Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2

[260] all that he planned, all that he read, all that he lived, he brought here. All the great topics that make the court, the street, the caucus,--life,--interesting to you, he brought here. All that makes your life a life he brought here.

That is what gives interest to this pulpit. If we go to see the androides--as we used to when we were children — which can haul a wheelbarrow out, and water a plot of ground, and whip the children, and strike the hour of he day on the clock, we do not go more than once; in once we have seen all that they can do. The moment the world realizes that the pulpit has a limit which it cannot pass; that they are not seeing a man there, but the puppet of something behind; that when you have seen the performance once or twice you have gauged the extent, sounded the bottom,--men do not go more than twice, unless attracted by some rare rhetorical gift, as they crowded long ago to hear Everett read the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians in Brattle-Street Church, the same as some hang night after night on the same words from Kean or Rachel; unless they go from the motive of example, from a sense of duty, from an idea of supporting the religious institutions of their times,--as Coleridge, you know, said he found, on inquiry, that four fifths of the people who attended his preaching attended from a sense of duty to the other fifth.

Now, that is not a pulpit, in the sense of being able to keep the mind of an age. Mark me, I am not speaking in any bitterness toward the pulpit. I have no more bitterness than the municipality of Paris has when it cuts down an old street in order to make a new thoroughfare. My opinion is, that the age, in order to get all its advantage from the pulpit, needs a new type of the pulpit. Look at our life! The press, flooding us every day with ideas; the theatre, open to very serious objections, yet sometimes lifting the people by addressing its love of