and a rebel world
surrendered at the feet of God, could endure the agony of the stake,
the privation of the wilderness, and all the discomforts and all the
discouragements of fields of endeavor well sowed but scantily
reaped.

Let the preacher preach the supernatural--the things that are
miraculous, and be unafraid.

He need not be afraid. The world wants that sort of preaching. It is
growing tired at heart of mere machinery and this eternally running
up against a formula of the laboratory or a mathematical calculation
and analyzed force, as explanatory of everything in heaven and in
earth. It would like, if it were possible, to believe in something a
little beyond the length of its eyelashes and the touch of its
finger tips; something that cannot be summed up always in
avoirdupois; something, indeed, beyond the ability of man.

Let the church get back to the old-fashioned doctrinal,
supernatural, miraculous Christianity that underwrites itself with
the name of God. Let it be boldly proclaimed that Christianity is
miraculous, because it is, first and last, the Christianity of that
God who is himself--the eternal miracle.

The very salvation of the church as a church depends upon this
retrograde.

If the church hesitates, compromises, seeks to accommodate its
formulas to modern nomenclature. If it is willing to carry its
baggage at half weight; if it is willing to make its proclamation a
continual denial of all that it has heretofore professed as
fundamental; if it believes the twentieth century has the call on
the first, and that modernism outranks primitivism; if, in short, it
looks upon primitive and apostolic Christianity as the feeble hint
which the modern thinker has known how to modify and improve, then,
as already suggested, the days of its spiritual and moral bankruptcy
are in sight, and the sooner good business arrangements are made to
hire out its meeting houses for ethical and social culture the
better.

Let the church persevere in turning its back upon the hereafter; let
it continue the folly of ignoring the eschatological emphasis of
Christianity; let it keep on giving to men the anodynes of mere
moral maxims; let it direct all its energies to improving and
perfecting a society which God has already judged and condemned at
its best, and presently these drugged and befooled people will
awake, the drugs will no longer be effective, and they will turn in
indignation upon a Christianity which began by