[Side note:  3.—­Be natural in delivery]

The faintest suspicion of art immediately sets your audience up in arms.  Their teeth are on edge; their heart locked against you.  “This is acting and not preaching” seals your fate.

Do not imagine for a moment that I advocate the neglect of elocutionary graces.  So far from that I hold that every young priest leaving college should be a past master of all rhetorical arts.  Gesture, articulation, voice production and inflection should be at his finger tips.  No book on the subject should be unread.  No year of college life should pass without contributing materially towards the elocutionary equipment of the future preacher.  The college that neglects this training and permits young men to go into the ministry without this needful art is guilty of a most serious sin of omission.

What I do mean is preach your sermons and do not declaim them.  How is this accomplished?

For the first year bend all your powers to capturing the intellects of your auditors, holding in reserve, for the time being, the elocutionary forces.  Then, when you have acquired the habit of convincing the intelligence, let the elegancies of finished declamation insinuate themselves gradually into your delivery.  Thus art will so engraft itself on nature, the rhetorical graces so entwining and dovetailing into your convictions and passions that they will appear as growing out of and not added on to them.  Here is perfection—­

    Ars artium celare artem.

Reverse this:  make declamation your first concern, and let us even suppose the artificiality is not detected, which is supposing a great deal.  What is the result?  Your sermon is declamation and nothing else.  This means failure, for no matter how the passions are aroused, if they are not upheld by the pillars of conviction, your finest effort is a fire of chips:  a blaze for a moment, then ashes.

Though elocutionary powers are of so much importance as to be almost indispensable, yet they are subordinate to the sermon:  they are the aids and auxiliaries to drive it home.  A graceful gesture or musical inflection of voice will not convince the intellect or move the passions:  they are not the arrows:  they lend wings of fire, however, to send the arrows to the mark.

I know no more fatal blunder, or one that militates more strongly against a speaker, than the adoption of an artificial accent.

[Side note:  The Irish gift of oratory]

God has not only given our race a special mission—­the apostolate of the English-speaking world—­but he has singularly endowed us with those gifts that go to make successful preachers of His Word—­logical minds, imagination and sensibility.

[Side note:  Logical minds]

That we possess this in an eminent degree is evident from a striking fact.  There are three avocations to which the faculty of close reasoning is a first essential—­law, politics and theology—­and in each of these our countrymen excel.