As a lecturer, of course, he was vigorous to the highest degree. Many of those who have heard him at the height of his powers will agree to the verdict that he was by far the most powerful English orator of his time. There was something overwhelming in his force of speech when impassioned; it lifted an audience from its feet like a storm, and raised their intellectual conviction to a white heat of enthusiasm for the truth it conveyed. Other speakers of his day may have been as thrillingly impressive at their best moments; but he had great passages in nearly every speech, and rarely faced an audience without electrifying it. The Rev. Mr Westerby, at the close of his debate with Bradlaugh, testified with some chagrin to the extraordinary effectiveness of his opponent's speaking, and this in a debate full of close and difficult argument, as the verbatim report shows. "I only wish," said the reverend gentleman, "that I, in power of speech, were as powerful as he. Then I might have done honour to my cause.... Only by the power of his speech, and by the marvellous energy with which he can endow it, can I understand the impression he has produced upon you." But the reader of the debate can understand it without hearing the delivery. At its highest stress the energy is controlled and intelligized; never is the argument confused or let slip; never does vigour lapse to coarseness. He was certainly not an abusive or even a harsh controversialist; he dealt much less in invective and imputation than most men in his place would have felt justified in doing. One of the strongest of his censures of antagonists in matters of argument is passed on the late Bishop of Peterborough, Dr Magee, who was a sufficiently reckless polemist. The passage occurs in the second of the three (unwritten) lectures he delivered in Norwich, in reply to three sermons by the Bishop:-- "I have now to complain of something still worse than that the Bishop should have forgotten his Bible, entirely ignored the Thirty-Nine Articles, and occasionally in the hurry of rapid speech contradicted his previous sentences. All these are matters at which, in even an extraordinary man burdened with a bishop's dignity, we need not wonder at all; but when we find him blundering in metaphysics, when we find him making mistakes which a man versed in the merest rudiments of Mill or the Scotch and German metaphysicians would not make--when we find the Bishop so blundering, either wilfully or ignorantly, it puts me in a position of extreme difficulty." This on Butler is also, for Bradlaugh, exceptionally severe:-- "Bishop Butler's argument on the doctrine of necessity is that which one might expect from a hired _nisi prius_ advocate, but which is read with regret coming from a gentleman who ought to be striving to convince his erring brethren by the words of truth alone."[98] [Footnote 98: Pamphlet on Heresy, p. 48.]