uth, a process of
thinking aloud--thinking accelerated, exhilarated, by the vocal exercise
accompanying, and then, too, by the blindfold sense of a listening
audience near. This is the preaching of Mr. Brooks.

It is, perhaps, not generally known that Mr. Brooks practices two
distinct methods of preaching: one, that with the manuscript; the other,
that without. The last time that I had the chance of a Sunday in Trinity
Church was Luther's day. The morning discourse was a luminous and
generous appreciation of the great reformer's character and work. This
was read in that rapid, vehement, incessant manner which description has
made sufficiently familiar to the public. The precipitation of utterance
is like the flowing forth of the liquid contents of a bottle suddenly
inverted; every word seems hurrying to be foremost. The unaccustomed
hearer is at first left hopelessly in the rear; but presently the
contagion of the speaker's rushing thought reaches him, and he is drawn
into the wake of that urgent ongoing; he is towed along in the great
multitudinous convoy that follows the mighty motor-vessel, steaming,
unconscious of the weight it bears, across the sea of thought. The
energy is sufficient for all; it overflows so amply that you scarcely
feel it not to be your own energy. The writing is like in character to
the speaking--continuous, no break, no shock, no rest, not much change
of swifter and slower till the end. The apparent mass of the speaker,
physical and mental, might at first seem equal to making up a full,
adequate momentum without multiplication by such a component of
velocity; but by-and-by you come to feel that the motion is a necessary
part of the power. I am told, indeed, that a constitutional tendency to
hesitation in utterance is the speaker's real reason for this indulged
precipitancy of speech. Not unlikely; but the final result of habit is
as if of nature.

Of the discourse itself on Luther, I have left myself room to say no
more than that Mr. Brooks's master formula for power in the preacher,
truth plus personality, came very fitly in to explain the problem of
Luther's prodigious career. It was the man himself, not less than the
truth he found, that gave Luther such possession of the present and such
a heritage in the future.

In the afternoon, Mr. Brooks took Luther's "The just shall live by
faith," and preached extemporarily. The character of the composition and
of the delivery was strikingly the s