Personally, I believe in excitement. Nothing worth thinking about is ever accomplished in its absence. We cannot relish food, or enjoy sleep, until first excited by hunger or fatigue. Why should not the church manifest as much zeal and enthusiasm in her work as political parties or commercial clubs do in theirs? I am tired of that contemptible sentiment which stands ready, everywhere, and all the time, to denounce everything that has to do with the emotions. Religion, I readily grant, does not consist of noise and bluster. It means vastly more than that. Nor does it consist in sitting around like so many lifeless knots on a log. We are told that it is the lightning and not thunder that kills. True enough, but lightning in the absence of thunder is harmless. Lightning makes the thunder. In our work but little was said about the new theology, or higher criticism. Watson and Ralston in their theologies, and Smith and Clark and Lange and Barnes in their expositions, seldom referred to the new-fangled theories which confuse and chill and curse some of the churches to-day. We all believed that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, and Paul the Epistle to the Hebrews; and personally I have never had any reason for changing my views. It had never occurred to us to put Job and Jonah on the fictitious list. We actually believed and preached that they lived and wrought, one in the land of Uz, and the other in Nineveh, after escaping from the whale’s belly. We tried to tell of the awfulness of sin, as well as the joys of religion. We believed in a heaven, and would often talk and sing and preach about it until we felt ourselves within its very suburbs. When Jesus said, “And these shall go away into everlasting punishment,” we supposed he meant it, and no one attempted to put an artificial bottom in the “bottomless pit.” We divided our time pretty well between Sinai and Zion. The decalogue and beatitudes were included, ofttimes, in the framework of the same sermon. We knew there were some inaccuracies in the authorized version, but nothing sufficiently serious to affect the fundamentals of Christianity. We were justified, as we thought, in preaching the whole Bible, as it was commonly understood and interpreted, because in doing so we were blessed and sinners were saved.