In the first place the average preacher in those days was more doctrinal than at the present time.

The masters in Israel evidently held with Phillips Brooks that "no exhortation to a good life that does not put behind it some great truth, as deep as eternity, can seize and hold the conscience," Therefore they pushed to the front such deep and mighty themes as the Attributes of God, the Divinity of Jesus Christ, the Nature and Desert of Sin, the Atonement, Regeneration, Faith, Resurrection, and Judgment to come, with Heaven and Hell as tremendous realities.

They emphasized the heinousness and the desert of sin as a great argument for repentance and acceptance of Jesus Christ.

A lapse from that style of preaching is to be deplored; for as Gladstone truly remarked, the decline or decay of a sense of sin against God is one of the most serious symptoms of these times.
Charles G.Finney, who was at the zenith of his power sixty years ago, bombarded the consciences of sinners with a prodigious broadside of pulpit doctrine; and many acute lawyers and eminent merchants were converted under his discourses.

No two finer examples of doctrinal preaching--once so prevalent--could be cited than Dr.Lyman Beecher and Dr.Horace Bushnell.