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 Alexander no more disturbed us with the much-vaunted conjectural Biblical criticisms than he disturbed us with Joe Smith’s “golden plates” at Nauvoo.  For this fact I feel deeply thankful; and I comfort myself with the reflection that the great British preachers of the last dozen years—­Dr. McLaren, Charles H. Spurgeon, Newman Hall, Canon Liddon, Dr. Dale and Dr. Joseph Parker—­have suffered no more from the virulent attacks of the radical and revolutionary higher criticism than I have, during my long and happy ministry.

Ministers had some advantages sixty or seventy years ago over their successors of our day.  They had a more uninterrupted opportunity for the preparation of their sermons and for thorough personal visitation of their flocks.  They were not importuned so often to serve on committees and to be participants in all sorts of social schemes of charity.  Every pastor ought to keep abreast of reformatory movements as long as they do not trench upon the vital and imperative duties of his high calling.  “This one thing I do,” said single-hearted Paul; and if Paul were a pastor now in New York or Boston or Chicago, he would make short work of many an intrusive rap of a time-killer at his study door.