That wasn’t because he cared more about great ideas than lost souls. He cared about the one because he loved the other. It was the same with Isaac Watts, who lived a hundred years earlier. Samuel Johnson said of Watts, “Whatever he took in hand, was, by his incessant solicitude for souls, converted to theology.”5 Which I take to mean, in Watts’s case, that everything was brought into relation to God—because he cared about people. Today Johnson would, I believe, say of much contemporary preaching,
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