John Wesley was such a man. I read recently that, when he was preaching at Tullamore, a large cat leaped from the rafters upon a woman’s head, and ran over the heads and shoulders of the closely packed congregation. “But none of them cried out any more than if it had been a butterfly.” _There_ was a test of the preacher’s supremacy. What other influence could have been so absolute and coercive? When I was a very little girl I was taken to see Edwin Booth play “Hamlet,” in the old Walnut Street theatre of Philadelphia. That night a cat entered with the ghost, and paced sedately in his wake across the ramparts of Elsinore. The audience shouted its amusement, and the poignancy of a great scene, interpreted by a great actor, was temporarily lost. “Spellbound” is a word in common use, expressing, as a rule, very ordinary attention. Booth cast a spell, but it was easily broken. Wesley cast a spell which defied both fear and laughter. Nothing short of dynamite could have distracted that Tullamore congregation from the business it had on hand. That the sermon was tyrannical in the days of its pride and power is a truth which cannot be gainsaid. Eloquence in the pulpit has no more bowels for its victims than has eloquence on the rostrum. History is full of instances that move our souls to wonder. When Darnley, new wedded to Mary Stuart, and seeing himself in the rôle of peacemaker, went to hear Knox preach in Saint Giles’, that uncompromising divine likened him to Ahab, who incurred the wrath of Jehovah by acquiescing in the idolatry of Jezebel, his wife. James Melville says that when Knox preached, “he was like to ding the pulpit to blads, and fly out of it.” Darnley, furious, or frightened, or both, left the church while the victorious preacher was still marshalling the hosts of Israel to combat. Charles the Second was wont to recall with bitter mirth a certain Sunday in Edinburgh when he was forced by his loyal Scotch subjects to hear six sermons, a heavy price to pay even for loyalty. Paris may have been worth one mass to Henry of Navarre; but all Scotland was not worth six sermons to Charles Stuart, and the memory of that Sunday sweetened his return to France and to freedom.