1.C 09. Nearness to the Audience
Nearness to the Audience. The next point you should look to is to have your pews as near as possible to the speaker. A preacher must be a man among men. There is a force call it magnetism, or electricity, or what you will in a man, which is a personal element, and which flows from a speaker who is enrapport with his audience. This principle should be utilized in the work of preaching. I do not say that Jonathan Edwards could not have preached under the pulpit disadvantage. He could have preached out of any thing. But there are not many men like Jonathan Edwards. The average man needs all the extraneous advantages he can press into his service.
People often say, “Do you not think it is much more inspiring to speak to a largo audience than a small one? “ No, I say; I can speak just as well to twelve persons as to a thousand, provided those twelve are crowded around me and close together, so that they touch each other. But even a thou sand people, with four feet space between every two of them, would be just the same as an empty room.
Every lecturer will understand what I mean, who has ever seen such audiences and addressed them. But crowd your audience together, and you will set them off with not half the effort.
Brother Day, the son of old President Day, of Yale College, was one of my right-hand men in founding the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn; and -being a civil engineer, and the church having voted to build, he went into my study with me to plan the edifice. He asked me what I wanted, in the first place, and how many people I wanted the church to seat. I told him. “ Very good,” he said; “ and how do you want them located? “ “I want them to surround me, so that they will come up on every side, and behind me, so that I shall be in the centre of the crowd, and have the people surge all about me.” The result is, that there is not a better constructed hall in the world for the purposes of speaking and hearing than Plymouth Church. Charles Dickens, after giving one of his readings in it, sent me special word not to build any other hall for speaking; that Plymouth Church was perfect. It is perfect, because it was built on a principle, the principle of social and personal magnetism, which emanates reciprocally from a speaker and from a close throng of hearers. This is perhaps the most import ant element of all the external conditions conducive to good and effective preaching.