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

“ [265] in the churches” ? Do you not see without going into the nature of that command that it is evident from the very prohibition that everybody was in the habit of speaking, men and women, every one that sat in the church? The early Church was not like the Catskill Falls, where, when you crawl up to see them, a man pulls away a board and lets the water down. It was Niagara, poured by God's hand from a million of voices and a million of hearts. Everybody spoke. The purposes, the wants, the thoughts, the hopes of every Christian man bubbled up to the surface. Now there are practical difficulties in the way of that. Our ideal is to stand midway. Men do not go to a caucus in Faneuil Hall from the idea of example. A man does not say to his wife, “My dear, I am going down to Faneuil Hall to-night in order to hold up the institutions of the country. If I don't go, my neighbors won't do their duty; I am sorry to waste the hour, but I must do it and set a good example to my children.” He goes, because his heart is there half an hour before he is. He goes, because he cannot stay away; because there are live men there who are making his cradle safer; who, with earnest blows on the hot iron of the present, are to shape his future. He goes to share in the great struggle, and glow in the electric conflict. You do not need to have societies to preach to men the duty of going to Faneuil Hall. That organ plays itself.

The real pulpit does not need Dr. Ellis's apology. It can hold its own against the lyceum. “Lively talk and sparkling rattle” are not what most deeply interests the human heart. One earnest sentence will scatter all the “lively rattle” that ever came from countless lyceum lecturers. Thousands crowd to listen to the man who appeals to his fellows, saying, “Brothers, I find great suffering, help me to cure it; I find great darkness, ”