The gravest problems of the world are not found here.  They are found in the decline of spiritual understanding, the decay of moral standards, the growth of the vindictive and unforgiving spirit, the lapse from charity, the overweening pride of the human heart.  With these matters the church must chiefly deal; to their spiritual infidelity she must bring a spiritual message; to their poor thinking she must bring the wisdom of the eternal.  This task, preventive not remedial, is her characteristic one.  Is it not worth while to remember that the great religious leaders have generally ignored contemporary social problems?  So have the great artists who are closely allied to them.  Neither William Shakespeare nor Leonardo da Vinci were reformers; neither Gautama nor the Lord Jesus had much to say about the actual international economic and political readjustments which were as pressing in their day as ours.  They were content to preach the truth, sure that it, once understood, would set men free.

But a second reason why we dislike doctrinal preaching is because we confound it with dogmatic preaching.  Doctrinal sermons are those which deal with the philosophy of religion.  They expound or defend or relate the intellectual statements, the formulae of religion.  Such discourses differ essentially from dogmatic sermonizing.  For what is a doctrine?  A doctrine is an intellectual formulation of an experience.  Suppose a man receives a new influx of moral energy and spiritual insight, through reading the Bible, through trying to pray, through loving and meditating upon the Lord Jesus.  That experience isn’t a speculative proposition, it isn’t a faith or an hypothesis; it’s a fact.  Like the man in the Johannine record the believer says, “Whether he be a sinner I know not:  but one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.”

Now, let this new experience of moral power and spiritual insight express itself, as it normally will, in a more holy and more useful life, in the appropriate terms of action.  There you get that confession of experience which we call character.  Or let it express itself in the appropriate emotions of joy and awe and reverence so that, like Ray Palmer, the convert writes an immortal hymn, or a body of converts like the early church produces the Te Deum.  There is the confession of experience in worship.  Or let a man filled with this new life desire to understand it; see what its implications are regarding the nature of God, the nature of man, the place of Christ in the scale of created or uncreated Being.  Let him desire to thus conserve and interpret that he may transmit this new experience.  Then he will begin to define it and to reduce it, for brevity and clearness, to some abstract and compact formula.  Thus he will make a confession of experience in doctrine.