It is most important, brethren, to be convinced of this. We are all of us too apt to make our religion consist of hearing sermons; to suppose, that if we listen patiently, and grasp the intellectual meaning, and feel a little emotion about what is pathetic and alarming, and have a desire to do something that the preacher recommended, or to give up something that he denounced, then that we are receiving the things of the Spirit. Whereas preaching cannot, under any circumstances, do the least spiritual good, or at all enlarge spiritual comprehension, unless the hearers are spiritually prepared. We discourse on heaven or hell: we put together all that the Bible says or hints about it; we form a kind of natural picture of a spiritual thing, and we bid you look at it and consider it. Wherefore? If you are spiritual, to quicken your spirit; if you are natural, to speak to you a kind of parable, the meaning whereof you may be prompted to ask of Him who alone can reveal it, the Holy Spirit of GOD. And so of all preaching; it is an important means to an end. It talks to men of GOD, of redemption, of probation, of the Holy Spirit, of heaven and hell: not with any hope of thereby revealing to them these things; but only to convince their eyes, their ears, their hearts, that there is a kind of knowledge which ought to be had, but which they cannot take in; and so to stir them up to the inquiring how it is to be had, and to enlist them in the right effort to obtain it. Through the ear we arrest the natural man, as the voice of thunder did Saul on his road to Damascus; we do not sanctify him; we do not show him the things of GOD; we only convince him that there is something which he has not rightly received, or taken into account, and we bid him go elsewhere, to the Spirit, for instruction and salvation. The only possible good that a sermon can do, is, by working on the feelings, or appealing to the understanding, or cross-questioning the conscience, to stir men up to say: “I will know more of this matter.” And the work of grace is only then beginning, when the hearer of the sermon becomes a learner of the Spirit. Ear hath not heard.