One characteristic of the present time is the radical and revolutionary spirit which condemns everything that is “old,” especially in the realm of religion.  It arrogantly claims that the “advanced thought” of this highly cultured age has broken with the traditional beliefs of our benighted ancestors, and that modern congregations are too highly enlighted to accept those antiquated theologies.  No pretentions could be more preposterous.  Methinks that those stalwart farmers of New England, who on a wintry Sabbath, sat and eagerly devoured for an hour the strong meat of such theological giants as Jonathan Edwards, and Emmons and Bellamy and Dwight, would laugh to scorn the ridiculous assumption of the present day congregations, many of whom have fed on little else during the week but novels and newspapers.  This revolutionary spirit is expert in pulling down; it is a sorry bungler at rebuilding.  Nothing is too sacred for its assaults.  The iconoclasts who belong to the most extreme and destructive school of “higher criticism” have reduced a large portion of God’s revealed word utterly to tatters.  King David has been exiled from the Psalter; but no “sweet singers” have yet turned up who could have composed those matchless minstrelsies.  Paul is denied the authorship of the Epistle to the Romans; but the mighty mind has not been discovered which produced what Coleridge called the “profoundest book in existence.”  The Scripture miracles are discarded, but Christianity, which is the greatest miracle of all, is not accounted for.  The “new theology” which has well nigh banished the supernatural from the Bible pays an homage to the principle of “evolution,” which is due only to the Almighty Creator of the universe.  Spurgeon has wittily said that if we are not the product of God’s creating hand, but are only the advanced descendants of the ape, then we ought to conduct our devotions accordingly, and address our daily petitions “not to our Father which is in Heaven, but to our father which is up a tree.”

I do not belong to that class which is irreverently styled “old fogies,” for I hold that genuine conservatism consists in healthful and regular progress; and it has been my privilege to take an active part in a great many reformatory movements; yet I am more warmly hospitable to a truth which has stood the test of time and of trial.  There are many things in this world that are improved by age.  Friendship is one of them, and I have found that it takes a great many new friends to make an old one.  My Bible is all the dearer to me, not only because it has pillowed the dying heads of my father and my mother, but because it has been the sure guide of a hundred generations of Christians before them.  When the boastful innovators offer me a new system of belief (which is really a congeries of unbeliefs) I say to them:  “the old is better.”  Twenty centuries of experience shared by such intellects as Augustine, Luther, Pascal, Calvin, Newton, Chalmers, Edwards,