As you sat by the winter’s fire your flesh was made to creep and your hair stood on end in terror while you furtively stole a glance around looking for the apparition described in the weird ghost story.  The secret power that somewhere lay enthralled you.  Was it not in the husky whisper or the hush of restraint?  Let that speaker tell the same story in the middle pitched narrative tone, and lo! the spell is vanished.  If the thunder thrills that rocked and vibrated through his voice were taken from Demosthenes, would he have ever driven Eschines into exile?

[Side note:  Two advantages of inflection]

The practice of varied cadences in speech has two genuine advantages—­it saves the speaker from fatigue and the hearers from weariness.

When a man varies his tone of voice he breaks up the arrangement in the group of muscles that till then bore the stress of effort:  a new combination is formed, and the work transferred to fresh muscles.  This brings instant relief.  A similar sense of refreshment comes to his hearers.

In speaking, as in singing, we must have melody, but there is no melody without variety.  People would rush even from a Melba if she sang every note in the same key.  Inflection not only constitutes the melody of speech, but imparts to it rhetorical significance and logical force.

The want of success in many a speaker who has both a good voice and good matter may be found in the fact that his voice, instead of being as flexible as a piece of whalebone, is as unbending as a bar of iron; or, worse still, perhaps he adopts the dreary monotony of the sing-song tone:  the two unvarying notes so suggestive of the up and down movements of a pump-handle.  This “cuckoo” tone would blight the best written sermon.

[Side note:  Two impediments to good preaching]

Nothing now remains except to warn the young preacher against the two most common defects—­affectation of voice and word-dropping at the end of the sentences.

[Side note:  An artificial tone of voice]

“Preach,” says Dr. Ireland, “in a manner that the people will understand, and that goes straight to their hearts, and not in the stilted phraseology of the seventeenth century sermon.”  Sage advice!  The comic stage has set the world laughing at the grotesque inflections of the parson preacher; but is his counterpart never found amongst ourselves.  Is the Catholic pulpit free from speakers whose ridiculous cadences at once class them amongst the disciples of the Rev. Mr. Spalding?

[Side note:  Artificiality means failure]

We have met priests, typical of a considerably large class, who, in ordinary conversation, could speak in a manner both natural and pleasing; who, when roused, could be even eloquently convincing; who, at the dinner-table and even on the platform, are listened to with pleasure, yet let one of them go into a pulpit, and fifteen minutes exhausts the patience of the most charitable congregation.  Should he exceed this limit there are suppressed sighs and ominous consulting of watches.  Why?  Because in the pulpit he adopts an artificial tone of voice.  In some instances it takes the shape of a pious whine, in others of a drone.  But in whatever shape it finds expression the hollow ring of the unreal is there to damn it.