I have sometimes heard of spells and charms to excite love, and have wished for them, when a boy, that I might cause others to love me.  But how much do I now wish for some charm which should lead men to love the Saviour!...  Could I paint a true likeness of Him, methinks I should rejoice to hold it up to the view and admiration of all creation, and be hid behind it forever.  It would be heaven enough to hear Him praised and adored.  But I can not paint Him; I can not describe Him; I can not make others love Him; nay, I can not love Him a thousandth part so much as I ought myself.  O, for an angel’s tongue!  O, for the tongues of ten thousand angels, to sound His praises.

He had a remarkable familiarity with the word of God and his mind seemed surcharged with its power.  “You could not, in conversation, mention a passage of Scripture to him but you found his soul in harmony with it—­the most apt illustrations would flow from his lips, the fire of devotion would beam from his eye, and you saw at once that not only could he deliver a sermon from it, but that the ordinary time allotted to a sermon would be exhausted before he could pour out the fullness of meaning which a sentence from the word of God presented to his mind.” [5]

He was wonderfully gifted in prayer.  Here all his intellectual, imaginative, and spiritual powers were fused into one and poured themselves forth in an unbroken stream of penitential and adoring affection.  When he said, “Let us pray,” a divine influence seemed to rest upon all present.  His prayers were not mere pious mental exercises, they were devout inspirations.

No one can form an adequate conception of what Dr. Payson was from any of the productions of his pen.  Admirable as his written sermons are, his extempore prayers and the gushings of his heart in familiar talk were altogether higher and more touching than anything he wrote.  It was my custom to close my eyes when he began to pray, and it was always a letting down, a sort of rude fall, to open them again, when he had concluded, and find myself still on the earth.  His prayers always took my spirit into the immediate presence of Christ, amid the glories of the spiritual world; and to look round again on this familiar and comparatively misty earth was almost painful.  At every prayer I heard him offer, during the seven years in which he was my spiritual guide, I never ceased to feel new astonishment, at the wonderful variety and depth and richness and even novelty of feeling and expression which were poured forth.  This was a feeling with which every hearer sympathised, and it is a fact well-known, that Christians trained under his influence were generally remarkable for their devotional habits. [6]