Again, the greatness of the preacher as a prophet to-day must be in spite of certain influences which militate against it. Strange to say, one of them is the general economic development of the country, together with the prevalence of ease and prosperity. Our ministers, as a rule, have come from the poorer class of homes and from the more poorly developed sections of the country, especially from the hills, plains, and deserts where solitude prevails. One little hill section in the middle west has supplied most of the ministers for its own and the surrounding States. There is a reason. In fact, there are two. One is the fact that in the poorer home and countryside there is not much to compete against God for a boy’s thought and attention. Young people brought up there do not enjoy many compensations. They have little to make them pleasure-mad. They live in a very narrow world, and they hunger to get out and do something worth while. The other is the fact that the religious consciousness is best developed in the solitudes. God has often to look to the hills and the desert for men to be his leaders. Abraham learned to be a friend of God partly because he walked so much in the vast silences. Moses met the great I Am on the mountain side. It was in the hill country that Elkanah and Hannah reared the little lad who was to be the successor of Eli. Our religion itself was cultivated in one of the poorest sections of the old world. With fertile river valleys all about it, barren Palestine gave us our richest heritage of religious literature and leadership. The men living in the richer sections might have done so, but they were too preoccupied with wealth-getting. They had no time to listen among the silences for the voice of God. Unfortunately, the temper of the present age is not so conducive as it might be to great preaching. There is a tendency to discount the value of the prophetic function manifest even on the part of some quite religious people. One may find in almost any current publication a statement or inference that it is not the spoken word but the acted deed that counts. The fact is that both count. It took both Moses, the man of deeds, and Aaron, the man of words, to lead Israel to the realization of its hope. It took both Ezra, the scribe, and Nehemiah, the cupbearer to the king, to rebuild the walls and the temple of Jerusalem. It has always taken the prophet and the toiler together to achieve human progress in the best sense. We have great preachers to-day. They have terrific competition to meet, but when one closes his ears to the clash of the noises about him he can still hear the voice of the prophet lifted clear and distinct. As of old, there are small prophets and false ones. As of old, at the same time, there are great prophets and true. However, if we are to keep preachers and preaching great they must have every encouragement that can be given them. The Heart Interest in Preaching (1922)