Faithfulness, then, is essential to the completeness of the message--faithfulness as to the true condition of the soul and its position in the sight of God. As Samuel stood before Saul in that fateful hour when the king, having disobeyed the commandments of the Lord, had brought of the sheep and of the oxen which he should have utterly destroyed; as the prophets, the apostles, the Master alike lifted up their witness against a corrupt and stiff-necked people, so the preacher of to-day must bear his testimony against the sins of men; must pronounce the penalties of ungodliness. A revelation of the transgression of the individual, of the lost state of every soul out of Christ, are part of the Word received from Him who sent him. This declaration must not concern the individual alone. To the age, also, he has a message of kindred truth. The pulpit is erected as a witness against the generations as they come and go. It is by the preacher that Jesus Christ speaks to successive centuries. He is the true oracle of God. Against the carelessness, the covetousness, the debauchery and corruption of the nations, God would speak through him. Against the oppression of the poor, the robbery of the widow, the exploitation of the savage; against the crimes of the empires, the Almighty, through his lips, would make His anger known. He has done so often and often. Again and again has the preacher turned back the tides of national iniquity, again and again prevented the wrongful purpose upon which a people had set its heart. The need is with us still. This warning and accusing note of sternness must be regained. To tell men of their sins and that they are lost unless God delivers them; to tell the age of its iniquities and that the sure end of national vice is national destruction--here is our work to-day. So there needs something in the nature of a reversion to the methods of days that are no more. Yet a _full_ return to the mode of our fathers is impossible. Let this be acknowledged frankly and fully and at once. Those "black sermons" to which we listened forty years ago can never be preached again. The day has gone, at least within the area of civilisation, for painting flaming pictures of hell, for realistic and horrible descriptions of the tortures of the damned. That kind of thing has had its day and can be done no more. Preachers could not do it; hearers would not hear it. The misfortune has been that the passing of our fathers' methods has not been followed by the discovery of others in which the truth they conveyed could be expressed in forms more suitable to different times. Even the man outside the Church has left behind him the literal understanding of those old figures of speech. Few now think of heaven as our grandsires thought of it; few imagine hell as they imagined it. Yet is there still a heaven; yet is there still a hell.