EVEN as a young man Conwell won local fame as an orator. At the
outbreak of the Civil War he began making patriotic speeches that gained
enlistments. After going to the front he was sent back home for a
time, on furlough, to make more speeches to draw more recruits, for
his speeches were so persuasive, so powerful, so full of homely and
patriotic feeling, that the men who heard them thronged into the
ranks. And as a preacher he uses persuasion, power, simple and homely
eloquence, to draw men to the ranks of Christianity.
He is an orator born, and has developed this inborn power by the hardest
of study and thought and practice. He is one of those rare men who
always seize and hold the attention. When he speaks, men listen. It is
quality, temperament, control--the word is immaterial, but the fact is
very material indeed.
Some quarter of a century ago Conwell published a little book for
students on the study and practice of oratory. That “clear-cut
articulation is the charm of eloquence” is one of his insisted-upon
statements, and it well illustrates the lifelong practice of the man
himself, for every word as he talks can be heard in every part of a
large building, yet always he speaks without apparent effort. He avoids
“elocution.” His voice is soft-pitched and never breaks, even now when
he is over seventy, because, so he explains it, he always speaks in his
natural voice. There is never a straining after effect.
“A speaker must possess a large-hearted regard for the welfare of
his audience,” he writes, and here again we see Conwell explaining
Conwellism. “Enthusiasm invites enthusiasm,” is another of his points
of importance; and one understands that it is by deliberate purpose,
and not by chance, that he tries with such tremendous effort to put
enthusiasm into his hearers with every sermon and every lecture that he
delivers.
“It is easy to raise a laugh, but dangerous, for it is the greatest test
of an orator’s control of his audience to be able to land them again on
the solid earth of sober thinking.” I have known him at the very end
of a sermon have a ripple of laughter sweep freely over the entire
congregation, and then in a moment he has every individual under his
control, listening soberly to his words.
He never fears to use humor, and it is always very simple and obvious
and effective. With him even a very simple pun may be used, not only
with-out taking away from the strength of what he is saying, but with a
vivid increase of impressiveness. And when he says something funny it
is in such a delightful and confidential way, with such a genial, quiet,
infectious humorousness, that his audience is captivated. And they never
think that he is telling something funny of his own; it seems, such is
the skill of the man, that he is just letting them know of something
humorous that they are to enjoy with him.
“Be absolutely truthful and scrupulously clear,” he writes; and with
delightfully terse common sense, he says, “Use illustrations that
illustrate”--and never did an orator live up to this injunction more
than does Conwell himself. Nothing is more surprising, nothing is more
interesting, than the way in which he makes use as illustrations of the
impressions and incidents of his long and varied life, and, whatever it
is, it has direct and instant bearing on the progress of his discourse.
He will refer to something that he heard a child say in a train
yesterday; in a few minutes he will speak of something that he saw or
some one whom he met last month, or last year, or ten years ago--in
Ohio, in California, in London, in Paris, in New York, in Bombay; and
each memory, each illustration, is a hammer with which he drives home a
truth.
The vast number of places he has visited and people he has met, the
infinite variety of things his observant eyes have seen, give him his
ceaseless flow of illustrations, and his memory and his skill make
admirable use of them. It is seldom that he uses an illustration from
what he has read; everything is, characteristically, his own. Henry
M. Stanley, who knew him well, referred to him as “that double-sighted
Yankee,” who could “see at a glance all there is and all there ever
was.”
And never was there a man who so supplements with personal reminiscence
the place or the person that has figured in the illustration. When
he illustrates with the story of the discovery of California gold at
Sutter’s he almost parenthetically remarks, “I delivered this lecture on
that very spot a few years ago; that is, in the town that arose on that
very spot.” And when he illustrates by the story of the invention of the
sewing-machine, he adds: “I suppose that if any of you were asked who
was the inventor of the sewing-machine, you would say that it was Elias
Howe. But that would be a mistake. I was with Elias Howe in the Civil
War, and he often used to tell me how he had tried for fourteen years to
invent the sewing-machine and that then his wife, feeling that something
really had to be done, invented it in a couple of hours.” Listening to
him, you begin to feel in touch with everybody and everything, and in a
friendly and intimate way.
Always, whether in the pulpit or on the platform, as in private
conversation, there is an absolute simplicity about the man and his
words; a simplicity, an earnestness, a complete honesty. And when he
sets down, in his book on oratory, “A man has no right to use words
carelessly,” he stands for that respect for word-craftsmanship that
every successful speaker or writer must feel.
“Be intensely in earnest,” he writes; and in writing this he sets down a
prime principle not only of his oratory, but of his life.
A young minister told me that Dr. Conwell once said to him, with deep
feeling, “Always remember, as you preach, that you are striving to save
at least one soul with every sermon.” And to one of his close friends
Dr. Conwell said, in one of his self-revealing conversations:
“I feel, whenever I preach, that there is always one person in the
congregation to whom, in all probability, I shall never preach again,
and therefore I feel that I must exert my utmost power in that last
chance.” And in this, even if this were all, one sees why each of his
sermons is so impressive, and why his energy never lags. Always, with
him, is the feeling that he is in the world to do all the good he can
possibly do; not a moment, not an opportunity, must be lost.
The moment he rises and steps to the front of his pulpit he has the
attention of every one in the building, and this attention he closely
holds till he is through. Yet it is never by a striking effort that
attention is gained, except in so far that his utter simplicity is
striking. “I want to preach so simply that you will not think it
preaching, but just that you are listening to a friend,” I remember his
saying, one Sunday morning, as he began his sermon; and then he went on
just as simply as such homely, kindly, friendly words promised. And how
effectively!
He believes that everything should be so put as to be understood by all,
and this belief he applies not only to his preaching, but to the reading
of the Bible, whose descriptions he not only visualizes to himself, but
makes vividly clear to his hearers; and this often makes for fascination
in result.
For example, he is reading the tenth chapter of I Samuel, and begins,
“‘Thou shalt meet a company of prophets.’”
“‘Singers,’ it should be translated,” he puts in, lifting his eyes from
the page and looking out over his people. Then he goes on, taking this
change as a matter of course, “‘Thou shalt meet a company of singers
coming down from the high place--’”
Whereupon he again interrupts himself, and in an irresistible
explanatory aside, which instantly raises the desired picture in the
mind of every one, he says: “That means, from the little old church
on the hill, you know.” And how plain and clear and real and
interesting--most of all, interesting--it is from this moment! Another
man would have left it that prophets were coming down from a high place,
which would not have seemed at all alive or natural, and here, suddenly,
Conwell has flashed his picture of the singers coming down from the
little old church on the hill! There is magic in doing that sort of
thing.
And he goes on, now reading: “‘Thou shalt meet a company of singers
coming down from the little old church on the hill, with a psaltery, and
a tabret, and a pipe, and a harp, and they shall sing.’”
Music is one of Conwell’s strongest aids. He sings himself; sings as if
he likes to sing, and often finds himself leading the singing--usually
so, indeed, at the prayer-meetings, and often, in effect, at the church
services.
I remember at one church service that the choir-leader was standing
in front of the massed choir ostensibly leading the singing, but that
Conwell himself, standing at the rear of the pulpit platform, with his
eyes on his hymn-book, silently swaying a little with the music and
unconsciously beating time as he swayed, was just as unconsciously the
real leader, for it was he whom the congregation were watching and with
him that they were keeping time! He never suspected it; he was merely
thinking along with the music; and there was such a look of contagious
happiness on his face as made every one in the building similarly happy.
For he possesses a mysterious faculty of imbuing others with his own
happiness.
Not only singers, but the modern equivalent of psaltery and tabret and
cymbals, all have their place in Dr. Conwell’s scheme of church service;
for there may be a piano, and there may even be a trombone, and there is
a great organ to help the voices, and at times there are chiming bells.
His musical taste seems to tend toward the thunderous--or perhaps it
is only that he knows there are times when people like to hear the
thunderous and are moved by it.
And how the choir themselves like it! They occupy a great curving
space behind the pulpit, and put their hearts into song. And as the
congregation disperse and the choir filter down, sometimes they are
still singing and some of them continue to sing as they go slowly out
toward the doors. They are happy--Conwell himself is happy--all the
congregation are happy. He makes everybody feel happy in coming to
church; he makes the church attractive just as Howells was so long ago
told that he did in Lexington.
And there is something more than happiness; there is a sense of ease, of
comfort, of general joy, that is quite unmistakable. There is nothing of
stiffness or constraint. And with it all there is full reverence. It
is no wonder that he is accustomed to fill every seat of the great
building.
His gestures are usually very simple. Now and then, when he works up to
emphasis, he strikes one fist in the palm of the other hand. When he is
through you do not remember that he has made any gestures at all, but
the sound of his voice remains with you, and the look of his wonderful
eyes. And though he is past the threescore years and ten, he looks out
over his people with eyes that still have the veritable look of youth.
Like all great men, he not only does big things, but keeps in touch with
myriad details. When his assistant, announcing the funeral of an old
member, hesitates about the street and number and says that they can
be found in the telephone directory, Dr. Conwell’s deep voice breaks
quietly in with, “Such a number [giving it], Dauphin Street”--quietly,
and in a low tone, yet every one in the church hears distinctly every
syllable of that low voice.
His fund of personal anecdote, or personal reminiscence, is constant and
illustrative in his preaching, just as it is when he lectures, and
the reminiscences sweep through many years, and at times are really
startling in the vivid and homelike pictures they present of the famous
folk of the past that he knew.
One Sunday evening he made an almost casual reference to the time when
he first met Garfield, then a candidate for the Presidency. “I asked
Major McKinley, whom I had met in Washington, and whose home was
in northern Ohio, as was that of Mr. Garfield, to go with me to Mr.
Garfield’s home and introduce me. When we got there, a neighbor had to
find him. ‘Jim! Jim!’ he called. You see, Garfield was just plain Jim to
his old neighbors. It’s hard to recognize a hero over your back fence!”
He paused a moment for the appreciative ripple to subside, and went on:
“We three talked there together”--what a rare talking that must have
been-McKinley, Garfield, and Conwell--“we talked together, and after a
while we got to the subject of hymns, and those two great men both told
me how deeply they loved the old hymn, ‘The Old-Time Religion.’ Garfield
especially loved it, so he told us, because the good old man who brought
him up as a boy and to whom he owed such gratitude, used to sing it at
the pasture bars outside of the boy’s window every morning, and young
Jim knew, whenever he heard that old tune, that it meant it was time
for him to get up. He said that he had heard the best concerts and the
finest operas in the world, but had never heard anything he loved as he
still loved ‘The Old-Time Religion.’ I forget what reason there was
for McKinley’s especially liking it, but he, as did Garfield, liked it
immensely.”
What followed was a striking example of Conwell’s intentness on losing
no chance to fix an impression on his hearers’ minds, and at the same
time it was a really astonishing proof of his power to move and sway.
For a new expression came over his face, and he said, as if the idea had
only at that moment occurred to him--as it most probably had--“I think
it’s in our hymnal!” And in a moment he announced the number, and the
great organ struck up, and every person in the great church every man,
woman, and child--joined in the swinging rhythm of verse after verse,
as if they could never tire, of “The Old-Time Religion.” It is a simple
melody--barely more than a single line of almost monotone music:
_It was good enough for mother and it’s good enough for me!
It was good on the fiery furnace and it’s good enough for me!_
Thus it went on, with never-wearying iteration, and each time with the
refrain, more and more rhythmic and swaying:
_The old-time religion,
The old-time religion,
The old-time religion--
It’s good enough for me!_
That it was good for the Hebrew children, that it was good for Paul and
Silas, that it will help you when you’re dying, that it will show the
way to heaven--all these and still other lines were sung, with a sort
of wailing softness, a curious monotone, a depth of earnestness. And the
man who had worked this miracle of control by evoking out of the past
his memory of a meeting with two of the vanished great ones of the
earth, stood before his people, leading them, singing with them, his
eyes aglow with an inward light. His magic had suddenly set them into
the spirit of the old camp-meeting days, the days of pioneering and
hardship, when religion meant so much to everybody, and even those who
knew nothing of such things felt them, even if but vaguely. Every heart
was moved and touched, and that old tune will sing in the memory of all
who thus heard it and sung it as long as they live.