This is the process that is going to break down the artificialities and fan out the chaff of unreality from religion. Perpetuating systems is poor business, but adventuring in the field of truth is a high privilege. That is what the preacher to college students must do. Granted that it is in the field of religion, his one test for homiletic material is the question whether it is true. One of the most common mistakes made in the popular and superficial analysis of the student mind is the assumption that it is essentially a radical mind. This often becomes the basis of a great homiletic error in preaching to students. A comparative few students are radical, just as are a comparative few taken from any group one might mention. But with the mass it is not so. The great majority of college students are probably more conservative than the majority of people outside the university world. They think carefully, act with deliberation, and go quietly about their way while a few exceptions to the rule take the soap box and loudly demand the immediate reversal of all things. I should say that about the last place to go to start a revolution of any kind would be the average college campus. Yet the campus mind is alive to the evolution that is going on in everything—including itself. The student mind would be properly impatient of a static or reactionary viewpoint, but it is little concerned with wildeyed radicalism of any kind. The preacher who is most likely to reach its processes is the one who is honest, fearless, and open-minded, and yet who is conservative in the sense that he abandons a position only when he has found sufficient reason for believing that another one is better. The preacher who shows a conservatism which takes care to be progressive will commend himself and his message to the student hearer. The presence of students in one’s congregation should save him from the pitiful fate of ceasing to grow, and thereby becoming old. They are an advancing race, and it is his privilege to advance with them. If he does so, the day will come when he can look back across the years and find satisfaction in the thought that he has had a real part in the making of the history of his and succeeding times—that of building the solidness and savour of ancient truth into the life of the new world. Some Problems of the Preacher (1928) The day one offers himself to God for the work of the Christian ministry he takes upon himself a set of serious personal problems, along with his problems of leadership and service. He proposes to do God’s work, and that means also to be God’s man. He must be that amid difficult conditions, under constant scrutiny, and in the face of frequent misjudgment.