it is equally so for the highest possible cultivation of what shall be popularly effective in the minister.
"No one who has given even a passing attention to the habits and feelings of our people can doubt of the immense effect of a ready and natural elocution: yet how little attention is paid to a right training for its acquirement! Looking at the ministrations of the Church practically and in detail; following them from the pulpit to the school-room, from the catechetical lecture to the chamber of sickness, from the instruction and consolation of the dying poor to the kind but dignified reproof of the careless and frequently half-intoxicated bystanders, from the abode of squalid misery to the parlour of worldly-minded avarice, fortified by incipient, perhaps confirmed, scepticism; from all these, to the platform for the propagation of Christian knowledge, or the exposure of anti-Christian error;-in whatever department of his labours you contemplate the minister of the Church, it would be difficult to estimate the advantage that might, under the divine blessing, be derived from Elocution classes in our Universities, where under the management of competent professors, our young men might be trained in recitation, both of selections from standard authors and of their own compositions on set subjects. . . . Instead of superseding any part of the present process, this might be added to it all; and if candidates for Orders were thereby delayed a year, there would be more than compensation for the delay in the increased competency for the work."
The ideas thus forcibly put forth by the eloquent divine who, in his own person, affords a striking example of great natural powers of oratory, developed and cultivated by elocutionary study and practice to the highest degree of perfection, must have been more or less felt by thousands—laymen as well as clergymen-who have at all considered the subject in any of its many forms and phases. No one can look around him, indeed, without being impressed with their truth and importance. Earnestly do