Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 May 1890 — A Significant Change in Preaching. [ARTICLE]

A Significant Change in Preaching.

The most significant symptom of the day is not the timid and tentative efforts at creed revision in ecclesiastical councils. It is not even the bolder admissions and conversions of an occasional writer of such standing and authority in the church as to have no fear of being brought to book for heresy. It is rather the calm acceptance of “advanced viqws,” which a few years ago would have caused a decided shock to rooted prejudices, and private evidences that many a preacher of unquestioned orthodoxy would gladly welcome a revivified gospel that would free him from tbe trammels of formal beliefs that had their origin in a more superstitious and less enlightened age. Is it not a noticeable sign that intellectual and educated ministers have almost ceased to preach the doctrines of their theology? It is partly because they have ceased to believe them, and more perhaps because they know that intelligent and educated people in the pews do not believe them and can no longer be made to believe them. Neither are they anjr longer effective for the “conversion” and “regeneration” of nankind. —Forum.