Ministerial Confessions.

We have been timid. Fear has often led us to smooth down or generalize

truths which if broadly stated must have brought hatred and reproach upon

us. We have thus often failed to declare to our people the whole counsel of

God. We have shrunk from reproving, rebuking and exhorting with all

patience and doctrine. We have feared to alienate friends, or to awaken the

wrath of enemies.

We have been lacking in solemnity. How deeply ought we to be abased at our

levity, frivolity, flippancy, vain mirth, foolish talking and jesting, by which

grievous injury has been done to souls, the progress of the saints retarded, and

the world countenanced in its wretched vanities.

We have preached ourselves, not Christ. We have sought applause, courted

honor, been avaricious of fame and jealous of our reputation. We have

preached too often so as to exalt ourselves instead of magnifying Christ, so as

to draw men's eyes to ourselves instead of fixing them on Him and His cross.

Have we not often preached Christ for the very purpose of getting honor to

ourselves? Christ, in the sufferings of His first coming and the glory of His

second, has not been the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, of all our

sermons.

We have not duly studied and honored the Word of God. We have given a

greater prominence to man's writings, man's opinions, man's systems in our

studies than to the Word. We have drunk more out of human cisterns than

divine. We have held more communion with man than God. Hence the mold

and fashion of our spirits, our lives, our words, have been derived more from

man than God. We must study the Bible more. We must steep our souls in it.

We must not only lay it up within us, but transfuse it through the whole

texture of the soul. The study of truth in its academic more than in its

devotional form has robbed it of its freshness and power, engendering