THE PREACHER'S NOVITIATE, WITH ITS PERILS.

Of all persons, there are none whom our subject so much concerns as those to whom the duties of the pulpit are new. We assume the character and spirit of the neophyte to be such as befits the office; that he has cultivated his powers, and stored his mind with knowledge; that he is still bent on mental growth, and aims at self-improvement in all its forms. To accomplish something in the world, something really good and lasting, we will suppose to be his object. He has but one life, and is not content that it should be frittered away. The blossom of his early prime is not to go up as dust. A work is set before him which deserves to be done "with all his might." We will suppose that our Beginners, as a class, belong to that order of men who (to quote an expression of "The Times") "fight battles in order to win them;" a very different thing, by the way, from finding consolation in the sympathy of friends who wonder that they did not win them! Now, it depends more upon their having a "good delivery," than upon anything else in the way of equipment or preparation, whether they shall "win the battle,"

whether they shall gain the public ear, whether they shall keep up attention when once gained, whether they shall long have a people to call their own, or whether life is to be to them a protracted failure. Happily for a young Preacher his manner is not already "set." Faults there may be, but they are not confirmed by time. His bonds are but as green withes: would that we could help him against their putting on a more rigid form ! --Now, there is need for the earliest warning in this case, for such reasons as the following:

1. A faulty or unnatural manner grows upon us unperceived, and when detected, and in a sense laid aside, it steals over us again and again, and must as often be cleared away. Who is there that has not contracted little habits, and tricks, and ways, even in such simple things as his style of dress, his walk, his manner of sitting and standing, his way of entering and quitting a room, his very eating and drinking-tricks and ways which when awkward, as they generally are, it is the first aim of good breeding to detect, and its last achievement to overcome and lay aside? A well-bred man has no observable peculiarities.

2. The young Preacher may already have become unnatural: nay, may have set out with unnaturalness, from the unconscious imitation of others. This state of things is explained when you learn under

what preacher, or class of preachers, the youth has been brought up. Peculiar tones, little tricks of gesture, attitudes, pauses, and other things not a few, may have been caught up insensibly. The speaker (a beginner let us say) is most incorrectly charged with setting himself to imitate this or that person. He is intentionally imitating no one; and yet, undesignedly and unconsciously, he is reproducing the peculiar gestures and tones to which he has been accustomed. The mere child, the veriest clown, can discover in his manner resemblances of this sort; and people who are by no means uncharitable may imagine them to be designed, when in truth nothing is further from the Speaker's thoughts. It should be added that tricks and peculiarities of all kinds are in their very nature contagious. In the commonest acts of life people are unconsciously setting patterns which others are just as unconsciously imitating. Especially is this apt to be the case with a thing so liable to variations as public speaking, in which peculiarities combine so early and so multifariously with each other, and form a result too complex for analysis.

We are mirrors to one another. Often may we learn what we are ourselves doing, by noticing some turn or trick in others of which we had unconsciously given the example.

3. In proportion to the largeness of the area to

A chant can be sus

be filled, unnatural speaking-that is, some kind of intonation, chanting, sing-song, &c.- costs less effort than what is natural, because conversational. In a spacious building it is easier to intone than simply to talk, or to recite. tained, a musical note can be prolonged, and made to fill a large edifice, with comparative ease. A boy at a railway station can sing out his "Day's Times!" "Morning Papers!" &c., prolonging the "" in the first of these cries, and dwelling upon the liquids-the "n's" and the "r's"-in the second, so as to fill a space far larger than the strongest man could make resonant by mere natural speaking, or loud converse. Unhappily many of our churches and chapels are so constructed, that to speak in them in the way of a chant is much easier than to fill them with natural conversational discourse. They are well adapted for the proclamation of a crier, but not at all fitted for argument, didactic comments, calm narration, or persuasive address. Speakers are therefore insensibly drawn into the practice of intoning or chanting, or into that kind of sing-song which is a chant without the music, and which passes under the general name of heaviness or monotony.

4. There are certain letters of the alphabet which almost tempt us into unnaturalness, by their being so easily capable of prolongation. These are the vowels; and the liquids, l, m, n, r.

A vowel may

be prolonged indefinitely, i.e., as long as the longest breath will hold out; and this may be said with almost equal truth of the liquids also. We have heard the letter O in the word "pour" prolonged for a space quite extended enough to admit of a good-sized vessel being filled by the act of pouring. Indeed, this seemed to be the mental association that guided the speaker. But the letter M in "come," may be dwelt upon quite as long as it would take a person actually to cross the floor of a church. Now, one apparent advantage of this prolongation, or expansion, or inflation, of the sounds, this "dwelling" upon them (as we say), is that the Speaker gains time to think. If ideas rise slowly, if fit words do not promptly occur, if the mind be weary, and especially if it be understood that a certain length of time must be filled up, irrespective of the amount of the material that is at command, it is obvious that such an expedient may prove serviceable. Whether this prolongation-sometimes called by the inelegant word "mouthing," is not unfavourable to impressionnay, almost fatal to it—is truly another and a very different matter.

5. It is one of the most serious liabilities of public speaking that this prolongation, this enlargement of sound, this swollen emphasis, tends to recur after certain fixed and measured intervals. These intervals become briefer as the fault grows