“We often turn our attention to the light literature of the day, and the new books that appear; we read the articles in the reviews, and we take the daily papers, and are, many of us, well versed in the politics of the day. And hence our preaching suffers. We want absorption with the great themes we preach. The deeper we go into our own spirits, the deeper we may expect to go into the spirits of our hearers.”

Jones, commenting on why preaching in his day was so different to that of Rowland, states ‘The main difference between Rowlands and the preachers of our day is, we should say, fervent prayer and deep absorption of mind. The preachers of the present day have a thousand things to attend to. Their energies are scattered over a wide field, while the energies of our fathers were concentrated upon one thing. We need to do everything, they tried but one thing. We have our time battered down, and broken into fragments,  while they had their time for their great work. We often turn our attention to the light literature of the day, and the new books that appear; we read the articles in the reviews, and we take the daily papers, and are, many of us, well versed in the politics of the day. And hence our preaching suffers. We want absorption with the great themes we preach. The deeper we go into our own spirits, the deeper we may expect to go into the spirits of our hearers. Daniel Rowland was a man of deep absorption and intense concentration. He was a man of one thing – one thing and one thing only – and that one thing was preaching.

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