When reporting this pastorate to the Board of Missions, Dr. Mateer said, “This is work that I love to do, especially the preaching.” When doing the work of an evangelist among the people at large, sermonizing could have no place. Even formal addresses of any sort were rarely practicable. The best that the missionary can do when itinerating is to get attention by any legitimate means, and then to talk, and hear and answer questions, and bear with all sorts of irrelevancies and interruptions. But when a church is organized, a sermon, consisting of a passage of Scripture and a discourse built upon it, is just as much in place as it is in one of our home houses of worship on the Sabbath. It was to the opportunity for that form of service that he refers when he expressed his pleasure in the pastorate. In this also he greatly excelled. Some who knew him most intimately, and who appreciated fully his great worth and efficiency, did not regard him as a very eloquent preacher in an English pulpit. He commanded the attention of his audience by his strong, clear, earnest presentation of the great religious truths which he believed with all his soul. The personality and consecration of the man were a tremendous force when he stood in a pulpit in his own land; what he lacked was the ability which some speakers possess of carrying his audience with him, almost irrespective of the thoughts to which they give utterance. But in preaching to the Chinese he took on an extraordinary effectiveness. There was in the man, in the movement of his thought, in his mastery of the language, in the intense earnestness of his delivery, in the substance of his sermons and addresses, much that captivated the native Christians, and made others bow before his power. Mr. Baller, who had heard him frequently, says: “His sermons were logical, direct, a unit in thought and enriched with a copious vocabulary and illustrations. His points were usually put from the Chinese point of view, so that a foreign air was conspicuously absent.” To this day some of his addresses are recalled as triumphs of real eloquence of speech; perhaps the most notable of these being an address which he delivered at the opening of the English Baptist Institution at Tsinan fu, in 1907. It was an opportunity such as never before had come to a missionary in Shantung,—all the highest officials of the province, and half-a-hundred others of lesser degree, being present. He took as his theme “The Importance of an Upright Character,” and more than rose to the height of the occasion. One of his most memorable sermons was delivered before a convention of some three hundred women gathered at Wei Hsien from the native church members of that region.