THE SPEAKER AT HOME.

CHAPTER I.

"Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to Heaven."-SHAKESPEARE.

N audience of hearers is one thing, an
audience of listeners is another. There
is, perhaps, no class of men who have
to realize this fact so often or so pain-

fully as the younger clergy. A congregation gathered together to hear the words of one whose appeals and counsel have often before sent them away better and happier men is, from that very fact, a congregation of listeners; but confront them with a smooth-faced youth of some four-and-twenty summers, and they become at once-the first stages of somnolence having been shown to be peculiarly sensitive of sound-hearers only in the most limited sense of the word.

Nor is it the younger clergy only who have to complain of this listlessness on the part of their hearers; from the very nature of the case, it is an

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evil which every preacher has more or less to contend with. Men go to the public meeting, to the courts of law, or to the Houses of Parliament, with minds occupied with the subjects under discussion; not so, however, with the congregations who gather Sunday after Sunday in our churches; their minds are too often entirely preoccupied with subjects the very antipodes to those which are to be brought forward, and, therefore, the danger evidently is that their thoughts will still flow on uninterruptedly in the same channel.

There is a story told of a shipbuilder in one of our large seaport towns, who, after attending service on the Sunday morning, remarked that he had planned out the whole of a new vessel which he had to commence, and that he was much pleased with many improvements that had suggested themselves to his mind, during the uninterrupted half hour of the sermon. On his return, however, on the following Sunday, after having heard a stranger, on being asked how he had got on with his ship-building, he declared that he had not been able to lay a single plank !

The first thing we have to do, then, disguise the fact as we may, is to break off the attention of our hearers from the matters which previously engross their minds. The question is, How is this to be done? Experience says that the system in vogue up to this time has signally failed, and that a large body of the most highly-educated men in the country are

positively unable to obtain a patient hearing for half an hour a week, on a topic which, for power of enlisting the attention and sympathies of all classes, has no equal.

Now the first requisite, that of gaining attention, is undoubtedly to be acquired by extempore speaking; whether such speaking be good, bad, or indifferent, you cannot help listening. Let four persons be in a room together-A is talking to B, and C to D, and B wishes to hear what C is saying; no matter what common-place A is talking, B cannot so entirely abstract his mind as to listen to C: this is ten-fold more the case in a public assembly, where hundreds are keeping silence for one man to speak.

One reason of this is well given in the following passage from Archbishop Whateley's Rhetoric.

"The audience are more sure that the thoughts that they hear expressed are the genuine emanation of the speaker's mind at the moment; their attention and interest are excited by their sympathy with one whom they perceive to be carried forward solely by his own unaided and unremitted efforts, without having any book to refer to: they view him as a swimmer supported by his own exertions; and in every such case, if the feat be well accomplished, the surmounting of the difficulty affords great gratification; especially to those who are conscious that they could not do the same. And one proof that part of the pleasure conveyed does arise from this source is, that as the spectators of an exhibition of

supposed unusual skill in swimming would instantly withdraw most of their interest and admiration, if they perceived that the performer was supported by corks, or the like, so would the feelings alter of the hearers of a supposed extemporaneous discourse, as soon as they should perceive or even suspect that the orator had it written down before him.”

All then, at first, is manifestly in favour of the extempore speaker; he has a listening and anxiously expectant audience.

What, then, shall induce any one to forego such an advantage? And what will induce even the members of a congregation themselves to say that they prefer to listen to a written sermon?

First, for the speaker himself—he says he has not sufficient fluency of language; secondly, subjectmatter is apt to fail him; thirdly, he has not the power of arranging his ideas into a clear and convincing argument; fourthly, he is apt to say that which after more mature reflection he would have omitted.

Many persons, who have never attempted to speak in public, decide that they have not sufficient fluency of language from the fact of their feeling a defect even in ordinary conversation. Now it may seem a curious assertion, but I believe that nearly all public speakers will affirm that they find it more difficult to express their ideas in one continuous flow of language in conversation than they do in a public address. Nay, many men have so felt their deficiency in