My father and my mother read the books of the soul, but they have left behind them a dry-eyed reprobate in me! Say that to-night as you look around on the grievous famine of the suppletory arts and stratagems of repentance and reformation in your heathenish bedroom.
Spiritual preaching; real face to face, inward, verifiable, experimental, spiritual preaching; preaching to a heart in the agony of its sanctification; preaching to men whose whole life is given over to making them a new heart--that kind of preaching is scarcely ever heard in our day.

There is great intellectual ability in the pulpit of our day, great scholarship, great eloquence, and great earnestness, but spiritual preaching, preaching to the spirit--'wet-eyed' preaching--is a lost art.
At the same time, if that living art is for the present overlaid and lost, the literature of a deeper spiritual day abides to us, and our spiritually-minded people are not confined to us, they are not dependent on us.

Well, this is the Communion week with us yet once more.

Will you not, then, make it the beginning of some of the suppletory arts and stratagems of the spiritual life with yourselves?
I cannot preach as I would like on such subjects, but I can tell you who could, and who, though dead, yet speak by their immortal books.

You have the wet-eyed psalms; but they are beyond the depth of most people.