This practice should be continued till it becomes a rooted habit, till it has grown to be his normal method of speaking.
When he goes into the pulpit I would give him an advice, the value of which time and experience can alone enable him to appreciate.
Direct your voice not to the end of the church, but to the side wall about three-quarters way down from the pulpit to the door. Fix your eye on some person there; to him address your sermon, but pitch your voice against the wall about two feet above his head.
By this plan you not only secure your voice against unnecessary fatigue, but you take the surest method of sending it into every ear, and the reverberations of your own voice will act electrically on you.
As ring after ring of your sentences comes back from the sounding spot against which you have discharged them you are filled with courageous confidence and an assurance that every word has found its mark.
A recent writer in the Quarterly Review discloses in one luminous sentence the qualities that go to make an orator, and every priest should struggle with all his might to be an orator in the best sense of the word.
He says: "Nor is any man a great orator who has not many of the gifts of a great actor—his command of gesture, his variety and grace of elocution, his mobility of features, his instant sympathy with the ethical tone of this or that situation, his power of evoking that sympathy in every member of his audience; and this is surely what Demosthenes meant by making acting not action the secret of all oratory."
What a vista these words open up! What a variety of accomplishments demanded that can only be acquired, even by the most gifted, by long study and patient practice! And since learning to speak in public is like learning to swim, or to skate, or to ride a bicycle, in this sense at least, that no amount of previous theoretical instruction will enable one to realise the initial difficulties or find out how to overcome them without actual experiment, it would be arrant folly on the part of the future priest to neglect this subject during his student years.
These questions—Culture, English, and Preaching—should occupy a foremost place in the curricula of our colleges. It is only by training the student from the start, by fostering literary, dramatic and debating societies where not alone the practical art of speaking is developed, but the social amenities of good society are practised, that the young priest can be equipped to efficiently discharge the high office awaiting him, and so reflect a lasting credit on the Church of God at home and abroad.