the Seminary was not friendly or helpful to it. It was about as trying an ordeal as a man can well pass to stand up and speak without a manuscript, in the lecture-room or the chapel. I don't know that the criticism which was encountered was any more severe than it should have been. I am sure it was never intentionally oppressive or unjust. But it was most thoroughly searching and exact; so that if a man had any weaknesses or faults about him, as all of us had, he was sure enough to find them out, and was usually glad, after one experiment, to take refuge in future behind his notes.

I got some practice in the debating society; and two or three times, as I remember, adventured upon short public speeches, without notes in my pocket. But on the whole I lost rather than gained, in this regard, in my Seminary course; and when I came out was hardly as eager, perhaps, so far as courage and confidence were concerned, was hardly as well fitted, to preach without notes as I should have been ear

SETTLEMENT AT BROOKLINE.

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lier. My conviction on the subject remained, however; and I was still resolved to get used to this method, and to employ it, if I could.

My first settlement in the ministry was at Brookline, near Boston; in a charming suburban parish, but with a congregation not helpful to my plans in regard to this matter of the method of preaching. In a church capable of holding five hundred or six hundred people we had usually, in the winter, a congregation of perhaps seventy-five to a hundred. They were as affectionate and appreciative hearers as any man need ask or hope for. But the majority of them were cultured, careful, critical hearers, who required a high intellectual tone in whatever was said to them, and were instantly sensitive to its absence.

They had been trained under the Boston pulpits, the ministers in which almost universally— perhaps quite universally-then read their sermons; and, though kind as they could be, they were inevitably exacting in their demand for precision and elegance of literary form. It was a

scattered assembly, of individuals, and of separated households. There was no mass of hearers, to be kindled and swayed by a common enthusiasm, and in turn to reäct upon the preacher: they were not numerous enough for that, and the building itself was relatively too large. They were most of them, of course, older than I was, and I was diffident in speaking before them on subjects much longer familiar to them than they had been to me. They were more or less anxious, too, as to the impression to be made by my preaching on the Unitarian or Episcopalian outsiders who frequently made a part of the congregation; and so were uneasy and apprehensive when I rose without notes, and jubilant whenever they saw these before me.

I made my endeavors, more than once, to carry out the plan which I had proposed, and preach without a manuscript before me; but it was all the time like swimming up the rapids, while with the manuscript I had only to float easily on the current. I tried to combine the advantages of

USE OF A SKELETON.

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both methods: to have notes before me, a somewhat full skeleton of my discourse, and then to be at liberty, in the intervals between the heads and sub-heads, to avail myself of any suggestions that might come. But this plan I found, for me however it may be for others the poorest

possible. I lost all fluency, and continuity of thought. The intervals were not long enough, between my prepared heads, to allow the mind. to get freely, freshly, vigorously at work. Just as my mental glow began, if it did begin, it had to be checked by returning to the manuscript. My utterance was inevitably interrupted, suspended, at the moment at which it might otherwise have come to be easy and spontaneous. I could never get force enough, between the recurring references to my notes, to push the sermon home upon my hearers, or even to carry my own mind through it with any sense of liberty and vigor. The whole sermon became a series of jerks. There was no gathered and helpful momentum, toward the end, or anywhere else. I

lost the foresight of the end from the beginning; was wholly engrossed in taking each successive step correctly, when I should come to it. I became timid, retrospective, and had no sense of real mastery over the theme, or of any mastery whatever over the minds to which I was speaking.

So I gave up that plan, then and there, and have never once thought of trying it since. It would be to me like running a race, with a ball and chain attached to each foot. I should read every sermon I ever preached, if that were to be the only alternative.

During the year which I spent at Brookline, I persevered in these efforts to get free from necessary dependence on my notes; but I do not think that I ever once, in the pulpit there, on the Sunday, had any true sense of liberty and joy in public utterance, unless I was reading. It was a steady hard struggle, from first to last, for conscious freedom in public speech; with almost no sense of success, and with very little