tion explained; the claims of Christianity were presented; and
people were urged to immediate decision. Nowadays a large portion of
sermons are addressed to professing Christians; many others are
addressed to nobody in particular, but there is less of faithful,
fervid, loving and persuasive discourses to the unconverted. This is one
of the reasons for the lamentable decrease in the number of conversions.
If ministers are set to be watchmen of souls, how shall they escape if
they neglect the salvation of souls?

I think, too, that we cannot be mistaken in saying that there has been a
decline in impassioned pulpit eloquence. There is a change in the
fashions of preaching. Students are now taught to be calm and
colloquial; to aim at producing epigrammatical essays; to discuss
sociological problems and address the intellects of their auditors
rather in the style of the lecture platform or college class room. The
great Dr. Chalmers "making the rafters roar" is as much a bygone
tradition in many quarters as faith in the Mosaic authorship of the
Pentateuch. I have often wished that the young Edward N. Kirk, who
melted to tears the professors and students of Yale during the revival
there, could come back to us and teach candidates for the ministry how
to preach. There was no stentorian shouting or rhetorical exhortation;
but there was an intense, solemn, white-heat earnestness that made his
auditors feel not only that life was worth living, but that the soul was
worth saving and Jesus Christ was worth serving, and Heaven was worth
securing, and that for all these things "God will bring us into
judgment." If Lyman Beecher and Dr. Edward Dorr Griffin and Finney did
not possess all of Kirk's grace of delivery, they possessed his fire,
and they made the Gospel doctrines glow with a living heat that burned
into the hearts and consciences of their auditors.

May God send into our churches not only a revival of pure and undefiled
religion, but also a revival of old-fashioned soul-inspiring pulpit
eloquence!

It is rather a delicate subject to touch upon, but I am happy to say
that in my early ministry the preachers of God's Word were not hamstrung
by any doubt of the divine inspiration or infallibility of the Book that
lay before them on their pulpits. The questions, "Have we got any
Bible?" and "If any Bible, how much?" had not been hatched. When I was
in Princeton Seminary, our profoundly learned Hebrew Professor, Dr. J.
Addison