preaching that is deserving the name is preaching that deals with the
great Christian doctrines. But somebody says, I do not like doctrinal
preaching. A great many people have said that within recent years. I
do not believe they mean what they say. They are not expressing with
accuracy what is in their mind. They do like doctrinal preaching if
they are intelligent, faithful Christians, for doctrinal preaching is
bread to hearts that have been born again. When people say they do
not like doctrinal preaching, they often mean that they do not like
preaching which belongs to the eighteenth or seventeenth or sixteenth
centuries. They are not to be blamed for this. There is nothing that
gets stale so soon as preaching. We can not live upon the preaching
of a bygone age. If preachers bring out the interpretations and
phraseology which were current a hundred years ago, people must of
necessity say, "Oh, please do not give us that, we do not like such
doctrinal preaching." But doctrinal preaching need not be antiquated
or belated, it may be fresh, it may be couched in the language in
which men were born, it may use for its illustrations the images and
figures and analogies which are uppermost in men's imagination. And
whenever it does this there is no preaching which is so thrilling
and uplifting and mighty as the preaching which deals with the great
fundamental doctrines.

In one sense, the Christian religion never changes, in another sense
it is changing all the time. The facts of Christianity never change,
the interpretations of those facts alter from age to age. It is with
religion as it is with, the stars, the stars never change. They move
in their orbits in our night sky as they moved in the night sky of
Abraham when he left his old Chaldean home. The constellations were
the same at the opening of our century as they were when David watched
his flocks on the old Judean hills. But the interpretations of the