330 His roRY of Methodism 



He was already the prey of fatal disease, and a weight 

 of misfortune, such as rarely falls to the lot of mortals, 

 had bowed down his spirit. Whenever I expressed 

 what I always felt, the highest admiration of his orig- 

 inal genius and irresistibly powerful preaching, I 

 could perceive sadness gathering upon the brow of 

 the old Methodists, as they exclaimed, "Ah, poor 

 Brother Russell! he preaches well, very well, and it 

 is long since I heard such a sermon before. But he 

 is no longer what he used to be. You should have 

 heard him fifteen years ago." It is certain that the 

 preaching of Russell, fallen as he was from the strength 

 of his manhood, made an impression upon me such as 

 has seldom been produced by another. Perhaps he 

 had lost something from the vigor of his action and 

 the pathos of his exhortation. The vividness and 

 luxuriance of his imagination might have been with- 

 ered in the furnace of suffering; but the strong dis- 

 tinguishing features of his original mind, his shrewd- 

 ness of perception, his urgency of argument, his 

 inimitable aptness of illustration, his powers of rapid 

 and novel combination, were unimpaired. A leading 

 excellency in his preaching consisted in his peculiar 

 felicity of expression. His style was always adapted 

 to the genius of his congregation. Not that he was 

 such a master of language as to be able to rise and 

 fall with the ever-varying intellectual standard of his 

 auditory, but whilst his choice of words and construc- 

 tion of sentences were seldom displeasing to a culti- 

 vated ear, they were always level to the capacities of 

 plain, unlettered men. His rhetoric as well as his 

 logic was that of common life. For both he was much 

 indebted to books. Reading had disciplined his mind 

 and purified his taste; but it had left no other vestiges 



