Roland Dwight Grant: his lectures

              Roland Dwight Grant
 HIS LECTURES



PROFOUND THINGS MADE PLAIN … PLAIN THINGS MADE BEAUTIFUL




ROLAND DWIGHT GRANT, A.M., D.D.




DR. GRANT'S PLATFORM
READ THIS AND COME EXPECTING ENTERTAINMENT
THE ART OF LECTURING




The art of entertaining must ever stand at head of list among all arts.




Even the good conversationalist can command any place he wills in the social group.




Lecturing as an art at its best, is the purest conversation.  The silent response of the audience is in their keen appreciation and real pleasure.  But their pleasure can never equal that of the artistic speaker, for his sometimes approximates a real mental intoxication.




The truly Artistic Lecture is the one that gives delight and entertainment while it is being delivered, and forces mental and educational stimulus the days following.  But the choicest entertainment must predominate during the Lecture.  Entertainment now, and mental stimulus to-morrow.  These two elements—and without these two the Lecture is not a success.




Successful is the Physician who can make his patient smile while he takes his medicine and to-morrow is healed.  There is no reason why an audience should not laugh and be happy to-night, if to-morrow it is to be glad and inspired.




Roland D. Grant.





Lecture Titles



Trees of Eden; or, Snakes in Paradise


Story of a Spade


Birth of Art in Europe


Evolutionism a Failure


Rome with Michaelangelo


Yellowstone—Scenic and Scientific


Wild Life in the Selkirks


How the Daisies Made the Sun


Job's Wife Vindicated


The Mighty Columbia


New England Gardens, Garrets and Kitchens


Wrinkles, Cracks and Erosions





JOSEPH COOK



America's great thinker, says: 
There is very little to be added when Dr. Grant has done with the discussion of any topic.





GILMAN PARKER



If you have a good story just tell it to Dr. Grant, and let him tell it over to you so you can appreciate it.






Dr. O. P. GIFFORD says:




Dr. Grant is a live wire always charged.  He will inspire and delight you, and while it will be a magnificent entertainment, it will make you think.




THIS CIRCULAR IS PREPARED FOR THOUGHTFUL PEOPLE DIRECTION






A BIT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY



R
OLAND DWIGHT GRANT, A.M., D.D., was born in 
ye ancient Windsor, Connecticut.
  The old Grant homestead is still in splendid shape, that has proudly sheltered eight generations of the Grants unbroken since 1697, when the house was built.  Two score of the family had brave part in the Revolution, as well as in the Colonial and Indian Wars.  Of these, Dr. Grant has rare personal documents and commissions of ten generations.  These include letters of John Hancock, Chief Justice Ellsworth, Oliver Wolcott, John Fitch, Timothy Edwards, and others, all written to or about the Grant family.




Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., was first President, and Dr. Grant first Vice-president, of the Grant Family Association of America.  He has traced the family name over a thousand years to their settlement of Cambridge, England, originally known as Grantbridge.




He is a passionate lover of Nature, having many thousands of beautiful specimens of Natural History.  Indeed, the Grant home is a regular Kensington Museum of rare and choice collections, and Mrs. Grant and the family, who travel much with him, are in perfect sympathy in entertaining those who appreciate their world of gems.




Aside from European travel and study, he has made nearly fifty trips from ocean to ocean.  His gift of observation is of that sort that misses nothing.




His pastorates have been in and about Boston and at Portland, Oregon, where the stone White Temple was built for him at a cost of $185,000, with audience room for twenty-five hundred, and during his pastorate was none too large.




His influence in his home city is marked by the fact that lectures given there in one winter brought $2400.  The last two brought over $1300 at the door.




Waterloo, N. H., has been their summer hiding place for many years, and is now their permanent country home.





DR. GRANT'S COUNTRY HOME AT WATERLOO, N. H.
(
PERMANENT ADDRESS
)



WORD MERCHANT



A Lecturer is a Word Merchant.  He should deliver his goods to every customer in such manner that everyone can rest and enjoy while he receives that for which he has paid.  It is as dishonest for a Preacher to fail to deliver his goods as for a Grocer.  Every word must be freighted with good things and carried by the voice to each listener so that he has no effort to enjoy it.  The moment the listener has to make any effort to catch the words, that moment the Word Merchant fails, or is dishonest.




Roland Dwight Grant.





YOU NEVER MISS A WORD OF THE GRANT LECTURES
KIND WORDS FROM 23RD STREET SECRETARIES



I think that Dr. Grant is the greatest lecturer we ever had at our Y. M. C. A. (23rd St., N. Y).




(Sec.) Wm. H. Baxley.




I admire Dr. Grant's wonderful ability to see things and the helpful way he tells others what he sees.




(Sec.) Wm. A. Caldwell.




I think Dr. Grant and Fred B. Smith are the two greatest speakers we have ever had at Twenty-third St. Y. M. C.A.




(Sec.) Charles Samson.




Disagree with him—dislike him if you will—but you can't afford to miss hearing his great Lectures.




Twenty-third St., N. Y., by John R. Voris, Secretary.




A live speaker to live men on live topics.




(Sec.) Dr. Geo. F. Poole.




Our people can never seem to get enough of Dr. Grant's talks, though he has been coming to our great course for years, and we consider him booked ahead for life.




Noel Jacks, Secretary, Y. M. C. A., Hartford, Conn.






THE GRANT LECTURES
In the South



JOHN TEMPLE GRAVES, IN ATLANTA NEWS, SAYS:


Dr. Grant has been coming South every year for a long time, and the eagerness with which his annual visits are anticipated constitutes the best evidence of his merit and attractiveness.  Dr. Grant is a man of great information and experience.  He has traveled a great deal and he has a faculty of observation which enables him to see much more than a dozen ordinary men.  But the charm of his manner in telling what he has seen, and in voicing his opinions on the great questions of life, has few parallels.  He is one of the most entertaining men on the American platform.





MY THREE BEST FRIENDS AT 
THE ANCHORAGE






CHAUTAUQUAS



I am sorry for such as did not hear Dr. Grant's wonderful lecture.  I have heard the great lectures of this country, but must honestly say, never heard one to compare with that, and shall not forget it while I live.
—
J. H. Foster, President Chautauqua, Anniston, Ala.





PEN PICTURE BY A LONG-TIME FRIEND



Dr. B. A. Green, of Chicago, who knows how to use words with classic effect, writes as follows:




Dr. Grant has to stand in front of an audience to let his kingly self stand forth.  There he is so challenged by a sea of faces that his whole active force leaps to the front and the reserves are near enough to be felt.  He is calm in the midst of a storm of thinking.  He dares wait a moment to sharpen a phrase to razor edge.  He packs mental stuff into condensed sentences.  The condensation is not baled hay or cotton, but something useful when unpacked and used in the after quiet.  It is a storage of electricity; then and there it thrills and works.  When he is tender he can cut cameo.  He has the swift stroke-power, the sketchy vividness of flashes.  He knows where the heart beats.  And that voice of his, is it magnetic or hypnotic?  Fairies carved his epiglottis to give that resonance which men and women like to hear.  Afterwards to think of him brings flashes of memory pictures.





PEN PICTURE BY A CRITIC



Dr. Grant's lectures are uniformly enjoyable for a variety of causes.  He has a fine, well-modulated voice—and so musical and artistic a voice is unhappily rare.  He is naturally dramatic and artistically sensitive—his temperament apparently is keenly responsive to all the beauties of harmony in anything; and it is immediately resentful of the opposite.  When as a complement to such sensitive refinement of taste is given the ability to intelligently and enthusiastically describe and reproduce in word pictures things of beauty, the 
lecture
 naturally obtains a certain magnetic charm of its own that is no less delightful by reason of its evasiveness.  Unquestionably an egoist to a considerable degree, yet withal the Doctor has mental, poetic and artistic qualities that raise him above the common herd.  It would be maddening to such a man to face the crude, inartistic, yet even there he would be sure to find some solace in beneficent, beautiful nature.  The Doctor is among the favored few who can say with the Philistine:  
Had I two loaves of bread.  I would sell one and buy white lilies to feed my soul.
  The religion taught in Dr. Grant's lectures is the gospel of the true æsthete—the doctrine of refinement, taste and appreciation of grace and beauty in its every form.  The Doctor's style has very much in common with the late Robert Ingersoll's.  And this is_not at all uncomplimentary.—


Editor of Vancouver World.





COMPARED TO BOOTH AND IRVING



When Dr. Grant tells a story in his inimitable way it is always new whether it is new or not.  Shakespeare might be thought a chestnut if repetition would make it so, but surely not if told by Booth or Irving.
—
William H. Eaton, D.D., Boston, Mass.





AMUSES AND THRILLS A LARGE AUDIENCE ON THE PACIFIC



Dr. Grant attracted a very large audience and evoked most intense interest and enthusiasm ….  His word cartoons were immensely funny.—


Daily Times, Victoria, B. C.





THEN ON THE ATLANTIC



Dr. Grant's full, rich voice, his pleasing articulation, dramatic delivery, ready wit, graphic description of and love for the beauty and grandeur of American scenery, but above all his knowledge of the hidden corners of our continent, unite in furnishing an entertainment which few should miss, particularly students.  His lecture was instructive, entertaining, broad and refined.  At times the listeners were thrilled.—


Boston Journal.





DR. GRANT LECTURES AT CATHOLIC COLLEGE



The Boston Globe says:


Boston Catholic College Hall witnessed last night one of the most unusual scenes in its history—a Baptist minister lecturing to a Roman Catholic audience on a subject most dear to the Catholic mind.  The lecturer was Dr. Roland D. Grant on 'Pope Leo's Palace.'
The audience filled the entire hall (1800 people) and was as appreciative as it was large ….  While in no way truckling to prejudices his audience might have on his subject, he gave from his own standpoint impressions wrought on the visitor by contact with scenes of the early Christian struggles.  After the lecture he was congratulated by many, including Father Mullan, the president, who entertained the Doctor in his private apartments and also wrote him a beautiful letter of thanks and appreciation.  (The lecture was repeated a month later to a fashionable Boston Catholic Club.)





THE WATCHMAN SAID EDITORIALLY



When Dr. Grant is on the lecture platform you feel that he ought to stay there and when he is in the pulpit you wonder how he dares leave it for a moment.





ONE ROLAND TO ANOTHER



Your lecture that I listened to yesterday in the Marquam Grand is a grand thing.  That whole combination is a beautiful piece of work.




Roland Reed.

(America's late favorite on the stage.)





MASTER OF THE SITUATION



The Doctor is absolutely master of the situation.—


Concord (N.H.) Monitor





A BEAUTIFUL COMMENT



From Columbus, Tennessee.


To epitomize the lecture would be but to mar the memory of a delightful evening.  It will linger with us and do us good.  By all manner of means come again.





THE WHITE TEMPLE AUDIENCES



The Oregonian,
 the great paper of the Northwest, speaking of Dr. Grant's audiences in Portland, says:




Since the opening of the new White Temple it has proved too small for the vast crowds that throng its doors to hear its pastor, Roland D. Grant.  Each night for many weeks the two large rooms have been filled with people an hour before service time, and many hundreds by actual count, have been turned away.




Besides two hundred and twenty pews, there are twelve hundred chairs, and standing ones pack the corners and vestibules.




Three out of five of these audiences were men.





LECTURE ROOM OF THE WHITE TEMPLE






FROM THE AUTHOR OF 
AMERICA



. . . I note your great success on the platform, and rejoice in it and congratulate you.  May the future be as the past and the present, and more




Fraternally yours,

S. F. Smith.



THE GRANT LECTURES

Mr. Grant is a delightful speaker, and packs into his lectures an immense amount of information.—


Hartford Courant.




THE FREE PRESS OF NANAIMO, B. C.


Every one who heard Dr. Grant will agree that he is a great entertainer.  They were amused by wit and impressed with philosophy.  The doctor on the platform is an attractive-looking gentleman and has a voice and style of delivery that at once lays hold on the attention of an audience.  All the story-telling is directly to the point.




THOUGHT, SUFFERED AND ENJOYED



Here is a man who has thought and suffered and enjoyed and who knows how to interpret these mysterious things to others.  Dr. Grant's wit is the purest philosophy, and his philosophy is keener than another man's wit.—


The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Tenn.




MOUNTAIN CLUBS




The lecture was delightful.  Your power of description and expression could never be rivaled, and the voice was all that a voice could be.




The above words are from Mrs. Thorpe, the successor to Madame Seiler, the world's greatest vocal authority.  It was Madame Seiler who revealed to Dr. Grant the proper use of the vocal chords, and variety of voice.  It never wearies an audience.




Dr. Grant is interested in several Mountain Clubs, like the Appalachian, the Sierras, and the Mazamas, of which he is Vice-president, and helped organize on top of Mt. Hood.




No one has done more to make us love the beautiful in nature.


Hon. George H. Williams, Attorney-general in Grant's Cabinet.





HIS PERSONALITY



The Watchman's comment on Dr. Grant's address to the Boston Clergy, on 
Has Christianity Exhausted Itself?




Dr. Grant's personality and style are so closely wedded to the subject matter of his addresses that any attempt at a report that would separate them would be foolish and unfair to him.  No adequate impression can be given in cold type.  The address was interspersed with many brilliant passages, and pointedly witty sentences.  It held the closest attention of a large audience and evidently made very deep impression.  It was thought-provoking.








DR GRANT AMONG HIS GEMS
THE COLLECTIONS OF DR. AND MRS. GRANT WILL FILL ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FEET LENGTH OF SHOW-CASES

SATISFACTION AND ENTERTAINMENT GUARANTEED



Item.
  The Grant Lectures have been before the public for over 20 years, and long since passed the experimental stage.  The common saying after the lecture is 
had I known it was so entertaining I would have brought all my friends.
  The lectures are full of the subtlest wit.  An hour of perfect enjoyment.  There are places where it has returned again and again for many years.




If ye will not believe this cloud of witnesses, then let the matter drop right here.