Puritan Preaching in England Author:John Brown Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: VIII REPRESENTATIVE PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM II. DK. K. W. DALE LECTURE REPRESENTATIVE PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM II. DR. R. W. DALE ... more »IN my last lecture I called your attention to two men who may be regarded as typical representatives of the English Puritan preacher of the nineteenth century, — Thomas Binney and Charles Haddon Spurgeon. I pass now from these to the late Dr. Dale of Birmingham, a preacher of whom a competent witness has said that "he had the real soul of the Puritan in him," and that as a theologian " our generation has had no abler interpreter of Evangelical thought." We may go one step farther and say that not merely this generation but this century has seen no abler man in the ranks of the English Congregational Ministry. It is not necessary for me, here and now, to explain Dr. Dale's methods of work as a preacher, inasmuch as some years ago, as a former Yale lecturer, he practically did thisfor himself. Upon his characteristic qualities as a man and a minister I therefore do not propose to dwell. But Dr. Dale was not merely a preacher; he was also an independent and constructive theologian, which, it is scarcely necessary to say, all preachers are not. As the foundation of his preaching, there was a strong, compact, and solid basis of theological thought which gave real unity to all his teaching. With sweat of brain and earnest wrestling of soul he wrought out for himself, from divine revelation, a doctrinal system, which he sought to verify at every step by his own actual religious experience and by that of the Christian Church at large. One who had exceptional means of knowing him tells us that "he thought himself into the mind of the sacred writers, taking his first principle from John, and working it into a theology by means of...« less