HOW TO GET STRONG
stead, he had crouched in behind a desk, and read from a paper, precisely as half, and more, of our ministers do read to-day—why, that audience would have flowed out of those doors; or, rather, would have never flowed into them; till they would have had to close the church because it did not pay.
And yet had Beecher any better chance—as good a chance as you have to-day—of counting for anything in the pulpit when, his own sexton, he was sweeping out his little church of only nineteen members in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, on three hundred dollars a year, half of it paid from the Home Missionary Fund; and the best suit he owned, when he first came East to preach, was so threadbare and shiny that his wife was ashamed of it?
And do you think that he got this power to speak without working for it?—without learning how to speak? On the contrary, Professor Mathews says that he placed himself at college under a skilful teacher; and for three years was drilled incessantly, he says, in posturing, gesture, and voice-culture. Later, at the Theological Seminary, he continued his drill. In a large grove between the Seminary and his father's house he says that he and others used to make the night and even the day hideous by exploding all the vowels from the bottom to the very top of their voices. And what was the result? "The drill I underwent produced, not a rhetorical manner, but a flexible instrument, that accommodated itself readily to every kind of thought, and every shade of feeling, and obeyed the inward will in the outward realization of the results of rules and regulations." Have you put yourself through any such preparation as that? Or as Demosthenes did for three whole months locked up in that subterranean cellar? These men meant to be speakers. Do you mean to be one? Does not knowledge
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