But after this suspension of arms, we must return to the charge with redoubled nerve and bravery, implanting our weapon in the heart, and turning it again and again within the wound. In other words, our train of thought should be still more energetic, our sentiments more powerful; embodied sometimes in a dramatic or tragic form, wherein truth and error are brought together in a fierce and obstinate hand-to-hand struggle; truth being made to overthrow error and to triumph over vice, and then to raise the erring and the transgressor, to embrace them, and to bear them away with herself to virtue, to happiness, to heaven. …
The following extract from M. de Cormenin furnishes an admirable summary of the foregoing chapter:—
"Select with a quick and confident instinct, from among the methods available to you, the method of the day; which may not be the most solid, but which, considering the disposition of men's minds, the nature of the matter in hand, and the peculiarity of concomitant circumstances, is the best adapted for making an impression upon your audience.
"Take strong hold of their attention. Stir up their pity or indignation, their sympathies or their antipathies, or their pride. Appear to be animated by their breath, all the while that you are communicating yours to them. When you have, in some degree, detached their souls from their bodies, and they come and group themselves of their own accord at the foot of the pulpit, riveted beneath the influence of your glance, then do not dally with them, for they are yours; your soul having, as may be truly said, passed into theirs. Look now how they follow its ebb and flow! how they will as you will! how they act as you act! But persist, give no rest; press your discourse home, and you will soon see all bosoms panting because yours pants; all eyes kindling because yours emit flame, or filling with tears because you grow tender. You will see all the hearers hanging on your lips through the attractions of persuasion; or, rather, you will see nothing, for you yourself will be under the spell of your own emotion; you will bend, you will succumb, under your own genius, and you will be the more eloquent the less effort you make to appear so.
"Be clear, exact, concise, impartial.
"Do not attempt to say every thing, but what you do say, say well."