The wells of salvation, and other sermons

Front matter

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THE)

WELLS OF SALVATION,

Introduction

TT is one of the favorable signs of the times that evangelical sermons in book-form find so wide circulation in our country. It betokens not only an elevation and refinement of literary taste in the laity, and an increasing interest in Christian truth, but also that the pulpit is steadily advancing in influence over cultivated minds. We hope the time will soon come when John Foster's essay "on some of the causes by which evangelical religion has been rendered unacceptable to persons of cultivated taste," will be entirely irrelevant. The ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church should contribute to hasten- the coming of this new religious era by supplying the public with religious reading of a tone so high as to dissipate the prejudice in men of taste against Christianity, arising from its association with a great number of its professors whose minds are weak and uncultivated. To the question, why this Church has not in the past supplied its proportion of this species of literature according to the number and talent of its preachers, several answers may be given. One characteristic excellence of their preaching has been the aim at immediate results. Hence their pulpit preparations for extemporaneous address, in their literary form, if io Introduction.

written at all, have been synoptical and fragmentary, ghastly skeletons, to be closeted rather than exposed to public view. Again, through fear of contracting the evil habit of sermon reading in the pulpit — displeasing to the audience and lessening the preacher's power — elaborate sermon writing was not much encouraged by our denominational fathers. Our peculiar ecclesiastical polity favoring the repetition of the best pulpit productions, the preacher has been inclined to withhold these from the press till he should be laid aside from the active duties of the sacred office. But in old age the sight is too dim to decipher the abbreviations of the youthful pen in its eager haste to keep pace with the rushing stream of thought. The administrator of the dead preacher's estate orders the manuscript sermons to be sold by the pound to the rag-man, or to be thrust into the furnace. Thus many of our most gifted preachers are passing away, leaving as their only literary monument a Thanksgiving or Fourth of July sermon, in the perishable form of a pamphlet, or the still more ephemeral newspaper. Dr. Winchester has very wisely become his own literary executor, by causing some of his best pulpit utterances to crystallize into the solid and enduring form of a book. Thus, with the apostle Peter, he says to the young of his generation, and to all the generations to come, "I will endeavor that ye may be able after my decease to have these things always in remembrance." To the "Wells of Salvation" he in-

Introduction. i t

vites all men to come and drink. He is not afraid that he will impoverish himself by this public invitation. He is confident that he can draw more water from the same wells to carry to his thirsty hearers during his future public ministry. In this particular, I have good reason for saying that he does not misjudge himself. From an association with him during four years in a college recitation-room, in the relation of teacher and pupil, I discovered that he was not only a thorough scholar, but that he had the greatest of all intellectual gifts, styled by Dr. Bushnell "the talent of growth."

We are especially pleased with this book because of its thorough doctrinal orthodoxy, accentuating the neglected Wesleyan tenet of Christian perfection, or the deliverance of the believer from sin, actual and original, in the present life, through the agency of the Holy Spirit, secured by the mediation of the Son of God. Doctrines promotive of advanced Christian experience must be inculcated if we, as a Church, are to be characterized in the future, as we have been in the past, as eminently spiritual and aggressive. These Scriptural truths, faithfully proclaimed, constitute the only dike which can resist the tides of worldliness which are setting so strongly against the Church of Christ and threatening her submersion. We congratulate the preachers and societies of Corning District on the fact that such a dike has been around them during the term of the presiding elder, which

1 2 Introd uction.

ends in 1897. We commend the episcopal wisdom which appoints to this subepiscopal office men of eminent spirituality, who will proclaim in every pulpit doctrines inspiring and fostering the deepest spirituality and practical godliness. The conservation of Wesleyan theology in the faith of the Church largely depends on such appointments to this office. We trust that other presiding elders, following Dr. Winchester's example, will leave behind them monuments of their faithfulness to revealed truth in volumes of sermons as "Wells of Salvation" for the refreshment of believers.

I deem it an honor to connect my name with this book in the humble office of a porter, who opens for the Christian public the gate to a fountain of pure water. Daniel Steele.

Daniee in the Lion's Den, 306