GREAT MEN'S BODIES
while his influence always made itself felt, powerfully if unobtrusively, on the right side.
"Further evidence of his industry is seen in his activity in pastoral work. The charge of a congregation numbering between three thousand and four thousand, and containing more than two thousand six hundred communicants, is itself, without the burden of preaching and outside writing, a task of great dimensions. But no minister in the city has been more assiduous than Dr. Hall, and no year has passed without at least one visit from him in every family of the congregation. It is his custom to have announced each week the streets in which he will make pastoral calls. His day begins at nine o'clock in the morning, when he is ready to receive visitors. Every hour until a bedtime not of the earliest has its duties and demands.
"In the pulpit Dr. Hall's predominant characteristics are his sincerity, lucidity, and simplicity of thought. The structure of his sermons shows that progress so vital to entertaining discourse. The manner is like the matter and the man. It is strong and simple and direct, with the charm of a rich, deep voice, in whose accents some discover a trace of the land which gave him birth. His language is the purest Anglo-Saxon. Although he preaches without notes or manuscript of any kind, yet his sermons are all carefully written out before their delivery."
The New York Sun of February 2, 1898, said: "The Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, throughout the thirty years of Dr. Hall's pastorate, has been the richest of the Presbyterian churches in this country, if not in the world. At one time its eligible pews were sold at prices equal to the cost of a very considerable house, and the salary of Dr. Hall was among the greatest ever paid to a Christian minister."
One glance at his body will satisfy any one as to where he gets his vigor; and he trained it by years of out-of-door life; for, "When John Hall was a young man and had the care of a thriving congregation at Armagh, in the north of Ireland, many of his people lived on farms three and four miles away from the town. In pastoral calls it was his custom to have a conveyance take him in the morning to the home of his most remote parish-
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