Excerpt from The Southern Methodist Pulpit, 1852, Vol. 5

God. Yet this would be a point easy to show. The Church would never have been shorn of her locks and have lost her aggressive, world-subduing power, had she not, by dallying with the Delilah of wordly ambition and power, lost the ia dependence of her pulpit. The superstitious mummeries and base corruptions of Romanism, could never have acquired their wonderful ascendancy among men, had the pulpit remained unmanacled and stood forth the bold and free champion of the truth. But with the death of the Apostles, came that falling away from thefaith, which they had predicted. The whole christian system by degrees underwent a miserable change. Grievous wolves, not sparing the flock, succeeded to the place of the faithful shepherds. The holy, self-denying ministers of Christ, strong' in faith and in the Holy Ghost, who in the first centuries wielded so successfully the sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God, and who had found it mighty to put to flight the armies of the aliens and to pull down the strong holds of sin, were now no longer found or if found, so few and scattered as to exert but a feeble influence. The pulpit was no longer filled by men of God. The power of faith was not there. It no longer hurled the terrors of the law against sin, or pressed home upon the conscience the guilt of the sinner. Sunk in degeneracy, instead of the honor which comes from God, it sought the popularity, pomp and power of the world. The pure and life-giving Gospel was no longer preached in its simplicity and power, but instead of sermons, little was heard from the sacred place but the sub iimated twattle of metaphysical reasonings, mystical divinity, Aristotelian categories and reading the lives of saints. The pulpit became the stage where mountebank priests obtained the vulgar laugh by exercising the lowest species of wit - the churches, shambles, where the ministers of the sanctuary drove a shameless trade in the price of sins.

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