“My whole life has more or less taken its color from the controversy which led to the division of the Old School and the New School Presbyterians. I was brought up in New England, a minister’s son, the son of a minister who was doctrinally inclined and whose warmest friends were great doctrinarians. My father’s household was substantially a debating society. As early as I can remember I knew enough to discuss foreordination, and I could do it as well as my betters. I could go just as far as they could, could run against snags at the same spots that they did, and could not get off any better than they could. All those great doctrines which tend powerfully to enlarge the imagination and to sharpen the reason without feeding them were, I had almost said, matters of daily conversation in my father’s family. When I went to college I fell under the influence of a young minister who became an Old School Presbyterian. He was a man of large brain and marked ability. He had a naturally philosophic mind. He was noble-hearted and genial. I remember that my poetic temperament, alongside of his rigorous, logical temperament, used to seem to me mean and contemptible. I thought he was like a big oak-tree, while I was more like a willow, half-grown and pliant, yielding to every force that was exerted upon it. At any rate, he had a powerful influence upon my development. But as I came to the possession of myself more and more I took on the logical methods in the exercise of the reasoning faculty which God had implanted in me, and they came near wrecking me; for I became sceptical, not malignantly but honestly, and it was to me a matter of great distress and anguish. It continued for years, and no logic ever relieved me. My brother Charles went through the same process, and he came back in the same way that I did, through the instrumentality of a living Saviour. An abstract, philosophical statement of the truth never met my wants, but when there arose over the horizon a vision of the Lord Jesus Christ as a living Friend, who had the profoundest personal interest in me, I embraced that view and was lifted up. My heart did for me then what my head had failed to do. This was an experience which has constituted one of the greatest affirmative forces that have acted on my mind in preaching. All my life long I have had a strong disposition to so preach the truth as to meet the wants of men who stand not only outside of the churches but outside of belief. I suppose that as long as I live I shall think of the truth, not as it looks to those that are within the Church, but as it looks to those that are outside of the Church and outside of belief itself. “This has given to my preaching an element of naturalism. It has led me to seek for a ground on which I could stand and bring men to a knowledge of the love of Christ. I have gone far from the usual narrow ecclesiastical and theological rules to broader social methods by which men that are doubters can be reached.