Another Systematic Theology! What courage akin to rashness it required to think of such a thing!

But then, "There is a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them as we will." Some things we are impelled to do by a power above our own. A Divine hand guides us in our meditation and study. Providence co-operates. Men impress us with an abiding influence. Sixty-four years ago I met the mighty Finney, a king among men, and sat four college years under

his ministry. A mind that he would not stir to the depths would be a marvel of mental lethargy. Associated with him was a faculty of strong independent thinkers, President James A. Fairchild, Dr. John Morgan, Professor of Hebrew, Dr. Henry Cowles, the spiritual commentator, and Dr. Judson Smith, afterward secretary of the American Board of Foreign Missions.

I then went to Yale sixty years ago, and met President Woolsey, just retiring, and President Noah Porter, and Timothy Dwight, the Greek exegete, afterward President, and Dr. George P. Fisher, the noble Church Historian, and Dr. Samuel Harris, Professor of Theology. These men were nobly endowed intellectually, and ranked high in scholarship, and were inspiring to a youth who was ambitious to be a soul-winner.

I began to buy theologies and read critically. Strangely enough all my first theologies were strongly Calvinistic, and that feature of them repelled me. I began to have revivals while yet in college, and I wanted a system of doctrines that were directly calculated to bring salvation to the lost. I was not seeking popularity or big pulpits, but usefulness and men. I wanted a practical Biblical theology that would win souls and not delude them by flattery, nor drive them into infidelity, nor drug them by opiates into a sleep of death.

Born and trained in a Congregational home and nursed by Congregational churches, and educated at Oberlin and Yale, I carried a very distinct stamp. But reading widely in twenty-five authors of systematic theology, an inquisitive, honest and teachable mind might get some new light and some deeper insight into Divine truth. I do not think I ever had a Methodist theology in my hand till I was some years in my first pastorate. But God has His own way of training His teachers. Since then I have owned and used ten Methodist theologies in the class-room teaching earnest inquiring minds who do not think alike. This I have been doing for thirty-three years.

I do not make the slightest claim to originality. I am debtor to everybody. If the reader finds anything excellent in this work, which I am sure he will, let him give all the praise to God, whose Holy Spirit has guided me through the tangled maze of conflicting human speculations to the truth as it is in Christ Jesus, found in the infallible Word of God. I invent no hypotheses, and advocate no fads. My sole aim has been to give the world a theology that wholly glorifies the character of the ever adorable God, and is best calculated to bring lost and sinful men in glad surrender to their blessed Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.