So inspired was I by his story, a story of someone who battled and battled and got things done but never got as much done as he’d have liked, a story of someone who worked to combine a genuine spiritual salvation with a social redemption, and someone who was known in his day as a great preacher … so inspired was I that I dug around in used bookstores to find some of his books. One of which is Speaking the Truth – in Love. The Modern Preacher’s Task.
, a collection of Cambridge lectures on preaching.

The essence of the first lecture was what he has learned from the history of preaching The Word, and that The Word, to be preached well, must be both “reflected and refracted.” This is what might be called his incarnational principle of preaching: “perfect faithfulness to the eternal Word yet utmost sympathy for His own dear friends were welded in a unity” (27).

For Macleod good preaching is the combination of the eternal Word with the temporal condition of one’s audience: the Eternal meeting the Temporal. He illustrates this by appealing to the atonement, and how each theory was shaped by and a response to the conditions of that day.