the emotional nature,
without attempting to engage the intellect, have ceased to be popular
favorites. So far as the popular lecture has taken hold of the
affections of a community, and secured its constant support, it has
destroyed the desire for all amusements of a lower grade; and it will be
found, that, generally, those who attend the lecture rarely or never
give their patronage and presence to the buffooneries of the day. They
have found something better,--something with more of flavor in the
eating, with more of nutriment in the digestion. How great a good this
is those only can judge who realize that men will have amusements of
some sort, and that, if they cannot obtain such as will elevate them,
they will indulge in such as are frivolous and dissipating. The lecture
does quite as much for elevated amusement out of the hall as in it. The
quickening social influence of an excellent lecture, particularly in a
community where life flows sluggishly and all are absorbed in manual
labor, is as remarkable as it is beneficent. The lecture and the
lecturer are the common topics of discussion for a week, and the
conversation which is so apt to cling to health and the weather is
raised above the level of commonplace.

Notwithstanding the fact that a moiety, or a majority, of the popular
lecturers are clergymen, the lecture has not always received the favor
of the cloth. Indeed, there has often been private and sometimes public
complaint on the part of preachers, that the finished productions of the
lecturer, the results of long and patient elaboration, rendered doubly
attractive by a style of delivery to be won only by frequent repetition
of the same discourse, have brought the hastily prepared and plainly
presented Sunday sermon into an unjust and damaging comparison. The
complaint is a strange one, particularly as no one has ever claimed that
the highest style of eloquence or the most remarkable models of rhetoric
are to be found in the lecture-hall. There has, at least, been no
general conviction that a standard of excellence in English and its
utterance has been maintained there too high for the comfort and credit
of the pulpit. It is possible, therefore, that the pulpit betrays its
weak point, and needs the comparison which it deprecates. A man of
brains will gratefully receive suggestions from any quarter. That
impulses to a more familiar and direct style of sermonizing, a brighter
and better elocution, and a bolder u