Recommendatory Letter

University Place, New York.
My Dear Brother Choules:

Your proposal to republish the “Morning Lectures,” in detached portions and a cheap form, I may say delights me. This class of publications may supply the most striking deficiency in the practical religious literature of our day. It was the defect of our fathers, that they thought efficiently without efficient action. It is ours, that action, though rarely excessive, is yet generally disproportioned to thought. The problem of the age is, to unite profound biblical thought with intense and judicious action. Now it is true that we cannot think by proxy; but it is also true, in every department of knowledge, that others can furnish us the richest material of thought, and enable us, as it were, almost to commence where they left off. There are rich veins of scriptural illustration and of religious sentiment, buried in the tomes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it is a good service to the church of the nineteenth century to reopen those mines. Our neophj-tes need it, and our ministerial corps may find models which can be most profitably imitated in some points. The American pulpit is probably the most efficient in the world, in the great work of conversion. But we fail just where the Mantons, the Howes, the Owens, the Godwins excelled: in “edifying the body of Christ.” May the Master approve and bless your work.

Your fellow-servant,

Edw. N. Kirk.