A COLLECTION OF SERMONS By CHARLES CARROLL ALBERTSON, D.D. Preface WICE or thrice a year, by the generous kindness of the Session of the Lafayette Avenue Church, the author is permitted to absent himself from his Brooklyn pulpit to fulfill the duties of a college ministry. No more eager and responsive congregations confront any preacher than those composed of young men and young women in our college chapels. If, at times, they do not conceal their dislike for mere formalities and roundabout modes of speech," the knowledge of their liberal appreciation of direct and helpful words is both tonic and inspiring. The sermons in this collection have been preached during the last four or five years in various colleges and universities in the East, including Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Princeton, the University of Virginia and Yale. Some of the briefer sermons have been delivered at vesper services in which, as at Cornell and Dartmouth, the preacher is limited to twelve or fifteen minutes. But one may say a good deal in a short time, by the 374299 omission of conventional "introductions," "perorations" and the like. The necessity to eliminate all unnecessary elaboration must exercise a considerable corrective influence on one's sermon-making. There is not a great deal of difference between the constituency of the college congregation and that of the city pastor's Sunday evening congregation. There are the same prompt responsiveness, the same heart-hunger for practical help in making the spiritual life real, the same evident hospitality to new truth or to new statements of old truth, and the same liking for certain types of hymns-buoyant, joyful, positive, even militant. It is a source of genuine satisfaction to the author that a former volume of his college sermons has been useful to leaders of informal religious services at certain secondary schools and private schools in which, on Sunday evenings, sermons or portions of sermons have been read to the students gathered about the piano for "family worship." This fact alone explains, if it does not justify, the printing of another book. C. C. A. Brooklyn, New York City. |