Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill Revelation Through Contact Year after year, generation after generation, the preacher enters the pulpit at sermon time and preaches as his prophetic ancestors preached before him. We are right in still attributing great power to the word thus spoken.1 Sometimes, however, I find myself wondering whether from preaching we are inclined to expect the impossible. Significant changes have taken place in the life of the crowd during the time that methods of preaching have remained substantially the same. There has been a decline in church-going. People are said to be more religious than they used to be, but the beliefs of many good persons are no longer fixed. Relatively few are within the effective range of the pulpit. It is a popular assumption with magazine writers that this is because the Christian message has lost its power. Before this explanation is accepted as final, it will be well to consider some of the disadvantages which to-day attend the delivery of the message. 1 In the course of the preparation of these lectures I asked devout laymen of many communions to give me their estimates of the value of preaching. In every instance they bore witness to the influence of preaching in their own lives. In almost every instance they testified that the influence of the pulpit had grown stronger and more compelling as the years passed by. In the first place, this is an era of excessive utterance. The man in the crowd, at least in the larger cities, is in serious danger of being talked to death. The number of opportunities afforded him to hear other people speak is very great. Accounts of travel, of adventure and discovery, the presentation of new causes and the making of pleas for needed reforms are matters of nightly occurrence. The after-dinner speech is more of a nu...