"The danger of educated religious organizations is that these non-essential doctrines are apt to suppress the growth of the real faith. There is a tendency to formalism, to doctrinal subtleties, to measuring the relative importance of each commandment, to spending time in fixing the character and location of hell, rather than striving to avoid it, to fixing the form of baptism, to word weaving, hair-splitting, letter worship; thus becoming blind leaders of the blind; eyes set upon unessential and exaggerated regalia, while the spirit loses sight of the light of the world.
"Think you a penitent sinner cannot be baptized, because there is not water at hand? Baptize him with sand. Think you that the ordinance of the Lord's supper cannot be observed because the wine is spilled? Fill the vessel with water and the spirit of observance will symbolically transform water into wine, as the wine stands for the blood of Christ. Must the gospel of Christ remain unpreached because there are no theologically educated ministers to expound it? Do you propose to create a sort of purgatory in which these immature preachers may have an opportunity to ripen until you say they are fit harvesters for the grain, over-ripe and wasting?
"A seminary education is a good, but not the great thing. Shall you or the Master say who is fit to serve as his messenger? Would you have picked his twelve? Would you have chosen from the fishing village or from the school of Gamaliel or the Sanhedrin? Any of you would have considered himself more fitted to preach the Pentecostal sermon than Peter. Had you done so, it is probable there would have been no physical demonstrations and at most half a dozen conversions. Yet Peter was but a fisherman, filled with the power of the Holy Ghost and telling in his own heart to heart way what the Master had taught him in that itinerant seminary of one teacher and twelve students on the shores of Galilee. Who among you would have chosen Saul as disciple for the Gentiles, as he traveled the road to Damascus, anxious to continue his persecutions.
"I cannot claim because I am the graduate of a seminary and a classical college that God has given to me a greater perception and measure of the power of the Holy Ghost to lead sinners to repentance than to Samuel McAdoo; nor for the same reason that I and not he, am God's minister. A preacher not fired with the Holy Ghost soon delivers his message.