This objection to eloquence is therefore its highest eulogium. The greater the benefits which naturally result from any thing, the more pernicious are its effects, when diverted from its proper course. Is there any thing which is not obnoxious to abuse? Even the benign religion of the Prince of Peace has been made the unwilling instrument of the greatest calamities ever experienced by man. Nor let it be objected, that eloquence sometimes im|pedes the course of justice, and screens the guilty from the punishment due to their crimes. To promote the innocent and refined pleasures of the fancy and intellect to strip the monster vice of all his borrowed charms, and expose to view his native defor|mity to display the resistless attractions of virtue and, in one word, to rouse to action all the latent energies of man, in the proper and ardent pursuit of the great end of his existence, is the orator's pleasing, benevolent, sublime employment. To scatter the clouds of ignorance and error from the atmosphere of reason to remove the film of preju|dice from the mental eye and thus to irradiate the benighted mind with the cheering beams of truth, is at once the business and the glory of eloquence. To instruct, to persuade, to please these are its objects. The benevolent design and the beneficial effects of eloquence, evince its great superiority over every other art, which ever exercised the ingenuity of man. A more convincing proof of the dignity and importance of our subject need not, cannot be advanced. To cultivate elo|quence, then, is to improve the noblest faculties of our nature, the richest talents with which we are intrusted. These are the pillars which support the fair fabric of eloquence the foundation, up|on which is erected the most magnificent edifice, that genius could design, or art construct. Speech and reason are the characteristics, the glory, and the happiness of man. THE excellence, utility, and importance of ELO|QUENCE its origin, progress, and present state and its superior claim to the particular attention of Columbia's free-born sons, will exercise for a few mo|ments the patience of this learned, polite, and respected assembly. EXTRACT FROM AN ORATION ON ELO|QUENCE, PRONOUNCED AT HARVARD UNIVER|SITY, ON COMMENCEMENT DAY, 1794.
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