of writing with the audience before us not only
secures cogency and point for our arguments and clearness for our
illustrations, but it saves us from the fatal mistake of
producing not a sermon but an essay.

Here our meditations assist us. The daily habit of balancing and
introspection enables a man to read and analyse his own heart,
its strength and weakness. He becomes familiar with the springs
and levers that move it, the storms that convulse and the
sunshine that gladdens the mysterious world within his own
breast. How useful this knowledge when he comes to train the
artillery of the pulpit on the hearts of others!

[Side note: _Placere_]

So far we have been studying how to mortise the joints of our
arguments into well-knit and shapely strength; the pure
scholastic, however, possesses but half the weapons of the
preacher. The best built skeleton is repulsive till it is clothed
with flesh, colour and beauty. This is the rhetorician's task. He
comes with his graceful art, and drapes the dry bones of hard
reasoning, clarifies the arguments by illustrations, clothes them
in language crisp and sparkling, weaves around them the warm glow
of fancy and renders the hardest truths palatable by the grace of
diction and delivery. He accomplishes all implied in the word
"_placere_."

When rhetoric and logic clasp hands the standard of triumph is
fairly certain to be planted above the stubborn heart. We must,
however, remember that the arts of rhetoric are subordinate to
the reasoning, and must be brought forward only for the purpose
of driving the reasoning home. But since man's faculties are not
divided into watertight compartments, neither should the sermon
intended to influence him.

Our reason is not independent of our passions; our feelings so
influence our judgment that even in our greatest actions it is
hard to disentangle and say so much is the product of one and so
much of the other. The sermon should be constructed to fit the
man; argument and emotion should not stand apart, but dovetail
and interlace.

[Side note: Sheil]

In the art of entwining the garlands of rhetoric around the
framework of argument, Sheil stands conspicuous. Lecky says of
him--"His speeches seem exactly to fulfil Burke's description of
perfect oratory--half poetry, half prose. Two very high
excellencies he possessed to the most wonderful degree--the power
of combining extreme preparation with the greatest passion and of
_blending ar