tterance of personal convictions,
have come to the pulpit from the platform, there is no question. This
feeling on the part of preachers is by no means universal, however; for
some of them have long regarded the lecture with contempt, and have
sometimes resented it as an impertinence. And it may be (for there shall
be no quarrel in the matter) that lecturers are quacks, and that
lectures, like homoeopathic remedies, are very contemptible things; but
they have pleasantly modified the doses of the old practice, however
slow the doctors are to confess it; and so much, at least, may be
counted among the beneficent results of the system under discussion.

Last in the brief enumeration of the benefits of the popular lecture, it
has been the devoted, consistent, never tiring champion of universal
liberty. If the popular lecturer has not been a power in this nation for
the overthrow of American Slavery,--for its overthrow in the
conscientious convictions and the legal and conventional fastnesses of
the nation,--then have the friends of oppression grossly lied; for none
have received their malicious and angry objurgations more unsparingly
than our plain-speaking gentleman who makes his yearly circuit among the
lyceums. No champion of slavery, no advocate of privilege, no apologist
for systematized and legalized wrong has ever been able to establish
himself as a popular lecturer. The people may listen respectfully to
such a man once; but, having heard him, they drop him forever. In truth,
a man cannot be a popular lecturer who does not plant himself upon the
eternal principles of justice. He must be a democrat, a believer in and
an advocate of the equal rights of men. A slavery-loving,
slavery-upholding lecturer would be just as much of an anomaly as a
slavery-loving and slavery-singing poet. The taint so vitiates the whole
aesthetic nature, so poisons the moral sense, so palsies the finer
powers, so destroys all true sympathy with universal humanity, that the
composition of an acceptable lecture becomes impossible to the man who
bears it. The popular lecture, as it has been described in this article,
has never existed at the South, and could not be tolerated there. Until
within three years it has never found opportunity for utterance in the
capital of the nation; but where liberty goes, it makes its way, and
helps to break the way for liberty everywhere.

It is a noteworthy fact, that the popular lecturer, though the devoted
ad