How wide the influence, and how great the responsibility of the lyceum lecturer! In a general way, at least, all men concede the power of oratory. The close student of the sources of human influence fully recognizes that power, in all its good and evil possibilities. Eloquently spoken words produce more immediate and fully as permanent results as eloquently written ones. When Demosthenes delivered a patriotic oration, the people who heard him said at once, “Let us go and fight Philip!” A little child after listening to George Whitefield’s beautiful and impassioned pictures of Heaven and the Deity, sobbed, “Let me go to Mr. Whitefield’s God!” There are hundreds in our country to-day who are what they are, not only in the success and happiness of their own lives, but as factors toward the wise solution of the profoundest problems of being because of the spoken words, the messages of the present-day lyceum. The Lyceum Platform thirty and forty years ago could boast of a score of thinkers, some of whom were orators; they served well their day and generation; products of the “form and pressure of the time,” they met its requirements, and left behind them evidences of work nobly done, and no man can say the memory of them shall perish. In far greater measure, because of the infinitely greater number of superior lecturers, the common people to-day are being educated in every phase of thought and purpose worthy earnest consideration. When one considers all this, the faint cry occasionally heard from those who do not take wide views of existing conditions, as to the “decay of the lyceum” is not warranted. Wherever and whenever the true lyceum idea is conserved in the work of the platform, the evidences of strength, wisdom and beauty are at once evident and undeniable.