was hottest. He had a rare gift as a speaker. His
influence with an audience was unlike that of any other of his
contemporaries. He shortened the distance between a smile and a tear in
oratory. He was one of the first, if not the first, American speaker who
introduced dramatic skill in his speeches. He ransacked and taxed all
the realm of wit and drama for his work. His was a magic from the heart.
Dramatic power had so often been used for the degradation of society
that speakers heretofore had assumed a strict reserve toward it. The
theatre had claimed the drama, and the platform had ignored it. But Mr.
Gough, in his great work of reform and relief, encouraged the
disheartened, lifted the fallen, adopting the elements of drama in his
appeals. He called for laughter from an audience, and it came; or, if he
called for tears, they came as gently as the dew upon a meadow's grass
at dawn. Mr. Gough was the pioneer in platform effectiveness, the first
orator to study the alchemy of human emotions, that he might stir them
first, and mix them as he judged wisely. So many people spoke of the
drama as though it was something built up outside of ourselves, as if it
were necessary for us to attune our hearts to correspond with the human
inventions of the dramatists. The drama, if it be true drama, is an echo
from something divinely implanted. While some conscienceless people
take this dramatic element and prostitute it in low play-houses, John B.
Gough raised it to the glorious uses of setting forth the hideousness of
vice and the splendour of virtue in the salvation of multitudes of
inebriates. The dramatic poets of Europe have merely dramatised what was
in the world's heart; Mr. Gough interpreted the more sacred dramatic
elements of the human heart. He abolished the old way of doing things on
the platform, the didactic and the humdrum. He harnessed the dramatic
element to religion. He lighted new fires of divine passion in our
pulpits.

The new confidence that this wonderful Cedar of Lebanon put into the
work of contemporary Christian labourers in the vineyard of sacred
meaning is our eternal inheritance of his spirit. He left us his
confidence.

When you destroy the confidence of man in man, you destroy society. The
prevailing idea in American life was of a different character. National
and civic affairs were full of plans to pull down, to make room for new
builders. That was the trouble. There were more builders than there was