Pulpit Elocution

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: others, unmindful of his accountability to Heaven for every gift which he has received. In fine, the elocutionist labors to make the preacher natural, and therefore impressive, and thus attractive. The naturalness is to be the proper expression of the truth; the impressiveness is to be the legitimate effect of the thought fitly uttered; and the attractiveness is to be the alluring influence, which the purity and firmness and and grandeur of the word of God always exert upon a soul that is attuned to the love of holiness, or even awake to the beauties of intellect. THE STUDY OF ELOCUTION, AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE PREPARATION REQUIRED BY THE PUBLIC DUTIES OF THE MINISTRY. [Contributed by the Kev. Edward N. Kirk, pastor of the Mount Vernon Church, Boston.] It is easy to recognize the difference between a speaker who is agreeable and one who is disagreeable, between one who is powerful and another who is feeble. Nor can any one entertain a doubt whether that difference is just as obvious in the pulpit as in the senate. Every preacher would desire so to deliver his sermon as that his meaning should be clearly perceived and his sentiments deeply felt, rather than to utter it in a manner unintelligible and unimpressive. Every congregation of worshippers would prefer in their pastor a good delivery, to an awkward and disagreeable style of speaking. Let two men of equal piety and scholarship be presented to any of our religious societies; the one a man of easy, becoming carriage in the pulpit, of simple, natural, and powerful utterance; the other uncouth in attitude and movement, indistinct and stammering in his enunciation, and wearisome in his drawling tones; can any man in his senses doubt, which of the two will be chosen ? No; thus far the case is plain. But if we go back of...