ut even for
him it can not be said that the form and construction of the interior do
not oppose a serious embarrassment to the proper effect of oratory. I
could not help feeling it to be a great wrong to the truth, or, to put
it personally, a great wrong to the preacher and to his hearers, that an
audience-room should be so broken up with pillars, angles, recesses, so
sown with contrasts of light and shade, as necessarily, inevitably, to
disperse and waste an immense fraction of the power exerted by the
preacher, whatever the measure, great or small, of that power might be.
The reaction of this audience-room upon the oratorical instinct and
habit of the man who should customarily speak in it could not but be
mischievous in a very high degree. The sense, which ought to live in
every public speaker, of his being fast bound in a grapple of mind to
mind, and heart to heart, and soul to soul, with his audience, must be
oppressed, if not extinguished, amid such architectural conditions as
those which surround Phillips Brooks when he stands to preach. That in
him this needful sense is not extinguished is a thing to be thankful
for. That it is, in fact, oppressed, I can not doubt. There is evidence
of it, I think, in his manner of preaching. For Mr. Brooks is not an
orator such as Mr. Beecher is. He does not speak _to_ people _with_
people, as Mr. Beecher does; rather he speaks _before_ them, in their
presence. He soliloquizes. There is almost a minimum of mutual relation
between speaker and hearer. Undoubtedly the swift, urgent monologue is
quickened, reinforced, by the consciousness of an audience present. That
consciousness, of course, penetrates to the mind of the speaker. But it
does not dominate the speaker's mind; it does not turn monologue into
dialogue; the speech is monologue still.

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 tr