rtificiality is not detected, which is
supposing a great deal. What is the result? Your sermon is
declamation and nothing else. This means failure, for no matter
how the passions are aroused, if they are not upheld by the
pillars of conviction, your finest effort is a fire of chips: a
blaze for a moment, then ashes.

Though elocutionary powers are of so much importance as to be
almost indispensable, yet they are subordinate to the sermon:
they are the aids and auxiliaries to drive it home. A graceful
gesture or musical inflection of voice will not convince the
intellect or move the passions: they are not the arrows: they
lend wings of fire, however, to send the arrows to the mark.

I know no more fatal blunder, or one that militates more strongly
against a speaker, than the adoption of an artificial accent.

[Side note: The Irish gift of oratory]

God has not only given our race a special mission--the apostolate
of the English-speaking world--but he has singularly endowed us
with those gifts that go to make successful preachers of His
Word--logical minds, imagination and sensibility.

[Side note: Logical minds]

That we possess this in an eminent degree is evident from a
striking fact. There are three avocations to which the faculty of
close reasoning is a first essential--law, politics and
theology--and in each of these our countrymen excel.

[Side note: Law]

We are as essentially a race of lawyers as the Jews are a race of
moneylenders.

For eleven years I watched the sons of Irish parents going from
an Australian college to professional careers. Ninety-eight per
cent., following the natural bent of their minds, turned to the
lawyer's office.

From the year 1858 to the present hour the robes of Victoria's
Chief Justice have been uninterruptedly worn by Irishmen. From
1873 the Chief Justiceship of New South Wales has been
exclusively held by sons of the green isle. But, above all, turn
to the lawyers' streets in the new worlds of America and
Australia and see the amazing number of brass plates adorned with
O's and Mac's.

[Side note: Politics]

The political organisations in the labour world of England to-day
are mainly captained by Irishmen. Two of them have been sent to
Parliament, and two more will probably join them in the next
Parliament.

The rapidity with which the Irish emigrant, following the law of
natural selection, plunges into politics has passed into a
proverb in America and furnishe