"So much knowledge...such small heads"
Besides, we are invited to follow the guidance of men who are not qualified to be leaders. I have waited with a good deal of interest to see whether modern thought would be capable of producing a man, a man of mark, of profound mind, and philosophic genius; but where is he? Where is the man who will found a school and sway his fellows; a man for the orthodox to tremble at, a great Goliath, head and shoulders above his fellows. Truly there are some who think they have power, and so they have amongst those young gentlemen whose moustachios are on the point of developing, but they have no influence over those who read their Bibles, have had experience, and are accustomed to try the spirits.
The great lights are the literary men who produce articles in certain reviews which are the oracles of the elite, or of those who think themselves so. I wonder how many these precious reviews sell, but that of course is of small consequence, because the quality of their readers is so high. See what airs a man gives himself because he reads a review! Are these things so very clever? I am unable to see it. I used to hear that evangelical writers produced platitudes; I believe they did, but surely they never wrote more watery trash than is produced in the present day in opposition to the orthodox faith, but then you see it is given out in such a latinized jargon that its obscurity is mistaken for profundity. If you have the time and patience to read a little of what is written by the modern-thought gentlemen, you will not be long before you are weary of their word-spinning, their tinkering of old heresies into original thought, and their general mystifying of plain things. It only needs a man of power to smash them up like potters' vessels, but then the result would only be pieces of pottery. "Show us a man worth following, "say we, "and when you do we will not follow him, but fight with him: at the present we are not likely to leave Calvin and Paul and Augustine to follow you."