Declaim against foreign missions, and prepare to give the State Board twenty-five dollars if the Board will send them one hundred dollars worth of preaching. After they treat a preacher in this way a few times, he is compelled from absolute necessity to abandon them. Thus, isolated, forsaken and helpless, they take no publications, know nothing of what is going on, pine away and die. This shows the utter fallacy of little, weak and helpless congregations keeping themselves isolated. They should act with their brethren, report themselves, be known in all their efforts, and send in their contributions, no matter how small. The ground of complaint here is, however, more on the part of preachers than any place else. In all our preaching, we should inculcate a missionary spirit, the importance of acting in harmony, unitedly and with energy in all our undertakings to evangelize the world. THE CONVERTING POWER. Men are talking of justification by _faith alone_; but the main trouble is, that they have no faith. They have no confidence in the gospel, the power of God. They have no confidence in preaching the cross of Christ, the power and wisdom of God. They have no confidence in preaching Christ to save the world. They never preach Christ with any animation—any spirit or power. They have deserted God’s ordained power to save men, and are dealing out their insipid theories of spiritual influence, their views and philosophies, which have nothing in them to save, if they were all true. Preaching theories of the Word or of the Spirit, of the mode of the Divine existence, or of anything else, has no power to convert or save any one. All the preaching of Calvinism or Arminianism, of Trinitarianism or Unitarianism, of Necessity or Freedom, or all the other theories ever preached, whether true or false, never saved one soul of our poor fallen race. But the preaching of the gospel, preaching Christ, the cross of Christ, is the ordained work for the Christian ministry. This is unequivocally the power God has authorized them to exercise in saving sinners. We know it will save sinners, from the following three reasons: 1. The Holy Spirit declares it to be “the power of God, to every one that believes.” 2. The apostles and first ministers of Christ preached it to the salvation of thousands in a single day, and millions in a few years. 3. We are preaching the gospel almost every day of our life, and find it bringing sinners to Christ. We have all faith in the gospel, the ancient gospel, preached in its purity and simplicity, as the only means of saving man. It will save men. It is the power of God to save men. We realize this more and more every year. The blessing of the Lord is attending every man who has faith in Christ, in his word, and preaches the gospel honestly. But we know that those brethren who oppose us in this, are wrong, for the following reasons: