Some of these days we will realize that we have not exactly the same class of people to deal with the pioneer preachers had, and we will try to meet the needs of actual prevailing conditions. Instead of a religious stock, who, though reared in sectarianism, knew God and believed in his goodness and power, and had been taught the awfulness of sin and the preciousness of God's grace; whose reverence and piety and devotion to God were as marked as their ignorance of the way of salvation, and who needed nothing so much as to be shown where they were in error and what they must do--instead of that, the bulk of the hearers now is composed of men who need to be convicted of sin, whose consciences need awakening; men hardened, indifferent, or conceited, or entirely ignorant of all that pertains to God, or fiercely partisan. Instead of detailed and polemical discussions of the "plan of salvation," these need to be taught of God; made to realize their individual responsibility to him and their personal relation to him. Christ needs to be held up before them. Jesus said: "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself." And again: "That every one that beholdeth the Son, and believeth in him, should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day." When men are made to see the Savior in his love and power to save, and they begin to trust in him and to love him, they are ready to listen to his commandments and to do them aright.

      There is too much taken for granted. Men hear of, get interested in, dispute about, items in the scheme of salvation, who have no conception of God, or of the [16] Christ that stands behind the "scheme" and gives it meaning and power. Some of the preaching is hardly calculated to bring these sinners face to face with God, or to awaken humility, contrition, and true repentance, and loving trust toward him, and fear of his holiness and reverence and awe. Now if instead of that these hearers get a series of noisy, blustering assevertations--"thus and so," and "this and that," and "such and such a fellow is wrong"--a pretense of deep thinking and acuteness, a vain show of logic, a mouthing of big words and rattling of dry precepts and empty directions that have no motive back of them, Christianity tends to become a "process," a dead wheelwork of regulations, a philosophy that busies itself with abstract arguments and contentions, while God is left out of view, Christ taken for granted, life and love and power lacking. Lord, deliver us!

[TAG 16-17]