[1] See Chapter VIII., last heading. Not merely for children, but for grown folk too is this kind of picture-work a means of teaching. In a densely populated quarter of New York City there is to-day a minister who is not content with mere word-pictures. He brings into the pulpit the objects themselves--it may be a candle, a plumb line, a live frog, an air pump. With him the method is a success, as it has been with others. Does this seem crude? So are the mental processes of every forty-nine out of fifty the world over. Dr. Parkhurst in the second of those memorable sermons with which he opened the public campaign against Tammany, carried into the pulpit and showed his congregation the very bundle of indictments with which he was to strike the first blow for civic purity. Ezekiel went still further, and not only used objects but actions to enforce and illustrate his terrible sermon: "To the amazement of the people, setting them all awondering what he could mean, he appears one day before them with fire, a pair of scales, a knife, and a barber's razor. These were the heads, and doom was the burden of his sermon. Sweeping off, what an easterner considers it a shame to lose, his beard, and the hair also from his head, this bald and beardless man divides them into three parts; weighing them in the balance. One third he burns in the fire; one third he smites with the knife; and the remaining third he tosses in the air, scattering it on the winds of heaven." Thus the prophet under divine direction foretells the disgrace, division, destruction, dispersion of his people. Not less striking is the story of Jeremiah's dramatic sermon as graphically told by Dr. Guthrie, from whom the preceding account has been quoted: "The preacher appears--nor book, nor speech in hand, but an earthen vessel. He addresses his hearers. Pointing across the valley to Jerusalem, with busy thousands in its streets, its massive towers and noble temple glorious and beautiful beneath a southern sky, he says, speaking as an ambassador of God, 'I will make this city desolate and an hissing' ... pauses--raises his arm--holds up the potter's vessel, dashes it on the ground; and planting his foot on its shivered fragments, he adds, 'Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, even so will I break this people, and this city as one breaketh a potter's vessel.'" It may have been the inspiration of such examples as these that moved Beecher when, in the stirring days before the war upon the platform of Plymouth Church, after taking up one argument after another against abolition and answering it, he carried each one to the side of the platform and threw it over into the pile with its predecessors, saying, "That disposes of you." And in his famous Liverpool address, did he not, when speaking of the freeing of the slaves, throw down and trample upon actual chains?