Reason, rhetoric, pathos, poetry, diction, gesture, wit and humor, each has its place on the platform.  While logic sounds the depths of thought, humor ripples its surface with laughing wavelets.  While reason cultivates the cornfields of the mind, rhetoric beautifies the pleasure gardens.

John B. Gough was the most popular platform orator of his day.  He began lecturing at from two to five dollars an evening.  He grew in popularity until he was in demand at five hundred dollars a lecture, and no one before or since more successfully used all the arts of the platform, from the comic that drew the very rabble of the streets, to flights of eloquence that captured college culture.  It has been well said:  “While Gough was a great preacher of righteousness, he was a whole theatre in dramatic delivery.”  Lecturers, like preachers, are fishers of men, and there are as many kinds of people in an average audience as there are kinds of fish in the sea.  It requires variety of bait for humanity as well as for fish.

Sam Jones used slang as one kind of bait and he used to say:  “It beats all how it draws.”  I saw this verified at Ottawa, Kansas, Chautauqua.  Giving a Saturday evening lecture he baited the platform with slang, satire and humor.  Sunday afternoon an hour before time for his lecture the people were hurrying to the auditorium.  When presented to the great audience he said:  “Record!  Record!  Record!” I remember the sermon as one of the sweetest and most powerful I ever heard.  Its influence will not cease this side the eternal morning.

Rowland Hill, the popular London preacher, used quaint humor to draw the people, and powerful appeal to sweep them into the kingdom.

It is said the fountain of laughter and fountain of tears lie very close together.  My experience has been, that often the best way to the fountain of tears is by the way of the fountain of laughter.  Some years ago at Ocean Grove, New Jersey, I was to lecture on the subject, “Boys and Girls, Nice and Naughty.”  A wealthy widow and her only son were there from New York, where the young boy had been leading a “gay life.”  Ocean Grove with its quiet, moral atmosphere was a dull place for this young man.  He happened to read the subject for the lecture on the bulletin board, and thinking it suggestive of humor he went to hear the lecture.  He had what he went for, as the lecture did deal with the fountain of laughter, but it also dealt with the fountain of tears.  It swung the red lantern of danger athwart the pathway of the wayward young man.  Following a story of mother love, I said:  “Young man, let the cares and burdens of life press you down to the very earth, let the great waves of sorrow roll over your soul, but let no act of yours ever roll a clod upon the coffin of her, whose image, enshrined upon the inner walls of your memory, white winters and long bright summers can never wash away.”