by R. A. Torrey — excerpted from "The Great Attraction"

In London, for two continuous months, six afternoons and evenings each week, I saw the great Royal Albert Hall filled and even jammed, and sometimes as many turned away as got in, though it would seat ten thousand people by actual count and provide standing room for two thousand more in the dome. On the opening night of these meetings a leading reporter of the city of London came to me before the service began and said, "You have rented this building for two consecutive months?" "Yes." "And you expect to fill it every day?" "Yes." "Why," he said, "no one has ever attempted to hold two weeks consecutive meetings here of any kind. Gladstone himself could not fill it for two weeks. And you really expect to fill it for two months?" I replied, "Come and see." He came and he saw.

On the last night, when the place was jammed to its utmost capacity and thousands outside clamored for admission, he came to me again, and I said, "Has it been filled?" He smiled and said, "It has." But what filled it? No show on earth could have filled it once a day for many consecutive days. The preacher was no remarkable orator. He had no gift of wit and humor, and would not have exercised it if he had. The newspapers constantly called attention to the fact that he was no orator, but the crowds came and came and came; rainy days, and fine days they crowded in or stood outside, oftentimes in a downpour of rain, in the vain hope of getting in. What drew them? The uplifted Christ preached and sung in the power of the Holy Spirit, given in answer to the daily prayers of forty thousand people scattered throughout the earth.

In Liverpool, the Tournament Hall, that was said to seat twenty thousand people, and that by actual count seated 12,500 comfortably, located in a very out-of-the-way part of the city, several blocks from the nearest street-car line, and perhaps half a mile from all the regular street-car lines, was filled night after night for three months, and on the last night they crowded fifteen thousand people into the building at seven o'clock, and then emptied it, and crowded another fifteen thousand in who had been patiently waiting outside--30,000 people drawn in a single night! By what? By whom? Not by the preacher, not by the singer, but by Him who had said nearly nineteen hundred years before, "But I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself."