On the one hand, there is the sensuous tendency that wants something done for it, something to see, something that sense can grasp at; and so, as it fancies, work itself upwards into a higher region.  ’The Jew requires a sign’—­that is, not merely a miracle, but something to look at.  He wants a visible sacrifice; he wants a priest.  He wants religion to consist largely in the doing of certain acts which may be supposed to bring, in some magical fashion, spiritual blessings.  And Paul opposes to that, ‘We preach Christ crucified.’  Brethren, the tendency is strong to-day, not only in those parts of the Anglican communion where sacramentarian theories are in favour, but amongst all sections of the Christian Church, in which there is obvious a drift towards more ornate ritual, and aesthetic services, as means of attracting to church or chapel, and as more important than proclaiming Christ.  I am free to confess that possibly some of us, with our Puritan upbringing and tendency, too much disregard that side of human nature.  Possibly it is so.  But for all that I profoundly believe that if religion is to be strong it must have a very, very small infusion of these external aids to spiritual worship, and that few things more weaken the power of the Gospel that Paul preached than the lowering of the flag in conformity with desires of men of sense, and substituting for the simple glory of the preached Word the meretricious, and in time impotent, and always corrupting, attractions of a sensuous worship.

Further, ‘The Greeks seek after wisdom.’  They wanted demonstration, abstract principles, systematised philosophies, and the like.  Paul comes again with his ‘We preach Christ and Him crucified.’  The wisdom is there, as I shall have to say in a moment, but the form that it takes is directly antagonistic to the wishes of these wisdom-seeking Greeks.  The same thing in modern guise besets us to-day.  We are called upon, on all sides, to bring into the pulpit what they call an ethical gospel; putting it into plain English, to preach morality, and to leave out Christ.  We are called upon, on all sides, to preach an applied Christianity, a social gospel—­that is to say, largely to turn the pulpit into a Sunday supplement to the daily newspaper.  We are asked to deal with the intellectual difficulties which spring from the collision of science, true or false, with religion, and the like.  All that is right enough.  But I believe from my heart that the thing to do is to copy Paul’s example, and to preach Christ and Him crucified.  You may think me right or you may think me wrong, but here and now, at the end of forty years, I should like to say that I have for the most part ignored that class of subjects deliberately, and of set purpose, and with a profound conviction, be it erroneous or not, that a ministry which listens much to the cry for ‘wisdom’ in its modern forms, has departed from the true perspective of Christian teaching, and will weaken the churches which depend upon it.  Let who will turn the pulpit into a professor’s chair, or a lecturer’s platform, or a concert-room stage or a politician’s rostrum, I for one determine to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.