It is a spacious and practical
and complete church home, and the people feel
at home there.
``You see again,'' said Dr. Conwell, musingly,
``the advantage of aiming at big things. That
building represents $109,000 above ground. It
is free from debt. Had we built a small church, it
would now be heavily mortgaged.''
IV
HIS POWER AS ORATOR AND PREACHER
EVEN as a young man Conwell won local fame
as an orator. At the outbreak of the Civil
War he began making patriotic speeches that
gained enlistments. After going to the front he
was sent back home for a time, on furlough, to
make more speeches to draw more recruits, for his
speeches were so persuasive, so powerful, so full
of homely and patriotic feeling, that the men who
heard them thronged into the ranks. And as a
preacher he uses persuasion, power, simple and
homely eloquence, to draw men to the ranks of
Christianity.
He is an orator born, and has developed this
inborn power by the hardest of study and thought
and practice. He is one of those rare men who
always seize and hold the attention. When he
speaks, men listen. It is quality, temperament,
control--the word is immaterial, but the fact is
very material indeed.
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