and whether sentences should be long and stories few, the fact is that the glory of these preachers was their earnestness—an earnestness that might be called gravity. From that we have fallen so far that we can scarcely find positive categories to describe the atmosphere of this old preaching. Most people today have so little experience of deep, earnest, reverent, powerful encounters with God in preaching that the only associations that come to mind when the notion is mentioned are that the preacher