oppression of the poor, the robbery of the widow, the
exploitation of the savage; against the crimes of the empires, the
Almighty, through his lips, would make His anger known. He has done so
often and often. Again and again has the preacher turned back the
tides of national iniquity, again and again prevented the wrongful
purpose upon which a people had set its heart. The need is with us
still. This warning and accusing note of sternness must be regained.
To tell men of their sins and that they are lost unless God delivers
them; to tell the age of its iniquities and that the sure end of
national vice is national destruction--here is our work to-day.

So there needs something in the nature of a reversion to the methods of
days that are no more. Yet a _full_ return to the mode of our fathers
is impossible. Let this be acknowledged frankly and fully and at once.
Those "black sermons" to which we listened forty years ago can never be
preached again. The day has gone, at least within the area of
civilisation, for painting flaming pictures of hell, for realistic and
horrible descriptions of the tortures of the damned. That kind of
thing has had its day and can be done no more. Preachers could not do
it; hearers would not hear it. The misfortune has been that the
passing of our fathers' methods has not been followed by the discovery
of others in which the truth they conveyed could be expressed in forms
more suitable to different times. Even the man outside the Church has
left behind him the literal understanding of those old figures of
speech. Few now think of heaven as our grandsires thought of it; few
imagine hell as they imagined it. Yet is there still a heaven; yet is
there still a hell.

And, hard as it is to write it, it is to the preaching of hell that we
must return--the hell of degradation and of loss and of sure
retribution. That hell is the latter state to which every path of
wrong-doing leads with the inevitability of eternal law. Sin is hell
in the making. Hell is sin found out, perhaps, alas, too late. This
word is needed in our churches this very day.

It is needed, it was recently suggested to us, especially by our young
people. With good reason the churches are all anxious as to the young
people, so many of whom, alas! show a disposition to leave the temples
of their fathers. It cannot be said that the Church has not done her
best along certain lines to keep the coming generation at home.