when the crisis of a moral regeneration came to him, it found no other intellectual material to work on, save his vague reminiscences of his early Catholic belief; and with singular intensity of conviction and a pathetic simplicity of good faith, he died, anticipating from his scientific creed the revival of true religion and the salvation of the world.

Most men, of any Christian training at all, have probably got truth enough, so far as regards the mere furnishing of mental material. The need with them is to feel it, and understand it, and apply it. Most men's convictions are most lively and effectual when narrowed to a single point. Paul hinged everything on justification by faith, and was determined to "know nothing but Christ and him crucified." John had nothing of that, but preached the simple love of God, and his "word made flesh abiding with us." Yet, from these opposite poles, each comprehended the whole sphere of the Gospel truth. Two eminent men of the last generation were born within a month of each other, and died not far apart, Chalmers and Channing. One took the gospel of grace, and the other the gospel of humanity; each did his work, one which the other could not possibly have done; and the world well understands that from the religion of this nineteenth century neither could be spared. Every Christian sect, every honest and earnest man, carries the germ of what in its full ripeness should be the salvation of the world. It is only when Protestantism has had its perfect work, when each has followed out his own method, in entire freedom and absolute sincerity, that the conditions are secured of that higher religious unity, for which Protestantism, these three hundred years, has sought and sighed in vain.

ART. V.- WENDELL PHILLIPS AS AN ORATOR.

Speeches, Lectures, and Letters. By WENDELL PHILLIPS. Boston: James Redpath. Seventh Edition. 1863.

WERE there to be an Oration for the Crown of an international character, England and America putting forth rival claimants, probably few men in our country would fail to name as the representative of our own land Wendell Phillips. It is but recently that his most cherished opinions were shared only by a handful of men, while the vast majority were intensely imbittered against him; even now the majority look upon him with doubtful, even though with admiring eyes, while a large minority, to say the least, deem him utterly pestiferous, and would be quite as glad to abolish him as he to abolish slavery. Yet those who hate and denounce him most would hold up both hands to secure his election, were the palm of oratory to be disputed as we have supposed, — that is, if they wished America to triumph. By common consent, by the equal acknowledgment of those who rejoice in, and of those who deplore the fact, he is the first forensic orator of our land at the present day; nec viget quidquam simile aut secundum. Or if there be one who possesses rival powers, he is a man of that race in whose behalf Mr. Phillips has labored, the slave-born Frederick Douglass.

We do not forget others. Mr. Sumner is learned, exhaustive, ponderously eloquent. Mr. Beecher is a discourser of incomparable vividness, fertility, and picturesqueness. Mr. Everett is a master in what one may call literary oratory, graceful, lucid, classic, elegant, impressive; but for the forum, orator parum vehemens, dulcis tamen, ut Theophrasti discipulum possis agnoscere. Many others might be named with high praise, especially were pulpit eloquence, strictly speaking, to be brought into the account; for our country is fertile far beyond all others in modern times in oratorical gifts. But when all others are accredited with their proper excellence, Mr. Phillips, in a candid estimation, must, we think, be named as pre-eminent in forensic power.

The degree to which he is a native oratorical force may be suggested by the fact that, notwithstanding his pre-eminence, no one thinks of comparing him to any preceding orator. Almost every other man of literary eminence in America has been referred to some original in other lands and times. Irving was complimented by being named "the American Addison," Cooper "the American Scott," Dana “the American Coleridge" (sic); nay, it is incredibly affirmed by some that Nature has amused herself with the production of critics who could style Emerson an imitator of Carlyle; but the sportive Dame, we think, has never hatched a goose to cackle discovery of a foreign original for Wendell Phillips.

His speeches suggest no other speeches. We forget to ask what orator is his favorite, what one he has chiefly studied, whether Demosthenes, Cicero, Mirabeau, or Burke. Highly cultivated as he is, no man's eloquence, not that of Patrick Henry, nor of Jefferson's Indian chief Logan, ever sprang more from his own bosom, less from books. And this, we think, chiefly because it is no part of his aim to achieve eloquence for its own sake. He is saturated with unselfish purpose. He is intent on beneficent effects. He is eloquent partly because he does not try to be eloquent. He opens his heart to you as the spring buds do theirs; and you never think of asking from whom he learned how to do so.

It is the function of the orator as such distinctively to persuade men to honorable action, or enkindle them to noble sentiment, on the basis of their national life. This element of nationality must always be more or less, directly or indirectly, present, and is of the very gist and essence of the orator's inspiration. Eloquence there may be in books, in parlors, wherever men speak or write; but oratory belongs above all to the forum; it stands in close connection with patriotism; its principal purpose is to induce national truth, justice, courage, discretion, or honorable pride, to connect political or judicial action with the reason and heart of man. The aim of the preacher is to induce depth and rectitude. of personal life. He appeals to the sense of personal responsibility; he aims to upbuild personal character; he enters to the privacies of the soul; he takes up each individual VOL. LXXV. - 5TH S. VOL. XIII. NO. III.

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auditor to the summit of Sinai, and stands with him in the sole presence of the Highest; he strives to enhance those forces by which spiritual architectures are carried on, and to diminish those by which these are threatened. If the individual has duties toward the state, the preacher not only may, but in the just discharge of his own duty must, counsel their faithful and righteous fulfilment. He cannot urge all highest fidelities on the man, and countenance all infidelities in the citizen. He must follow the man into every stated department of his action, domestic, economical, political, social, and seek that in each he may acquit himself as a precious and immortal nature. It may happen, therefore, that the preacher and the forensic orator agree in the quality of their counsels; yet there will always be a difference in tòne, because there is a difference in point of view. The orator is looking primarily to national justice and welfare; the preacher is looking primarily to private rectitude, to the spiritual prosperity of persons as such.

We may discriminate the position of a third speaker, namely, the lecturer. His chief aim is to induce intellectual and moral enlargement. Before all things else, he labors for the expansion of the human spirit, -to place things in broader and more subtile relations, to enkindle new and widening sympathies, to awaken elevating interests, to confer upon the common life of men the dignity of knowledge, of appreciation, and of thought.

The lecturer, therefore, addresses man as a mind; the preacher addresses him as a soul; the orator addresses him as a definite and corporate social reality. The first would make him universal by thought; the second would give his being infinitude by placing it in purest vital connection with the Divine; the third would have him connect the higher contents of his being with his corporate social life.

Great orators belong more particularly to periods of change or of crisis in the destiny of nations, as the instances of Mirabeau, Cicero, and Demosthenes suggest. Properly, too, the orator is conservative. He appeals to men in behalf of old and established principles. This position is requisite for the highest oratorical effect; for if the speaker must establish

principles, he at once falls into the attitude of the lecturer, and assumes it as his task rather to elucidate than to warm and persuade. Just in proportion, therefore, as the orator must propound anything new, he is cut off from the higher, effects of his art. His position accordingly supposes in his audience a pre-existing community of faith, a pre-existing wealth of affection for certain ideas and institutions.

Hence there is no eloquence among a degenerate, degraded, and spiritually impoverished people. They do not supply the conditions under which oratory can flourish. Demosthenes, in later times, would not have been Demosthenes, but would have gone to his grave with the stammer of his youth. Scepticism slays eloquence. The soul of all powerful oratory is belief. Without intense and able believing, the orator can only bewitch, not inspire. Without genuine, hearty believing among the people, he can only smoulder, not blaze.

Therefore the substratum of all great forensic eloquence must be certain assumptions common to speaker and hearer. Assumption rules the world. Nothing else possesses the utmost power. And just in proportion to the depth, breadth, and richness of this body or soul of assumed principle in the bosom of a people, are they in a condition to vitalize the orator by their presence. And when, still further, against this deepgrounded, unquestioning faith there has come in some alien, insidious, invading element, persuasive by its appeal to fear, to avarice, to the love of indolent pleasure, just then is supplied to the orator that foothold and that occasion which he requires.

Let us see, now, to what degree these conditions have been supplied in the case of Mr. Phillips.

Our nation had assumed as its basis a doctrine of rights inhering in human beings simply as human. We built our national edifice on assumed principles of universal justice. We baptized these principles in the blood of battle; and having been victorious, we came forth from the crimson consecration to represent these principles before the world, and to perfect their application in our interior politics. And the nation was at the outset warm, hearty, intrepid in the faith it professed. On the other hand, here was the alien element, slavery, for