The Audibility of Evangelists Reading their comments, my mind went
back twenty-five Years and I began to wonder what Mr. Graham has that Aimee Semple MacPherson did not have. The short but Perhaps not unimportant answer is a microphone. In 1929 I interviewed this lady for an undergraduate magazine, first attending one of her meetings at the Albert Hall, where__ except that it was not full—the setting was similar to that at Harringay : the limelight, the banks of flowers, the choir, the trim retinue of men in dark suits, the well-upholstered Platitudes delivered in a pleasant voice and backed up by simple gestures. The trouble was that—in rd th I g weallery, at easttyou could hardly hear her. Afterwas nt to the artists' room (where Miss MacPherson was removing an enormous golden wig, made, she said, from her own hair) and found to my surprise that 'she was charming, unaffected and sincere. Later I wrote—pompous even in those days—that she was " an interesting and at the moment a slightly pathetic ,ngure, working in a medium too crude and with methods too neatly for the self-conscious and comparatively sophisticated conservatism of English audiences." I do not know if the Pim Four-Square Gospellers are still a thriving sect in these islands, but I bet there would have been more of them than 'ere are if Miss MacPherson had had a microphone.
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