instead of important and impressive facts, in their appropriate tone. This fault is sufficiently ridiculous to ears not indurated to it, by the effect of custom. But the speaker who makes it, has never dreamed of its existence in his personal habits; and he goes on, from year to year, announcing sacred truths in the tone and accent of a series of sly jokes. The effect of such utterance, when added to the proverbial coldness and stiffness of general manner, current, more particularly, in the pulpits of New England, is one great cause of the avowed dislike, so generally expressed in other parts of the country, to the style of preachers from that quarter. A slight attention to culture would suffice to put an end to such impediments to the legitimate influence of the pulpit.

The undisciplined speaker fails, usually, in adequate length of pauses. He allows no opportunity for an impressive thought to "sink down into the ear," and penetrate the heart; he hastens on, heedlessly, over the most momentous thoughts, as if they were matters of indifference; and the effects which he produces on his hearers, are correspondent to his style. Truth, uttered in such modes, is stripped of its reality, and leaves the soul callous to its power. A false current notion, that the elocution of the pulpit is to be modelled on that of the bar, or the popular assembly, induces some speakers to imagine that eloquence consists in fluency, and that the acceptable preacher is he who does not keep his people waiting for his words, but glides on, on the "festina lente" principle, and judiciously shortens the duration of the penance of listening to a sermon. A moderate attention to the demands of solemnity and impressiveness, as prominent features of sacred eloquence, would guard the preacher from such errors of judgment and taste, while it would equally save him and his hearers from the lagging slowness and merciless drawling, which are also among the current faults of pulpit elocution.

The preacher who neglects the cultivation of his voice,

may be congratulating himself on his exemption from hollow and artificial tones, which he detects in others. But he is, perhaps, in the habit of using a high, thin, and squeaking pitch, which forbids the possibility of grave, deep, or solemn emotion, on the part of his hearers; matter how reverential the unuttered feeling which is, all the while, latent in the bosom of the speaker.

- no

An inevitable law of our constitution demands deep tones in the utterance of solemn emotions. The fireside tone is intolerable in the pulpit; the voice of familiar anecdote, substituted for that of grave and devout discourse, is a desecration to the ear. Yet a few hours' practice would enable most speakers to draw and observe the line which separates one pitch of voice and one mode of feeling from another. The preacher would thus obey, and coöperate with, the ordinations of Creative wisdom, and convert his voice from a hinderance into an effective aid to the purposes of his office.

But the undisciplined speaker in the pulpit, sometimes, —whether from inadvertence or erroneous impression, allows himself to fall into the opposite fault of a hollow, sepulchral, morbid voice, which is a mere matter of habit, and bears no relation to his theme, for the moment. He may actually be expatiating on the joys of heaven, with a voice which has precisely the pitch of the ghost in Hamlet, when describing the horrors of hell. The effect of such intonation usually is to make the ministrations of the pulpit associate themselves, in the feelings of an audience, with a condition of gloom and repugnance. Were the themes of pulpit eloquence such as never admitted strains of animation, cheerfulness, and delight, — were love and joy necessarily debarred from the circle of sacred emotions, the uniformly hollow, heavy voice of awe and horror, might be appropriate, as a characteristic of professional elocution. But on no other condition can it Yet how often is this burden of preternatural pitch

be so.

laid upon the sensibility of an audience, by the uncultivated voice of the preacher!

Fitness and beauty are the universal characteristics of organization, in all the works of God. The very analogies of man's constitution, predispose him to repeat these traits in all his humbler sphere of creation and effect. His nature thirsts for these, in every act of mind or body. But if false taste and erroneous habit usurp the control of the forming processes of education, the natural tendencies of mind are checked; the soul becomes callous; the eye becomes blind, and the ear deaf to propriety and grace. Perversion and evil, in every variety of shape, are the result. The mind ceases to perceive, the organs cease to execute their original purpose. Deformity is adopted as the model of grace; habit imbibes the influence and breathes the air, which custom has prescribed. Vitiated habit and depraved taste go hand in hand, in the work of desecration and corruption.

The current style of elocution, in the pulpit, forms a striking example of this downward tendency of mind and manner. The beautiful and wondrous adaptation of the human voice to the varied functions of expressive utterance, is clearly exhibited in the vivid and eloquent tones of childhood. It forms a most exquisite page in the poetry of man's life. But neglect and perversion commence, as formerly mentioned, with the processes of artificial culture; and power and grace of expressive tone gradually die out; so that the man, in his maturity, has lost the faculty of adapting voice to feeling, which he possessed in his earliest years. Not only so he has acquired mechanical and false habits of tone, which bury rather than give forth emotion. Of a hundred persons whom you may ask to read a vivid passage from the most natural of all writers, Shakspeare, not one, perhaps, can give the genuine tones of feeling to what he attempts to read. To do such a thing, is in fact, commonly thought to be the exercise of an art possessed only by an actor or

an elocutionist,

one who has made an express business of acquiring the vivid tones of emotion.

The same experiment of reading may be made with the Bible, or the hymn book, or with a page of a sermon; and the result will, for the most part, be, that neither layman nor clergyman utters any tone of feeling with its true and appropriate character. The agonies and the ecstasies of the Psalmist, will, usually, be read with the tones of perfect decorum in a modern gentleman; the seraphic ardor of Watts will be uttered with the coolest composure; and the sermon will be read as if the ideas of God, of heaven, and of hell, were things to which the human heart had acquired a comfortable indifference.

The uncultivated reader in the pulpit, thus nullifies, to the ear, whatever may be in his heart; and what was meant to pierce the inmost soul, "plays harmless round the head." The voice of the preacher, which ought to be the living link of connection between earth and Heaven, becomes a most effectual non-conductor. The immense power which lies wrapped up in the human voice, and which is only transcended by that of the soul itself, the negligent speaker has left dormant, till he has lost faith in its existence, and actually regards the endeavor to arouse it as on a par with the infatuated search for imaginary lost treasure.

Never, from his lips, shall come the startling or the thrilling note of warning to the slumbering spirit; the tone that makes a Felix tremble at the fearful possibilities of retribution; the voice that can melt the obdurate heart to tears of contrition; the words that can inspire the despondent or soothe the sorrowing soul, or "stir the blood like the sound of a trumpet," while it summons to "glory, honor, and immortality."

To the uncultivated speaker, the natural avenues of the heart, the modes of sympathetic tone, are, comparatively, shut. His feelings may be strong and deep; but he knows not how to give them effective utterance.

He

is powerless from want of practice. His voice, the appointed organ of communication with the soul, has become virtually dead. It might have been an instrument of electric effect, but he has chosen to let it rust unused. His voice, however, is but what the hand of Angelo would have been, undisciplined, uninspired by his soul, a mass of bone, flesh, ligament, and skin, as that of the laborer in the quarry, not that wondrous instrument, which more than any other production of Divine skill, has shown how "fearfully and wonderfully" the members of the human frame are formed, in adaptation to the purposes and capacities of the soul.

The preacher who neglects the cultivation of his organs, usually subjects himself to a whole host of disadvantages, distinct from those which are connected with the unskilful use of the voice. He offends the eye, by violating the natural laws of posture and motion, which regulate the human frame.

Man's body was designed to depict his emotions, by its sympathetic coöperation with his mind. But the preacher has listened to the prevailing cant around him, about attitude and gesticulation, and has neglected the natural use of his bodily members, as expressive agents; so that he has lost the power of using them, and even a natural, momentary exertion of using them, has become, to him, a conscious effort. In the unperverted years of childhood, his soul beamed forth in every posture, and in every action; his very frame radiated emotion, and invested itself with the powers of a spiritual presence. Such is man's natural condition. But education steps in, and imposes on his body the same train of evils which it inflicted on his voice. It quenches the light, and steals away the warmth of his being, and moulds his susceptible nature into low and arbitrary forms, either inevitable or actually prescribed. The informing spirit withdraws itself from its original resort to the exterior frame, and ceases to actuate it: the bodily organs are soon usurped by routine