Added to the forces of experience and surroundings was always that of
his own personal, natural endowment. This he found fault with and
tried to change, as most people do at some period of their lives, but
finally accepted and concluded to use as best he could, without
murmuring, but always conscious of its limitations.

"I have my own peculiar temperament, I have my own method of preaching,
and my method and temperament necessitate errors. I am not worthy to
be related in the hundred-thousandth degree to those more happy men who
never make a mistake in the pulpit. I make a great many. I am
impetuous. I am intense at times on subjects that deeply move me. I
feel as though all the ocean were not strong enough to be the power
beyond my words, nor all the thunders that were in the heavens, and it
is of necessity that such a nature as that should give such intensity
at times to parts of doctrine as to exaggerate them when you come to
bring them into connection with a more rounded-out and balanced view.
I know it--I know it as well as you do. I would not do it if I could
help it; but there are times when it is not I that is talking, when I
am caught up and carried away so that I know not whether I am in the
body or out of the body, when I think things in the pulpit that I never
could think in the study, and when I have feelings that are so far
different from any that belong to the lower or normal condition that I
neither can regulate them nor understand them. I see things and I hear
sounds, and seem, if not in the seventh heaven, yet in a condition that
leads me to understand what Paul said--that he heard things which it
was not possible for a man to utter. I am acting under such a
temperament as that. I have got to use it, or not preach at all. I
know very well I do not give crystalline views nor thoroughly guarded
views; there is often an error on this side and an error on that, and I