There was a storm came upon the giant cedars of American life about this time, which spread disaster upon our national strength.  It was a storm that prostrated the Cedars of Lebanon.

Secretary Frelinghuysen, Vice-president Hendricks, ex-Governor Seymour, General Hancock, and John B. Gough were the victims.  It was a cataclysm of fatality that impressed its sadness on the nation.  The three mightiest agencies for public benefit are the printing press, the pulpit, and the platform.  The decease of John B. Gough left the platforms of America without any orator as great as he had been.  For thirty-five years his theme was temperance, and he died when the fight against liquor was hottest.  He had a rare gift as a speaker.  His influence with an audience was unlike that of any other of his contemporaries.  He shortened the distance between a smile and a tear in oratory.  He was one of the first, if not the first, American speaker who introduced dramatic skill in his speeches.  He ransacked and taxed all the realm of wit and drama for his work.  His was a magic from the heart.  Dramatic power had so often been used for the degradation of society that speakers heretofore had assumed a strict reserve toward it.  The theatre had claimed the drama, and the platform had ignored it.  But Mr. Gough, in his great work of reform and relief, encouraged the disheartened, lifted the fallen, adopting the elements of drama in his appeals.  He called for laughter from an audience, and it came; or, if he called for tears, they came as gently as the dew upon a meadow’s grass at dawn.  Mr. Gough was the pioneer in platform effectiveness, the first orator to study the alchemy of human emotions, that he might stir them first, and mix them as he judged wisely.  So many people spoke of the drama as though it was something built up outside of ourselves, as if it were necessary for us to attune our hearts to correspond with the human inventions of the dramatists.  The drama, if it be true drama, is an echo from something divinely implanted.  While some conscienceless people take this dramatic element and prostitute it in low play-houses, John B. Gough raised it to the glorious uses of setting forth the hideousness of vice and the splendour of virtue in the salvation of multitudes of inebriates.  The dramatic poets of Europe have merely dramatised what was in the world’s heart; Mr. Gough interpreted the more sacred dramatic elements of the human heart.  He abolished the old way of doing things on the platform, the didactic and the humdrum.  He harnessed the dramatic element to religion.  He lighted new fires of divine passion in our pulpits.

The new confidence that this wonderful Cedar of Lebanon put into the work of contemporary Christian labourers in the vineyard of sacred meaning is our eternal inheritance of his spirit.  He left us his confidence.

When you destroy the confidence of man in man, you destroy society.  The prevailing idea in American life was of a different character.  National and civic affairs were full of plans to pull down, to make room for new builders.  That was the trouble.  There were more builders than there was space or need to build.  A little repairing of old standards would have been better than tearing those we still remembered to pieces, merely to give others something to do.