o the advantage of the preacher and his people? To-day, also, we
hear less concerning the joy of the Christian life than formerly; less
concerning new triumphs in the conversion of sinners than in days it is
glorious to remember. To-day men complain, as we have already heard,
that the preachers ask too little and do not bid them look so high as
something in their bosoms tells them they ought to look. The preaching
of Scriptural holiness has been discredited, it must be confessed, by
the language into which it has often been thrown; by a disposition to
censoriousness in those who have given it a large place in their
ministry; by a disposition, too, on the part of its preachers to label
as sins many things which were capable of innocent use and enjoyment,
to cut out of life more than they sought to put in, dealing rather in
prohibitions than in inspirations. This doctrine has suffered, again,
more than most, from the inconsistencies of its apostles, as was indeed
inevitable and should have been expected, for the higher a man's
preaching the more clearly his personal imperfections are brought out
by force of contrast, which may be rather to the glory of the preaching
than to its discredit. Say, however, all that can be said in this
direction concerning the doctrine of Christian Perfection; the ideals
of the Gospel for human living are no lower than the highest word the
Perfectionist has ever uttered. These ideals, as put before us and
required of us, are part of the message of the Cross, and the preaching
which does not include and enforce them is incomplete and cannot
become, in the highest sense, effective in the accomplishment of its
divine purpose. When a man's preaching presents ideals higher than
those of the Sermon on the Mount; when he asks for a whiter purity, a
more embracing charity, a nobler style of living than are required by
Jesus Christ, _then_ will have come the time to call a halt. Up to
this point he has behind him not only divine permission but divine
command. By his ears, if he but listen, may be heard, also, the voices
of men who are weary of the valleys and the swamps, and who long to
climb the heights and pierce the clouds that hold their vision from the
skies. We need a new Puritanism, and it must not be a Puritanism
principally of prohibitions, as was the old. It must be a Puritanism
in which all the glories possible to heart and mind and soul are set
forth in charm and beauty.

But the