C 05 - A Speaking Vocation
A SPEAKING VOCATION
5. In the same line the ministry has the at traction of being a speaking vocation. Truth may be imparted and minds educated through the printed page, and this is the work and joy of the author. But there is a special joy in imparting truth through the voice to a present, visible audience. Speaking is an exercise that arouses the speaker’s whole personality physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Under its inspiration the heart beats with a quicker bound, the blood rushes in a ruddy, glowing stream through the arteries and veins, and every organ and nerve is quickened into a keener and fuller life. The mind also is aroused and its mental associations come flocking around the theme under discussion and pour their light upon it, the logical faculties grow more alert to see relations, and thought finds readier and more forcible expression in speech. The emotions are kindled and begin to glow and fuse the whole soul into fervency and fire. The imagination spreads its wings and soars to loftier heights where the mind can see with broader vision and utter more eloquent speech and deliver more powerful strokes of thought. The will arouses its energy and mounts into mastery and bends all thought and passion and speech to its own purpose.
Speaker and audience also react on each other and put fuel on each other’s fire. “While the speaker magnetizes the audience, the audience inspires the speaker. The fire in his eyes kindles their souls, and their gleaming eyes are flaming torches to his soul. His eloquence puts a kind of hypnotic spell upon them, and their eager faces and rapt attention excite him to still greater efforts and effects. The interest and especially the passion of speaker and audience are mutually contagious; they catch and kindle each other’s emotions. A great orator may become transfigured before his audience and his face may shine with a supernal light, as did the face of Moses. Of Daniel Webster it is recorded that for several hours after his great oration at the dedication of Bunker Hill Monument his face wore an indescribably grand expression that awed those who came into his presence. The orator thus rises to heights of thought and emotion that he never could attain in the calmness and coolness of private study and meditation. By a process of electric induction the audience charges him with power by which his total soul down to its unconscious deeps is aroused into action and he transcends his ordinary ability and may be a revelation and wonder to himself.
Such an experience is one of the greatest triumphs and joys of the human soul. The whole soul is then alive and alert in all its powers of thought and passion and pours forth its total self in a flood of spontaneity and abandon as a bird discharges its soul in a gush of song. All disharmony in the soul is unified, all distracting and troublous thoughts and feelings are submerged, and the soul loses itself in perfect expression and pure joy. This is probably the highest state of the human soul and it is only approached by the great artist in the act of giving birth to some child of his genius.
Now the minister’s work is in this field.
He is a speaker, and two or three times a week he stands before an audience and speaks to them face to face and soul to soul. His audience is one of intelligence, and it is interested in his subject and has some general acquaintance with it. It understands his general line of reasoning and his personal purpose, and it is quick to appreciate his good points, and is also able and keen to note his defects. His audience is sympathetic, it usually is en rapport with him and wants and waits to be instructed and stirred to action.
It waits for him as an instrument waits for the musician to sweep its keys- or strings. On the whole, Christian people furnish the best average audience that could be gathered in its community. The preacher has his chance with it, and if he has any spark of the oratorio instinct he will catch and hold its attention and kindle its interest. He may not be a great orator such as Beecher or Spurgeon, for such men of genius are as rare in the pulpit as they are in any other field; but he has some ability as a speaker and he has about the best opportunity that any man can have to cultivate the art of speaking and achieve efficiency if not mastery in it. “With themes appealing to human souls on the greatest issues of time and eternity, he can arouse himself to his fullest power and fervency and he can arouse his hearers to some realization of the mighty motives that should move them to Christian faith and action. This privilege is a joy com pared with which many of the pleasures for which other men pay dearly are not worthy to be considered, and this will ever be one of the highest attractions of the ministry.