hey hear
every morning the gossip of a thousand cities from China to Peru. The
world has become for the modern man immensely larger and more
interesting than it was to his predecessors; and facts about it are
accumulated on his mind in overwhelming quantity and bewildering
variety. But does this make preaching less necessary to him? It surely
makes it far more necessary. He has more need than his fathers had of
those supersensible principles which give order and meaning to
sensible facts. The larger and more wonderful the world becomes, the
more urgent becomes the question of the cause which has produced it;
and, the more the figures multiply which the spectators have to watch
on the theatre of history, the more indispensable becomes the
knowledge of the argument of the drama. If the pulpit has an authentic
message to deliver about Him whose thought is the ground of all
existence, and whose will of love is the explanation of the pain and
mystery of life, the more cultivated and eager the mind of man
becomes, then the more indispensable will the voice of the pulpit be
felt to be; and a real decay of the power of the pulpit can only be
due either to preachers themselves, when, losing touch with the
mysteries of revelation, they let themselves down to the level of
vendors of passing opinion, or to such a shallowing of the general
mind as will render it incapable of taking an earnest interest in the
profounder problems of existence.

FOOTNOTES:

[1]

"A set o' dull, conceited hashes
Confuse their brains in college classes,
They gang in stirks, and come out asses,
Plain truth to speak,
An' syne they hope to speel Parnassus
By dint o' Greek.

"Gi'e me _a'e spark o' nature's fire_,
That's a' the learnin' I desire,
Then, though I trudge through dub an' mire,
At pleuch or cart,
My muse, though homely in attire,
May touch the heart."--BURNS.

[2] "In 1880 there was in the United States one Evangelical Church
organization to every 516 of the population. In Boston there is 1 church
to every 1,600 of the population; in Chicago 1 to 2,081; in New York 1
to 2,468; in St. Louis 1 to 2,800."--_Our Country_, by Rev. Josiah
Strong, D.D.

[3] See Duhm: _Die Theologie der Propheten_--preface.

[4] Cheyne, Smith, Delitzsch, von Orelli, Dillmann, etc.

[5] "After eleven years of active preaching I have spent five of hardly
less acti