ical Theology. Such a
specialty, early taken up, is like a well dug on one's property, which
year by year becomes deeper. All the little streams and rivulets of
reading and experience find their way into it; and almost unawares the
happy possessor comes to have within himself a fountain which makes it
impossible that his mind should ever run dry.

* * * * *

Of course I cannot attempt to give here even the slightest sketch of
the doctrinal system of St. Paul; but there are two characteristics of
it which I should like to mention in closing, as they are essential to
the right management of the element of preaching with which I have
occupied you to-day.

The thinking of St. Paul went hand in hand with his experience. His
Christianity began in a great experience, in which he discovered the
secret of life and found peace with God. He set his mind to reflect
upon this, so as to comprehend how it came about and what it involved;
and the theology of the first part of his apostolate was nothing but
the result of these broodings under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
These in their turn, however, brought him still nearer to God and
closer to Christ; and so he obtained new and deeper experiences, of
which the doctrines of his more advanced life are again the
exposition. Thus his thinking was both experimental and progressive.
If his Epistles be arranged in chronological order, it will easily be
seen that there is a splendid growth in his theology from first to
last. He never, indeed, gave up the doctrines of his earlier life;
there is no inconsistency between one part of his writings and
another; but neither his experience nor his thinking ever stood still;
he made his first doctrines the foundations on which he reared a
structure which was rising higher and higher to the very close of his
life.

St. Paul had the heartiest scorn for intellectualism in religion
divorced from experience; and it cannot be denied that it is this
divorce which has brought contempt on the intellectual element in
preaching. When doctrine is preached as mere dogma, imposed as a form
on the mind of the preacher from without, no wonder it is dry and
barren. It is when the preacher's own experience is growing, and he is
coming up with the doctrines of Christianity one by one as the natural
expression for what he knows in his deepest consciousness to be true,
that he utters the truth with power. Never, perhaps, is a sermon