the suffering: his whole soul will, in a word, become legible in his
features, in his attitude, in the expressive eloquence of his hand; his
whole style will be felt to be that of heart communing with heart."

Dramatic action gives picturesqueness to the spoken word. It makes
things vivid to slow imaginations, and by contrast invests the
speaker's message with new meaning and vitality. It discloses, too, the
speaker's sympathy and identification with his subject. His thought and
feeling, communicating themselves to voice and face, to hand and arm, to
posture and walk, satisfy and impress the hearer by a sense of adequacy
and completeness.

Henry Ward Beecher, a conspicuous example of the dramatic style in
preaching, was drilled for three years, while at college, in
voice-culture, gesture, and action. His daily practise in the woods,
during which he exploded all the vowels from the bottom to the top of
his voice, gave him not only a wonderfully responsive and flexible
instrument, but a freedom of bodily movement that made him one of the
most vigorous and virile of American preachers. He was in the highest
sense a persuasive pulpit orator.

A sensible preacher will avoid the grotesque and the extremes of mere
animal vivacity. Incessant gesture and action, undue emphasizing with
hand and head, and all suggestion of self-sufficiency in attitude or
manner should be guarded against. All the various instruments of
expression should be made ready and responsive for immediate use, but
are to be employed with that taste and tact that characterize the
well-balanced man. Too much action and long-continued emotional effort
lose force, and unless the law of action and reaction is applied to the
preaching of the sermon the attention of the congregation may snap and