But I am aware that already I have lost my reader’s sympathy.  You do not desire to preach doctrinal sermons and while you may read with amiable patience and faintly smiling complacency this discussion, you have no intention of following its advice.  We tend to think that doctrinal sermons are outmoded—­old-fashioned and unpopular—­and we dread as we dread few other things, not being up to date.  Besides, doctrinal preaching offers little of that opportunity which is found in expository and yet more in topical preaching for exploiting our own personalities.  Some of us are young.  It is merely a polite way of saying that we are egotistical.  We know in our secret heart of hearts that the main thing that we have to give the world is our own new, fresh selves with their corrected and arresting understanding of the world.  We are modestly yet eagerly ready to bestow that gift of ours upon the waiting congregation.  One of the few compensations of growing old is that, as the hot inner fires burn lower, this self-absorption lessens and we become disinterested and judicial observers of life and find so much pleasure in other people’s successes and so much wisdom in other folk’s ideas.  But not so for youth; it isn’t what the past or the collective mind and heart have formulated:  it’s what you’ve got to say that interests you.  Hence it is probably true that doctrinal preaching, in the very nature of things, makes no strong appeal to men who are beginning the ministry.

But there are other objections which are more serious, because inherent in the very genius of doctrinal preaching itself.  First:  such preaching is more or less remote from contemporary and practical issues.  It deals with thought, not actions; understanding rather than efficiency; principles rather than applications.  It moves among the basic concepts of the religious life; deals with matters beyond and above and without the tumultuous issues of the moment.  So it follows that doctrinal preaching has an air of detachment, almost of seclusion from the world; the preacher brings his message from some pale world of ideas to this quick world of action.  And we are afraid of this detachment, the abstract and theoretical nature of the thinker’s sermon.

I think the fear is not well grounded.  What is the use of preaching social service to the almost total neglect of setting forth the intellectual and emotional concept of the servant?  It is the quality of the doer which determines the value of the deed.  Why keep on insisting upon being good if our hearers have never been carefully instructed in the nature and the sanctions of goodness?  Has not the trouble with most of our political and moral reform been that we have had a passion for it but very little science of it?  How can we know the ways of godliness if we take God Himself for granted?  No:  our chief business, as preachers, is to preach the content rather than the application of the truth.  Not many people are interested in trying to find the substance