aching of our fathers. The old
sermon titles--"Suffering with Christ that we may be also glorified
with Him," for instance--seem very far away from it. Nor is it to be
supposed that this is what its author intended the story we have been
using to convey nor that these were the reactions that it aroused
in the breasts of its original hearers. But as the sermonizer would
doubtless go on to remark, there is a certain universal quality in all
great literature, and genius builds better than it knows, and so each
man can draw his own water of refreshment from these great wells of
the past. And indeed nothing is more amazing or disconcerting than the
mutually exclusive notions, the apparently opposing truths, which can
be educed by this method, from one and the same passage of Scripture!
There is scarcely a chapter in all the Old Testament, and to a
less degree in the New Testament, which may not be thus ingeniously
transmogrified to meet almost any homiletical emergency.

Now, I may as well confess that I have preached this kind of sermon
lo! these many years _ad infinitum_ and I doubt not _ad nauseam_. We
have all used in this way the flaming rhetoric of the Hebrew prophets
until we think of them chiefly as indicters of a social order. They
were not chiefly this but something quite different and more valuable,
namely, religious geniuses. First-rate preaching would deal with Amos
as the pioneer in ethical monotheism, with Hosea as the first poet of
the divine grace, with Jeremiah as the herald of the possibility of
each man's separate and personal communion with the living God. But,
of course, such religious preaching, dealing with great doctrines of
faith, would have a kind of large remoteness about it; it would pay
very little attention to the incidents of the story, and indeed,
would tend to be hardly expository at all, but rather speculative and
doctrinal.

And that brings us to the theme of this final discussion. For I am one
of those who believe that great preaching is doctrinal preaching and
that it is particularly needed at this hour. The comparative neglect
of the New Testament in favor of the Old in contemporary preaching;
the use and nature of the expository method--no less than the
unworshipful character of our services--appear to me to offer a final
and conclusive proof of the unreligious overhumanistic emphases of our
interpretation of religion. And if we are to have a religious revival,
then it seems to me wo