"Suppose the congregation thus assembled--pews filled with sitters, and aisles, to a great extent, with standers. They wait in eager expectation. The preacher appears. The devotional exercises of praise and prayer having been gone through with unaffected simplicity and earnestness, the entire assembly set themselves for the _treat_, with feelings very diverse in kind, but all eager and intent. There is a hush of dead silence. The text is announced, and he begins. Every countenance is up--every eye bent, with fixed intentness, on the speaker. As he kindles the interest grows. Every breath is held--every cough is suppressed--every fidgety movement is settled--every one, riveted himself by the spell of the impassioned and entrancing eloquence, knows how sensitively his neighbor will resent the very slightest disturbance. Then, by-and-by, there is a pause. The speaker stops--to gather breath--to wipe his forehead--to adjust his gown, and purposely too, and wisely, to give the audience, as well as himself, a moment or two of relaxation. The moment is embraced--there is free breathing--suppressed coughs get vent--postures are changed--there is a universal stir, as of persons who could not have endured the constraint much longer--the preacher bends forward--his hand is raised--all is again hushed. The same stillness and strain of unrelaxed attention is repeated, more intent still, it may be, than before, as the interest of the subject and of the speaker advance. And so, for perhaps four or five times in the course of a sermon, there is the _relaxation_ and the '_at it again_' till the final winding up. "And _then_, the moment the last word was uttered, and followed by the--'_let us pray_,' there was a scene for which no excuse or palliation can be pleaded but the fact of its having been to many a matter of difficulty, in the morning of a week-day, to accomplish the abstraction of even so much of their time from business--the closing prayer completely drowned by the hurried rush of large numbers from the aisles and pews to the door; an unseemly scene, without doubt, as if so many had come to the house of God not to worship, but simply to enjoy the fascination of human eloquence. Even this much it was a great thing for eloquence to accomplish. And how diversified soever the motives which drew so many together, and the emotions awakened and impressions produced by what was heard--though, in the terms of the text of one of his most overpoweringly stirring and faithful appeals, he was to not a few 'as one that had a pleasant voice and could play well on an instrument,' yet there is abundant proof that, in the highest sense, 'his labor was not in vain in the Lord;' that the truths which, with so much fearless fidelity and impassioned earnestness, he delivered, went in many instances farther than the ear, or even the intellect--that they reached the heart, and, by the power of the Spirit, turned it to God."