This is not invariably the case; for, occasionally, the preacher turns his noble face toward you, and for that instant you feel the aim of his discourse leveled full at your personality.  Now there is a glimpse of true oratorical power.  But the glimpse passes quickly.  The countenance is again directed forward toward a horizon, or even lifted toward a quarter of the sky above the horizon, and the but momentarily interrupted rapt soliloquy proceeds.

Such I understand to have been the style of Robert Hall’s pulpit speech.  It is a rare gift to be a speaker of this sort.  The speaker must be a thinker as well as a speaker.  The speech is, in truth, 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.