it--the most apt illustrations would flow from his lips, the fire of
devotion would beam from his eye, and you saw at once that not only
could he deliver a sermon from it, but that the ordinary time allotted
to a sermon would be exhausted before he could pour out the fullness of
meaning which a sentence from the word of God presented to his mind."
[5]

He was wonderfully gifted in prayer. Here all his intellectual,
imaginative, and spiritual powers were fused into one and poured
themselves forth in an unbroken stream of penitential and adoring
affection. When he said, "Let us pray," a divine influence seemed to
rest upon all present. His prayers were not mere pious mental exercises,
they were devout inspirations.

No one can form an adequate conception of what Dr. Payson was from any
of the productions of his pen. Admirable as his written sermons are, his
extempore prayers and the gushings of his heart in familiar talk were
altogether higher and more touching than anything he wrote. It was my
custom to close my eyes when he began to pray, and it was always a
letting down, a sort of rude fall, to open them again, when he had
concluded, and find myself still on the earth. His prayers always took
my spirit into the immediate presence of Christ, amid the glories of
the spiritual world; and to look round again on this familiar and
comparatively misty earth was almost painful. At every prayer I heard
him offer, during the seven years in which he was my spiritual guide,
I never ceased to feel new astonishment, at the wonderful variety and
depth and richness and even novelty of feeling and expression which were
poured forth. This was a feeling with which every hearer sympathised,
and it is a fact well-known, that Christians trained under his influence
were generally remarkable for their devotional habits. [6]