At the request of A.A. Hodge, B.B. Warfield wrote about the impression made upon him by Charles Hodge. He recalls Hodge’s “ordinary bearing” in the recitation room.
After his always strikingly appropriate opening prayer had been offered, and we had been settled back into our seats, he would open his well thumbed Greek Testament–on which it was plain that there was not a single marginal note–look at the passage for a second, and then throwing his head back, and closing his eyes, begin his exposition. He scarcely again glanced at the Testament during the hour, the text was evidently before his mind, verbally, and the matter of his exposition thoroughly at his command. In an unbroken stream it flowed from subject to subject, simple, clear, cogent, unfailingly reverent. Now and then he would pause a moment to insert an illustrative anecdote–now and then lean forward suddenly with tearful, wide-open eyes, to press home a quick-risen inference of the love of God to lost sinners. But the web of his discourse–for a discourse it really was–was calm, critical and argumentative [source].