My topics were "Trusting Jesus Christ" in the morning and "The Day of Judgment" at the evening service.

The next day, when I was buying my ticket at the railway station to leave the town, a plain man (who was a baker in the village) said to me: "Are you not the young man who spoke yesterday in our meeting-house ?" I told him that I was.

"Well," said he, "I never felt more sorry for any one in my life." "Why so ?" I asked.

His answer was: "I said to myself, there is a youth just out of the Seminary, and he does not know that a Saratoga audience is made up of highly educated people from all parts of the land; but I have noticed that if a minister, during his first ten minutes, can convince the people that he is only trying to save their souls he _kills all the critics in the house_." I have never ceased to thank God for the remark of that shrewd Saratoga baker, who, I was told, had come there from New Haven, Connecticut, and was a man of remarkable sagacity.

That was one of the profoundest bits of sound philosophy on the art of preaching that I have ever encountered, and I have quoted it in every Theological Seminary that I have ever addressed.