or
superficial movement of hand and voice, but the action of the whole man,
body and soul, all powerfully quickened and moved from within by the
living thoughts and emotions to which he was giving utterance."

"I have heard many of the greatest orators of our time. But, with the
exception of Daniel Webster and Dr. Channing in their highest moments,
Mr. Dewey was the most [149] eloquent man among them all, and that not
once or twice, on great occasions, but Sunday after Sunday, forenoon and
afternoon, for months together."

"Some allowance should perhaps be made for the state of mind and the
period of life in which I heard him. I had just come from college, where
the intellect had been cultivated in advance of the moral and religious
faculties. The equilibrium which belongs to a perfectly healthy and
harmonious nature was disturbed, and, as a necessary consequence of this
unbalanced and distempered condition, there was a deep inward unrest,
and a craving for something,--the greatest of all,--which had not yet
been attained. Mr. Dewey's preaching came in just at this critical time,
and it was to me the opening into a new world. The hymn, the prayer, the
Scripture reading, usually brought me into a reverent and plastic state
of mind, ready to receive and be moulded by the deepest and loftiest
Christian truths. From the beginning to the end of the sermon I
was under the spell which he had thrown over me, and unconscious of
everything else. Very seldom during my life, and then only for a
few minutes at a time, has any one, by his eloquence, exercised this
absorbing and commanding influence over me. Once or twice in hearing
Dr. Channing I felt as I suppose the prophet may have felt when he heard
'the still small voice,' at which 'he wrapped his face in his mantle,'
and listened as to the voice of God. A few such experiences I have had
with other men; but with Mr. Dewey more than with all others. And when
the benediction was pronounced, I wished to go away and be by myself
in the new world of spiritual ideas and emotions into which I had been
drawn. Those were to me great experiences, [150] inwrought into the
inmost fibres of my nature, and always associated in my mind with Mr.
Dewey's preaching."

"Nor were these experiences peculiar to any one person. The audience as
a whole were affected in a similar manner. A deep solemnity pervaded the
place. There was not merely silence, but the spell of absorbed attention
that makes