spiritual scarlatina. But many have been placed in circumstances where this tendency has day by day and hour by hour been called to larger development. They have gone from attainment to attainment, and from class to class, until they have become regularly graduated liars.

The air of the city is filled with falsehoods. They hang pendent from the chandeliers of our finest residences. They crowd the shelves of some of our merchant princes. They fill the sidewalk from curb-stone to brown-stone facing. They cluster

round the mechanic's hammer, and blossom from the end of the merchant's yardstick, and sit in the doors of churches. Some call them 66 fiction." Some style them "fabrications." You might say that they were subterfuge, disguise, illusion, romance, evasion, pretence, fable, deception, misrepresentation; but, as I am ignorant of anything to be gained by the hiding of a God-defying outrage under a lexicographer's blanket, I shall chiefly call them in plainest vernacular lies.

Let us all strive to be what we appear to be, and banish from our lives everything that looks like deception, remembering that God will yet reveal to the universe what we really are.

To many, alas, this life is a masquerade ball. As at such entertainments gentlemen and ladies appear in the dress of kings and queens, mountain bandits or clowns, and at the close of the dance throw off their disguises, so many all through life move in mask. Across the floor they trip merrily. The lights sparkle along the wall or drop from the ceiling, a very cohort of fire. The feet bound, gemmed hands stretched out clasp gemmed hands, dancing feet respond to dancing feet, gleaming brow bends low to gleaming brow. On with the dance! Flash and rustle and laughter and immeasurable merrymaking! But the languor of death comes over the limbs and blurs the sight. Lights lower; floors hollow with selpulchral echo; music saddens into a wail. Lights lower; the maskers can hardly now be seen; flowers exchange their fragrance for a sickening odor, such as comes from garlands that have lain in vaults of cemeteries. Lights lower; mists fill the room; glasses rattle as though shaken by sullen thunder; sighs seem caught among the curtains; scarf falls from the shoulder of beauty a shroud. Lights lower; over the slippery boards in dance of death glide jealousies, disappointments, lust, despair; torn leaves and withered garlands only half hide the ulcered feet; the stench of the smoking lampwicks almost quenched, choking damps, chilliness, feet still, hands folded, eyes shut, voices hushed. Lights out!

On the public lecture platform oratory finds perhaps its broadest scope. Here subjects are drawn from every possible field, appeals are made to every conceivable motive, and the style ranges from the humorous to the pathetic and the sublime. Here then the orator has full play of his powers and may be expected to use every resource at his command.

The object of a public lecture is not in general to arouse people to any particular or hasty action; oftener this would seem to be very far from its purpose. And no doubt the people are inclined to look upon it solely as a means for their instruction or entertainment. But it is more than that. The lecture platform is a means for bringing the great leaders of the world's thought and action into closer touch with the masses whom they lead. The true public orator realizes this. He knows that while he may instruct and amuse he does it to better purpose than that. He knows that his responsibility is great because his opportunity is great and his influence incalculable. He knows that the fitly and fervently spoken word shall fall as a seed into the

hearts of his hearers to germinate in due season and blossom into lovely or unlovely characters and bear fruit in deeds that shall be a curse or a blessing to all humanity. With this realization full upon him he may well feel that there is no dignity or sincerity or wisdom or strength that he should not strive to attain.