Influenced By His Mother

1915

John Bright's Explanation of His Supreme Mastery of the Art of Public Speaking

The famous English orator, John Bright, was asked how he came to be such a master of the art of public speaking. He answered that the only help he ever had in that direction he got by listening to his mother read the Bible.

She was accustomed to read the Bible aloud to the children, and he was so fascinated, he said, by her way of reading that he had tried ever since to imitate it.

John Bright became a great statesman, who carried out the teachings of the Bible in a noble and helpful life. Such was the power of his eloquence that he brought about great and beneficial changes in the laws of England.

His mother's Bible reading during the years of his impressible childhood influenced his whole life; the careful, unhurried, reverent and expressive way in which she read was the chief influence in producing one of England's greatest and noblest orators.

There are many ways in which a mother may influence legislation, even in communities where she may not yet cast a vote. — Youth's Companion.

Three Requisites of an Orator

1902

By Henry M. Dowling

Three great requisites are demanded of everyone who would speak well. He must be clear, he must be forceful, and he must please. Clearness will be secured by translation and composition. How can we speak forcibly and in a manner to excite pleasure? Anyone may avoid egregious blunders; it is the able orator who makes his speech sinewy in its strength, charming in its beauty.

"Bold propositions, boldly and briefly expressed — pithy sentences, nervous common sense, strong phrases, well-compacted periods, sudden and strong masses of light, an apt adage, a keen sarcasm, a merciless personality, a mortal thrust — these are the beauties and deformities that now make a speaker most interesting." Nothing is more artificial than the adornments in a spoken discourse. They do not necessarily arise from the peculiar attractiveness of the subject. Erskine could throw a charm about the most repulsive causes; and there may be speakers who, without strenuous effort, could render sterile and disgusting a subject boundless in suggestiveness and luxuriant in beauty.

In all your compositions, oral and written, first outline the general plan of your matter, and then select portions to be embellished by chaste adornment, not in the spirit of the pulpit orator who annotated his sermon manuscript with stage directions such as, "Here weep!" but with a rational sense of the places where ornament may appropriately be inserted, to clarify the thought, vitalize the argument, or arouse new interest on the part of an audience. At one point, you will decide to use a bit of vivid description of men or scenes; at another, you will mark, as a proper place to thrust forward a pungent antithesis, a picturesque metaphor; at another, you will select, as affording an opportunity, a supposed speech of your adversary or of a third person, or pretend to read from an imaginary document; at a fourth, you will see to it that you express indignation and apologies to the audience for being overborne by your feelings. — Success.

Where the Deaf May Hear

1896

Many an old lady goes to church of a Sunday and sits through the service in a frame of mind devout to a degree, but never hears a solitary word of the sermon.

There is a preacher in Syracuse, Rev. George B. Spalding, D. D., who has changed all that. Dr. Spalding is pastor of the first Presbyterian Church, a religious body made up in the main of wealthy folk to whom money is no particular object.

Moved at first by the lamentations of some of his aged parishioners that they could not hear his preachments — Dr. Spalding was a newspaper man before he joined the clergy, and is a practical soul withal — he arranged, for the better delivery of the Gospel to those deaf brethren and sisters, speaking tubes which ran from a large metal receiver — really a megaphone immediately in front of him on the pulpit, down under the flooring of the auditorium and up into the pews.

The megaphone is built into the front of the pulpit, so that when reading or speaking the doctor addresses it directly.

So successful did the clergyman's device prove, that speaking tubes were put into every pew in the great auditorium. Any person, who is hard of hearing and happens to be a visitor to the church, will find means at hand of hearing the sermon.

One deaf old lady, who went to Dr. Spalding's church the other day, having heard of the speaking-tube system, burst into tears when she put the transmitter to her ear and caught the sound of the preacher's voice. She said it was the first sermon she had heard in over a quarter of a century. — New York Journal.