IN CONCLUSION
nearly all. There are those who, after the fairest and most protracted series of trials, have satisfied themselves and their hearers that they can read more effectively than they can preach. But how many have really made any such trial? Starting next Sunday, give every clergyman in our land who now reads his sermons, in addition to his present salary, a hundred dollars for each sermon he will not read, but preach—with no desk or anything else but his people in front of him—and both pastor and flock, in hundreds of our parishes, would be electrified. He would get that hundred dollars every time. And nearly every time the congregation would get better sermons than it is getting now; and it will begin to look as if, as Mr. Beecher said of getting rich, the same reason exists why most ministers do not preach well; and that is because they are too lazy. And perhaps too timid. Ask the ferry-hands at Fulton Ferry from New York, on a Sunday in his day—no, you did not need to ask them—where all those crowds were going. Hark a minute, and you would hear: "Right up this way to Beecher's church! Second street to the right! Follow the crowd!" And men and women came from all over America and from other lands to hear this giant. No fear of empty benches there. Why, you would stand up outside often fifteen minutes before you could get standing-room even inside. And within, what a sight! Thousands of intent, eager, set faces, in a house where, but for the speaker's voice, you could have heard a pin drop—all determined to lose no word that fell from his lips! And all you saw on that broad platform was no pulpit, no desk, no anything else but a stalwart, magnificent, supremely earnest man, his face radiant with intelligence; with some great fact to tell, and almost bursting to divulge it. Suppose, in-
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