If Protestantism to-day is not doing what it ought to do, and is manifesting symptoms which are alarming to Christian leaders, it is because she has in these recent years been engaged so largely in practical duties as to forget to drink inspiration from the great doctrines which must forever furnish life and strength and hope.  If you will allow me to prophesy this morning, I predict that the preaching of the next fifty years will be far more doctrinal than the preaching of the last fifty years has been.  I imagine some of you will shudder at that.  You say you do not like doctrinal preaching, you want preaching that is practical.  Well, pray, what is practical preaching?  Practical preaching is preaching that accomplishes the object for which preaching is done, and the primary object of all Christian preaching is to reconcile men to God.  The experience of 1900 years proves that it is only doctrinal preaching that reconciles the heart to God.  If, then, you really want practical preaching, the only preaching that is deserving the name is preaching that deals with the great Christian doctrines.  But somebody says, I do not like doctrinal preaching.  A great many people have said that within recent years.  I do not believe they mean what they say.  They are not expressing with accuracy what is in their mind.  They do like doctrinal preaching if they are intelligent, faithful Christians, for doctrinal preaching is bread to hearts that have been born again.  When people say they do not like doctrinal preaching, they often mean that they do not like preaching which belongs to the eighteenth or seventeenth or sixteenth centuries.  They are not to be blamed for this.  There is nothing that gets stale so soon as preaching.  We can not live upon the preaching of a bygone age.  If preachers bring out the interpretations and phraseology which were current a hundred years ago, people must of necessity say, “Oh, please do not give us that, we do not like such doctrinal preaching.”  But doctrinal preaching need not be antiquated or belated, it may be fresh, it may be couched in the language in which men were born, it may use for its illustrations the images and figures and analogies which are uppermost in men’s imagination.  And whenever it does this there is no preaching which is so thrilling and uplifting and mighty as the preaching which deals with the great fundamental doctrines.

In one sense, the Christian religion never changes, in another sense it is changing all the time.  The facts of Christianity never change, the interpretations of those facts alter from age to age.  It is with religion as it is with, the stars, the stars never change.  They move in their orbits in our night sky as they moved in the night sky of Abraham when he left his old Chaldean home.  The constellations were the same at the opening of our century as they were when David watched his flocks on the old Judean hills.  But the interpretations of the stars have always changed, must always change.  Pick up the