PREACHING AND PAGANISM

BY

ALBERT PARKER FITCH

PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF RELIGION IN AMHERST COLLEGE

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE COLLEGE COURSE AND THE PREPARATION FOR LIFE

CAN THE CHURCH SURVIVE IN THE CHANGING ORDER?

PUBLISHED ON THE FOUNDATION ESTABLISHED IN MEMORY OF JAMES WESLEYCOOPER OF THE CLASS OF 1865, YALE COLLEGE

THE FORTY-SIXTH SERIES OF THE LYMAN BEECHER LECTURESHIP ON PREACHINGIN YALE UNIVERSITY

NEW HAVEN YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS MDCCCCXX

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

FIRST PUBLISHED, 1920

THE JAMES WESLEY COOPER MEMORIAL PUBLICATION FUND

The present volume is the fourth work published by the Yale UniversityPress on the James Wesley Cooper Memorial Publication Fund. ThisFoundation was established March 30, 1918, by a gift to YaleUniversity from Mrs. Ellen H. Cooper in memory of her husband, Rev. James Wesley Cooper, D. D. , who died in New York City, March 16, 1916. Dr. Cooper was a member of the Class of 1865, Yale College, and fortwenty-five years pastor of the South Congregational Church of NewBritain, Connecticut. For thirty years he was a corporate member ofthe American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and from 1885until the time of his death was a Fellow of Yale University, servingon the Corporation as one of the Successors of the Original Trustees. 

TO MY WIFE

PREFACE

The chief, perhaps the only, commendation of these chapters is thatthey pretend to no final solution of the problem which they discuss. How to assert the eternal and objective reality of that Presence, theconsciousness of Whom is alike the beginning and the end, the motiveand the reward, of the religious experience, is not altogether clearin an age that, for over two centuries, has more and more rejected thetranscendental ideas of the human understanding. Yet the consequencesof that rejection, in the increasing individualism of conduct whichhas kept pace with the growing subjectivism of thought, are nowsufficiently apparent and the present plight of our civilizationis already leading its more characteristic members, the politicalscientists and the economists, to reëxamine and reappraise theconcepts upon which it is founded. It is a similar attempt toscrutinize and evaluate the significant aspects of the interdependentthought and conduct of our day from the standpoint of religion whichis here attempted. Its sole and modest purpose is to endeavor torestore some neglected emphases, to recall to spiritually minded menand women certain half-forgotten values in the religious experienceand to add such observations regarding them as may, by good fortune, contribute something to that future reconciling of the thoughtcurrents and value judgments of our day to these central and preciousfacts of the religious life. 

Many men and minds have contributed to these pages. Such sources ofsuggestion and insight have been indicated wherever they could beidentified. In especial I must record my grateful sense of obligationto Professor Irving Babbitt's _Rousseau and Romanticism_. The chapteron Naturalism owes much to its brilliant and provocative discussions. 

CONTENTS

 PAGE

 Preface 11

 I. The Learner, the Doer and the Seer 15

 II. The Children of Zion and the Sons of Greece 40

 III. Eating, Drinking and Being Merry 72

 IV. The Unmeasured Gulf 102

 V. Grace, Knowledge, Virtue 131

 VI. The Almighty and Everlasting God 157

 VII. Worship as the Chief Approach to Transcendence 184

 VIII. Worship and the Discipline of Doctrine 209

CHAPTER ONE

THE LEARNER, THE DOER AND THE SEER

The first difficulty which confronts the incumbent of the LymanBeecher Foundation, after he has accepted the appalling fact that hemust hitch his modest wagon, not merely to a star, but rather to anentire constellation, is the delimitation of his subject. There aremany inquiries, none of them without significance, with which he mightappropriately concern himself. For not only is the profession of theChristian ministry a many-sided one, but scales of value changeand emphases shift, within the calling itself, with our changingcivilization. The mediaeval world brought forth, out of its need, therobed and mitered ecclesiastic; a more recent world, pursuant to itsgenius, demanded the ethical idealist. Drink-sodden Georgian Englandresponded to the open-air evangelism of Whitefield and Wesley; thenext century found the Established Church divided against itselfby the learning and culture of the Oxford Movement. Sometimesa philosopher and theologian, like Edwards, initiates the GreatAwakening; sometimes an emotional mystic like Bernard can arouseall Europe and carry men, tens of thousands strong, over the Danubeand over the Hellespont to die for the Cross upon the burning sandsof Syria; sometimes it is the George Herberts, in a hundred ruralparishes, who make grace to abound through the intimate and preciousministrations of the country parson. Let us, therefore, devote thischapter to a review of the several aspects of the Christian ministry, in order to set in its just perspective the one which we have chosenfor these discussions and to see why it seems to stand, for themoment, in the forefront of importance. Our immediate question is, Who, on the whole, is the most needed figure in the ministry today?Is it the professional ecclesiastic, backed with the authority andprestige of a venerable organization? Is it the curate of souls, patient shepherd of the silly sheep? Is it the theologian, theadministrator, the prophet--who?

One might think profitably on that first question in these veryinformal days. We are witnessing a breakdown of all external forms ofauthority which, while salutary and necessary, is also perilous. Notmany of us err, just now, by overmagnifying our official status. Many of us instead are terribly at ease in Zion and might become lessassured and more significant by undertaking the subjective task ofa study in ministerial personality. "What we are, " to paraphraseEmerson, "speaks so loud that men cannot hear what we say. " Everygreat calling has its characteristic mental attitude, the unwrittencode of honor of the group, without a knowledge of which one couldscarcely be an efficient or honorable practitioner within it. One ofthe perplexing and irritating problems of the personal life of thepreacher today has to do with the collision between the secularstandards of his time, this traditional code of his class, andthe requirements of his faith. Shall he acquiesce in the smugconformities, the externalized procedures of average society, somewhatpietized, and join that large company of good and ordinary people, of whom Samuel Butler remarks, in _The Way of All Flesh_, that theywould be "equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, or at seeing it practised?" There are ministers who do thus contentthemselves with being merely superrespectable. Shall he exalt thestandards of his calling, accentuate the speech and dress, the codeand manners of his group, the historic statements of his faith, at therisk of becoming an official, a "professional"? Or does he possess theinsight, and can he acquire the courage, to follow men like Francisof Assisi or Father Damien and adopt the Christian ethic and thus jointhat company of the apostles and martyrs whose blood is the seed ofthe church? A good deal might be said today on the need of this sortof personal culture in the ministerial candidate. But, provocative andsignificant though the question is, it is too limited in scope, toopurely subjective in nature, to suit the character and the urgency ofthe needs of this moment. 

Again, every profession has the prized inheritance of its ownparticular and gradually perfected human skill. An interesting study, then, would be the analysis of that rich content of human insights, the result of generations of pastoral experience, which form thebackground of all great preaching. No man, whether learned or pious, or both, is equipped for the pulpit without the addition of thatintuitive discernment, that quick and varied appreciation, that saneand tolerant knowledge of life and the world, which is the rewardgiven to the friends and lovers of mankind. For the preacher deals notwith the shallows but the depths of life. Like his Master he must be agreat humanist. To make real sermons he has to look, without dismay orevasion, far into the heart's impenetrable recesses. He must have hadsome experience with the absolutism of both good and evil. I thinkpreachers who regard sermons on salvation as superfluous have not hadmuch experience with either. They belong to that large world of theintermediates, neither positively good nor bad, who compose the massof the prosperous and respectable in our genteel civilization. Sincethey belong to it they cannot lead it. And certainly they who donot know the absolutism of evil cannot very well understand sinners. Genuine satans, as Milton knew, are not weaklings and traitors whohave declined from the standards of a respectable civilization. Theyare positive and impressive figures pursuing and acting up to theirown ideal of conduct, not fleeing from self-accepted retribution orfalling away from a confessed morality of ours. Evil is a force evenmore than a folly; it is a positive agent busily building away at theCity of Dreadful Night, constructing its insolent and scoffing societywithin the very precincts of the City of God. 

He must know, then, that evil and suffering are not temporary elementsof man's evolution, just about to be eliminated by the new reform, the last formula, the fresh panacea. To those who have tasted griefand smelt the fire such easy preaching and such confident solutionsare a grave offense. They know that evil is an integral part of ouruniverse; suffering an enduring element of the whole. So he mustpreach upon the chances and changes of this mortal world, or go tothe house of shame or the place of mourning, knowing that there issomething past finding out in evil, something incommunicable abouttrue sorrow. They are not external things, alien to our natures, thathappen one day from without, and may perhaps be avoided, and by andby are gone. No; that which makes sorrow, sorrow, and evil, evil, istheir naturalness; they well up from within, part of the very textureof our consciousness. He knows you can never express them, for trulyto do that you would have to express and explain the entire world. It is not easy then to interpret the evil and suffering which are notexternal and temporary, but enduring and a part of the whole. 

So the preacher is never dealing with plain or uncomplicated matters. It is his business to perceive the mystery of iniquity in the saintand to recognize the mystery of godliness in the sinner. It is hisbusiness to revere the child and yet watch him that he may make aman of him. He must say, so as to be understood, to those who balk atdiscipline, and rail at self-repression, and resent pain: you havenot yet begun to live nor made the first step toward understanding theuniverse and yourselves. To avoid discipline and to blench at pain isto evade life. There are limitations, occasioned by the evil and thesuffering of the world, in whose repressions men find fulfillment. When you are honest with yourself you will know what Dante meant whenhe said:

 "And thou shalt see those who Contented are within the fire; Because they hope to come, When e'er it may be, to the blessed people. "[1]

It is his business, also, to be the comrade of his peers, and yetspeak to them the truth in love; his task to understand the bitternessand assuage the sorrows of old age. I suppose the greatest influencea preacher ever exercises, and a chief source of the material andinsight of his preaching, is found in this intimate contact withliving and suffering, divided and distracted men and women. Whenstrong men blench with pain and exquisite grief stirs within us atthe sight and we can endure naught else but to suffer with them, whenyouth is blurred with sin, and gray heads are sick with shame and we, then, want to die and cry, O God! forgive and save them or else blotme out of Thy book of life--for who could bear to live in a worldwhere such things are the end!--then, through the society of sorrow, and the holy comradeship in shame, we begin to find the Lord and tounderstand both the kindness and the justice of His world. In themoment when sympathy takes the bitterness out of another's sorrow andmy suffering breaks the captivity of my neighbor's sin--then, whenbecause "together, " with sinner and sufferer, we come out into thequiet land of freedom and of peace, we perceive how the very heart ofGod, upon which there we know we rest, may be found in the vicarioussuffering and sacrifice called forth by the sorrow and the evilof mankind. Then we can preach the Gospel. Because then we dimlyunderstand why men have hung their God upon the Cross of Christ!

[Footnote 1: _The Divine Comedy: Hell_; canto I. ]

Is it not ludicrous, then, to suppose that a man merely equipped withprofessional scholarship, or contented with moral conformities, canminister to the sorrow and the mystery, the mingled shame and glory ofa human being? This is why the average theologue, in his first parish, is like the well-meaning but meddling engineer endeavoring with clumsytools and insensitive fingers to adjust the delicate and complicatedmechanism of a Genevan watch. And here is one of the real reasons whywe deprecate men entering our calling, without both the culture ofa liberal education and the learning of a graduate school. Clearly, therefore, one real task of such schools and their lectureships is tooffer men wide and gracious training in the art of human contacts, so that their lives may be lifted above Pharisaism and moralself-consciousness, made acquainted with the higher and comprehensiveinterpretations of the heart and mind of our race. For only thus canthey approach life reverently and humbly. Only thus will they reverethe integrity of the human spirit; only thus can they regard it witha magnanimous and catholic understanding and measure it not by thestandards of temperamental or sectarian convictions, but by whatis best and highest, deepest and holiest in the race. No one needsmore than the young preacher to be drawn out of the range of narrowjudgments, of exclusive standards and ecclesiastical traditions and tobe flung out among free and sensitive spirits, that he may watch theirworkings, master their perceptions, catch their scale of values. 

A discussion, then, dealing with this aspect of our problem, wouldraise many and genuine questions for us. There is the more room for itin this time of increasing emphasis upon machinery when even ministersare being measured in the terms of power, speed and utility. These arenot real ends of life; real ends are unity, repose, the imaginativeand spiritual values which make for the release of self, with itsby-product of happiness. In such days, then, when the old-timepastor-preacher is becoming as rare as the former generalpractitioner; when the lines of division between speaker, educator, expert in social hygiene, are being sharply drawn--as though newmethods insured of themselves fresh inspiration, and technicalknowledge was identical with spiritual understanding--it would beworth while to dwell upon the culture of the pastoral office and toshow that ingenuity is not yet synonymous with insight, and that, inour profession at least, card-catalogues cannot take the place ofthe personal study of the human heart. But many discussions on thisFoundation, and recently those of Dr. Jowett, have already dealt withthis sort of analysis. Besides, today, when not merely the preacher, but the very view of the world that produced him, is being threatenedwith temporary extinction, such a theme, poetic and rewarding thoughit is, becomes irrelevant and parochial. 

Or we might turn to the problem of technique, that professionalequipment for his task as a sermonizer and public speaker which ispartly a native endowment and partly a laborious acquisition on thepreacher's part. Such was President Tucker's course on _The Makingand Unmaking of the Preacher_. Certainly observations on professionaltechnique, especially if they should include, like his, acutediscussion of the speaker's obligation to honesty of thinking, no lessthan integrity of conduct; of the immorality of the pragmatic standardof mere effectiveness or immediate efficiency in the selection ofmaterial; of the aesthetic folly and ethical dubiety of simulatedextempore speaking and genuinely impromptu prayers, would not besuperfluous. But, on the other hand, we may hope to accomplishmuch of this indirectly today. Because there is no way of handlingspecifically either the content of the Christian message or theproblem of the immediate needs and temper of those to whom it is tobe addressed, without reference to the kind of personality, and thenature of the tools at his disposal, which is best suited to commendthe one and to interpret the other. 

Hence such a discussion as this ought, by its very scale of values--bythe motives that inform it and the ends that determine it--to condemnthereby the insincere and artificial speaker, or that pseudo-sermonwhich is neither as exposition, an argument nor a meditation but amosaic, a compilation of other men's thoughts, eked out by impossiblyimpressive or piously sentimental anecdotes, the whole glued togetherby platitudes of the Martin Tupper or Samuel Smiles variety. It iscertainly an obvious but greatly neglected truth that simplicityand candor in public speaking, largeness of mental movement, whatPhillips Brooks called direct utterance of comprehensive truths, areindispensable prerequisites for any significant ethical or spiritualleadership. But, taken as a main theme, this third topic, like theothers, seems to me insufficiently inclusive to meet our presentexigencies. It deals more with the externals than with the heart ofour subject. 

Again we might address ourselves to the ethical and practicalaspects of preaching and the ministry. Taking largely for grantedour understanding of the Gospel, we might concern ourselves with itsrelations to society, the detailed implications for the moral andeconomic problems of our social and industrial order. Dean Brown, in_The Social Message of the Modern Pulpit_, and Dr. Coffin in _In aDay of Social Rebuilding_, have so enriched this Foundation. Moreover, this is, at the moment, an almost universally popular treatment ofthe preacher's opportunity and obligation. One reason, therefore, for not choosing this approach to our task is that the preacher'sattention, partly because of the excellence of these and otherbooks and lectures, and partly because of the acuteness of thepolitical-industrial crisis which is now upon us, is already focusedupon it. 

Besides, our present moment is changing with an ominous rapidity. Andone is not sure whether the immediate situation, as distinguished fromthat of even a few years ago, calls us to be concerned chiefly withthe practical and ethical aspects of our mission, urgent though theneed and critical the pass, to which the abuses of the capitalisticsystem have brought both European and American society. In this day ofthose shifting standards which mark the gradual transference of powerfrom one group to another in the community, and the merging of aspent epoch in a new order, neither the chief opportunity nor the mostserious peril of religious leadership is met by fresh and energeticprograms of religion in action. In such days, our chief gift to theworld cannot be the support of any particular reforms or the alliancewith any immediate ethical or economic movement. For these things atbest would be merely the effects of religion. And it is not religionin its relations, nor even in its expression in character--it is thething in itself that this age most needs. What men are chiefly askingof life at this moment is not, What ought we to do? but the deeperquestion, What is there we can believe? For they know that the answerto this question would show us what we ought to do. 

Nor do our reform alliances and successive programs and crusadesalways seem to me to proceed from any careful estimate of thesituation as a whole or to be conceived in the light of comprehensiveChristian principle. Instead, they sometimes seem to draw theirinspiration more from the sense of the urgent need of presenting to anindifferent or disillusioned world some quick and tangible evidenceof a continuing moral vigor and spiritual passion to which the deeperand more potent witnesses are absent. It is as though we thought themachinery of the church would revolve with more energy if geared intothe wheels of the working world. But that world and we do not drawour power from the same dynamo. And surely in a day of profoundand widespread mental ferment and moral restlessness, some morefundamental gift than this is asked of us. 

If, therefore, these chapters pay only an incidental attentionto the church's social and ethical message, it is partly becauseour attention is, at this very moment, largely centered upon thisimportant, yet secondary matter, and more because there lies beneathit a yet more urgent and inclusive task which confronts the spokesmanof organized religion. 

You will expect me then to say that we are to turn to some speculativeand philosophic study, such as the analysis of the Christian idea inits world relationships, some fresh statement of the Gospel, either byway of apologia for inherited concepts, or as attempting to make a newreceptacle for the living wine, which has indeed burst the most ofits ancient bottles. Such was Principal Fairbairn's monumental task in_The Place of Christ in Modern Theology_ and also Dr. Gordon's in hisdistinguished discussions in _The Ultimate Conceptions of Faith_. 

Here, certainly, is an endeavor which is always of primary importance. There is an abiding peril, forever crouching at the door of ancientorganizations, that they shall seek refuge from the difficulties ofthought in the opportunities of action. They need to be continuallyreminded that reforms begin in the same place where abuses do, namely, in the notion of things; that only just ideas can, in thelong run, purify conduct; that clear thinking is the source ofall high and sustained feeling. I wish that we might essay thephilosopher-theologian's task. This generation is hungry forunderstanding; it perishes for lack of knowledge. One reason forthe indubitable decline of the preacher's power is that we have beenculpably indifferent in maintaining close and friendly alliancesbetween the science and the art, the teachers and the practitioners ofreligion. Few things would be more ominous than to permit any furtherwidening of the gulf which already exists between these two. Nevermore than now does the preacher need to be reminded of what MarcusAurelius said: "Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also shall bethyself; for the soul is dyed by its thoughts. "

But such an undertaking, calling for wide and exact scholarship, largereserves of extra-professional learning, does not primarily belongto a discussion within the department of practical theology. Besideswhich there is a task, closely allied to it, but creative rather thancritical, prophetic rather than philosophic, which does fall withinthe precise area of this field. I mean the endeavor to describethe mind and heart of our generation, appraise the significantthought-currents of our time. This would be an attempt to give somedescription of the chief impulses fermenting in contemporary society, to ask what relation they hold to the Christian principle, and toinquire what attitude toward them our preaching should adopt. If it betrue that what is most revealing in any age is its regulative ideas, then what is more valuable for the preacher than to attempt theunderstanding of his generation through the defining of its rulingconcepts? And it is this audacious task which, for two reasons, weshall presume to undertake. 

The first reason is that it is appropriate both to the temperamentand the training of the preacher. There are three grand divisions, or rather determining emphases, by which men may be separated intovocational groups. To begin with, there is the man of the scientificor intellectual type. He has a passion for facts and a strong sense oftheir reality. He moves with natural ease among abstract propositions, is both critical of, and fertile in, theories; indicates his essentialdistinction in his love of the truth for the truth's sake. He looksfirst to the intrinsic reasonableness of any proposition; tends tojudge both men and movements not by traditional or personal values, but by a detached and disinterested appraisal of their inherent worth. He is often a dogmatist, but this fault is not peculiar to him, heshares it with the rest of mankind. He is sometimes a literalist andsometimes a slave to logic, more concerned with combating the crudeor untenable form of a proposition than inquiring with sympatheticinsight into the worth of its substance. But these things areperversions of his excellencies, defects of his virtues. Hischaracteristic qualities are mental integrity, accuracy of statement, sanity of judgment, capacity for sustained intellectual toil. Suchmen are investigators, scholars; when properly blended with theimaginative type they become inventors and teachers. They make goodtheologians and bad preachers. 

Then there are the practical men, beloved of our American life. Boththeir feet are firmly fixed upon the solid ground. They generallyknow just where they are, which is not surprising, for they do not, for the most part, either in the world of mind or spirit, frequentunusual places. The finespun speculations of the philosophers and theimpractical dreams of the artist make small appeal to them; the worldthey live in is a sharply defined and clearly lighted and ratherlimited place. They like to say to this man come and he cometh, and tothat man go and he goeth. They are enamored of offices, typewriters, telegrams, long-distance messages, secretaries, programs, conferencesand drives. Getting results is their goal; everything is judged by thecriterion of effective action; they are instinctive and unconsciouspragmatists. They make good cheer leaders at football games in theiryouth and impressive captains of industry in their old age. Theirvirtues are wholesome, if obvious; they are good mixers, have shrewdjudgment, immense physical and volitional energy. They understand thattwo and two make four. They are rarely saints but, unlike many ofus who once had the capacity for sainthood, they are not dreadfulsinners. They are the tribe of which politicians are born but, whenthey are blended with imaginative and spiritual gifts, they becomephilanthropists and statesmen, practical servants of mankind. Theymake good, if conservative, citizens; kind, if uninspiring, husbandsand deplorable preachers. 

Then there are those fascinating men of feeling and imagination, thosewho look into their own hearts and write, those to whom the innerdominions which the spirit conquers for itself become a thousand-foldmore real than the earth whereon they stamp their feet. These are theliterary or the creative folk. Their passion is not so much to knowlife as to enjoy it; not to direct it, but to experience it; not evento make understanding of it an end, but only a means to interpretingit. They do not, as a rule, thirst for erudition, and they areindifferent to those manipulations of the externals of life whichare dear to the lovers of executive power. They know less but theyunderstand more than their scholastic brethren. As a class they aresometimes disreputable but nearly always unworldly; more distinguishedby an intuitive and childlike than by an ingenious or sophisticatedquality of mind. Ideas and facts are perceived by them not abstractlynor practically, but in their typical or symbolic, hence theirpictorial and transmissible, aspects. They read dogma, whethertheological or other, in the terms of a living process, unconsciouslytranslating it, as they go along, out of its cold propositions intoits appropriate forms of feeling and needs and satisfactions. 

The scientist, then, is a critic, a learner who wants to analyze anddissect; the man of affairs is a director and builder and wants tocommand and construct; the man of this group is a seer. He is a loverand a dreamer; he watches and broods over life, profoundly feeling it, enamored both of its shame and of its glory. The intolerable poignancyof existence is bittersweet to his mouth; he craves to incarnate, to interpret its entire human process, always striving to pierce toits center, to capture and express its inexpressible ultimate. Heis an egotist but a valuable one, acutely aware of the depths andimmensities of his own spirit and of its significant relations tothis seething world without. Thus it is both himself and a new visionof life, in terms of himself, that he desires to project for hiscommunity. 

The form of that vision will vary according to the nature of thetools, the selection of material, the particular sort of nativeendowment which are given to him. Some such men reveal theirunderstanding of the soul and the world in the detached serenity, the too well-defined harmonies of a Parthenon; others in the dimand intricate richness, the confused and tortured aspiration of thelong-limbed saints and grotesque devils of a Gothic cathedral. Othersincarnate it in gleaming bronze; or spread it in subtle play of lightand shade and tones of color on a canvas; or write it in great playswhich open the dark chambers of the soul and make the heart standstill; or sing it in sweet and terrible verse, full-throated utteranceof man's pride and hope and passion. Some act it before the altar orbeneath the proscenium arch; some speak it, now in Cassandra-tones, now comfortably like shepherds of frail sheep. These folk are thebrothers-in-blood, the fellow craftsmen of the preacher. By a sillyconvention, he is almost forbidden to consult with them, and to betakehimself to the learned, the respectable and the dull. But it is withthese that naturally he sees eye to eye. 

In short, in calling the preacher a prophet we mean that preachingis an art and the preacher is an artist; for all great art has theprophetic quality. Many men object to this definition of the preacheras being profane. It appears to make secular or mechanicalize theirprofession, to rob preaching of its sacrosanctity, leave it lessauthority by making it more intelligible, remove it from the realmof the mystical and unique. This objection seems to me sometimesan expression of spiritual arrogance and sometimes a subtle form ofskepticism. It assumes a special privilege for our profession or anot-get-at-able defense and sanction by insisting that it differs inorigin and hence in kind from similar expressions of the human spirit. It hesitates to rely on the normal and the intelligible sources ofministerial power, to confess the relatively definable origin andunderstandable methods of our work. It fears to trust to these alone. 

But all these must be trusted. We may safely assert that the preacherdeals with absolute values, for all art does that. But we may notassert that he is the only person that does so or that his is the onlyor the unapproachable way. No; he, too, is an artist. Hence, a sermonis not a contribution to, but an interpretation of, knowledge, madein terms of the religious experience. It is taking truth out of itscompressed and abstract form, its impersonal and scientific language, and returning it to life in the terms of the ethical and spiritualexperience of mankind, thus giving it such concrete and pictorialexpression that it stimulates the imagination and moves the will. 

It will be clear then why I have said that the task of appraising theheart and mind of our generation, to which we address ourselves, isappropriate to the preaching genius. For only they could attemptsuch a task who possess an informed and disciplined yet essentiallyintuitive spirit with its scale of values; who by instinct can seetheir age as a whole and indicate its chief emphases, its controllingtendencies, its significant expressions. It is not the scientist butthe seer who thus attempts the precious but perilous task of makingthe great generalizations. This is what Aristotle means when he says, "The poet ranks higher than the historian because he achieves a moregeneral truth. " This is, I suppose, what Houston Stewart Chamberlainmeans when he says, in the introduction to the _Foundations of theNineteenth Century_: "our modern world represents an immeasurablearray of facts. The mastery of such a task as recording andinterpreting them scientifically is impossible. It is only the geniusof the artist, which feels the secret parallels that exist betweenthe world of vision and of thought, that can, if fortune be favorable, reveal the unity beneath the immeasurable complexities and diversitiesof the present order. " Or as Professor Hocking says: "The prophet mustfind in the current of history a unity corresponding to the unity ofthe physical universe, or else he must create it. It is this consciousunification of history that the religious will spontaneously tends tobring about. "[2]

[Footnote 2: _The Meaning of God in Human Experience_, p. 518. ]

It is then precisely the preacher's task, his peculiar office, toattempt these vast and perilous summations. What he is set here foris to bring the immeasurable within the scope of vision. He deals withthe far-flung outposts, no man knows how distant, and the boundlessinterspaces of human consciousness; he deals with the beginning, themiddle, the end--the origin, the meaning and the destiny--of humanlife. How can anyone give unity to such a prospect? Like any otherartist he gives it the only unity possible, the unity revealed inhis own personality. The theologian should not attempt to evaluatehis age; the preacher may. Because the theologian, like any otherscientist, analyzes and dissects; he breaks up the world. The preacherin his disciplined imagination, his spiritual intuitiveness, --what wecall the "religious temperament, "--unites it again and makes men seeit whole. This quality of purified and enlightened imagination is ofthe very essence of the preacher's power and art. Hence he may attemptto set forth a just understanding of his generation. 

This brings us to the second reason for our topic namely, itstimeliness. All religious values are not at all times equal inimportance. As generations come and go, first one, then another loomsin the foreground. But I sincerely believe that the most fatefulundertaking for the preacher at this moment is that of analyzing hisown generation. Because he has been flung into one of the world'stransition epochs, he speaks in an hour which is radical in changes, perplexing in its multifarious cross-currents, prolific of newforms and expressions. What the world most needs at such a moment ofexpansion and rebellion, is a redefining of its ideals. It needs tohave some eternal scale of values set before it once more. It needsto stop long enough to find out just what and where it is, and towardwhat it is going. It needs another Sheridan to write a new _School forScandal_, another Swift, with his _Gulliver's Travels_, a continuingShaw with his satiric comedies, a Mrs. Wharton with her _House ofMirth_, a Thorstein Veblen with his _Higher Learning in America_, aSavonarola with his call to repentance and indictment of worldly andunfaithful living. It is a difficult and dangerous office, this ofthe prophet; it calls for a considerate and honest mind as well as aflashing insight and an eager heart. The false prophet exposes that hemay exploit his age; the true prophet portrays that he may purge it. Like Jeremiah we may well dread to undertake the task, yet its day andhour are upon us!

I have already spoken to this point at length, in a little bookrecently published. I merely add here that in a day of obviouspolitical disillusionment and industrial revolt, of intellectualrebellion against an outworn order of ideas and of moral restlessnessand doubt, an indispensable duty for the preacher is thiscomprehensive study and understanding of his own epoch. Else, withoutrealizing it, --and how true this often is, --he proclaims a universaltruth in the unintelligible language of a forgotten order, and appliesa timeless experience to the faded conditions of yesterday. 

Indeed, I am convinced that a chief reason why preaching istemporarily obscured in power, is because most of our expertness in itis in terms of local problems, of partial significances, ratherthan in the wider tendencies that produce and carry them, or in theultimate laws of conduct which should govern them. We ought to betroubled, I think, in our present ecclesiastical situation, with itstaint of an almost frantic immediacy. Not only are we not sufficientlydealing with the Gospel as a universal code, but, as both cause andeffect of this, we are not applying it to the inclusive life of ourgeneration. We are tinkering here and patching there, but attemptingno grand evaluation. We have already granted that sweepinggeneralizations, inclusive estimates, are as difficult as they areaudacious. Yet we have also seen that these grand evaluations areof the very essence of religion and hence are characteristic of thepreacher's task. And, finally, it appears that ours is an age whichcalls for such redefining of its values, some fresh and inclusivemoral and religious estimates. Hence we undertake the task. 

There remains but one thing more to be accomplished in this chapter. The problem of the selection and arrangement of the material for sucha summary is not an easy one. Out of several possible devices Ihave taken as the framework on which to hang these discussions threefamiliar divisions of thought and feeling, with their accompanyinglaws of conduct, and value judgments. They are the humanisticor classic; the naturalistic or primitive; and the religious ortranscendent interpretation of the world and life. One sets up asocial, one an individual, and one a universal standard. Under themovements which these headings represent we can most easily andclearly order and appraise the chief influences of the Protestantcenturies. The first two are largely preëmpting between them, at thismoment, the field of human thought and conduct and a brief analysisof them, contrasting their general attitudes, may serve as a fitintroduction to the ensuing chapter. 

We begin, then, with the humanist. He is the man who ignores, asunnecessary, any direct reference to, or connection with, ultimate orsupernatural values. He lives in a high but self-contained world. Hisis man's universe. His law is the law of reasonable self-discipline, founded on observation of nature and a respect for social values, and buttressed by high human pride. He accepts the authority of thecollective experience of his generation or his race. He believes, centrally, in the trustworthiness of human nature, in its groupcapacity. Men, as a race, have intelligently observed and experimentedwith both themselves and the world about them. Out of centuries ofcritical reflection and sad and wise endeavor, they have evolvedcertain criteria of experience. These summations could hardly becalled eternal laws but they are standards; they are the permits andprohibitions for human life. Some of them affect personal conductand are moral standards; some of them affect civil government and arepolitical axioms; some of them affect production and distribution andare economic laws; some of them affect social relationships. But inevery case the humanist has what is, in a sense, an objective becausea formal standard; he looks without himself as an individual, yet tohimself as a part of the composite experience and wisdom of his race, for understanding and for guides. Thus the individual conforms to theneeds and wisdom of the group. Humanism, at its best, has somethingheroic, unselfish, noble about it. Its votaries do not eat to theirliking nor drink to their thirst. They learn deep lessons almostunconsciously; to conquer their desires, to make light of toil andpain and discomfort; the true humanist is well aware that Spartandiscipline is incomparably superior to Greek accidence. This is whatone of the greatest of them, Goethe, meant when he said: "Anythingwhich emancipates the spirit without a corresponding growth inself-mastery is pernicious. "

All humanists then have two characteristics in common: first, they assume that man is his own arbiter, has both the requisiteintelligence and the moral ability to control his own destiny;secondly, they place the source and criterion of this power incollective wisdom, not in individual vagary and not in divinerevelation. They assert, therefore, that the law of the group, theperfected and wrought out code of human experience, is all that isbinding and all that is essential. To be sure, and most significantly, this authority is not rigid, complete, fixed. There is nothingcomplete in the humanist's world. Experience accumulates and man'sknowledge grows; the expectation and joy in progress is a part of it;man's code changes, emends, expands with his onward marching. But thehumanistic point of view assumes something relatively stable in life. Hence our phrase that humanism gives us a classic, that is to say, asimple and established standard. 

It is to be observed that there is nothing in humanism thus definedwhich need be incompatible with religion. It is not with its contentbut its incompleteness that we quarrel. Indeed, in its assertion ofthe trustworthiness of human experience, its faith in the dignity andsignificance of man, its respect for the interests of the group, andits conviction that man finds his true self only outside his immediatephysical person, beyond his material wants and desires, it is quitegenuinely a part of the religious understanding. But we shall haveoccasion to observe that while much of this may be religious this isnot the whole of religion. For the note of universality is absent. Humanism is essentially aristocratic. It is for a selected group thatit is practicable and it is a selected experience upon which it rests. Its standards are esoteric rather than democratic. Yet it is hardlynecessary to point out the immense part which humanism, as thusdefined, is playing in present life. 

But there is another law which, from remotest times, man hasfollowed whenever he dared. It is not the law of the group but ofthe individual, not the law of civilization but of the jungle. "Mostmen, " says Aristotle, "would rather live in a disorderly than a sobermanner. " He means that most men would rather consult and gratify theirimmediate will, their nearest choices, their instantaneous desires, than conform the moment to some regulated and considerate, somecomprehensive scheme of life and action. The life of unreason is theirdesire; the experience whose bent is determined by every whim, theexpression which has no rational connection with the past and noserious consideration for the future. This is of the very essence oflawlessness because it is revolt against the normal sequence of lawand effect, in mind and conduct, in favor of untrammeled adventure. 

Now this is naturalism or paganism as we often call it. Naturalismis a perversion of that high instinct in mankind which issues in theold concept of supernaturalism. The supernaturalist, of a former anddiscredited type, believed that God violates the order of naturefor sublime ends; that He "breaks into" His own world, so to speak, "revealing" Himself in prodigious, inexplicable, arbitrary ways. By asort of degradation of this notion, a perversion of this instinct, thenaturalist assumes that he can violate both the human and the divinelaw for personal ends, and express himself in fantastic or indecentor impious ways. The older supernaturalism exalts the individualismof the Creator; naturalism the egotism of the creature. I make thecontrast not merely to excoriate naturalism, but to point out theinterdependence between man's apparently far-separated expressionsof his spirit, and how subtly misleading are our highly prizeddistinctions, how dangerous sometimes that secondary mental powerwhich multiplies them. It sobers and clarifies human thinking alittle, perhaps, to reflect on how thin a line separates the sublimeand the ridiculous, the saint and the sensualist, the martyr and thefool, the genius and the freak. 

Now, with this selfish individualism which we call naturalism we shallhave much to do, for it plays an increasing rôle in the modernworld; it is the neo-paganism which we may see spreading about us. Sophistries of all kinds become the powerful allies of this sort ofmoral and aesthetic anarchy. Its votaries are those sorts ofrebels who invariably make their minds not their friends but theiraccomplices. They are ingenious in the art of letting themselves goand at the same time thinking themselves controlled and praiseworthy. The naturalist, then, ignores the group; he flaunts impartiallyboth the classic and the religious law. He is equally unwilling tosubmit to a power imposed from above and without, or to accept thoserestrictions of society, self-imposed by man's own codified andcorrected observations of the natural world and his own impulses. Hejeers at the one as hypocrisy and superstition and at the other asmere "middle-class respectability. " He himself is the perpetual Ajaxstanding defiant upon the headland of his own inflamed desires, and scoffing at the lightnings either of heaven or society. Neitherdevoutness nor progress but mere personal expansion is his goal. Thehumanist curbs both the flesh and the imagination by a high doctrineof expediency. Natural values are always critically appraised in thelight of humane values, which is nearly, if not quite, the same assaying that the individual desires and delights must be conformedto the standards of the group. There can be no anarchy of theimagination, no license of the mind, no unbridled will. Humanism, no less than religion, is nobly, though not so deeply, traditional. But there is no tradition to the naturalist; not the normal andrepresentative, but the unique and spectacular is his goal. Noveltyand expansion, not form and proportion, are his goddesses. Not truthand duty, but instinct and appetite, are in the saddle. He will tryany horrid experiment from which he may derive a new sensation. 

Over against them both stands the man of religion with his vision ofthe whole and his consequent law of proud humility. The next threechapters will try to discuss in detail these several attitudes towardlife and their respective manifestations in contemporary society. 

CHAPTER TWO

THE CHILDREN OF ZION AND THE SONS OF GREECE

We are not using the term "humanism" in this chapter in its strictlytechnical sense. Because we are not concerned with the history ofthought merely, but also with its practical embodiments in varioussocial organizations as well. So we mean by "humanism" not only thosemodes and systems of thought in which human interests predominate butalso the present economic, political and ecclesiastical institutionswhich more or less consistently express them. Hence, the term asused will include concepts not always agreeing with each other, andsometimes only semi-related to the main stream of the movement. Thisneed not trouble us. Strict intellectual consistency is a fascinatingand impossible goal of probably dubious value. Moreover, it isthis whole expression of the time spirit which bathes the sensitivepersonality of the preacher, persuading and moulding him quite as muchby its derived and concrete manifestations in contemporary society asby its essential and abstract principles. 

There are then two sets of media through which humanism has affectedpreaching. The first are philosophical and find their expression in alarge body of literature which has been moulding thought and feelingfor nearly four centuries. Humanism begins with the general abstractassumption that all which men can know, or need to know, are "natural"and human values; that they have no means of getting outside theinexorable circle of their own experience. 

Much, of course, depends here upon the sense in which the word"experience" is used. The assumption need not necessarily bechallenged except where, as is very often the case, an arbitrarilylimited definition of experience is intended. From this generalassumption flows the subjective theory of morals; from it is derivedthe conviction that the rationalistic values in religion are the onlyreal, or at least demonstrable, ones; and hence from this comes theshifting of the seat of religious authority from "revelation" toexperience. In so far as this is a correction of emphasis only, or theabandonment of a misleading term rather than the denial of one of theareas and modes of understanding, again we have no quarrel with it. But if it means an exclusion of the supersensuous sources of knowledgeor the denial of the existence of absolute values as the source of ourrelative and subjective understanding, then it strikes at the heartof religion. Because the religious life is built on those factors ofexperience that lie above the strictly rational realm of consciousnessjust as the pagan view rests on primitive instincts that lie beneathit. Of course, in asserting the importance of these "supersensuous"values the religionist does not mean that they are beyond the reachof human appraisal or unrelated by their nature to the rest of ourunderstanding. By the intuitive he does not mean the uncritical nor bythe supersensuous the supernatural in the old and discredited sense ofan arbitrary and miraculous revelation. Mysticism is not superstition, nor are the insights of the poet the whimsies of the mereimpressionist. But he insists that the humanist, in his ordinarydefinition of experience, ignores or denies these superrationalvalues. In opposition to him he rests his faith on that definition ofexperience which underlies Aristotle's statement that "the intellectis dependent upon intuition for knowledge both of what is below andwhat is above itself. "

Now it is this first set of factors which are the more important. For the cause, as distinguished from the occasions, of our presentreligious scale of values is, like all major causes, not practical butideal, and its roots are found far beneath the soil of the presentin the beginnings of the modern age in the fourteenth century. It wasthen that our world was born; it is of the essence of that world thatit arose out of indifference toward speculative thinking and unfaithin those concepts regarding the origin and destiny of mankind whichspeculative philosophy tried to express and prove. 

From the first, then, humanistic leaders have not only franklyrejected the scholastic theologies, which had been the traditionalexpression of those absolute values with which the religiousexperience is chiefly concerned, but also ignored or rejected theexistence of those values themselves. Thus Petrarch is generallyconsidered the first of modern humanists. He not only speaks ofRome--meaning the whole semi-political, semi-ecclesiastical structureof dogmatic supernaturalism--as that "profane Babylon" but alsoreveals his rejection of the distinctively religious experience itselfby characterizing as "an impudent wench" the Christian church. Theattack is partly therefore on the faith in transcendent values whichfixes man's relative position by projecting him upon the screen of aninfinite existence and which asserts that he has an absolute, that is, an other-than-human guide. Again Erasmus, in his _Praise of Folly_, denounces indiscriminately churches, priesthoods, dogmas, ethicalvalues, the whole structure of organized religion, calling it those"foul smelling weeds of theology. " It was inevitable that such men asErasmus and Thomas More should hold aloof from the Reformation, not, as has been sometimes asserted, from any lack of moral courage butbecause of intellectual conviction. They saw little to choose betweenLutheran, Calvinistic and Romish dogmatism. They had rejected not onlymediaeval ecclesiasticism but also that view of the world founded onsupersensuous values, whose persistent intimations had produced thespeculative and scholastic theologies. To them, in a quite literalsense, the proper study of mankind was man. 

It is hardly necessary to speak here of the attitude towards the old"supernatural" religion taken by the English Deists of the last halfof the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century. Herewas the first definite struggle of the English church with a groupof thinkers who, under the leadership of Shaftesbury, Bolingbrokeand others, attempted to adapt humanistic philosophy to theologicalspeculation, to establish the sufficiency of natural religion asopposed to revelation, and to deny the unique significance of theOld and New Testament Scriptures. The English Deists were not deepor comprehensive thinkers, but they were typically humanistic in thattheir interests were not mainly theological or religious but ratherthose of a general culture. They were inconsistent with their humanismin their doctrine of a personal God who was not only remote butseparated from his universe, a _deus ex machina_ who excluded the ideaof immanence. While less influential in England, they had a powerfuleffect upon French and German thinking. Both Voltaire and Rousseauwere rationalists and Deists to the end of their days and both wereunwearied foes of any other-than-natural sources for our spiritualknowledge and religious values. 

In Germany the humanistic movement continued under Herder and hisyounger contemporaries, Schiller and Goethe. Its historical horizon, racial and literary sympathies, broadened under their direction, moving farther and farther beyond the sources and areas of acceptedreligious ideas and practices. They led the revival of study of theAryan languages and cultures; especially those of the Hellenes and theinhabitants of the Indian peninsula. They originated that criticaland rather hostile scrutiny of Semitic ideas and values in presentcivilization, which plays no small part in the dilettante naturalismof the moment. Thus the nature and place of _man_, under the influenceof these "uninspired" literatures and cultures, became more and moreimportant as both his person and his position in the cosmos ceasedto be interpreted either in those terms of the moral transcendenceof deity, or of the helplessness and insignificance of his creatures, which inform both the Jewish-Christian Scriptures and the philosophicabsolutism of the Catholic theologies. 

But the humanism of the eighteenth century comes most closely to gripswith the classic statements and concepts of religion in the criticalphilosophy of Kant. It is the intellectual current which rises inhim which is finding its last multifarious and minute rivulets in thevarious doctrines of relativity, in pragmatism, the subjectivism ofthe neo-realists, and in the superior place generally ascribed bypresent thinking to value judgments as against existential ones. Hiscentral insistence is upon the impossibility of any knowledge of Godas an objective reality. Speculative reason does indeed give us theidea of God but he denies that we have in the idea itself any groundfor thinking that there is an objective reality corresponding to it. The idea he admits as necessitated by "the very nature of reason" butit serves a purely harmonizing office. It is here to give coherenceand unity to the objects of the understanding, "to finish and crownthe whole of human knowledge. "[3] Experience of transcendence thusbecomes impossible. As Professor McGiffert in _The Modern Ideas ofGod_ says: "Subjectively considered, religion is the recognition ofour duties as commands of God. When we do our duty we are virtuous;when we recognize it as commanded by God we are religious. The notionthat there is anything we can do to please God except to live rightlyis superstition. Moreover, to think that we can distinguish worksof grace from works of nature, which is the essence of historicChristianity, or that we can detect the activity of heavenlyinfluences is also superstition. All such supernaturalism lies beyondour ken. There are three common forms of superstition, all promotedby positive religion: the belief in miracles, the belief in mysteries, and the belief in the means of grace. "[4] So prayer is a confession ofweakness, not a source of strength. 

[Footnote 3: See _The Critique of Pure Reason_ (Müller, tr. ), pp. 575ff. ]

[Footnote 4: _Harvard Theo. Rev. _, vol. I, no. 1, p. 16. ]

Kant is more than once profoundly inconsistent with the extremesubjectivism of his theory of ideas as when he says in the _PracticalReason_: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasingadmiration and awe the oftener and the more steadily we reflect onthem: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. "[5] Again heremarks, "The belief in a great and wise Author of the world has beensupported entirely by the wonderful beauty, order and providence, everywhere displayed in nature. "[6] Here the objective reality both ofwhat is presented to our senses and what is conceived of in the mind, is, as though unconsciously, taken for granted. Thus while he contendsfor a practical theism, the very basis of his interest still rests inthe conviction of a Being external to us and existing independent ofour thought. 

[Footnote 5: _The Critique of Practical Reason_ (tr. T. K. Abbott), p. 260. ]

[Footnote 6: _The Critique of Pure Reason_, p. 702. ]

But his intention of making right conduct the essence of religionis typical of the limits of humanistic interests and perceptions. Inmaking his division of reason into the theoretical and the practical, it is to the latter realm that he assigns morality and religion. Clearly this is genuine rationalism. I am not forgetting Kant's greatreligious contribution. He was the son of devout German pietists andsaturated in the literature of the Old Testament. It is to Amos, whomay justly be called his spiritual father, that he owes the moralabsoluteness of his categorical imperative, the reading of historyas a moral order. He was following Amos when he took God out of thephysical and put Him into the moral sphere and interpreted Him inthe terms of purpose. But the doctrine of _The Critique of PracticalReason_ is intended to negate those transcendent elements generallybelieved to be the distinctive portions of religion. God is not knownto us as an objective being, an entity without ourselves. He is anidea, a belief, which gives meaning to our ethical life, a subjectivenecessity. He is a postulate of the moral will. To quote ProfessorMcGiffert again: "We do not get God from the universe, we give Himto the universe. We read significance and moral purpose into it. Weassume God, not to account for the world, but for the subjectiveneed of realizing our highest good. . . . Religion becomes a creativeact of the moral will just as knowledge is a creative act of theunderstanding. "[7] Thus there are no ultimate values; at least we canknow nothing of them; we have nothing to look to which is objectiveand changeless. The absolutism of the Categorical Imperative isa subjective one, bounded by ourselves, formed of our substance. Religion is not discovered, but self-created, a sort of sublimeexpediency. It can carry, then, no confident assertion as to themeaning and destiny of the universe as a whole. 

[Footnote 7: _H. T. R. _, vol. I, no. 1, p. 18. ]

Here, then, the nature of morality, the inspiration for character, the solution of human destiny, are not sought outside in some sortof cosmic relationship, but within, either in the experience of thesuperman, the genius or the hero, or, as later, in the collectiveexperience and consciousness of the group. Thus this, too, throws manback upon himself, makes a new exaltation of personality in sharpestcontrast to the scholastic doctrine of the futility and depravity ofhuman nature. It produces the assertion of the sacred character of theindividual human being. The conviction of the immeasurable worth ofman is, of course, a characteristic teaching of Jesus; what it isimportant for the preacher to remember in humanism is the source, notthe fact, of its estimate. With Jesus man's is a derived greatnessfound in him as the child of the Eternal; in humanism, it is, so tospeak, self-originated, born of present worth, not of sublime originor shining destiny. 

So man in the humanistic movement moves into the center of his ownworld, becomes himself the measuring rod about whom all other valuesare grouped. In the place of inspiration, or prophetic understanding, which carries the implications of a transcendent source of truth andgoodness, we have a sharply limited, subjective wisdom and insight. The "thus saith the Lord" of the Hebrew prophet means nothing here. The humanist is, of course, confronted with the eternal question oforigins, of the thing-in-itself, the question whose insistence makesthe continuing worth of the absolutist speculations. He begs thequestion by answering it with an assertion, not an explanation. Hemeets it by an exaltation of human genius. Genius explains all sublimeachievements and genius is, so to speak, its own _fons et origo_. ThusDiderot says: "Genius is the higher activity of the soul. " "Genius, "remarks Rousseau in a letter, "makes knowledge unnecessary. " AndKant defines genius as "the talent to discover that which cannot betaught or learned. "[8] This appears to be more of an evasion thana definition! But the intent here is to refer all that seems totranscend mundane categories, man's highest, his widest, his sublimestintuitions and achievements, back to himself; he is his own source oflight and power. 

[Footnote 8: _Anthropologie_, para. 87 c. ]

Such an anthropocentric view of life and destiny in exalting man, of course, thereby liberated him, not merely from ecclesiasticaldomination, but also from those illusive fears and questionings, thoseremote and imaginative estimates of his own intended worth and thoseconsequent exacting demands upon himself which are a part of thereligious interpretation of life. Humanistic writing is full of theexulting sense of this emancipation. These superconsiderations do notbelong in the world of experience as the humanist ordinarily conceivesof it. Hence, man lives in an immensely contracted, but a very realand tangible world and within the small experimental circumference ofit, he holds a far larger place (from one viewpoint, a far smaller onefrom another) than that of a finite creature caught in the snare ofthis world and yet a child of the Eternal, having infinite destinies. The humanist sees man as freed from the tyranny of this supernaturalrevelation and laws. He rejoices over man because now he stands, "self-poised on manhood's solid earth Not forced to frame excuses for his birth, Fed from within with all the strength he needs. "

It is this sense of independence which arouses in Goethe a perennialenthusiasm. It is the greatest bliss, he says, that the humanist wonback for us. Henceforth, we must strive with all our power to keep it. 

We have attempted this brief sketch of one of the chief sources of thecontemporary thought movement, that we may realize the pit whence wewere digged, the quarry from which many corner stones in the presentedifice of civilization were dug. The preacher tends to underestimatethe comprehensive character of the pervasive ideas, worked into manyinstitutions and practices, which are continually impinging upon himand his message. They form a perpetual attrition, working silently andceaselessly day and night, wearing away the distinctively religiousconceptions of the community. Much of the vagueness and sentimentalismof present preaching, its uncritical impressionism, is due to theinfluence of the non-religious or, at least, the insufficientlyreligious character of the ruling ideas and motives outside the churchwhich are impinging upon it, and upon the rest of the thinking of themoment. 

Now, this _abstract_ humanism of the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies had a considerable influence upon early American preaching. The latter part of the eighteenth century marked a breaking away fromthe Protestant scholasticism of the Reformation theology. The FrenchRevolution accented and made operative, even across the Atlantic, thetypical humanistic concepts of the rights of man and the sovereigntyof the individual person. Skepticism and even atheism became a fashionin our infant republic. It was a mark of sophistication withmany educated men to regard Christianity as not worthy of seriousconsideration. College students modestly admitted that they wereinfidels and with a delicious naïveté assumed the names of Voltaire, Thomas Paine and even of that notorious and notable egotistRousseau. It is said that in 1795, on the first Sunday of Presidentadministration in Yale College, only three undergraduates remainedafter service to take the sacrament. The reasons were partlypolitical, probably, but these themselves were grounded in the newphilosophical, anti-religious attitude. 

Of course, this affected the churches. There was a reaction fromProtestant scholasticism within them which, later on, culminated inUnitarianism, Universalism and Arminianism. The most significant thingin the Unitarian movement was not its rejection of the Trinitarianspeculation, but its positive contribution to the reassertion ofJesus' doctrine of the worth and dignity of human nature. But itrecovered that doctrine much more by the way of humanistic philosophythan by way of the teaching of the New Testament. I suppose thething which has made the weakness of the Unitarian movement, itsacknowledged lack of religious warmth and feeling, is due not to theplace where it stands, but to the road by which it got there. 

Yet, take it for all in all, the effect upon the preaching of thesupernatural and speculative doctrines and insights of Christianity, was not in America as great as might be expected. Kant died in 1804, and Goethe in 1832, but only in the last sixty years has the preachingof the "evangelical" churches been fundamentally affected by theprevailing intellectual currents of the day. This is due, I think, to two causes. One was the nature of the German Reformation. Itfound preaching at a low ebb. Every great force, scholastic, popular, mystical, which had contributed to the splendor of the mediaevalpulpit had fallen into decay, and the widespread moral laxity of theclergy precluded spiritual insight. The Reformation, with its ethicaland political interests, revived preaching and by the nature of thesesame interests fixed the limits and determined the direction withinwhich it should develop. It is important to remember that Luther didnot break with the old theological system. He continued his beliefin an authority and revelation anterior, exterior and superior toman, merely shifting the locus of that authority from the Churchto the Book. Thus he paved the way for Zwingli and the Protestantscholasticism which became more rigid and sterile than the Catholicwhich it succeeded. We usually regard the Reformation as a part of theRenaissance and hence included in the humanistic movement. Politicallyand religiously, it undoubtedly should be so regarded, for it wasa chief factor in the renewal of German nationalism and its centraldoctrines of justification by faith, and the right of each separatebeliever to an unmediated access to the Highest, exalted the integrityand dignity of the individual. Inconsistently, however, it continuedthe old theological tradition. In the Lutheran system, says Paul deLagarde, we see the Catholic scholastic structure standinguntouched with the exception of a few loci. And Harnack, in the_Dogmengeschichte_ calls it "a miserable duplication of the CatholicChurch. "

Now, New England preaching, it is true, found its chief roots inCalvinism; Calvin, rather than Luther, was the religious leader ofthe Reformation outside Germany. But his system, also, is onlythe continuation of the ancient philosophy of the Christian faithoriginating with Augustine. He reduced it to order, expounded it withenergy and consistency, but one has only to recall its major doctrinesof the depravity of man, the atonement for sin, the irresistible graceof the Holy Spirit, to see how untouched it was by the characteristicpostulates of the new humanism. And it was on his theology that NewEngland preaching was founded. It was Calvin who, through JonathanEdwards, the elder and the younger, Joseph Bellamy, Samuel Hopkins, Nathaniel Emmons, Nathaniel N. Taylor, determined the course of theNew England pulpit. 

The other reason for our relative immunity from humanistic influenceis accidental and complementary merely. It is the mere fact of ourphysical isolation, which, until the last seventy-five years, quitelargely shut off thinkers here from continental and English currentsof thought and contributed to the brilliant, if sterile, provincialismof the New England theology. 

It is, therefore, to the second set of media, which may be generallycharacterized as scientific and practical, that we now turn. These arethe forces which apparently are most affecting Christian preachingat this moment. But it is important to remember that a large partof their influence is to be traced to the philosophic and ethicaltendencies of the earlier humanistic movement which had set the scenefor them, to which they are so sympathetic that we may assert thatit is in them that their practical interests are grounded and by themthat their scientific methods are reinforced. I divide this secondgroup of media, for clearness, under three heads. 

First comes the rise of the natural sciences. In 1859, Darwinpublished the _Origin of Species_ and gave to the world theevolutionary hypothesis, foreshadowed by Goethe and othereighteenth-century thinkers, simultaneously formulated by Wallaceand himself. Here is a theory, open to objections certainly, not yetconclusively demonstrated, but the most probable one which we yetpossess, as to the method of the appearance and the continuance oflife upon the planet. It conceives of creation as an unimaginablylong and intricate development from the inorganic to the organic, fromsimple to complex forms of life. Like Kantianism and the humanisticmovement generally, the evolutionary hypothesis springs from reasonedobservation of man and nature, not from any _a priori_ or speculativeprocess. With this theory, long a regulative idea of our world, preaching was forced to come to some sort of an understanding. Itstrikes a powerful blow at the scholastic notion of a dichotomizeduniverse divided between nature and supernature, divine and human. It reinforced humanism by minimizing, if not making unnecessary, the objective and external source and external interpretations ofreligions. It pushes back the initial creative _act_ until it is lostin the mists and chaos of an unimaginably remote past. Meanwhile, creative _energy_, the very essence of transcendent life, is, as weknow it, not transcendent at all, but working outward from within, a part of the process, not above and beyond it. The inevitableimplication here is that God is sufficiently, if not exclusively, known through natural and human media. Science recognizes Him in theterms of its own categories as in and of His world, a part of all itsongoings and developments. But His creative life is indistinguishablefrom, if not identical with, its expressions. Here, then, is apractical obliteration of the line once so sharply drawn between thenatural and the supernatural. Hence the demarcation between the divineand human into mutually exclusive states has disappeared. 

This would seem, then, to wipe out also any knowledge of absolutevalues. Christian theism has interpreted God largely in static, finalterms. The craving for the absolute in the human mind, as witnessed bythe long course of the history of thought, as pathetically witnessedto in the mixture of chicanery, fanaticism and insight of the modernmystical and occult healing sects, is central and immeasurable. ButGod, found, if at all, in the terms of a present process, is notstatic and absolute, but dynamic and relative; indefinite, incomplete, not final. And man's immense difference from Him, that sense ofthe immeasurable space between creator and created, is strangelycontracted. The gulf between holiness and guiltiness tends also todisappear. For our life would appear to be plastic and indefinite, a process rather than a state, not open then to conclusive moralestimates; incomplete, not fallen; life an orderly process, hence notperverse but defensible; without known breaks or infringements, hencerelatively normal and sufficiently intelligible. 

A second factor was the rise of the humane sciences. In the seventhand eighth decades of the last century men were absorbed in thediscovery of the nature and extent of the material universe. Butbeginning about 1890, interest swerved again toward man as itsmost revealing study and most significant inhabitant. Anthropology, ethnology, sociology, physical and functional psychology, came tothe front. Especially the humane studies of political science andindustrial economics were magnified because of the new and urgentproblems born of an industrial civilization and a capitalistic state. The invention and perfection of the industrial machine had by nowthoroughly dislocated former social groupings, made its own ethicalstandards and human problems. In the early days of the labor movementWilliam Morris wrote, "we have become slaves of the monster to whichinvention has given birth. " In 1853, shortly after the introduction ofthe cotton gin into India, the Viceroy wrote: "The misery is scarcelyparalleled in the history of trade. " (A large statement that!) "Thebones of the cotton workers whiten the plains of India. "

But the temporary suffering caused by the immediate crowding outof cottage industry and the abrupt increase in production wasinsignificant beside the deeper influence, physical, moral, mental, of the machine in changing the permanent habitat and the entire modeof living for millions of human beings. It removed them from thosehealthy rural surroundings which preserve the half-primitive, half-poetic insight into the nature of things which comes fromrelative isolation and close contact with the soil, to the nervoustension, the amoral conditions, the airless, lightless ugliness ofthe early factory settlements. Here living conditions were not merelybeastly; they were often bestial. The economic helplessness of thefactory hands reduced them to essential slavery. They must live wherethe factory was, and could work only in one factory, for they couldnot afford to move. Hence they must obey their industrial master inevery particular, since the raw material, the plant, the tools, thevery roof that covered them, were all his! In this new human conditionwas a powerful reinforcement, from another angle of approach, ofthe humanistic impulse. Man's interest in himself, which had beensometimes that of the dilettante, largely imaginative and evensentimental, was reinforced by man's new distress and became concreteand scientific. 

Thus man regarded himself and his own world with a new and urgentattention. The methods and secondary causes of his intellectual, emotional and volitional life began to be laid bare. The new situationrevealed the immense part played in shaping the personality andthe fate of the individual by inheritance and environment. TheFreudian doctrine, which traces conduct and habit back to earlyor prenatal repressions, strengthens the interest in the physicaland materialistic sources of character and conduct in human life. Behavioristic psychology, interpreting human nature in terms ofobservation and action, rather than analysis and value judgments, does the same. It tends to put the same emphasis upon the external andsensationalistic aspects of human experience. 

That, then, which is a central force in religion, the sense of theinscrutability of human nature, the feeling of awe before the naturalprocesses, what Paul called the mystery of iniquity and the mystery ofgodliness, tends to disappear. Wonder and confident curiosity succeedhumility and awe. That which is of the essence of religion, the senseof helplessness coupled with the sense of responsibility, is stifled. Whatever else the humane sciences have done, they have deepened man'sfascinated and narrowing absorption in himself and given him apparentreason to believe that by analyzing the iron chain of cause and effectwhich binds the process and admitting that it permits no deflectionor variation, he is making the further questions as to the origin, meaning and destiny of that process either futile or superfluous. Sothat, in brief, the check to speculative thinking and the repudiationof central metaphysical concepts, which the earlier movement broughtabout, has been accentuated and sealed by the humane sciences and thenew and living problems offered them for practical solution. Thus thegeneration now ending has been carried beyond the point of combatingancient doctrines of God and man, to the place where it has becomecomparatively indifferent, rather than hostile, to any doctrine ofGod, so absorbed is it in the physical functions, the temporal needsand the material manifestations of human personality. 

Finally, as the natural and humane sciences mark new steps in theexpanding humanistic movement, so in these last days, criticalscholarship, itself largely a product of the humanistic viewpoint, hasadded another factor to the group. The new methods of historical andliterary criticism, of comparative investigation in religion and theother arts, have exerted a vast influence upon contemporary religiousthought. They have not merely completed the breakdown of an arbitraryand fixed external authority and rendered finally invalid the notionof equal or verbal inspiration in sacred writings, but the presenttendency, especially in comparative religion, is to seek the sourceof all so-called religious experience within the human consciousness;particularly to derive it all from group experience. Here, then, isa theory of religious origins which once more turns the spirit of manback upon itself. Robertson Smith, Jane Harrison, Durkheim, rejectingan earlier animistic theory, find the origin of religion not incontemplation of the natural world and in the intuitive perceptionof something more-than-world which lies behind it, but in the groupexperience whose heightened emotional intensity and nervous energyimparts to the one the exaltation of the many. Smith, in the _Religionof the Semites_, [9] emphasizes, as the fundamental conception ofancient religion, "the solidarity of the gods and their worshipers aspart of an organic society. " Durkheim goes beyond this. There arenot at the beginning men and gods, but only the social group and thecollective emotions and representations which are generated throughmembership in the group. 

[Footnote 9: P. 32. ]

Here, then, is humanism again carried to the very heart of thecitadel. Religion at its source contains no real perceptions of anyextra-human force or person. What seemed to be such perceptionswere only the felt participation of the individual in a collectiveconsciousness which is superindividual, but not superhuman and alwayscontinuous with the individual consciousness. So that, whatever may ormay not be true later, the beginning of man's metaphysical interests, his cosmic consciousness, his more-than-human contacts, is simply hissocial experience, his collective emotions and representations. ThusDurkheim: "We are able to say, in sum, that the religious individualdoes not deceive himself when he believes in the existence of a moralpower upon which he depends and from which he holds the larger portionof himself. That power exists; it is society. When the Australianfeels within himself the surging of a life whose intensity surpriseshim, he is the dupe of no illusion; that exaltation is real, and itis really the product of forces that are external and superior to theindividual. "[10] Yes, but identical in kind and genesis with himselfand his own race. To Leuba, in his _Psychological Study of Religion_, this has already become the accepted viewpoint. Whatever is enduringand significant in religion is merely an expression of man's socialconsciousness and experience, his sense of participation in a commonlife. "Humanity, idealized and conceived as a manifestation ofcreative energy, possesses surprising qualifications for a sourceof religious inspiration. " Professor Overstreet, in "The DemocraticConception of God, " _Hibbert Journal_, volume XI, page 409, says: "Itis this large figure, not simply of human but of cosmic society whichis to yield our God of the future. There is no place in the future foran eternally perfect being and no need--society, democratic from endto end, can brook no such radical class distinction as that between asupreme being, favored with eternal and absolute perfection, and themass of beings doomed to the lower ways of imperfect struggle. "

[Footnote 10: _Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse_, p. 322. ]

There is certainly a striking immediacy in such language. We leave forlater treatment the question as to the historical validity of suchan attitude. It certainly ignores some of the most distinguished andfruitful concepts of trained minds; it rules out of court what areto the majority of men real and precious factors in the religiousexperience. It would appear to be another instance, among the many, ofthe fallacy of identifying the part with the whole. But the effectof such pervasive thought currents, the more subtle and unfightablebecause indirect and disguised in popular appearance and influence, upon the ethical and spiritual temper of religious leaders, thevery audacity of whose tasks puts them on the defensive, is vastand incalculable. At the worst, it drives man into a mechanicalizeduniverse, with a resulting materialism of thought and life; at thebest, it makes him a pragmatist with amiable but immediate objectives, just practical "results" as his guide and goal. Morality as, inAntigone's noble phrase, "the unwritten law of heaven" sinks down anddisappears. There is no room here for the Job who abhors himself andrepents in dust and ashes nor for Plato's _One behind the Many_; noperceptible room, in such a world, for any of the absolute values, thetranscendent interests, the ethics of idealism, any eschatology, orfor Christian theodicy. That which has been the typical contributionof the religious perceptions in the past, namely, the comprehensivevision of life and the world and time _sub specie aeternitatis_ ishere abandoned. Eternity is unreal or empty; we never heard the musicof the spheres. We are facing at this moment a disintegrating age. Here is a prime reason for it. The spiritual solidarity of mankindunder the humanistic interpretation of life and destiny is dissolvingand breaking down. Humanism is ingenious and reasonable and clever butit is too limited; it doesn't answer enough questions. 

Before going on, in a future chapter, to discuss the question as towhat kind of preaching such a world-view, seen from the Christianstandpoint, needs, we are now to inquire what the effect of thishumanistic movement upon Christian preaching has already been. That our preaching should have been profoundly influenced by it isinevitable. Religion is not apart from the rest of life. The verytemperament of the speaker makes him peculiarly susceptible to theintellectual and spiritual movements about him. What, then, hashumanism done to preaching? Has it worked to clarify and solidifythe essence of the religious position? Or has preaching declined andbecome neutralized in religious quality under it?

First: it has profoundly affected Christian preaching about God. The contemporary sermon on Deity minimizes or leaves out divinetranscendence; thus it starves one fundamental impulse in man--theneed and desire to look up. Instead of this transcendence modernpreaching emphasizes immanence, often to a naïve and ludicrous degree. God is the being who is like us. Under the influence of that monisticidealism, which is a derived philosophy of the humanistic impulse, preaching lays all the emphasis upon divine immanence in sharpestcontrast either to the deistic transcendence of the eighteenth centuryor the separateness and aloofness of the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, or of the classic Greek theologies of Christianity. God is, of course;that is, He is the informing principle in the natural and humanuniverse and essentially one with it. Present preaching does notconfess this identification but it evades rather than meets thelogical pantheistic conclusion. So our preaching has to do with Godin the common round of daily tasks; with sweeping a room to His glory;with adoration of His presence in a sunset and worship of Him in astar. Every bush's aflame with Him; there are sermons in stones andpoems in running brooks. Before us, even as behind, God is and all iswell. We are filled with a sort of intoxication with this intimate andprotective company of the Infinite; we are magnificently unabashed aswe familiarly approach Him. "Closer is He than breathing; nearer thanhands or feet. " Not then by denying or condemning or distrusting theworld in which we live, not by asserting the differences between Godand humanity do we understand Him. But by closest touch with naturedo we find Him. By a superb paradox, not without value, yet equallyineffable in sentimentality and sublime in its impiety we say, beholding man, "that which is most human is most divine!"

That there is truth in such comfortable and affable preaching isobvious; that there is not much truth in it is obvious, too. Towhat extent, and in what ways, nature, red with tooth and claw, indifferent, ruthless, whimsical, can be called the expression of theChristian God, is not usually specifically stated. In what way man, just emerging from the horror, the shame, the futility of his last andgreatest debauch of bloody self-destruction, can be called the chiefmedium of truth, holiness and beauty, the matrix of divinity, is notentirely manifest. But the fatal defect of such preaching is not thatthere is not, of course, a real identity between the world and itsMaker, the soul and its Creator, but that the aspect of reality whichthis truth expresses is the one which has least religious value, isleast distinctive in the spiritual experience. The religious nature issatisfied, and the springs of moral action are refreshed by dwellingon the "specialness" of God; men are brought back to themselves, notamong their fellows and by identifying them with their fellows, butby lifting them to the secret place of the Most High. They needreligiously not thousand-tongued nature, but to be kept secretly inHis pavilion from the strife of tongues. It is the difference betweenGod and men which makes men who know themselves trust Him. It is the"otherness, " not the sameness, which makes Him desirable and potent inthe daily round of life. A purely ethical interest in God ceases to beethical and becomes complacent; when we rule out the supraphenomenalwe have shut the door on the chief strength of the higher life. 

Second: modern preaching, under this same influence and to a yetgreater degree, emphasizes the principle of identity, where we needthat of difference, in its preaching about Jesus. He is still the mostmoving theme for the popular presentation of religion. But thatis because He offers the most intelligible approach to that very"otherness" in the person of the godhead. His healing and reconcilinginfluence over the heart of man--the way the human spirit expands andblossoms in His presence--is moving beyond expression to any observer, religious or irreligious. Each new crusade in the long strife forhuman betterment looks in sublime confidence to Him as its forerunnerand defense. To what planes of common service, faith, magnanimoussolicitude could He not lift the embittered, worldlyized men and womenof this torn and distracted age, which is so desperately seeking itsown life and thereby so inexorably losing it! But why is the heartsubdued, the mind elevated, the will made tractable by Him? Why, because He is enough like us so that we know that He understands, hasutter comprehension; and He is enough different from us so that we arewilling to trust Him. In what lies the essence of the leadership ofJesus? He is not like us: therefore, we are willing to relinquishourselves into His hands. 

Now, that is only half the truth. But if I may use a paradox, it isthe important half, the primary half. And it is just that essentialelement in the Christian experience of Jesus that modern preaching, under the humanistic impulse, is neglecting. Indeed, liberal preachershave largely ceased to sermonize about Him, just because it has becomeso easy! Humanism has made Jesus obvious, hence, relatively impotent. With its unified cosmos, its immanent God, its exalted humanity, thewhole Christological problem has become trivial. It drops the cosmicapproach to the person of Jesus in favor of the ethical. It does notapproach Him from the side of God; we approach nothing from thatside now; but from the side of man. Thus He is not so much a divinerevelation as He is a human achievement. Humanity and divinity areone in essence. The Creator is distinguished from His creatures inmultifarious differences of degree but not in kind. We do not see, then, in Christ, a perfect isolated God, joined to a perfect isolatedman, in what were indeed the incredible terms of the older andsuperseded Christologies. But rather, He is the perfect revelation ofthe moral being, the character of God, in all those ways capable ofexpression or comprehension in human life, just because he is thehighest manifestation of a humanity through which God has been foreverexpressing Himself in the world. For man is, so to speak, his owncosmic center; the greatest divine manifestation which we know. Granted, then, an ideal man, a complete moral being, and _ipso facto_we have our supreme revelation of God. 

So runs the thrice familiar argument. Of course, we have gainedsomething by it. We may drop gladly the old dualistic philosophy, andwe must drop it, though I doubt if it is so easy to drop the dualisticexperience which created it. But I beg to point out that, on thewhole, we have lost more religiously than we have gained. For we havemade Jesus easy to understand, not as He brings us up to His level, but as we have reduced Him to ours. Can we afford to do that?Bernard's mystical line, "The love of Jesus, what it is, none but Hisloved ones know, " has small meaning here. The argument is very goodhumanism but it drops the word "Saviour" out of the vocabularyof faith. Oh, how many sermons since, let us say, 1890, have beenpreached on the text, "He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father. "And how uniformly the sermons have explained that the text meansnot that Jesus is like God, but that God is like Jesus--and we havealready seen that Jesus is like us! One only has to state it all tosee beneath its superficial reasonableness its appalling profanity!

Third: we may see the influence of humanism upon our preaching in therelinquishment of the goal of conversion. We are preaching to educate, not to save; to instruct, not to transform. Conversion may be gradualand half-unconscious, a long and normal process under favorableinheritance and with the culture of a Christian environment. Or itmay be sudden and catastrophic, a violent change of emotional andvolitional activity. When a man whose feeling has been repressed bysin and crusted over by deception, whose inner restlessness has beenaccumulating under the misery and impotence of a divided life, isbrought into contact with Christian truth, he can only accept itthrough a volitional crisis, with its cleansing flood of penitence andconfession and its blessed reward of the sense of pardon and peace andthe relinquishment of the self into the divine hands. But one thing istrue of either process in the Christian doctrine of conversion. It isnot merely an achievement, although it is that; it is also a rescue. It cannot come about without faith, the "will to believe"; neither canit come about by that alone. Conversion is something we do; it is alsosomething else, working within us, if we will let it, helping us todo; hence it is something done for us. 

Now, this experience of conversion is passing out of Christianlife and preaching under humanistic influence. We are acceptingthe Socratic dictum that knowledge is virtue. Hence we blur thedistinction between the Christian and the non-Christian. Educationsupplants salvation. We bring the boys and girls into the churchbecause they are safer there than outside it; and on the whole it isa good thing to do and really they belong there anyway. The churchmember is a man of the world, softened by Christian feeling. He isa kindly and amiable citizen and an honorable man; he has not beensaved. But he knows the unwisdom of evil; if you know what is rightyou will do it. Intelligence needs no support from grace. It isstrange that the church does not see that with this relinquishmentof her insistence upon something that religion can do for a man thatnothing else can attempt, she has thereby given up her real excuse forbeing, and that her peculiar and distinctive mission has gone. It isstrange that she does not see that the humanism which, since it isat home in the world, can sometimes make there a classic hero, degenerates dreadfully and becomes unreal in a church where unskilledhands use it to make it a substitute for a Christian saint! Butfor how many efficient parish administrators, Y. M. C. A. Secretaries, up-to-date preachers, character is conceived of as coming not bydiscipline but by expansion, not by salvation, but by activity. Socialservice solves everything without any reference to the troublesomefact that the value of the service will depend upon the quality of theservant. Salvation is a combination of intelligence and machinery. Sinis pure ignorance or just maladjustment to environment. All we need isto know what is right and wrong; the humane sciences will take care ofthat; and, then, have an advertising agent, a gymnasium, a committeeon spiritual resources, a program, a conference, a drive for money, and behold, the Kingdom of God is among us!

Fourth, and most significant: it is to the humanistic impulse andits derived philosophies that we owe the individualistic ethics, therelative absence of the sense of moral responsibility for the socialorder which has, from the beginning, maimed and distorted ProtestantChristianity. It was, perhaps, a consequence of the speculativeand absolute philosophies of the mediaeval church that, since theyendeavored to relate religion to the whole of the cosmos, itsremotest and ultimate issues, so they conceived of its absoluteness asconcerned with the whole of human experience, with every relation oforganized society. Under their regulative ideas all human beings, nota selected number, had, not in themselves but because of the DivineSacrifice, divine significance; reverence was had, not for supermen orcaptains of industry, but for every one of those for whom Christ died. There were no human institutions which were ends in themselves ormore important than the men which created and served them. The HolyCatholic Church was the only institution which was so conceived; allothers, social, political, economic, were means toward the end of thepreservation and expression of human personality. Hence, the interestof the mediaeval church in social ethics and corporate values; hence, the axiom of the church's control of, the believers' responsibilityfor, the economic relations of society. An unjust distribution ofgoods, the withholding from the producer of his fair share of thewealth which he creates, profiteering, predatory riches--these wereranked under one term as avarice, and they were counted not amongthe venial offenses, like aberrations of the flesh, but avarice wasconsidered one of the seven deadly sins of the spirit. The applicationof the ethics of Jesus to social control began to die out ashumanism individualized Christian morals and as, under its influence, nationalism tended to supplant the international ecclesiastical order. The cynical and sordid maxim that business is business; that, in theeconomic sphere, the standards of the church are not operative and theresponsibility of the church is not recognized--notions which area chief heresy and an outstanding disgrace of nineteenth-centuryreligion, from which we are only now painfully and slowlyreacting--these may be traced back to the influence of humanism uponChristian thought and conduct. 

In general, then, it seems to me abundantly clear that the humanisticmovement has both limited and secularized Christian preaching. Itdogmatically ignores supersensuous values; hence it has rationalizedpreaching hence it has made provincial its intellectual approach andtreatment, narrowed and made mechanical its content. It has turnedpreaching away from speculative to practical themes. It was, perhaps, this mental and spiritual decline of the ministry to which adistinguished educator referred when he told a body of Congregationalpreachers that their sermons were marked by "intellectual frugality. "It is this which a great New England theologian-preacher, Dr. Gordon, means when he says "an indescribable pettiness, a mean kind of retailtrade has taken possession of the preachers; they have substituted themill-round for the sun-path. "

The whole world today tends toward a monstrous egotism. Man'sattention is centered on himself, his temporal salvation, his externalprosperity. Preaching, yielding partly to the intellectual and partlyto the practical environment, has tended to adopt the same secularscale of values, somewhat pietized and intensified, and to move withinthe same area of operation. That is why most preaching today dealswith relations of men with men, not of men with God. Yet humanrelationships can only be determined in the light of ultimate ones. Most preaching instinctively avoids the definitely religious themes;deals with the ethical aspects of devotion; with conduct rather thanwith worship; with the effects, not the causes, the expression, notthe essence of the religious life. Most college preaching chieflyamounts to informal talks on conduct; somewhat idealized discussionsof public questions; exhortations to social service. When sermons dodeal with ultimate sanctions they can hardly be called Christian. Theyare often stoical; self-control is exalted as an heroic achievement, as being self-authenticating, carrying its own reward. Or they areutilitarian, giving a sentimentalized or frankly shrewd doctrine ofexpediencies, the appeal to an exaggerated self-respect, enlightenedself-interest, social responsibility. These are typical humanisticvalues; they are real and potent and legitimate. But they are notreligious and they do not touch religious motives. The very differencebetween the humanist and the Christian lies here. To obey a principleis moral and admirable; to do good and be good because it pays issensible; but to act from love of a person is a joyous ecstasy, aliberation of power; it alone transforms life with an ultimate andenduring goodness. Genuine Christian preaching makes its final appeal, not to fear, not to hope, not to future rewards and punishments, notto reason or prudence or benevolence. It makes its appeal to love, and that means that it calls men to devotion to a living Being, aTranscendence beyond and without us. For you cannot love a principle, or relinquish yourself to an idea. You must love another livingBeing. Which amounts to saying that humanism just because it isself-contained is self-condemned. It minimizes or ignores the livingGod, in His world, but not to be identified with it; beyond it andabove it; loving it because it needs to be loved; blessing it becausesaving it. In so doing, it lays the axe at the very root of the treeof religion. Francis Xavier, in his greatest of all hymns, has statedonce for all the essence of the Christian motive and the religiousattitude:

 "O Deus, ego amo te Nec amo te ut salves me Aut quia non amantes te Aeternis punis igne. 

 "Nee praemii illius spe Sed sicut tu amasti me Sic amo et amabo te Solem, quia Rex meus est. "

What, then, has been the final effect of humanism upon preaching? Ithas tempted the preacher to depersonalize religion. And since love isthe essence of personality, it has thereby stripped preaching of theemotional energy, of the universal human interests and theprophetic insight which only love can bestow. Over against thisdepersonalization, we must find some way to return to expressing thereligious view and utilizing the religious power of the human spirit. 

CHAPTER THREE

EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY

We ventured to say in the preceding chapter that, under the influencesof more than three centuries of humanism, the spiritual solidarity ofmankind is breaking down. For humanism makes an inhuman demand uponthe will; it minimizes the force of the subrational and it largelyignores the superrational elements in human experience; it does notanswer enough questions. Indeed, it is frankly confessed, particularlyby students of the political and economic forces now working insociety, that the new freedom born in the Renaissance is, in somegrave sense, a failure. It destroyed what had been the common moralauthority of European civilization in its denial of the rule of thechurch. But for nearly four centuries it has become increasingly clearthat it offered no adequate substitute for the supernatural moral andreligious order which it supplanted. John Morley was certainly one ofthe most enlightened and humane positivists of the last generation. In his _Recollections_, published three years ago, there is a finalparagraph which runs as follows: "A painful interrogatory, I mustconfess, emerges. Has not your school held the civilized world, both old and new alike, in the hollow of their hand for two longgenerations past? Is it quite clear that their influence has beenso much more potent than the gospel of the various churches?_Circumspice_. Is not diplomacy, unkindly called by Voltaire the fieldof lies, as able as ever it was to dupe governments and governed bygrand abstract catchwords veiling obscure and inexplicable purposes, and turning the whole world over with blood and tears, to a strangeWitch's Sabbath?"[11] This is his conclusion of the whole matter. 

[Footnote 11: _Recollections_: II, p. 366 ff. ]

But while the reasons for the failure are not far to seek, it is worthwhile for the preacher to dwell on them for a moment. In stronglycentered souls like a Morley or an Erasmus, humanism produces astoical endurance and a sublime self-confidence. But it tends, inlesser spirits, to a restless arrogance. Hence, both those lowerelements in human nature, the nature and extent of whose force iteither cloaks or minimizes, and those imponderable and supersensuousvalues which it tends to ignore and which are not ordinarily includedin its definition of experience, return to vex and plague it. Indeedthe worst foe of humanism has never been the religious view of theworld upon whose stored-up moral reserves of uncompromising doctrineit has often half-consciously subsisted. Humanism has long profitedfrom the admitted truth that the moral restraints of an age thatpossesses an authoritative and absolute belief survive for some timeafter the doctrine itself has been rejected. What has revealed theincompleteness of the humanistic position has been its constanttendency to decline into naturalism; a tendency markedly acceleratedtoday. Hence, we find ourselves in a disintegrating and distractedepoch. In 1912 Rudolph Eucken wrote: "The moral solidarity of mankindis dissolved. Sects and parties are increasing; common estimates andideals keep slipping away from us; we understand one another lessand less. Even voluntary associations, that form of unity peculiar tomodern times, unite more in achievement than in disposition, bring mentogether outwardly rather than inwardly. The danger is imminent thatthe end may be _bellum omnium contra omnes_, a war of all againstall. "[12]

[Footnote 12: _Harvard Theo. Rev. _, vol. V, no. 3, p. 277. ]

That disintegration is sufficiently advanced so that we can see thedirection it is taking and the principle that inspires it. Humanismhas at least the value of an objective standard in the sense that itsets up criteria which are without the individual; it substitutes acollective subjectivism, if we may use the term, for personal whimand impulse. Thus it proclaims a classic standard of moderation in allthings, the golden mean of the Greeks, Confucius' and Gautama's lawof measure. It proposes to bring the primitive and sensual element inman under critical control; to accomplish this it relies chiefly uponits amiable exaggeration of the reasonableness of human nature. Butthe Socratic dictum that knowledge is virtue was the product of apersonality distinguished, if we accept the dialogues of Plato, bya perfect harmony of thought and feeling. Probably it is not wise tobuild so important a rule upon so distinguished an exception!

But the positive defect of humanism is more serious. It likewiseproposes to rationalize those supersensuous needs and convictionswhich lie in the imaginative, the intuitive ranges of experience. The very proposal carries a denial of their value-in-themselves. Its inevitable result in the humanist is their virtual ignoring. Thegreatest of all the humanists of the Orient was Confucius. "I ventureto ask about death, " said a disciple to the sage. "While you do notknow life, " replied he, "how can you know about death?"[13] Even moretypical of the humanistic attitude towards the distinctively religiouselements of experience are other sayings of Confucius, such as: "Togive oneself earnestly to the duties due to men, and while respectingspiritual beings, to keep aloof from them may be called wisdom. "[13]The precise area of humanistic interests is indicated in anotherobservation. "The subjects on which the Master did not talk were. . . Disorder and spiritual beings. "[13] For the very elements ofexperience which humanism belittles or avoids are found in the worldwhere pagans like Rabelais robustly jest or the high spaces wheresouls like Newman meditate and pray. The humanist appears to befrightened by the one and repelled by the other; will not or cannotsee life steadily and whole. That a powerful primitivistic faith, like Taoism, a sort of religious bohemianism, should flourish besidesuch pragmatic and passionless moderation as classic Confucianism isinevitable; that the worship of Amida Buddha, the Buddha of redemptionand a future heaven, of a positive and eternal bliss, should be theChinese form of the Indian faith is equally intelligible. After a likemanner it is the humanism of our Protestant preaching today from whichmen are defecting into utter worldliness and indifference on the onehand and returning to mediaeval and Catholic forms of supernaturalismon the other. 

[Footnote 13: _Analects_, XI, CXI; VI, CXX. ]

For the primitive in man is a beast whom it is hard to chain nor doeshumanism with its semi-scientific, semi-sentimental laudation of allnatural values produce that exacting mood of inward scrutiny in whichself-control has most chance of succeeding. Hence here, as elsewhereon the continent, and formerly in China, in Greece and in Rome, a sortof neo-paganism has been steadily supplanting it. 

To the study of this neo-paganism we now address ourselves. It isthe third and lowest of those levels of human experience to which wereferred in the first lecture. The naturalist, you may remember, is that incorrigible individual who imagines that he is a law untohimself, that he may erect his person into a sovereign over the wholeuniverse. He perversely identifies discipline with repression andmakes the unlimited the goal both of imagination and conduct. OscarWilde's epigrams, and more particularly his fables, are examples ofa thoroughgoing naturalist's insolent indifference to any form ofrestraint. All things, whether holy or bestial, were material for histopsy-turvy wit, his literally unbridled imagination. No humanisticlaw of decency, that is to say, a proper respect for the opinions ofmankind, and no divine law of reverence and humility, acted for himas a restraining force or a selective principle. An immediate andsignificant example of this naturalistic riot of feeling, with itsconsequent false and anarchic scale of values, is found in thefilm dramas of the moving picture houses. Unreal extravagance ofimagination, accompanied by the debauch of the aesthetic and moraljudgment, frequently distinguishes them. In screenland, it is thevampire, the villain, the superman, the saccharine angel child, who reign almost undisputed. Noble convicts, virtuous courtesans, attractive murderers, good bad men, and ridiculous good men, flitacross the canvas haloed with cheap sentimentality. Opposed to them, in an ever losing struggle, are those conventional figures who standfor the sober realities of an orderly and disciplined world; thejudge, the policeman, the mere husband. These pitiable and laughablefigures are always outwitted; they receive the fate which indeed, inany primitive society, they so richly deserve!

How deeply sunk in the modern world are the roots of this naturalismis shown by its long course in history, paralleling humanism. It hasseeped down through the Protestant centuries in two streams. One isa sort of scientific naturalism. It exalts material phenomena and theexternal order, issues in a glorification of elemental impulses, anattempted return to childlike spontaneous living, the identifying ofman's values with those of primitive nature. The other is an emotionalnaturalism, of which Maeterlinck is at the moment a brilliant andlamentable example. This exchanges the world of sober conduct, intelligible and straightforward thinking for an unfettered dreamland, compounded of fairy beauty, flashes of mystical and intuitiveunderstanding intermixed with claptrap magic, a high-flowncommercialism and an etherealized sensuality. 

Rousseau represents both these streams in his own person. Hissentimentalized egotism and bland sensuality pass belief. Hissensitive spirit dissolves in tears over the death of his dog but hebravely consigns his illegitimate children to the foundling asylumwithout one tremor. In his justly famous and justly infamous_Confessions_, he presents himself Satan-wise before the Almighty atthe last Judgment, these _Confessions_ in his hand, a challenge to theremainder of the human race upon his lips. "Let a single one assertto Thee, if he dare: I am better than that man. " But his preachmentof natural and spontaneous values, return to primitive conditions, was equally aggressive. If anyone wants to inspect the pit whence theMontessori system of education was digged, let him read Rousseau, whodeclared that the only habit a child should have is the habit of nothaving a habit, or his contemporary disciple, George Moore, who saysthat one should be ashamed of nothing except of being ashamed. There are admirable features in the schooling-made-easy system. Itrecognizes the fitness of different minds for different work; thatthe process of education need not and should not be forbidding; thatnatural science has been subordinated overmuch to the humanities; thatthe imagination and the hand should be trained with the intellect. But the method which proposes to give children an education alongthe lines of least resistance is, like all other naturalism, acontradiction in terms, sometimes a _reductio ad absurdum_, sometimes_ad nauseam_. As long ago as 1893, when Huxley wrote his Romaneslecture on _Evolution and Ethics_, this identity of natural and humanvalues was explicitly denied. Teachers do not exist for the amusementof children, nor for the repression of children; they exist forthe discipline of children. The new education is consistentlyprimitivistic in the latitude which it allows to whim and in itsindulgence of indolence. There is only one way to make a man out ofa child; to teach him that happiness is a by-product of achievement;that pleasure is an accompaniment of labor; that the foundation ofself-respect is drudgery well done; that there is no power in anysystem of philosophy, any view of the world, no view of the world, which can release him from the unchanging necessity of personalstruggle, personal consecration, personal holiness in human life. "That wherein a man cannot be equaled, " says Confucius, "is his workwhich other men cannot see. "[14] The humanist, at least, does notblink the fact that we are caught in a serious and difficult world. Torail at it, to deny it, to run hither and thither like scurrying ratsto evade it, will not alter one jot or one tittle of its inexorablefacts. 

[Footnote 14: _Doctrine of the Mean_, ch. Xxxiii, v. 2. ]

Following Rousseau and Chateaubriand come a striking group ofFrenchmen who passed on this torch of ethical and aesthetic rebellion. Some of them are wildly romantic like Dumas and Hugo; some of themperversely realistic like Balzac, Flaubert, Gautier, Zola. PaulVerlaine, a near contemporary of ours, is of this first number; writerof some of the most exquisite lyrics in the French language, yet a manwho floated all his life in typical romantic fashion from passionto repentance, "passing from lust of the flesh to sorrow for sin inperpetual alternation. " Guy de Maupassant again is a naturalist ofthe second sort, a brutal realist; de Maupassant, who died a suicide, crying out to his valet from his hacked throat "_Encore l'homme aurancart_!"--another carcass to the dustheap!

In English letters Wordsworth in his earlier verse illustrated thesame sentimental primitivism. It would be unfair to quote _PeterBell_, for that is Wordsworth at his dreadful worst, but even in_Tinlern Abbey_, which has passages of incomparable majesty andbeauty, there are lines in which he declares himself:

 ". . . Well pleased to recognize In nature, and the language of the sense The anchor of my purest thought, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. "

Byron's innate sophistication saves him from the ludicrous depths towhich Wordsworth sometimes fell, but he, too, is Rousseau's disciple, a moral rebel, a highly personal and subjective poet of whom Goethesaid that he respected no law, human or divine, except that of thethree unities. Byron's verse is fascinating; it overflows with a sortof desperate and fiery sincerity; but, as he himself says, his lifewas one long strife of "passion with eternal law. " He combines boththe romantic and the realistic elements of naturalism, both flameswith elemental passion and parades his cynicism, is forever snappinghis mood in _Don Juan_, alternating extravagant and romantic feelingwith lines of sardonic and purposely prosaic realism. Shelley is anaturalist, too, not in the realm of sordid values but of Arcadianfancy. The pre-Raphaelites belong here, together with a group of youngEnglishmen who flourished between 1890 and 1914, of whom John Davidsonand Richard Middleton, both suicides, are striking examples. PoorMiddleton turned from naturalism to religion at the last. When he hadresolved on death, he wrote a message telling what he was about to do, parting from his friend with brave assumption of serenity. But he didnot send the postcard, and in the last hour of that hired bedroom inBrussels, with the bottle of chloroform before him, he traced acrossthe card's surface "a broken and a contrite spirit thou wilt notdespise. " So there was humility at the last. One remembers rathergrimly what the clown says in _Twelfth Night_, "Pleasure will be paid some time or other. "

This same revolt against the decencies and conventions of our humanistcivilization occupies a great part of present literature. How farremoved from the clean and virile stoicism of George Meredith or thehonest pessimism of Thomas Hardy is Arnold Bennett's _The Pretty Lady_or Galsworthy's _The Dark Flower_. Finally, in this country we needonly mention, if we may descend so far, such naturalists in literatureas Jack London, Robert Chambers and Gouverneur Morris. One's onlyexcuse for referring to them is that they are vastly popular with thepeople whom you and I try to interest in sermons, to whom we talk onreligion!

Of course, this naturalism in letters has its accompanying andinterdependent philosophic theory, its intellectual interpretationand defense. As Kant is the noblest of the moralists, so I supposeWilliam James and, still later, Henri Bergson and Croce are the chiefprotagonists of unrestrained feeling and naturalistic values in theworld of thought. To the neo-realists "the thing given" is alonereality. James' pragmatism frankly relinquishes any absolute standardin favor of relativity. In _the Varieties of Religious Experience_, which Professor Babbitt tells us someone in Cambridge suggested shouldhave had for a subtitle "Wild Religions I Have Known, " he is plainlymore interested in the intensity than in the normality, in theexcesses than in the essence of the religious life. Indeed, ProfessorBabbitt quotes him as saying in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton, "mere sanity is the most Philistine and at the bottom most unessentialof a man's attributes. "[15] In the same way Bergson, consistentlyanti-Socratic and discrediting analytical intellect, insists thatwhatever unity may be had must come through instinct, not analysis. He refuses to recognize Plato's _One in the Many_, sees the wholeuniverse as "a perpetual gushing forth of novelties, " a universal andmeaningless flux. Surrender to this eternal flux, he appears to say, and then we shall gain reality. So he relies on impulse, instinct, his_elan vital_, which means, I take it, on man's subrational emotions. We call it Intuitionism, but such philosophy in plain and bitterEnglish is the intellectual defense and solemn glorification ofimpulse. "Time, " says Bergson, "is a continuous stream, a present thatendures. "[16] Time apparently is all. "Life can have no purpose in thehuman sense of the word. "[17] Essentially, then, James, Bergson andCroce appeal from intellect to feeling. They return to primitivism. 

[Footnote 15: Letter to C. E. Norton, June 30, 1904. ]

[Footnote 16: _Le Perception de Changement_, 30. ]

[Footnote 17: _L'evolution creatrice_, 55. ]

Here is a philosophy which obviously may be both as antihumanistic andas irreligious as any which could well be conceived. Here is licensein conduct and romanticism in expression going hand in hand withthis all but exclusive emphasis upon relativity in thought. Here isdisorder, erected as a universal concept; the world conceived of asa vast and impenetrable veil which is hiding nothing; an intricacywithout pattern. Obviously so ungoverned and fluid a universejustifies uncritical and irresponsible thinking and living. 

We have tried thus to sketch that declension into paganism on thepart of much of the present world, of which we spoke earlier in thechapter. It denies or ignores the humanistic law with its exactingmoral and aesthetic standards; it openly flouts the attitude ofobedience and humility before religious mandates, and, so far asopportunity offers or prudence permits, goes its own insolently wantonway. Our world is full of dilettanti in the colleges, anarchists inthe state, atheists in the church, bohemians in art, sybarites inconduct and ineffably silly women in society, who have felt, andoccasionally studied the scientific and naturalistic movement just farenough and superficially enough to grasp the idea of relativity andto exalt it as sufficient and complete in itself. Many of them areincapable of realizing the implications for conduct and belief whichit entails. Others of them, who are of the lesser sort, pulled bythe imperious hungers of the flesh, the untutored instincts of arestless spirit, hating Hellenic discipline no less than Christianrenunciation, having no stomach either for self-control orself-surrender, look out on the mass of endlessly opposingcomplexities of the modern world and gladly use that vision as anexcuse for abandoning what is indeed the ever failing but also theever necessary struggle to achieve order, unity, yes, even perfection. 

To them, therefore, the only way to conquer a temptation is to yieldto it. They rail nonsensically at all repression, forgetting that mancannot express the full circle of his mutually exclusive instincts, and that when he gives rein to one he thereby negates another;that choice, therefore, is inevitable and that the more exactingand critical the choice, the more valuable and comprehensive theexpression. So they frankly assert their choices along the lines ofleast resistance and abandon themselves, at least in principle, toemotional chaos and moral sentimentalism. Very often they are of allmen the most meticulously mannered. But their manners are not thedecorum of the humanist, they are the etiquette of the worldling. Chesterfield had these folk in mind when he spoke with an intolerable, if incisive, cynicism of those who know the art of combining theuseful appearances of virtue with the solid satisfactions of vice. 

Such naturalism is sometimes tolerated by those who aspire to urbaneand liberal judgments because they think it can be defended onhumanistic grounds. But, as a matter of fact, it is as offensive tothe thoroughgoing humanist as it is to the sincere religionist. They have a common quarrel with it. Take, for example, the notoriousnaturalistic doctrine of art for art's sake, the defiant divorcing ofethical and aesthetic values. Civilization no less than religionmust fight this. For it is as false in experience and as unclear inthinking as could well be imagined. Its defense, so far as it hasany, is based upon the confusion in the pagan mind of morality withmoralizing, a confusion that no good humanist would ever permithimself. Of course, the end of art is neither preaching nor teachingbut delighting. For that very reason, however, art, too, mustconform--hateful word!--conform to fixed standards. For the sense ofproportion, the instinct for elimination, is integral to art and this, as Professor Babbitt points out, is attained only with the aid ofthe ethical imagination. [18] Because without the ethical restraint, the creative spirit roams among unbridled emotions; art becomesimpressionism. What it then produces may indeed be picturesque, melodramatic, sensual, but it will not be beautiful because therewill be no imaginative wholeness in it. In other words, the artistwho divorces aesthetics from ethics does gain creative license, buthe gains it at the expense of a balanced and harmonious expression. If you do not believe it, compare the Venus de Milo with the Venus deMedici or a Rubens fleshy, spilling-out-of-her-clothes Magdalen witha Donatello Madonna. When ethical restraint disappears, art tends tocaricature, it becomes depersonalized. The Venus de Milo is a livingbeing, a great personage; indeed, a genuine and gracious goddess. TheVenus de Medici has scarcely any personality at all; she is chieflyobjectified desire! The essence of art is not spontaneous expressionnor naked passion; the essence of art is critical expression, restrained passion. 

[Footnote 18: _Rousseau and Romanticism_, p. 206. ]

Now, such extreme naturalism has been the continuing peril and thearch foe of every successive civilization. It is the "reversion totype" of the scientist, the "natural depravity" of the older theology, the scoffing devil, with his eternal no! in Goethe's _Faust_. It tendsto accept all powerful impulses as thereby justified, all vital andnovel interests as _ipso facto_ beautiful and good. Nothing desirableis ugly or evil. It pays no attention, except to ridicule them, tothe problems that vex high and serious souls: What is right and wrong?What is ugly and beautiful? What is holy and what is profane? Iteither refuses to admit the existence of these questions or elseasserts that, as insoluble, they are also negligible problems. To allsuch stupid moralizing it prefers the click of the castanets! Thelaw, then, of this naturalism always and everywhere is the law ofrebellion, of ruthless self-assertion, of whim and impulse, of cunningand of might. 

You may wonder why we, being preachers, have spent so much timetalking about it. Folk of this sort do not ordinarily flock to thestenciled walls and carpeted floors of our comfortable, middle-classProtestant meeting-houses. They are not attracted by Tiffany glasswindows, nor the vanilla-flavored music of a mixed quartet, nor theoddly assorted "enrichments" we have dovetailed into a once puritanorder of worship. That is true, but it is also true that these arethey who need the Gospel; also that these folk do influence thetime-current that enfolds us and pervades the very air we breathe andthat they and their standards are profoundly influencing the youth ofthis generation. You need only attend a few college dances to be sureof that! One of the sad things about the Protestant preacher is hisusual willingness to move in a strictly professional society andactivity, his lack of extra-ecclesiastical interests, hence his narrowand unskillful observations and perceptions outside his own parish andhis own field. 

Moreover, there are other forms in which naturalism is dominatingmodern society. It began, like all movements, in literature andphilosophy and individual bohemianism; but it soon worked its wayinto social and political and economic organizations. Now, when we aredealing with them we are dealing with the world of the middle class;this is our world. And here we find naturalism today in its mostbrutal and entrenched expressions. Here it confronts every preacheron the middle aisle of his Sunday morning congregation. We arecontinually forgetting this because it is a common fallacy of ourhard-headed and prosperous parishioners to suppose that the vagariesof philosophers and the maunderings of poets have only the slightestpractical significance. But few things could be further from thetruth. It is abstract thought and pure feeling which are perpetuallymoulding the life of office and market and street. It has sometimesbeen the dire mistake of preaching that it took only an indifferentand contemptuous interest in such contemporary movements in literatureand art. Its attitude toward them has been determined by temperamentalindifference to their appeal. It forgets the significance of theirintellectual and emotional sources. This is, then, provincialism andobtuseness and nowhere are they by their very nature more indefensibleor more disastrous than in the preacher of religion. 

Let us turn, then, to those organized expressions of society whereour own civilization is strained the most, where it is nearest to thebreaking point, namely, to our industrial and political order. Let usask ourselves if we do not find this naturalistic philosophy regnantthere. That we are surrounded by widespread industrial revolt, that wesee obvious political decadence on the one hand, and a determinationto experiment with fresh governmental processes on the other, fewwould deny. It would appear to me that in both cases the revolt andthe decadence are due to that fierce, short creed of rebellion againsthumane no less than religious standards, which has more and moregoverned our national economic systems and our international politicalintercourse. Let me begin with business and industry as they existedbefore the war. I paint a general picture; there are many and notableexceptions to it, human idealism there is in plenty, but it and theyonly prove the rule. And as I paint the picture, ask yourselves thetwo questions which should interest us as preachers regarding it. First, by which of these three laws of human development, religious, humanistic, naturalistic, has it been largely governed? Secondly, bywhat law are men now attempting to solve its present difficulties?

The present industrial situation is the product of two causes. Oneof them was the invention of machinery and the discovery of steamtransit. These multiplied production. They made accessible unexploitedsources of raw material and new markets for finished goods. Theopportunities for lucrative trading and the profitableness ofoverproduction which they made possible became almost immeasurable. Before these discoveries western society was generally agricultural, accompanied by cottage industries and guild trades. It was largelymade up of direct contacts and controlled by local interests. Afterthem it became a huge industrial empire of ramified internationalrelationships. 

The second factor in the situation was the intellectual and spiritualnature of the society which these inventions entered. It was, as wehave seen, essentially humanistic. It believed much in the naturalrights of man. The individual was justified, by the natural order, inseeking his separate good. If he only sought it hard enough and wellenough the result would be for the general welfare of society. Thus atthe moment when mechanical invention offered unheard-of opportunitiesfor material expansion and lucrative business, the thought and feelingof the community pretty generally sanctioned an individualisticphilosophy of life. The result was tragic if inevitable. The newindustrial order offered both the practical incentive and thetheoretical justification for institutional declension from humaneto primitive standards. It is not to be supposed that men slippeddeliberately into paganism; the human mind is not so sinister as itis stupid nor so cruel as it is unimaginative nor so brutal as itis complacent. For the most part we do not really understand, inour daily lives, what we are about. Hence society degenerated, asit always does, in the confident and stubborn belief that it wasimproving the time and doing God's service. But He that sitteth in theheavens must have laughed, He must have had us in derision!

For upon what law, natural, human, divine, has this new empire beenfounded? That it has produced great humanists is gratefullyconceded; that real spiritual progress has issued from its incidentalcosmopolitanism is manifest; but which way has it fronted, what havebeen its characteristic emphases and its controlling tendencies?Let its own works testify. It has created a world of new and extremeinequality, both in the distribution of material, of intellectualand of spiritual goods. Here is a small group who own the land, thehouses, the factories, machinery and the tools. Here is a very largegroup, without houses, without tools, without land or goods. At thismoment only 7 per cent of our 110, 000, 000 of American people have anincome of $3, 000 or more; only 1¼ per cent have an income of $5, 000or more! What law produced and justifies such a society? The unwrittenlaw of heaven? No. The law of humanism, of Confucius and Buddha andEpictetus and Aurelius? No. The law of naked individualism; of might;force; cunning? Yes. 

Here in our American cities are the overwealthy and the insolentlyworldly people. They have their palatial town house, their broadinland acres; some of them have their seaside homes, their fish andgame preserves as well. Here in our American cities are the alien, theignorant, the helpless, crowded into unclean and indecent tenements, sometimes 1, 000 human beings to the acre. What justifies apseudo-civilization which permits such tragic inequality of fortune?Inequality of endowment? No. First, because there is no naturalinequality so extreme as that; secondly, because no one would dareassert that these cleavages in the industrial state even remotelyparallel the corresponding cleavages in the distribution of abilityamong mankind. What justifies it, then? The unwritten law of heaven?No. The law of humanism? No. The law of the jungle? Yes. 

Now for our second question. By what law, admitting many exceptions, are men on the whole trying to change this situation at once indecentand impious? This is a yet more important query. Our world hasobviously awakened to the rottenness in Denmark. But where are weturning for our remedy? Is it to the penitence and confession, thepublic-mindedness, the identification of the fate of the individualwith the fate of the whole group which is the religious impulse? Is itto a disinterested and even-handed justice, the high legalism of theGolden Rule, which would be the humanist's way? Or is it to the oldlaw of aggression and might transferring the gain thereof from thepresent exploiters to the recently exploited?

It would appear to be generally true that society at this moment isnot chiefly concerned with either love or justice, renunciationor discipline, not with the supplanting of the old order, butwith perpetuating the naturalistic principle by means of a partialredivision of the spoils, a series of compromises, designed to make itmore tolerable for one class of its former victims. Thus in capital wehave the autocratic corporation, atoning for past outrages on humanityby a well-advertised benevolent paternalism, calculated to make mencomfortable so that they may not struggle to be free, or by huge giftsto education, to philanthropy, to religion. In labor we see men risingin brute fury against both employer and society. They deny the basicnecessities of life to their fellow citizens; they bring the bludgeonof the picket down upon the head of the scab; by means of the closedshop they refuse the right to work to their brother craftsmen; theylevel the incapable men up and the capable men down by insisting uponuniformity of production and wage. Thus they replace the artificialinequality of the aristocrat with the artificial equality of theproletariat, striving to organize a new tyranny for the old. It issignificant that our society believes that this is the only way bywhich it can gain its rights. That betrays our real infidelity. Forbetween the two, associated capital and associated labor, what isthere to choose today? By what law, depending upon what sort of power, is each seeking its respective ends? By the unwritten law of heaven?No. By the humane law, some objective standard of common rights andinclusive justice? No! By the ancient law that the only effectualappeal is to might and that opportunity therefore justifies the deed?On the whole it is to this question that we must answer, yes!

Turn away now from national economics and industry to internationalpolitics. Does not its _real politik_ make the philosophicalnaturalism of Spencer and Haeckel seem like child's play? For longthere has been one code of ethics for the peaceful penetration ofcommercially desirable lands, for punitive expeditions against peoplespossessed of raw materials, for international banking and financeand diplomatic intercourse, and another code for private honor andpersonal morality. There has been one moral scale of values for thefather of his family and another for the same man as ward or state orfederal politician; one code to govern internal disputes within thenation; another code to govern external disputes between nations. And what is this code that produced the Prussian autocracy, that longinsisted on the opium trade between India and China, that permittedthe atrocities in the Belgian Congo, that sent first Russia and thenJapan into Port Arthur and first Germany and then Japan into Shantung, that insists upon retaining the Turk in Constantinople, that producedthe already discredited treaty of Versailles? What is the code thatmade the deadly rivalry of mounting armaments between army and army, navy and navy, of the Europe before 1914? The code, to be sure, ofcunning, of greed, of might; the materialism of the philosopher andthe naturalism of the sensualist, clothed in grandiose forms andcovered with the insufferable hypocrisy of solemn phrases. There areno conceivable ethical or religious interests and no humane goalsor values that justify these things. International diplomacy andpolitics, economic imperialism, using political machinery and power tohalf-cloak, half-champion its ends, has no law of Christian sacrificeand no law of Greek moderation behind it. On the contrary, whatshould interest the Christian preacher, as he regards it, is its sheeranarchy, its unashamed and naked paganism. Its law is that of theunscrupulous and the daring, not that of the compassionate or thejust. In what does scientific and emotional naturalism issue, then? Inthis; a man, if he be a man, will stand above divine or human law andmake it operative only for the weaklings beneath. Wherever opportunityoffers he will consult his own will and gratify it to the full. Tohave, to get, to buy, to sell, to exploit the world for power, toexploit one's self for pleasure, this is to live. The only law isthe old primitive snarl; each man for himself, let the devil take thehindmost. 

There is only one end to such naturalism and that is increasinganarchy. It means my will against your will; my appetite for gold, forland, for women, for luxury and beauty against your appetite; untilat length it culminates in the open madness of physical violence, physical destruction, physical death and despair. There can be noother end to it. If men dare not risk being the lovers of their kind, then they must choose between being the slaves of duty or the slavesof force. What are we reading in the public prints and hearing fromplatform and stage? The unending wail for "rights"; the assertion ofthe individual. Ceased is the chant of duty, forgotten the sacrificeof love!

The events which have transformed the world since 1914 are an awfulcommentary upon such naturalism and a dreadful confirmation of ourindictment. Before the spectacle that many of us saw on those soddenfields of Flanders, both humanist and religionist should be alikeaghast. How childish not to perceive that its causes, as distinguishedfrom its occasions, were common to our whole civilization. Howperverse not to confess that beneath all our modern life, as itsdominating motive, has lain that ruthless and pagan philosophy, whichcreates alike the sybarite, the tyrant and the anarch; the philosophyin which lust goes hand in hand with cruelty and unrestrained will topower is accompanied by unmeasured and unscrupulous force. 

It is incredible to me how men can take this delirium ofself-destruction, this plunging of the sword into our own heart ina final frenzy of competing anarchy and deck it out with heroic andpoetic values, fling over it the seamless robe of Christ, unfurl aboveit the banner of the Cross! The only contribution the World Warhas made to religion has been to throw into intolerable relief theessentially irreligious and inhumane character of our civilization. 

Of course, the men and the ideals who actually fought the contestas distinguished from the men and ideals which precipitated it anddetermined its movements, fill gallant pages with their heroism andholy sacrifice. For wars are fought by the young at the dictation ofthe old, and youth is everywhere humane and poetic. Thus, if I may bepermitted to quote from a book of mine recently published:

"Our sons were bade to enter it as a 'war to end war, ' a finalstruggle which should abolish the intolerable burdens of armaments andconscription. They were taught to exalt it as a strife for oppressedand helpless peoples; the prelude to a new brotherhood and cooperationamong the nations, and to that reign of justice which is theantecedent condition of peace. 

"They did their part. With adventurous faith they glorified theircause and offered their fresh lives to make it good. Their sacrifice, the idealism which lay behind it in their respective communities--theunofficial perceptions that they, the fathers and mothers and theboys, were fighting to vindicate the supremacy of the moral over thematerial factors of life--this has made an imperishable gift to thenew world and our children's lives. When an entire commuity rises tosomething of magnanimity, and a nation identifies its fate withthe lot of weaker states, then even mutilation and death may begift-bringers to mankind. 

"But it is more significant to our purpose to note that the blood ofyouth had hardly ceased to run before the officials began to dickerfor the material fruits of conquest. Not how to obtain peace but howto exploit victory--to wrest each for himself the larger tribute fromthe fallen foe--became their primary concern. So the youth appear tohave died for a tariff, perished for trade routes and harbors, forthe furthering of the commercial advantages of this nation as againstthat, for the seizing of the markets of the world. They supposed theyfought 'to end business of that sort' but they returned to find theiraccredited representatives contemplating universal military servicein frank expectation of 'the next war. ' They strove for the'self-determination of peoples' but find that it was for some people, but not all. And as for the cooperation among nations, Judge Gary hasrecently told us that, as a result of the war, we should prepare for'the fiercest commercial struggle in the history of mankind!'"[19]

[Footnote 19: _Can the Church Survive_? pp. 14 ff. ]

Is it not clear, then, today that behind the determining asdistinguished from the fighting forces of the war there lay acommercial and financial imperialism, directed by small and powerfulminorities, largely supported by a sympathetic press which used themachinery of representative democracy to overthrow a more naked andbrutal imperialism whose machinery was that of a military autocracy?Motives, scales of value, methods and desired ends, were much the samefor all these small governing groups as they operated from behind thevarious shibboleths whose magic they used to nerve the arms of thecontending forces. The conclusion of the war has revealed the commonsprings of action of the professional soldier, statesman, banker, ecclesiastic, in our present civilization. On the whole they acceptthe rule of physical might as the ultimate justification of conduct. They are the leaders and spokesmen in an economic, social andpolitical establishment which, pretending to civilization, alwaysturns when strained or imperiled by foreign or domestic dangers tophysical force as the final arbiter. 

It is truly ominous to see the gradual extension of this naturalisticprinciple still going on in the state. The coal strike was settled, not by arbitration, but by conference, and "conferences" appear tobe replacing disinterested arbitration. This means that decisions arebeing made on the principle of compromise, dictated by the expediencyof the moment, not by reference to any third party, or to some fixedand mutually recognized standards. This is as old as Pythagoras andas new as Bergson and Croce; it assumes that the concept of justiceis man-made, produced and to be altered by expediences andpracticalities, always in flux. But the essence of a civilization isthe humanistic conviction that there is something fixed and abidingaround which life may order and maintain itself. 

Progress rests on the Platonic theory that laws are not made by manbut discovered by him; that they exist as eternal distinctionsbeyond the reach of his alteration. Again, an unashamed and rampantnaturalism has just been sweeping this country in the wave of meanand cruel intolerance which insists upon the continued imprisonmentof political heretics, which would prohibit freedom of speech bygovernmental decree and oppose new or distasteful ideas by thephysical suppression of the thinker. The several and notoriousattempts beginning with deportations and ending with the unseating ofthe New York assemblymen, to combat radical thinking by physicalor political persecution--attempts uniformly mean and universallyimpotent in history--are as sinister as they are stupid. The onlylaw which justifies the persecution and imprisonment of religious andpolitical heretics is neither the law of reason nor the law oflove, but the law of fear, hence of tyranny and force. When atwentieth-century nation begins to raise the ancient cry, "Come nowand let us kill this dreamer and we shall see what will become of hisdreams, " that nation is declining to the naturalistic level. Forthis clearly indicates that the humane and religious resources ofcivilization, of which the church is among the chief confessed andappointed guardians, are utterly inadequate to the strain imposedupon them. Hence force, not justice, though they may sometimes havehappened to coincide, and power, not reason or faith, are becoming theembodiment of the state today. 

We come now to the final question of our chapter. How has this renewalof naturalism affected the church and Christian preaching? On thewhole today, the Protestant church is accepting this naturalisticattitude. In a signed editorial in the _New Republic_ for the lastweek of December, 1919, Herbert Croly said, under the significanttitle of "Disordered Christianity": "Both politicians and propertyowners consider themselves entitled to ignore Christian guidance inexercising political and economic power, to expect or to compel theclergy to agree with them and if necessary to treat disagreement asnegligible. The Christian church, as a whole, or in part, does notprotest against the practically complete secularization of political, economic and social life. "

You may say such extra-ecclesiastical strictures are unsympathetic andill informed. But here is what Washington Gladden wrote in January, 1918: "If after the war the church keeps on with the same oldreligion, there will be the same old hell on earth that religiousleaders have been preparing for centuries, the full fruit of which weare gathering now. The church must cease to sanction those principlesof militaristic and atheistic nationalism by which the rulers of theearth have so long kept the earth at war. "[20] Thus from within thesanctuary is the same indictment of our naturalism. 

[Footnote 20: The _Pacific_, January 17, 1918. ]

But you may say Dr. Gladden was an old man and a little extreme insome of his positions and he belonged to a past generation. But thereare many signs at the present moment of the increasing secularizingof our churches. The individualism of our services, their casualcharacter, their romantic and sentimental music, their minimizing ofthe offices of prayer and devotion, their increasing turning of thepulpit into a forum for political discussion and a place of commonentertainment all indicate it. There is an accepted secularity todayabout the organization. Church and preacher have, to a large degree, relinquished their essential message, dropped their religious values. We are pretty largely today playing our game the world's way. We areadopting the methods and accepting the standards of the market. Inan issue last month of the _Inter-Church Bulletin_ was the followingheadline: "Christianity Hand in Hand with Business, " and underneaththe following:

"George W. Wickersham, formerly United States attorney-general, says in an interview that there is nothing incompatible betweenChristianity and modern business methods. A leading lay official ofthe Episcopal Church declares that what the churches need more thananything else is a strong injection of business method into theirmanagement. 'Some latter-day Henry Drummond, ' he said, 'should write abook on Business Law in the Spiritual World. '"

In this same paper, in the issue of March 27, 1920, there wasan article commending Christian missions. The first caption ran:"Commercial Progress Follows Work of Protestant Missions, " and itssubtitle was "How Missionaries Aid Commerce. " Here is Business Law inthe Spiritual World! Here is the church commended to the heathen andthe sinner as an advertising agent, an advance guard of commercialprosperity, a hawker of wares! If the _Bulletin_ ever penetrates tothose benighted lands of the Orient upon which we are thus anxiousto bestow the so apparent benefits of our present civilization it isconceivable that even the untutored savage, to say nothing of Chinamenand Japanese, might read it with his tongue in his cheek. 

Such naïve opportunism and frantic immediacy would seem to meconclusive proof of the disintegration and anarchy of the spiritwithin the sanctuary. It is a part of it all that everyone has todaywhat he is pleased to call "his own religion. " And nearly everyonemade it himself, or thinks he did. Conscience has ceased to be a checkupon personal impulse, the "thou shalt not" of the soul addressed tountutored desires, and become an amiable instinct for doing good toothers. The Christian is an effusive creature, loving everything andeverybody; exalting others in terms of himself. We abhor religiousconventions; in particular we hasten to proclaim that we are free fromthe stigma of orthodoxy. We do not go to church to learn, to meditate, to repent and to pray; we go to be happy, to learn how to keep youngand prosperous; it is good business; it pays. We have a new and mostdetestable cant; someone has justly said that the natural man in ushas been masquerading as the spiritual man by endlessly pratingof "courage, " "patriotism"--what crimes have been committed inits name!--"development of backward people, " "brotherhood of man, ""service of those less fortunate than ourselves, " "natural ethicalidealism, " "the common destinies of nations"--and now he rises up andglares at us with stained fingers and bloodshot eyes![21] In so faras we have succumbed to naturalism, we have become cold and shrewd andflexible; shallow and noisy and effusive; have been rather proud tobelieve anything in general and almost nothing in particular; becomea sort of religious jelly fish, bumping blindly about in seas ofsentiment and labeling that peace and brotherhood and religion!

[Footnote 21: _Rousseau and Romanticism_, p. 376. ]

Here, then, is the state of organized religion today in our churches. They are voluntary groups of men and women, long since emancipatedfrom the control of the church as such, or of the minister as anofficial, set free also from allegiance to historic statements, traditional, intellectual sanctions of our faith; moulded by thetime spirit which enfolds them to a half-unconscious ignoring ordepreciation of what must always be the fundamental problem ofreligion--the relationship of the soul, not to its neighbor, but toGod. Hence the almost total absence of doctrinal preaching--indeed, how dare we preach Christian doctrine to the industry and politics andconduct of this age? Hence the humiliating striving to keep upwith popular movements, to conform to the moment. Hence the placidacceptance of military propaganda and even of vindictive exhortation. 

Is it any wonder then that we cannot compete with the state or theworld for the loyalty of men and women? We have no substitute tooffer. Who need be surprised at the restlessness, the fluidity, theelusiveness of the Protestant laity? And who need wonder that at thismoment we are depending upon the externals of machinery, publicity andmoney to reinstate ourselves as a spiritual society in the community?A well-known official of our communion, speaking before a meeting ofministers in New York City on Tuesday, March 23, was quoted in the_Springfield Republican_ of the next day as saying: "The church holdsthe only cure for the possible anarchy of the future and offers theonly preventative for the hell which we have had for the last fiveyears. But to meet this challenge the church can only go as far--asthe money permits. "

Has not the time arrived when, if we are to find ourselves again inthe world, we should ask, What is this religion in which we believe?What is the real nature of its resources? What the real nature of itsremedies? Do we dare define it? And, if we do, would we dare to assertit, come out from the world and live for it, in the midst of thepaganism of this moment? Is it true that without the loaves and thefishes we can do nothing? If so, then we, too, have succumbed tonaturalism indeed!

CHAPTER FOUR

THE UNMEASURED GULF

You may remember that when Daniel Webster made his reply to Haynein the Senate he began the argument by a return to first principles. "When the mariner, " said he, "has been tossed for many days in thickweather and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of thefirst pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take hislatitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from histrue course. Let us imitate this prudence and before we floatfurther on the waves of this debate, refer to the point from which wedeparted. " He then asked for the reading of the resolution. 

It is to some such rehearsing of our original message, a restatementof the thesis which we, as preachers, are set to commend, that we turnourselves in these pages. The brutal dislocations of the war, and thelong and confused course of disintegrating life that lay behind it, have driven civilization from its true course and deflected the churchfrom her normal path, her natural undertakings. Let us try, then, toget back to our charter; define once more what we really stand for;view our human life, not as captain of industry, or internationalpolitician, or pagan worldling, or even classic hero, would regardit, but see it through the eyes of a Paul, an Augustine, a Bernard, a Luther, the Lord Jesus. We have already remarked how timely andnecessary is this redefining of our religious values. If, as Lessingsaid, it is the end of education to make men to see things that arelarge as large and things that are small as small, it is even moretruly the end of Christian preaching. What we are most in need oftoday is a corrected perspective of our faith; without it we darkencounsel as we talk in confusion. So, while we may not attempt here adetailed and reasoned statement of religious belief, we may try to saywhat is the fundamental attitude, both toward nature and toward man, that lies underneath the religious experience. We have seen that weare not stating that attitude very clearly nowadays in our pulpits;hence we are often dealing there with sentimental or stereotyped orhumane or even pagan interpretations. Yet nothing is more fatal forus; if we peddle other men's wares they will be very sure that wedespise our own. 

We approach, then, the third and final level of experience to which wereferred in the first lecture. We have seen that the humanist acceptsthe law of measure; he rests back upon the selected and certifiedexperience of his race; from within himself, as the noblest inhabitantof the planet, and by the further critical observation of nature heproposes to interpret and guide his life. He is convinced that thiscombined authority of reason and observation will lead to the _summumbonum_ of the golden mean in which unbridled self-expression will beseen as equally unwise and indecent and ascetic repression as bothunworthy and unnecessary. It is important to again remind ourselvesthat confidence in the human spirit as the master of its own fate, and in reason and natural observation as offering it the means of thisself-control and understanding, are essential humanistic principles. The humanist world is rational, social, ethical. 

Over against this reasonable and disciplined view of man and ofhis world stands naturalism. It exploits the defects of the classic"virtue"; it is, so to speak, humanism run to seed. Just as religionso often sinks into bigotry, cruelty and superstitition, so humanism, in lesser souls, declines to egotism, license and sentimentality. Naturalism, either by a shallow and insincere use of the materialisticview of the universe, or by the exalting of wanton feeling andwhimsical fancy as ends in themselves, attempts the identification ofman with the natural order, permits him to conceive of each desire, instinct, impulse, as, being natural, thereby defensible andvaluable. Hence it permits him to disregard the imposed laws ofcivilization--those fixed points of a humane order--and to returnin principle, and so far as he dares in action, to the unlimited andirresponsible individualism of the horde. Inevitably the law of thejungle is deliberately exalted, or unconsciously adopted, over againstthe humanist law of moderation and discipline. 

The humanist, then, critically studies nature and mankind, finding inher matrix and in his own spirit data for the guidance of the race, improving upon it by a cultivated and collective experience. Thenaturalist uncritically exalts nature, seeks identification with it sothat he may freely exploit both himself and it. The faith of the oneis in the self-sufficiency of the disciplined spirit of mankind; theunfaith of the other is in its glorification of the natural world andin its allegiance to the momentary devices and desires of the separateheart. It will be borne in mind that these definitions are tooclear-cut; that these divisions appear in the complexities of humanexperience, blurred and modified by the welter of cross currents, subsidiary conflicting movements, which obscure all human problems. They represent genuine and significant divisions of thought andconduct. But they appear in actual experience as controlling emphasesrather than mutually exclusive territories. 

Now, the clearest way to get before us the religious view of the worldand the law which issues from it is to contrast it with the other two. In the first place, the religious temperament takes a very differentview of nature than either romantic, or to a less degreescientific, naturalism. Naturalism is subrational on the one hand ornon-imaginative on the other, in that it emphasizes the _continuity_between man and the physical universe. The religious man issuperrational and nobly imaginative as he emphasizes the _difference_between man and nature. He does not forget man's biological kinship tothe brute, his intimate structural and even psychological relation tothe primates, but he is aware that it is not in dwelling upon thesefacts that his spirit discovers what is distinctive to man as man. That he believes will be found by accenting the _chasm_ between manand nature. He does not know how to conceive of a personal beingexcept by thinking of him as proceeding by other, though notconflicting, laws and by moving toward different secondary ends fromthose laws and ends which govern the impersonal external world. Thissense of the difference between man and nature he shares with thehumanist, only the humanist does not carry it as far as he does andhence may not draw from it his ultimate conclusions. 

The religious view, then, begins with the perception of man'sisolation in the natural order; his difference from his surroundings. That sense of separateness is fundamental to the religious nature. Thefalse sentiment and partial science of the pagan which stresses theidentification of man and beast is the first quarrel that religionistand humanist alike have with him. Neither of them sanctionsthis perversion of thought and feeling which either projects theimpressionistic self so absurdly and perilously into the naturalorder, or else minimizes man's imaginative and intellectual power, leveling him down to the amoral instinct of the brute. "How muchmore, " said Jesus, "is a man better than a sheep!" One of the greatestof English humanists was Matthew Arnold. You remember his sonnet, entitled, alas! "To a Preacher, " which runs as follows:

 "In harmony with Nature? Restless fool, Who with such heat doth preach what were to thee, When true, the last impossibility-- To be like Nature strong, like Nature cool! Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good, Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood; Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore; Nature is fickle, man hath need of rest; Nature forgives no debt and fears no grave; Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest. Man must begin; know this, where Nature ends; Nature and man can never be fast friends. Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!"

Religionist and humanist alike share this clear sense of separateness. Literature is full of the expression of it. Religion, in especial, has little to do with the natural world as such. It is that other andinner one, which can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell, withwhich it is chiefly concerned. Who can forget Othello's soliloquy ashe prepares to darken his marriage chamber before the murder of hiswife?

 "Put out the light, and then put out the light. If I quench thee, thou flaming minister, I can again thy former light restore, Should I repent me; but once put out thy light, Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature, I know not where is that Promethean heat, That can thy light relume. When I have pluck'd the rose I cannot give it vital growth again, It needs must wither. "

Indeed, how vivid to us all is this difference between man and nature. "I would to heaven, " Byron traced on the back of the manuscript of_Don Juan_, "I would to heaven that I were so much clay, As I am bone, blood, marrow, passion, feeling. "

Ah me! So at many times would most of us. And in that sense that weare not is where the religious consciousness takes its beginning. 

Here is the sense of the gap between man and the natural world feltbecause man has no power over it. He cannot swerve nor modify itslaws, nor do his laws acknowledge its ascendency over them. Butwhat makes the gulf deeper is the sense of the immeasurable moraldifference between a thinking, feeling, self-estimating being and allthis unheeding world about him. Whatever it is that looks out from thewindows of our eyes something not merely of wonder and desire but alsoof fear and repulsion must be there as it gazes into so cruel as wellas so alien an environment. For a moral being to glorify nature assuch is pure folly or sheer sentimentality. For he knows that herapparent repose and beauty is built up on the ruthless and unendingwarfare of matched forces, it represents a dreadful equilibrium ofpain. He knows, too, that that in him which allies him withthis natural world is his baser, not his better part. This noblypessimistic attitude toward the natural universe and toward man so faras he shares in its characteristics, is found in all classic systemsof theology and has dominated the greater part of Christianthinking. If it is ignored today by the pseudo-religionists andthe sentimentalists; it is clearly enough perceived by contemporaryscience and contemporary art. The biologist understands it. "I know ofno study, " wrote Thomas Huxley, "which is so unutterably saddeningas that of the evolution of humanity as set forth in the annals ofhistory. Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with themarks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only moreintelligent than the other brutes; a blind prey to impulses which asoften as not lead him to destruction; a victim to endless illusionswhich make his mental existence a terror and a burden, and fill hisphysical life with barren toil and battle. He attains a certain degreeof comfort, and develops a more or less workable theory of life insuch favorable situations as the plains of Mesopotamia or of Egypt, and then, for thousands and thousands of years struggles with variousfortunes, attended by infinite wickedness, bloodshed and misery, tomaintain himself at this point against the greed and ambition of hisfellow men. He makes a point of killing and otherwise persecuting allthose who first try to get him to move on; and when he has moveda step farther he foolishly confers post-mortem deification on hisvictims. He exactly repeats the process with all who want to move astep yet farther. "[22]

[Footnote 22: "Agnosticism, " the _Nineteenth Century_, February, 1889. ]

And no less does the artist, the man of high and correct feeling, perceive the immeasurable distance between uncaring nature andsuffering men and women. There is, for instance, the passage in _TheEducation of Henry Adams_, in which Adams speaks of the death ofhis sister at Bagni di Lucca. "In the singular color of the Tuscanatmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed burstingwith midsummer blood. The sick room itself glowed with the Italian joyof life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the softshadows; even the dying woman shared the sense of the Italian summer, the soft velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fullness ofNature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and evengayly, racked slowly to unconsciousness but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on thesehills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with thesame air of sensual pleasure. 

"Impressions like these are not reasoned or catalogued in the mind;they are felt as a part of violent emotion; and the mind that feelsthem is a different one from that which reasons; it is thoughtof a different power and a different person. The first seriousconsciousness of Nature's gesture--her attitude toward life--took formthen as a phantasm, a nightmare, an insanity of force. For the firsttime the stage scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind feltitself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting and destroying whatthese same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect. "

Here is a vivid interpretation of a universal human experience. Might not any one of us who had endured it turn upon the pagan andsentimentalist, crying in the mood of a Swift or a Voltaire, "_Ca vousamuse, la vie_"? The abstract natural rights of the eighteenth centurysmack of academic complacency before this. The indignation we feelagainst the insolent individualism of a Louis XIV who cried "_L'étatc'est moi_!" or against the industrial overlord who spills the tearsof women for his ambition, the sweat of the children for his greed, is as nothing beside the indignation with the natural order which anybiological study would arouse except as the scientist perceives thatindignation is, for him, beside the point and the religionist believesthat it proceeds from not seeing far enough into the process. Thisis why there is an essential absurdity in any naturalistic system ofethics. Even the clown can say, "Here's a night that pities Neither wise men nor fools. "

This common attitude of the religionist toward nature as a remoteand cruel world, alien to our spirits, is abundantly reflected inliterature. It finds a sort of final consummation in the intuitiveinsight, the bright understanding of the creative spirits of our race. What Aristotle defines as the tragic emotions, the sense of the terrorand the pity of human life, arise partly from this perception of theisolation always and keenly felt by dramatist and prophet and poet. They know well that Nature does not exist by our law; that we neithercontrol nor understand it; is it not our friend?

There is, then, the law of identity between man and nature, found intheir common physical origin; there is also the law of difference. Itis on that aspect of reality that religion places its emphasis. Itis with this approach to understanding ourselves that preachers, asdistinguished from scientists, deal. Our present society is travelingfarther and farther away from reality in so far as it turns either tothe outside world of fact, or to the domain of natural law, expectingto find in these the elements of insight for the fresh guidance ofthe human spirit. Not there resides the secret of the beings of whomShelley said, "We look before and after And pine for what is not, Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught. "

Instinct is a base, a prime factor, part of the matrix of personality. But personality is not instinct; it is instinct plus a differentforce; instinct transformed by spiritual insight and controlled bymoral discipline. The man of religion, therefore, finds himself notin one but two worlds, not indeed mutually exclusive, having a commonorigin, but nevertheless significantly distinct. Each is incompletewithout the other, each in a true sense non-existent without theother. But that which is most vital to man's world is unknown in thedomain of nature. Already the perception of a dualism is here. 

But now a third element comes into it. There is something spirituallycommon to nature and man behind the one, within the other. ThisSomething is the origin, the responsible agent for man's and nature'sphysical identity. This Something binds the separates into a sort ofwhole. This, I suppose, is what Professor Hocking refers to when hesays, "the original source of the knowledge of God is an experiencewhich might be described as of _not being alone in knowing the world_, and especially the world of nature. "[23] Thus the religious manrecognizes beyond the gulf, behind the chasm, something more likehimself than it. When he contemplates nature, he sees something otherthan nature; not a world which is what it seems to be, but a worldwhose chief significance is that it is more than it seems to be. It isa world where appearance and reality are inextricably mingled and yetsublimely and significantly separate. In short, the naturalist, thepagan, takes the world as it stands; it is just what it appears; theessence of his irreligion is that he perceives nothing in it thatneeds to be explained. But the religionist knows that the worldwhich lies before our mortal vision so splendid and so ruthless, sobeautiful and so dreadful, does really gain both its substance andsignificance from immaterial and unseen powers. It is significantnot in itself but because it hides the truth. It points forever to abeyond. It is the vague and insubstantial pageant of a dream. Behindit, within the impenetrable shadows, stands the Infinite Watcher ofthe sons of men. 

[Footnote 23: _The Meaning of God in Human Experience_, p. 236. ]

In every age religious souls have voiced this unearthliness ofreality, the noble other-worldliness of the goals of the naturalorder. "Heard melodies are sweet, but unheard melodies are sweeter. "Poet, philosopher and mystic have sung their song or proclaimed theirmessage knowing that they were moving about in worlds not realized, clearly perceiving the incompleteness of the phenomenal world and thedelusive nature of sense perceptions. They have known a Reality whichthey could not comprehend; felt a Presence which they could not grasp. They have found strength for the battle and peace for the pain byregarding nature as a dim projection, a tantalizing intimation of thatother, conscious and creative life, that originating and directiveforce, which is not nature any more than the copper wire is theelectric fluid which it carries--a force which was before it, whichmoves within it, which shall be after it. 

So poet and believer and mystic find the key to nature, theinterpretation of that alien and cruel world, not by sinking to itsindifferent level, not by sentimental exaltation of its speciouspeace, its amoral cruelty and beauty, but by regarding it as theexpression, the intimation rather, of a purposive Intelligence, asilent and infinite Force, beyond it all. So the pagan effuses overnature, gilding with his sentimentality the puddles that the beastswould cough at. And the scientist is interested in efficient causes, seeing nature as an unbroken sequence, an endless uniformity of causeand effect, against whose iron chain the spirit of mankind wages aforedoomed but never ending revolt. But the religionist, confessingthe ruthless indifference, the amorality which he distrusts andfears, and not denying the majestic uniformity of order, neverthelessdeclares that these are not self-made, that the amorality is butone half and that the confusing half of the tale. The whole creationindeed groaneth and travaileth in pain, but for a final cause, whichalone interprets or justifies it, and which eventually shall set itfree. As a matter of fact, nearly all poets and artists thus viewnature in the light of final causes, though often instinctively andunconsciously so. For what they sing or paint or mould is not thelandscape that we see, the flesh we touch, but the life behind it, the light that never was on land or sea. What they give us is nota photograph or an inventory--it is worlds away from such naïve andlying realism. But they hint at the inexpressible behind expression;paint the beauty which is indistinguishable from nature but notidentical with Nature. They make us see that not she, red in tooth andclaw, but that intangible and supernal something-more, is what givesher the cleansing bath of loveliness. No reflective or imaginativeperson needs to be greatly troubled, therefore, by any purelymechanical or materialistic conception of the universe. They whowould commend that view of the cosmos have not only to reckon withphilosophical and religious idealism, but also with all the brightband of poets and artists and seers. Such an issue once resolutelyforced would therewith collapse, for it would pit the qualitativestandards against the quantitative, the imagination againstliteralism, the creative spirit in man against the machine in him. 

Here, then, is the difference between the naturalist's and thereligionist's attitude toward Nature. The believer judges Nature, wellaware of the gulf between himself and her, hating with inexpressibledepth of indignation and repudiating with profound contempt thesybarite's identification of human and natural law. But also he comesback to her, not to accept in wonder her variable outward form, but toworship in awe before her invariable inner meaning. Sometimes, likeso many of the humanists, he rises only to a vague sense of the mysticunity that fills up the interspaces of the world, and cries withWordsworth:

 ". . . And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. "[24]

Sometimes he dares to personalize this ultimate and then ascends tothe supreme poetry of the religious experience and feels the cosmicconsciousness, the eternal "I" of this strange world, which fills itwith observant majesty. And then he chants, "The heavens declare the glory of God, The firmament showeth his handiwork. "

Or he whispers, "Whither shall I go from Thy spirit, Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there, If I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there, If I take the wings of the morning And dwell in the uttermost parts of the earth, Even there shall Thy hand lead me And Thy right hand shall hold me. "[25]

Indeed, the devout religionist almost never thinks of nature as such. She is always the bush which flames and is not consumed. Therefore hewalks softly all his days, conscious that God is near. 

 "Of old, " he says, "Thou hast laid the foundations of the earth; And the heavens are the work of Thy hands. They shall perish, but Thou shalt endure; Yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; As a vesture shalt Thou change them, and they shall be changed; But Thou art the same, And Thy years shall have no end. "[26]

To him nature is the glass through which he sees darkly and often witha darkling mind, the all-pervasive Presence; it is the veil--the veilthat covers the face of God. 

[Footnote 24: _Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey_, stanza3, ll. 36-45. ]

[Footnote 25: Psalm cxxxix. 7-9. ]

[Footnote 26: Psalm cii. 25-27. ]

Here, then, we have the contrasting attitude of worldling and believertoward nature, the outward universe. Now we come to the contrastingattitude of humanist and believer toward man, the world within. Forwhy are we so sure, first, of the chasm between ourselves andNature and, second, that we can bridge that chasm by reaching out tosomething behind and beyond her which is more like us than her?What gives us the key to her dualism? Why do we think that there isSomething which perpetually beckons to us through her, makes awfulsigns of an intimate and significant relationship? Because we feela similar chasm, an equal cleft in our own hearts, a division in themoral nature of mankind. We know that gulf between us and the outwardworld because we know the greater gulf between flesh and spirit, between the natural man and the real man, between the "I" and the"other I. "

Here is where the humanist bids us good-by and we must go forward onour road alone. For he will not acknowledge that there is anythingessential or permanent in that divided inner world; he would minimizeit or explain it away. But we know it is there and the reason we knowthere is Something without which can bridge the outer chasm is becausewe also know there is Something-Else within which might bridge thisone. For we who are religious know that within the depths and theimmensities of this inner world, where there is no space but wherethere is infinite largeness, where there is no time but where there isperpetual strife, there is Something-Else as well as the "I" and the"other I, " and it is that He who is the Something-Else who alone canclose the gap in that divided kingdom and make us one with ourselves, hence with Himself and hence with His world. 

You ask how we can say, "He's there; He knows. " We answer that this"other, " this "He" is a constant figure in the experience; alwaysin the vision; an integral part of the perception. What is He like?"He" is purity and compassion and inexorableness. Somethingfixed, immutable, not to be tricked, not to be evaded and oh!all-comprehending. He sees, his eyes run to and fro in all the darkand wide, the light and high dominions of the soul. If we will notcome to terms with "Him, " that eternal and changeless life will be thecliff against which the tumultuous waves of the divided spirit shallshatter and dissipate into soundless foam; if we will come to terms, relinquish, accept, surrender, then that purity and that compassionwill be the cleansing tide, the healing and restoring flood in whichwe sink in the ecstasy of self-loss to arise refreshed, radiant, andmade whole. 

So we reckon from within out. The religious view of the world is basedupon the religious experience of the soul. We have no other means ofgetting at reality. I know that there is Something-more than me andSomething-more than the nature outside of me, because we know thatthere is Something which is not me and is not nature, inside of me. Sothe man of religion, like any other poet, artist, seer, looks in hisown heart and writes. What he finds there is real, or else, as faras he is concerned, there is no reality. He does not assert thatthis reality is the final and utter truth. But he knows it is histrustworthy mediator of that truth. 

Here, then, is an immense separation between religionist and bothhumanist and naturalist; a separation so complete as to come fullcircle. We are convinced of the secondary value, both of naturalappearances and of the mortal, temporal consciousness. So wesubstitute for impertinent familiarity with Nature, a reverent regardfor what she half reveals, half hides. We interpret her by ourselves. We are the same compound of identity and difference. We acknowledgeour continuity with the natural world, our intimate and tragicalliance with the dust, but we also know that we, within ourselves, are Something-Else as well. And it is that Something-Else in us whichmakes the significant part of us, which sets our value and place inthe scale of being. 

In short, the dualism of nature is revealed in the dualism of thesoul. There is a gulf within, and if only man can span the innerchasm, he will know how to bridge the outer. He must begin by findingGod within himself, or he will never find Him anywhere. Now, it is outof this sense of a separation within himself, from himself andfrom the Author of himself, that there arises that awful sense ofhelplessness, of dependence, of bewilderment, which is the secondgreat element in the religious life. Man is alone in the world; manis helpless in the world; man ought not to be alone in the world;man is therefore under scrutiny and condemnation; he must findreconciliation, harmony, companionship, somehow, somewhere. Hencethe religious man is not arrogant like the pagan, nor proud like thehumanist; he is humble. It is Burke, I think, who says that the wholeethical life of man has its roots in this humility. [27] The religiousman cannot help but be humble. He has an awful pride in his kinshipwith heaven, but, standing before the Lord of heaven, he feels humannature's proper place, its confusion and division and helplessness;its dependence upon the higher Power. 

[Footnote 27: _Correspondence_, III, p. 213. ]

It is at this point that humanism and religion definitely partcompany. The former does not feel this absolute and judging Presence, hence cannot understand the spiritual solicitude of the latter. St. Paul was not quite at home on Mars Hill; it was hard to make those whowere always hearing and seeing some new thing understand; the shameand humility of the cross were an unnecessary foolishness to them. Sothey have always been. The humanist cannot take seriously this senseof a transcendent reality. When Cicero, to escape the vengeance ofClodius, withdrew from Rome, he passed over into Greece and dwelt fora while in Thessalonica. One day he saw Mount Olympus, the lofty andeternal home of the deities of ancient Greece. "But I, " said the blandeclectic philosopher, "saw nothing but snow and ice. "

How inadequate, then, as a substitute for religion, is even thenoblest humanism. True and fine as far as it goes, it does not go farenough for us. It takes too little account of the divided life. Itappears not to understand it. On the whole it refuses to acknowledgethat it really exists, or, if it does, it is convinced of man'sunaided ability to efface it. It isn't something inevitable. Hence thepride which is an essential quality of the humanistic attitude. 

But the religious man knows that it does exist and that while he isnot wholly responsible for it, yet he is essentially so and that, alas, in spite of that fact, he alone cannot bridge it. So he cries, "Wretched man that I am, what shall I do to be saved?" Here is thefeeling of uneasiness, the sense of something being wrong about usas we naturally stand, of which James speaks. In that sense ofresponsibility is the confession of sin and in the confession of sinis the acknowledgment of the impotence of the sinner. 

 "The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on Nor all your wit nor all your tears, can wash a line of it. "

Man cannot, unaided, make his connection with this higher power. Theworld is at fault, yes, but we are at fault, something both within andwithout dreadfully needs explaining. So man is subdued and troubled bythe infinite mystery; and he cannot accept the place in which he findshimself in that mystery; he is ashamed of it. 

Vivid, then, is his sense of helplessness! It makes him resent thehumanist, who bids him, unaided, solve his fate and be a man. That isgiving him stones when he asks for bread. He knows that advice makesan inhuman demand upon the will; it assumes a reasonableness, aninsight and a moral power, which for him do not exist; it ignoresor it denies the reality and the meaning of this inner gulf. It isimportant to note that even as philosophy and art and literature soonparted company with the naturalist, so, to a large degree, they partcompany with the humanist, too. They do not know very much of anharmonious and triumphant universe. Few of the world's creativespirits have ever denied that inner chasm or minimized its tragicconsequences to mankind. Isaiah and Paul and John and Augustine andLuther are wrung with the consciousness of it. Indeed, the antithesisbetween flesh and spirit is too familiar in religious literature toneed any recounting. It is more vividly brought home to us fromthe nonprofessional, the disinterested and involuntary testimony ofsecular writing. Was there ever such a cry of revolt on the part ofthe trapped spirit against the net and slough of natural values andnatural desires as runs through the sonnets of William Shakespeare? Weremember the 104th:

 "Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, Foiled by these rebel powers that thee array, Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth, Painting thine outward walls so costly gay? Why so large cost, having so short a lease, Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end? Then soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss And let that pine to aggravate thy store, Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross Within be fed, without be rich no more--"

Or turn to our contemporary poet, James Stephens:

 "Good and bad are in my heart But I cannot tell to you For they never are apart Which is the better of the two. 

 I am this: I am the other And the devil is my brother And my father he is God And my mother is the sod, Therefore I am safe, you see Owing to my pedigree. 

 So I cherish love and hate Like twin brothers in a nest Lest I find when it's too late That the other was the best. "[28]

Here, then, we find the next thing which grows out of man's senseof separation both from nature and from his own best self. It is hismoral judgment on himself as well as on the world outside, and thatpower to judge shows that he is greater than either. As Dr. Gordonsays, "Every honest man lives under the shadow of his own rebuke. " Wecan go far with the humanist in acknowledging the failures that aredue to environment, to incompleteness, to ignorance; we do not forgetthe helpless multitude who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death;and we agree with the scientist that their helplessness foredoomsthem and that their fate cannot be laid to their charge. But we go farbeyond where scientist and humanist stop. For we know that the deepestcause of human misery is not inheritance, is not environment, is notignorance, is not incompleteness; it is the informed but the perversehuman will. Just as unhappiness is the consciousness of the dividedmind, so guilt is this sense of the deliberately divided will. Jonathan Swift knew that; on every yearly recurrence of the hour inwhich he came into the world, he cried lamentably, "Let the day perishwherein I was born. "

[Footnote 28: _Songs from the Clay_, p. 40. ]

The Lord Jesus knew it, too. His teaching, unlike that of Paul, doesnot throw into the foreground the divided will and its accompanyingsense of sin and guilt. But he does not ignore it. He brought it outwith infinite tenderness but inexorable clearness in the parables ofthe lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost boy. The sheep were butyoung and silly, they did not wish to be lost on the mountain-side;they knew no better; inexperience, ignorance were theirs, andfor their sad estate they were not held responsible. For them thecompassionate shepherd sought until he found them in the wilds, tookthem, involuntary burdens, on his heart, brought them back to safetyand the fold. The coin had no native affinity with the dirt and grimeof the careless woman's house. It was only a coin, attached to ankletor bracelet, having no power, no independence of its own; where itfell, there must it lie. So with the lives set by fate in the refuseand grime of our industrial civilization, the pure minted goldeffectually concealed by the obscurity and filth around. For suchlives, victims of environment, the Father will search, too, until theyare found, taken up, and somewhere, in this world or another, restoredto their native worth. But the chief of the parables, and the one thathas captured the imagination and subdued the heart of mankind, becauseit so true to the greater part of life, is the story of the lost boy. For he was the real sinner and he was such because, knowing whathe was about and able to choose, he desired to do wrong. It was notignorance, nor environment, nor inheritance, that led him into the farcountry. It was its alien delights and their alien nature, for whichas such he craved. How subtle and certain is the word of Jesus here. No shepherd seeks this wandering sheep; no householder searches forthis lost coin. The boy who willed to do wrong must stay with theswine among the husks until he wills to do right. Then, whenhe desires to return, return is made possible and easy, but theresponsibility is forever his. The source of his misery is his ownwill. 

So the disposition of mankind is at the bottom of the suffering andthe division. There is rebellion and perverseness mingled with thehelplessness and ignorance and sorrow. No man ever understands or canspeak to the religious life unless he has the consciousness of thisinner moral cleft. No man will ever be able to preach with power aboutGod unless he does it chiefly in terms of God's difference from manand man's perilous estate and desperate need of Him. Indeed, God isnot like us, not like this inner life of ours; this is what we wantto hear. God is different; that is why we want to be able to love Him. And being thus different, we are separated from Him, both by the innerchasm of the divided soul and the outer chasm of remote and hostilenature. Then comes the final question: How are we, being helpless, toreach Him? How are we, being guilty, to find Him?

When men deal with these queries, with this range of experience, thisset of inward perceptions, then they are preaching religiously. Andthen, I venture to say, they do not fail either of hearers or offollowers. Then there is what Catherine Booth used to call "libertyof speech"; then there is power because then we talk of realities. For what is it that looks out from the eyes of religious humanity?Rebellion, pride? no! Humility, loneliness, something of a just anddeserved fear; but most of all, desire, insatiable, unwavering, anintense desire. This passion of the race, its never satisfied hunger, its incredible intensity and persistency of striving and longing, is at once the tragedy and glory, the witness to the helplessness, the revelation of the capacity of the race. The mainspring of humanactivity, the creative impulse from which in devious ways all thethousand-hued motives of our lives arise, is revealed in the ancientcry, "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God!" That unquenchedthirst for Him underlies all human life, as the solemn stillness ofthe ocean underlies the restless upper waves. The dynamic of the worldis the sense of the divine reality. The woe of the world is man'sinability to discover and appropriate that reality. Who that hasentered truly into life does not perceive beneath all the glitter ofits brilliance, the roar of its energy and achievement, the note ofmelancholy? The great undertone of life is solemn in its patheticuniformity. The poets and prophets of the world have seized unerringlyupon that melancholy undertone. Who ever better understood thefutility and helplessness of unaided man, the certain doom that tracksdown his pride of insolence, or his sin, than the Greek tragedians?Sophocles, divided spirit that he was, heard that note of melancholylong ago by the Ægean, wrote it into his somber dramas, with theirturbid ebb and flow of human misery. Sometimes the voices of ourhumanity as they rise blend and compose into one great cry that islifted, shivering and tingling, to the stars, "Oh, that I knew where Imight find Him!" Sometimes and more often they sink into a subdued andminor plaint, infinitely touching in its human solicitude, perplexityand pain. Again, James Stephens has phrased it for us in his verse_The Nodding Stars_. [29]

[Footnote 29: _Songs from the Clay_, p. 68. ]

 "Brothers, what is it ye mean, What is it ye try to say That so earnestly ye lean From the spirit to the clay. 

 "There are weary gulfs between Here and sunny Paradise, Brothers! What is it ye mean That ye search with burning eyes, "Down for me whose fire is clogged, Clamped in sullen, earthy mould, Battened down and fogged and bogged, Where the clay is seven-fold. "

Now we understand the tragic aspect of nature and of the human soulcaught in this cosmic dualism without which corresponds to the ethicaldualism within. This perception of the One behind the many in nature, of the thing-in-itself, as distinguished from the many expressions ofthat thing, is the chief theme for preaching. This is what brings mento themselves. Herein, as Dr. Newman Smyth has pointed out, appearsthe unique marvel of personality. "It becomes conscious of itself asindividual and it individualizes the world; it is the one discoveringitself among the many. In the midst of uniformities of nature, movingat will on the plane of natural necessities, weaving the pattern ofits ideas through the warp of natural laws, runs the personal life. On the same plane and amid these uniformities, yet itself a sphere ofbeing of another order; in it, yet disentangled from it, and havingits center in itself, it lives and moves and has its being, breakingno thread of nature's weaving, subject to its own law, and manifestinga dynamic of its own. "[30]

[Footnote 30: _The Meaning of the Personal Life_, p. 173. ]

The source, then, as we see it, of all human hopes and human dignity, the urge that lies behind all metaphysics and much of literature andart, the thing that makes men eager to live, yet nobly curious to die, is this conviction that One like unto ourselves but from whom we havemade ourselves unlike, akin to our real, if buried, person, walkethwith us in the fiery furnace of our life. There is a Spirit in manand the breath of the Almighty giveth him understanding. Starting fromthis interpretation, we can begin to order the baffling and teasingaspects, the illusive nature of the world. Why this ever failing, butnever ending struggle against unseen odds to grasp and understandand live with the Divine? Why, between the two, the absolute and thechangeless spirit, unseen but felt, and the hesitant and timid spiritof a man, would there seem to be a great gulf fixed? Because we arewrong. Because man finds the gulf within himself. He chafes at thelimitations of time and space? Yes; but he chafes more at the mysteryand weakness, the mingled deceitfulness and cunning and splendor ofthe human heart. Because there is no one of us who can say, I havemade my life pure, I am free from my sin. He knows that the gulf isthere between the fallible and human, and the more than human; he doesnot know how to cross it; he says, "I would think until I found Something I can never find Something lying on the ground In the bottom of my mind. "

Here, then, can we not understand that mingling of mystic dignityand profound humility, of awe-struck pride and utter self-abnegation, wherewith the man of religion regards his race and himself? He is thechild of the Eternal; he, being man, alone knows that God is. "When Iconsider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the starswhich Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that Thou visitest him?" Here is the humility: "Whyso hot, little man!" Then comes the awe-struck pride: "Yet Thou hastmade him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory andhonor. " "Alone with the gods, alone!" God is the high and lofty onewhich inhabiteth eternity, but He is also nigh unto them who are of abroken and a contrite heart. 

Here we are come to the very heart of religion. Man's proudseparateness in the universe; yet man's moral defection and hisresponsibility for it which makes him know that separateness; man'sshame and helplessness under it. Over against the denial or evasionof moral values by the naturalist and the dullness to the senseof moral helplessness by the humanist, there stands the sense ofmoral difference, the sense of sin, of penitence and confession. Nopreaching not founded on these things can ever be called religious orcan ever stir those ranges of the human life for which alone preachingis supposed to exist. 

What is the religious law, then? It is the law of humility. And whatis the religious consciousness? The sense of man's difference fromnature and from God. The sense of his difference from himself withinhimself and the longing for an inner harmony which shall unite himwith himself and with the beauty and the spirit without. So whatis the religious passion? Is it to exalt human nature? It wouldbe more true to say it is to lose it. What is the end for us? Notidentification with nature and the natural self, but pursuit of theother than nature, the more than natural self. Our humility is notlike that of Uriah Heep, a mean opinion of ourselves in comparisonwith other men. It is the profound consciousness of the weakness andthe nothingness of our kind, and of the poor ends human nature setsits heart upon, in comparison with that Other One above and beyond andwithout us, to whom we are kin, from whom we are different, to whom weaspire, to reach whom we know not how. 

This, then, is what we mean when we turn back from the language ofexperience to the vocabulary of philosophy and theology and talk aboutthe absolute values of religion. We mean by "absolute values" thatbehind the multifarious and ever changing nature, is a single and asteadfast cause--a great rock in a weary land. We have lost the oldabsolute philosophies and dogmatic theologies and that is good andright, for they were outworn. But we are never going to lose thecentral experience that produced them, and our task is to find anew philosophy to express these inner things for which the words"supernatural, " "absolute, " are no longer intelligible. For we stillknow that behind man's partial and relative knowledge, feeling, willing, is an utter knowledge, a perfect feeling, a serene andunswerving will; that beneath man's moral anarchy there is moralsovereignty; that behind his helplessness there is abundant powerto save. Perhaps this Other is always changing, but, if so, it is aOneness which is changing. In short, the thing that is characteristicof religion is that it dwells, not on man's likenesses, but on hisawful differences from nature and from God; sees him not as littlecounterparts of deity, but as broken fragments only to be made wholewithin the perfect life. It sees relativity as the law of our being, yes, but relativity, not of the sort that excludes, but is includedin, a higher absolute, even as the planet swings in infinite space. 

The trouble with much preaching is that it lacks the essentiallyreligious insight; in dwelling on man's identities it confuses ordrugs, not clarifies and purges, the spirit. Thus, it obscures thegulf. Sometimes it evades it, or bridges it by minimizing it, andgenuinely religious people, and those who want to be religious, andthose who might be, know that such preaching is not real and that itdoes not move them and, worst of all, the hungry sheep look up andare not fed. For in such preaching there is no call to humility, noplea for grace, no sense that the achievement of self-unity is asmuch a rescue as it is a reformation. But this sense of the need ofsalvation is integral to religion; this is where it has parted companywith humanism. Humanism makes no organic relations between man andthe Eternal. It is as though it thought these would take care ofthemselves! In the place of grace it puts pride; pride of caste, offamily, of character, of intellect. But high self-discipline andpride in the human spirit are not the deepest or the highest notes manstrikes. The cry, not of pride in self, but for fellowship with theInfinite, is the superlative expression of man. Augustine sounded thehighest note of feeling when he wrote, "O God, Thou hast made us forThyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee. " Thewords of the Lord Jesus gave the clearest insight of the human mindwhen He said, "And when he came to himself, he said, I will arise andgo to my Father. "

CHAPTER FIVE

GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE

I hope the concluding paragraphs of the last chapter brought us backinto the atmosphere of religion, into that sort of mood in which thereality of the struggle for character, the craving of the human spiritto give and to receive compassion, the cry of the lonely soul for thelove of God, were made manifest. These are the real goods of life toreligious natures; they need this meat which the world knoweth not of;there is a continuing resolve in them to say, "Good-by, proud world, I'm going home!" The genuinely religious man must, and should indeed, live in this world, but he cannot live of it. 

Merely to create such an atmosphere then, to induce this sort of mood, to shift for men their perspectives, until these needs and values riseonce more compelling before their eyes, is a chief end of preaching. Its object is not so much moralizing or instructing as it isinterpreting and revealing; not the plotting out of the landscapeat our feet, but the lifting of our eyes to the hills, to the fixedstars. Then we really do see things that are large as large and thingsthat are small as small. We need that vision today from religiousleaders more than we need any other one thing. 

For humanism and naturalism between them have brought us to an almostcomplete secularization of preaching, in which its characteristicelements, its distinctive contribution, have largely faded fromliberal speaking and from the consciousness of its hearers. We haveemphasized man's kinship with nature until now we can see him againdeclining to the brute; we have proclaimed the divine Immanenceuntil we think to compass the Eternal within a facile and finitecomprehension. By thus dwelling on the physical and rational elementsof human experience, religion has come to concern itself to anextraordinary degree with the local and temporal reaches of faith. We have lost the sense of communion with Absolute Being and of theobligation to standards higher than those of the world, which thatcommunion brings. Out of this identification of man with nature hascome the preaching which ignores the fact of sin; which reduces freewill and the moral responsibility of the individual to the vanishingpoint; which stresses the control of the forces of inheritance andenvironment to the edge of fatalistic determinism; which leads manto regard himself as unfortunate rather than reprehensible when moraldisaster overtakes him; which induces that condoning of the moralrebel which is born not of love for the sinner but of indifference tohis sin; which issues in that last degeneration of self-pity inwhich individuals and societies alike indulge; and in that repellentsentimentality over vice and crime which beflowers the murderer whileit forgets its victim, which turns to ouija boards and levitatedtables to obscure the solemn finality of death and to gloze over theguilty secrets of the battlefield. 

Thus it has come about that we preach of God in terms of thedrawing-room, as though he were some vast St. Nicholas, sitting upthere in the sky or amiably informing our present world, regardingwith easy benevolence His minute and multifarious creations, winkingat our pride, our cruelty, our self-love, our lust, not greatlycaring if we break His laws, tossing out His indiscriminate gifts, and vaguely trusting in our automatic arrival at virtue. Even as inphilosophy, it is psychologists, experts in empirical science andmethods, and sociologists, experts in practical ethics, who may befound, while the historian and the metaphysician are increasinglyrare, so in preaching we are amiable and pious and ethical andpractical and informative, but the vision and the absolutism ofreligion are a departing glory. 

What complicates the danger and difficulty of such a position, withits confusion of natural and human values, and its rationalizingand secularizing of theistic thinking, is that it has its measure ofreality. All these observations of naturalist and humanist are halftruths, and for that very reason more perilous than utter falsehoods. For the mind tends to rest contented within their areas, and so thepartial becomes the worst enemy of the whole. What we have been doingis stressing the indubitable identity between man and nature andbetween the Creator and His creatures to the point of unreality, forgetting the equally important fact of the difference, thedistinction between the two. But sound knowledge and normal feelingrest upon observing and reckoning with both aspects of this law ofkinship and contrast. All human experience becomes known to us throughthe interplay of what appear to be contradictory needs and opposingtruths within our being. Thus, man is a social animal and can onlyfind himself in a series of relationships as producer, lover, husband, father and friend. He is a part of and like unto his kind, his spiritimmanent in his race. But man is also a solitary creature, and in thatvery solitariness, which he knows as he contrasts it with his socialinterests, he finds identity of self, the something which makes us"us, " which separates us from all others in the world. A Crusoe, marooned on a South Sea island, without even a black man Friday forcompanionship, would soon cease to be a man; personality would forsakehim. But the same Crusoe is equally in need of solitude. The hell ofthe barracks, no matter how well conducted, is their hideous lack ofprivacy; men condemned by shipwreck or imprisonment to an unbroken andintimate companionship kill their comrade or themselves. We are allalike and hence gregarious; we are all different and hence flee as abird to the mountain. The reality of human personality lies in neitherone aspect of the truth nor the other, but in both. The truth is foundas we hold the balance between identity and difference. Hence we arenot able to think of personality in the Godhead unless we conceive ofGod as being, within Himself, a social no less than a solitary Being. 

Again, this law that the truth is found in the balance of theantinomies appears in man's equal passion for continuity andpermanency and for variety and change. The book of Revelation tellsus that the redeemed, before the great white throne, standing upon thesea of glass, sing the song of Moses and the Lamb. What has the oneto do with the other? Here is the savage, triumphant chant of the fardawn of Israel's history, joined with the furthest and latest possibleevents and words. Well, it at least suggests the continuity of theageless struggle of mankind, showing that the past has its placein the present, relieving man's horror of the impermanence, thedisjointed character of existence. He wants something orderly andstatic. But, like the jet of water in the fountain, his life isforever collapsing and collapsing, falling in upon itself, itsapparent permanence nothing but a rapid and glittering succession ofimpermanences. The dread of growing old is chiefly that, as yearscome on, life changes more and faster, becomes a continual process ofreadjustment. Therefore we want something fixed; like the sailor withhis compass, we must have some needle, even if a tremulous one, alwayspointing toward a changeless star. Yet this is but one half of thepicture. Does man desire continuity?--quite as much does he wish forvariety, cessation of old ways, change and fresh beginnings. Themost terrible figure which the subtle imagination of the Middle Agesconjured up was that of the Wandering Jew, the man who could not die!Here, then, we arrive at knowledge, the genuine values of experience, by this same balancing of opposites. Continuity alone kills; perpetualchange strips life of significance; man must have both. 

Now, it is in the religious field that this interests us most. We haveseen that what we have been doing there of late has been to ignore thefact that reality is found only through this balancing of the law ofdifference and identity, contrast and likeness. We have been absorbedin one half of reality, identifying man with nature, prating of hisself-sufficiency, seeing divinity almost exclusively as immanent inthe phenomenal world. Thus we have not merely been dealing with onlyone half of the truth, but that, to use a solecism, the lesser half. 

For doubtless men do desire in religion a recognition of the realvalues of their physical nature. And they want rules of conduct, aguide for practical affairs, a scale of values for this world. Thissatisfies the craving for temporal adjustment, the sense of thegoodness and worth of what our instinct transmits to us. But it doesnothing to meet that profound dissatisfaction with this world and thatsense of the encumbrances of the flesh which is also a part of realityand, to the religious man, perhaps the greater part. He wants to turnaway from all these present things and be kept secretly in a pavilionfrom the strife of tongues. Here he has no continuing city. Alwayswhile we dwell here we have a dim and restless sense that we are in anunreal country and we know, in our still moments, that we shall onlycome to ourselves when we return to the house of our Father. Hencemen have never been satisfied with religious leaders who chieflyinterpreted this world to them. 

And indeed, since July, 1914, and down to and including this veryhour, this idealizing of time, which we had almost accepted as ouroffice, has had a ghastly exposure. Because there has come upon us allone of these irrevocable and irremediable disasters, for which timehas no word of hope, to which Nature is totally indifferent, for whichthe God of the outgoings and incomings of the morning is too small. For millions of living and suffering men and women all temporaland mortal values have been wiped out. They have been caught in acatastrophe so ruthless and dreadful that it has strewed their bodiesin heaps over the fields and valleys of many nations. Today centraland south and northeastern Europe and western Asia are filled withidle and hungry and desperate men and women. They have been deprivedof peace, of security, of bread, of enlightenment alike. Somethingmore than temporal salvation and human words of hope are neededhere. Something more than ethical reform and social readjustment andeconomic alleviation, admirable though these are! Something there mustbe in human nature that eclipses human nature, if it is to endure somuch! What has the God of this world to give for youth, deprived oftheir physical immortality and all their sweet and inalienable humanrights, who are lying now beneath the acre upon acre of totteringwooden crosses in their soldier's graves? Is there anything in thisworld sufficient now for the widow, the orphan, the cripple, thestarving, the disillusioned and the desperate? What Europe wants toknow is why and for what purpose this holocaust--is there anythingbeyond, was there anything before it? A civilization dedicated tospeed and power and utility and mere intelligence cannot answer thesequestions. Neither can a religion resolved into naught but the ethicsof Jesus answer them. "If in this world only, " cries today the voiceof our humanity, "we have hope, then we are of all men the mostmiserable!" When one sees our American society of this momentreturning so easily to the physical and the obvious and the practicalthings of life; when one sees the church immersed in programs, andmoralizing, and hospitals, and campaigns, and membership drives, andstatistics, and money getting, one is constrained to ask, "What shallbe said of the human spirit that it can forget so soon?"

Is it not obvious, then, that our task for a pagan society and aself-contained humanity is to restore the balance of the religiousconsciousness and to dwell, not on man's identity with Nature, buton his far-flung difference; not on his self-sufficiency, but on histragic helplessness; not on the God of the market place, the officeand the street, an immanent and relative deity, but on the Absolute, that high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity? Indeed, we are beingsolemnly reminded today that the other-worldliness of religion, itsconcern with future, supertemporal things, is its characteristic andmost precious contribution to the world. We are seeing how every humanproblem when pressed to its ultimate issue becomes theological. Hereis where the fertile field for contemporary preaching lies. Itis found, not in remaining with those elements in the religiousconsciousness which it shares in common with naturalism and humanism, but in passing over to those which are distinctive to itself alone. Ithas always been true, but it is especially true at this moment, thateffective preaching has to do chiefly with transcendent values. 

Our task is to assert, first, then, the "otherness" of man, hisdifference from Nature, to point out the illusoriness of her phenomenafor him, the derived reality and secondary value of her facts. These are things that need religious elucidation. The phrase"other-worldliness" has come, not without reason, to have an evilconnotation among us, but there is nevertheless a genuine disdainof this world, a sense of high superiority to it and profoundindifference toward it, which is of the essence of the religiousattitude. He who knows that here he is a stranger, sojourning intabernacles; that he belongs by his nature, not to this world, butthat he seeks a better, that is to say, a heavenly country, will forthe joy that is set before him, endure a cross and will despisethe shame. He will have a conscious superiority to hostile facts ofwhatever sort or magnitude, for he knows that they deceive in sofar as they pretend to finality. When religion has thus acquired aclear-sighted and thoroughgoing indifference to the natural order, then, and then only, it begins to be potent within that order. Then, as Professor Hocking says, it rises superior to the world of facts andbecomes irresistible. [31]

[Footnote 31: _The Meaning of God in Human Experience_, p. 518. ]

The time is ripe, then, first, for the preacher to emphasize theinward and essential difference between man and nature which existsunder the outward likeness, to remind him of this more-than-nature, this "otherness" of man, without which he would lose his most preciouspossession, the sense of personality. Faith begins by recognizing thistranscendent element in man and the acceptance of it is the foundationof religious preaching. What was the worst thing about the war? Notits destruction nor its horrors nor its futilities, but its shames;the dreadful indignities which it inflicted upon man; it treated menas though they were not souls! No such moral catastrophe could haveoverwhelmed us if we had not for long let the brute lie too near thevalues and practices of our lives, depersonalizing thus, in politicsand industry and morals and religion, our civilization. It allproceeded from the irreligious interpretation of human existence, andthe fruits of that interpretation are before us. 

The first task of the preacher, then, is to combat the naturalisticinterpretation of humanity with every insight and every convictionthat is within his power. If we are to restore religious values, rebuild a world of transcendent ends and more-than-natural beauty, wemust begin here with man. In the popular understanding of the phraseall life is not essentially one in kind; physical self-preservationand reproduction are not the be-all and the end-all of existence. There is something more to be expressed in man without which these arebut dust and ashes in the mouth. There is another kind of life mixedin with this, the obvious. If we cannot express the other world, weshall not long tolerate this one. To think that this world is all, leans toward madness; such a picture of man is a travesty, not aportrait of his nature. Only on some such basic truths as these canwe build character in our young people. Paganism tells them that itis neither natural nor possible to keep themselves unspotted from theworld. Over against it we must reiterate, You can and you must! forthe man that sinneth wrongeth his own soul. You are something morethan physical hunger and reproductive instinct; you are of spirit noless than dust. How, then, can you do this great sin against God!

How abundant here are the data with which religious preaching maydeal. Indeed, as Huxley and scores of others have pointed out, it isonly the religious view of man that builds up civilization. A greatcommunity is the record of man's supernaturalism, his uniqueness. Itis built on the "higher-than-self" principle which is involved in themoral sense itself. And this higher-than-self is not just a collectivenaturalism, a social consciousness, as Durkheim and Overstreet andMiss Harrison would say. The simplest introspective act will provethat. For a man cannot ignore self-condemnation as if it were only anatural difficulty, nor disparage it as though it were merely humanlyimposed. We think it comes from that which is above and without, because it speaks to the solitary and the unique, not the socialand the common part of us. Hence conscience is not chiefly a tribalproduct, for it is what separates us from the group and in ourisolation unites us with something other than the group. "AgainstThee, Thee only, have I sinned and done this evil in Thy sight. " Soreligious preaching perpetually holds us up above our natural selvesand the natural order. 

Thus man must live by an other-than-natural law if he is to preservethe family, which is the social unit of civilization. Its veryexistence depends upon modifying and transforming natural hunger by adiviner instinct, by making voluntary repressions, willing sacrificesof the lower to the higher, the subordinating of the law of self andmight to the law of sacrifice and love--this is what preserves familylife. Animals indeed rear and cherish their young and for the matingseason remain true to one another, but no animality _per se_ ever yetbuilt a home. There must be a more-than-natural law in the state. Ournational life and honor rest upon the stability of the democracy andwe can only maintain that by walking a very straight and narrow path. For the peace of freedom as distinguished from precarious license isa more-than-natural attainment, born of self-repression and socialdiscipline, the voluntary relinquishment of lesser rights for higherrights, of personal privileges for the sake of the common good. Government by the broad and easy path, following the lines of leastresistance, like the natural order, saying might is right, meanseither tyranny or anarchy. _Circumspice_! One of the glories ofwestern civilization is its hospitals. They stand for the supernaturaldoctrine of the survival of the unfit, the conviction of the communitythat, to take the easy path of casting out the aged and infirm, the sick and the suffering, would mean incalculable degenerationof national character, and that the difficult and costly path ofprotection and ministering service is both necessary and right. Andwhy is the reformatory replacing the prison? Because we have learnedthat the obvious, natural way of dealing with the criminal certainlydestroys him and threatens to destroy us; and that the hard, difficultpath of reeducating and reforming a vicious life is the one which thestate for her own safety must follow. 

Genuine preaching, then, first of all, calls men to repentance, bidsthem turn away from their natural selves, and, to find that other andrealer self, enter the straight and narrow gate. The call is not anarbitrary command, born of a negative and repressive spirit. It is aprofound exhortation based upon a fundamental law of human progress, having behind it the inviolable sanction of the truth. Such preachingwould have the authentic note. It is self-verifying. It stirs toanswer that quality--both moral and imaginative--in the spirit of manwhich craves the pain and difficulty and satisfaction of separationfrom the natural order. It appeals to a timeless worth in man whichtranscends any values of mere intelligence which vary with the ages, or any material prosperity which perishes with the using, or anyvolitional activity that dies in its own expenditure. Much of thephilosophy of Socrates was long ago outmoded, but Socrates himself, asdepicted in the Phaedo, confronting death with the cup of hemlock inhis hand, saying with a smile, "There is no evil which can happen toa good man living or dead, " has a more-than-natural, an enduring andtranscendent quality. Whenever we preach to the element in mankindwhich produces such attitudes toward life and bid it assert itself, then we are doing religious preaching, and then we speak with power. Jesus lived within the inexorable circle of the ideas of His time;He staked much on the coming of the new kingdom which did not appeareither when or as He had first expected it. He had to adjust, as do weall, His life to His experience, His destiny to His fate. But when Hewas hanging on His cross, forgotten of men and apparently deserted byHis God, something in Him that had nothing to do with nature or thebrute rose to a final expression and by its more-than-natural reality, sealed and authenticated His life. Looking down upon His torturers, understanding them far better than they understood themselves, Hecried, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. " Thatcry has no place in nature; it has no application and no meaningoutside the human heart and that which is above, not beneath, thehuman heart, from which it is derived. There, then, again was thesupernatural law; there was the more-than-nature in man which makesnature into human nature; and there is the thing to whose discovery, cultivation, expression, real preaching is addressed. Every time a mantruly preaches he so portrays what men ought to be, must be, and canbe if they will, that they know there is something here

 "that leaps life's narrow bars To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven! A seed of sunshine that doth leaven Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars, And glorify our clay With light from fountains elder than the Day. "[32]

[Footnote 32: J. R. Lowell, _Commemoration Ode_, stanza IV, ll. 30-35. ]

Such preaching is a perpetual refutation of and rebuke to thenaturalism and imperialism of our present society. It is the callto the absolute in man, to a clear issue with evil. It would not crypeace, peace, when there is no peace. It would be living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing ofboth joints and marrow, quick to discern the thoughts and intents ofthe heart. 

Following this insistence upon the difference from nature, themore-than-natural in man, the second thing in religious preachingwill have to be, obviously, the message of salvation. That is to say, reducing the statement to its lowest terms, if man is to live by sucha law, the law of more-than-nature, then he must have something alsomore-than-human to help him in his task. He will need strength fromoutside. Indeed, because religion declares that there is such divineassistance, and that faith can command it, is the chief cause andreason for our existence. When we cease to preach salvation in someform or other, we deny our own selves; we efface our own existence. For no one can preach the more-than-human in mankind withoutemphasizing those elements of free will, moral responsibility, theneed and capacity for struggle and holiness in human life which itindicates, and which in every age have been a part of the message ofHim who said, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father, which isin heaven, is perfect. "

Therefore, as we have previously corrected the half truth of thenaturalist who makes a caricature, not a portrait of man, we must nowin the same way turn to the correcting of the humanist's emphasis uponman's native capacity and insist upon the complementary truth whichfulfills this moral heroism of mankind, namely, the divine rescuewhich answers to its inadequacy. Man must struggle for his victory; hecan win; he cannot win alone. We must then insist upon the doctrineof salvation, turning ourselves to the other side of the humanist'spicture. Man cannot live by this more-than-natural law unaided. Fornot only has he the power to rise above Nature; the same thing giveshim equal capacity to sink beneath her, and, when left to himself, hegenerally does so. The preacher does not dare deny the sovereigntyof sin. Humanism hates the very name of sin; it has never madeany serious attempt to explain the consciousness of guilt. Neithernaturalist nor humanist can afford to admit sin, for sin takes man, asholiness does, outside the iron chain of cause and effect; it breaksthe law; it is not strictly natural. It makes clear enough that manis outside the natural order in two ways. He is both inferior andsuperior to it. He falls beneath, he rises above it. When he acts likea beast, he is not clean and beastly, but unclean and bestial. When helifts his head in moral anguish, bathes all his spirit in the floodof awe and repentance, is transfigured with the glorious madness ofself-sacrifice, he is so many worlds higher than the beast that theirrelationship becomes irrelevant. So we must deal more completelythan humanists do with the central mystery of our experience; man'simpotent idealism, his insight not matched with consummation; the factthat what he dares to dream of he is not able alone to do. 

For the humanist exalts man, which is good; but then he makes himself-sufficient for the struggle which such exaltation demands, whichis bad. In that partial understanding he departs from truth. And whatis it that makes the futility of so much present preaching? It is theacceptance of this doctrine of man's moral adequacy and consequentlythe almost total lack either of the assurance of grace or of theappeal to the will. No wonder such exhortations cannot stem the tideof an ever increasing worldliness. Such preaching stimulates the mind;in both the better and the worse preachers, it moves the emotions butit gives men little power to act on what they hear and feel to thetransformation of their daily existence. Thus the humanistic sense ofman's sufficiency, coupled with the inherent distrust of any notion ofhelp from beyond and above, any belief in a reinforcing power which acritical rationalism cannot dissect and explain, has gradually ruledout of court the doctrine of salvation until the preacher's power, both to experience and to transmit it, has atrophied through disuse. 

Who can doubt that one large reason why crude and indefensibleconcepts of the Christian faith have such a disconcerting vitalitytoday is because they carry, in their outmoded, unethical, discreditedforms, the truth of man's insufficiency in himself and the confidentassurance of that something coming from without which will abundantlycomplete the struggling life within? They offer the assurance of thatpeace and moral victory which man so ardently desires, because theydeclare that it is both a discovery and a revelation, an achievementand a rescue. There are vigorous and rapidly growing popular movementsof the day which rest their summation of faith on the quadrilateral ofan inerrant and verbally inspired Scripture, the full deity of JesusChrist, the efficacy of His substitutionary atonement, the speedysecond coming of the Lord. No sane person can suppose that these cultssucceed because of the ethical insight, the spiritual sensitiveness, the intellectual integrity of such a message. It does not possessthese things. They succeed, in spite of their obscurantism, becausethey do confess and meet man's central need, his need to be saved. The power of that fact is what is able to carry so narrow and soindefensible a doctrine. 

So the second problem of the preacher is clear. Man asserts hispotential independence of the natural law. But to realize that, hemust bridge the gulf between himself and the supernatural lawgiverto whose dictates he confesses he is subject. He is not free from thebondage of the lower, except through the bondage to the higher. Norcan he live by that higher law unaided and alone. Here we strike atthe root of humanism. Its kindly tolerance of the church is builtup on the proud conviction that we, with our distinctive doctrine ofsalvation, are superfluous, hence sometimes disingenuous and alwaysnegligible. The humanist believes that understanding takes the placeof faith. What men need is not to be redeemed from their sins, but tobe educated out of their follies. 

But does right knowing in itself suffice to insure right doing?Socrates and Plato, with their indentification of knowledge andvirtue, would appear to think so; the church has gone a long way, under humanistic pressure, in tacit acquiescence with their doctrine. Yet most of us, judging alike from internal and personal evidenceand from external and social observation, would say that there was nosadder or more universal experience than that of the failure of rightknowledge to secure right performance. Right knowledge is not initself right living. We have striking testimony on that point from oneof the greatest of all humanists, no less a person than Confucius. "At seventy, " he says, "I could follow what my heart desired withouttransgressing the law of measure. "[33] The implication of suchtestimony makes no very good humanistic apologetic! Most of us, whendesire has failed, can manage to attain, unaided, the identificationof understanding and conduct, can climb to the poor heights of aworn-out and withered continence. But one wonders a little whether, then, the climbing seems to be worth while. 

[Footnote 33: _Analects_, II, civ. ]

But the doctrine usually begins by minimizing the free agency ofthe individual, playing up the factors of compulsion, either ofcircumstance or inheritance or of ignorance, as being in themselveschiefly responsible for blameful acts. These are therefore consideredinvoluntary and certain to be reformed when man knows better and hasthe corresponding strength of his knowledge. But Aristotle, who dealswith this Socratic doctrine in the third book of the _Ethics_, verysensibly remarks, "It is ridiculous to lay the blame of our wrongactions upon external causes rather than upon the facility with whichwe ourselves are caught by such causes, and, while we take credit forour noble actions to ourselves, lay the blame of our shameful actionsupon pleasure. "[34] "The facility with which we are caught"--thereis the religious understanding there is that perversion of will whichconspires with the perils and chances of the world so that togetherthey may undo the soul. 

[Footnote 34: _Ethics_, Book III, ch. Ii, p. 61. ]

Of course, as Aristotle admits, there is this half truth lying at theroot of the Socratic identification of virtue and knowledge that everyvicious person is ignorant of what he ought to do and what he ought toabstain from doing in the sense that what he is about to do couldnot be defended upon any ground of enlightened self-interest. Andso, while he finds sin sweet and evil pleasant, these are delusiveexperiences, which, if he saw life steadily and whole, he would knowas such. But one reason for this ignorance is unwillingness to know. Good men do evil, and understanding men sin, partly because they aremisled by false ideas, partly, also, because, knowing them false, they cannot or will not give them up. This is what Goethe very wellunderstood when he said, "Most men prefer error to truth, becausetruth imposes limitations and error does not. "

And another reason is that when men do know, they find a deadly andmysterious, a sort of perverted joy--a sweet and terrible and secretdelight, --in denying their own understanding. Thus right living callsfor a repeated and difficult exercise of the will, what ProfessorBabbitt calls "a pulling back of the impulse to the track thatknowledge indicates. " Such moral mastery is not identical with moralperception and most frequently is not its accompaniment, unlessobservation and experience are alike fallacious. Thus the wholeargument falls to the ground when we confess that possession ofknowledge does not guarantee the application of it. Therefore the twothings, knowledge and virtue, according to universal experience, arenot identical. Humanists indeed use the word "knowledge" for the mostpart in an esoteric sense. Knowledge is virtue in the sense that itenables us to see virtue as excellent and desirable; it is not virtuein the sense that it alone enables us to acquire it. 

Who, indeed, that has ever lived in the far country does not knowthat one factor in its fascination was a bittersweet awareness of thefolly, the inevitable disaster, of such alien surroundings. Whoalso does not know that often when the whole will is set to identifyconduct with conviction, it may be, for all its passionate and bittersincerity, set in vain. In every hour of every day there are hundredsof lives that battle honestly, but with decreasing spiritual forces, with passion and temptation. Sometimes a life is driven by the fiercegales of enticement, the swift currents of desire, right upon thejagged rock of some great sin. Lives that have seemed strong and fairgo down every day, do they not, and shock us for a moment with theirirremediable catastrophe? And we must not forget that before they wentdown, for many a month or even year they have been hard beset lives. Before that final and complete ruin, they have been drifting andstruggling, driven and fighting, sin drawing nearer and nearer, theirfated lives urged on, the mind growing darker, the stars in theirsouls going out, the steering of their own lives taken from theirhands. Then there has been the sense of the coming danger, the darkpresentiment of how it all must end when the "powers that tend thesoul to help it from the death that cannot die, and save it even inextremes, begin to vex and plague it. " There has been the dreadfulsense of life drifting toward a great crash, nearer and nearer to whatmust be the wreck of all things. What does the humanist have to offerto these men and women who know perfectly well where they are, andwhat they are about, and where they would like to be, but who can'tget there and who are, today and every day, putting forth their lastand somber efforts, trying in vain to just keep clear of ruin untilthe darkness and the helplessness shall lift and something or someoneshall give them peace!

Now, it is this defect in the will which automatically limits thepower of the intellect. It is this which the Socratic identificationignores. So while we might readily grant that it is in the essentialnature of things that virtue and truth, wisdom and character, understanding and goodness, are but two aspects of one thing, is itnot trifling with one of the most serious facts of human destinyto interpret the truism to mean that, when a man knows that acontemplated act is wrong or foolish or ugly, he is thereby restrainedfrom accomplishing it? Knowledge is not virtue in the sense thatmere reason or mere perception can control the will. And this is theconclusion that Aristotle also comes to when he says: "Some peoplesay that incontinence is impossible, if one has knowledge. It seemsto them strange, as it did to Socrates, that where knowledge exists inman, something else should master it and drag it about like a slave. Socrates was wholly opposed to this idea; he denied the existence ofincontinence, arguing that nobody with a conception of what was bestcould act against it, and therefore, if he did so act, his actionmust be due to ignorance. " And then Aristotle adds, "The theory isevidently at variance with the facts of experience. "[35] Plato himselfexposes the theoretical nature of the assertion, its inhuman demandupon the will, the superreasonableness which it expects but offers noway of obtaining, when he says, "Every one will admit that a naturehaving in perfection all the qualities which are required in aphilosopher is a rare plant seldom seen among men. "[36]

[Footnote 35: _Ethics_, Book VII, ch. Iii, pp. 206-207. ]

[Footnote 36: _Republic_, VI, 491. ]

It would be well if those people who are going about the world todayteaching social hygiene to adolescents (on the whole an admirablething to do) but proceeding on the assumption that when youth knowswhat is right and what is wrong, and why it is right and why it iswrong, and what are the consequences of right and wrong, that then, _ipso facto_, youth will become chaste, --well if they would acquaintthemselves either with the ethics of Aristotle or with the Christiandoctrine of salvation. For if men think that knowledge by itself everyet produced virtue in eager and unsated lives, they are either knavesor fools. They will find that knowledge uncontrolled by a purifiedspirit and a reinforced will is already teaching men not how tobe good, but how to sin the more boldly with the better chance ofphysical impunity. "Philosophy, " says Black, "is a feeble antagonistbefore passion, because it does not supply an adequate motive for theconflict. "[37] There were few men in the nineteenth century in whomknowledge and virtue were more profoundly and completely joined thanin John Henry Newman. But did that subtle intellect suffice? could itmake the scholar into the saint? Hear his own words:

 "O Holy Lord, who with the children three Didst walk the piercing flame; Help, in those trial hours which, save to Thee, I dare not name; Nor let these quivering eyes and sickening heart Crumble to dust beneath the tempter's dart. 

 "Thou who didst once Thy life from Mary's breast Renew from day to day; O might her smile, severely sweet, but rest On this frail clay! Till I am Thine with my whole soul, and fear Not feel, a secret joy, that Hell is near. "

So, only when we include in the term "knowledge" understanding plusgood will, is the humanist position true, and this, I suppose, iswhat Aristotle meant when he finally says, "Vice is consistent withknowledge of some kind, but it excludes knowledge in the full andproper sense of the word. "[38]

[Footnote 37: _Culture and Restraint_, p. 104. ]

[Footnote 38: _Ethics_, Book VII, ch. V, p. 215. ]

Now, so finespun a discussion of intricate and psychologicalsubtleties is mildly interesting presumably to middle-aged scholars, but I submit that a half truth that needs so much explanation andso many admissions before it can be made safe or actual, is a ratherdangerous thing to offer to adolescence or to a congregation ofaverage men and women. It cannot sound to them very much like the goodnews of Jesus. Culture is a precious thing, but no culture, withoutthe help of divine grace and the responsive affection on our partwhich that grace induces, will ever knit men together in a kingdomof God, a spiritual society. As long ago as the second century Celsusunderstood that. He says in his polemic against Christianity, asquoted by Origen, "If any one suppose that it is possible that thepeople of Asia and Europe and Africa, Greeks and barbarians, shouldagree to follow one law, he is hopelessly ignorant. "[39] Now, Celsuswas proceeding on the assumption that Christianity was only anotherphilosophy, a new intellectual system, and he was merely exposing thefutility of all such unaided intellectualism. 

[Footnote 39: _Origen, contra Celsum_, VIII, p. 72. ]

It is, therefore, of prime importance for the preacher to rememberthat humanism, or any other doctrine which approaches the problem oflife and conduct other than by moral and spiritual means, can nevertake the place of the religious appeal, because it does not touch thesprings of action where motives are born and from which convictionsarise. You do not make a man moral by enlightening him; it is nearerthe truth to say that you enlighten him when you make him moral. "Blessed are the pure in heart, " said Jesus, "for they shall seeGod. If any man wills to do the will, he shall know the doctrine. "Education does not wipe out crime nor an understanding mind make aholy will. The last half of the nineteenth century made it terriblyclear that the learning and science of mankind, where they aredivorced from piety, unconsecrated by a spiritual passion, and largelydirected by selfish motives, can neither benefit nor redeem the race. Consider for a moment the enormous expansion of knowledge which theworld has witnessed since the year 1859. What prodigious accessionsto the sum of our common understanding have we seen in the natural andthe humane sciences; and what marvelous uses of scientific knowledgefor practical purposes have we discovered! We have mastered in theselatter days a thousand secrets of nature. We have freed the mind fromold ignorance and ancient superstition. We have penetrated the secretsof the body, and can almost conquer death and indefinitely prolongthe span of human days. We face the facts and know the world as ourfathers could never do. We understand the past and foresee the future. But the most significant thing about our present situation is this:how little has this wisdom, in and of itself, done for us! It has mademen more cunning rather than more noble. Still the body is ravaged andconsumed by passion. Still men toil for others against their will, and the strong spill the blood of the weak for their ambition and thesweat of the children for their greed. Never was learning so diffusednor the content of scholarship so large as now. Yet the great citiesare as Babylon and Rome of old, where human wreckage multiplies, andhideous vices flourish, and men toil without expectancy, and livewithout hope, and millions exist--not live at all--from hand to mouth. As we survey the universal unrest of the world today and see thehorrors of war between nation and nation, and between class and class, it would not be difficult to make out a case for the thesis that thescientific and intellectual advances of the nineteenth centuryhave largely worked to make men keener and more capacious in theirsuffering. And at least this is true; just so far as the achievementof the mind has been divorced from the consecration of the spirit, in just so far knowledge has had no beneficent potency for the humanrace. 

Is it not clear, then, that preaching must deal again, never moreindeed than now, with the religion which offers a redemption from sin?This is still foolishness to the Greeks, but to those who believe itis still the power of God unto salvation. Culture is not religion. When the preacher substitutes the one for the other, he gives stonesfor bread, and the hungry sheep go elsewhere or are not fed. It isthis emasculated preaching, mulcted of its spiritual forces, whichawakes the bitterest distrust and deepest indignation that humanbeings know. They are fighting the foes of the flesh and the enemiesof the spirit, enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, standing by the open graves of their friends and kindred, sayingthere, "I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me. " And then, with all this mystery and oppression of life upon them they enter thedoors of the house of God and listen to a polite essay, are told ofthe consolations of art, reminded of the stupidity of evil, assured ofthe unreality of sin, offered the subtle satisfactions of a cultivatedintelligence. In just so far as they are genuine men and women, theyresent such preaching as an insult, a mockery and an offense. No, no;something more is needed than the humanist can offer for those who arehard-pressed participants in the stricken fields of life. 

Religious preaching, then, begins with these two things: man'ssolitary place in nature, man's inability to hold that place alone. Hence two more things are necessary as essentials of great preachingin a pagan day. The clear proclamation of the superhuman God, thetranscendent spirit who is able to control and reinforce the spirit ofman, and the setting forth of some way or some mediator, through whomman may meet and touch that Spirit so far removed yet so infinitelynear and dear to him. It is with these matters that we shall beoccupied in the next chapter. 

CHAPTER SIX

THE ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD

If the transcendent element in man which endows him with the proud iftragic sense of personality is the first message of the preacher toa chattering and volatile world, and the second is the setting forthof what this endowment demands and how pitiably man fails to meet it, then the third message is of the Rock that is higher than he, eveninclusive of his all, in whose composed and comprehensive Being hisbaffled and divided person may be gathered up, brought to its ownconsummation of self. The rivers that pour tumultuously to their oceanbed, the ascending fire ever falling backward but leaping upward tothe sun, are poor figures to express the depth and irresistible urgeof the passion in man for completeness, for repose, for power, forself-perception in self-expression, for victory and the attainmentof the end. Conscious and divided spirit that he is, man turns away, sooner or later, with utter weariness and self-disgust from the naturewhich pleases him by betraying him, which maims his person that hemay enjoy his senses, and reaches out after the other-worldly, thesupernatural, the invisible and eternal Hope and Home of the Soul. 

Humanism which bids men sufficiently find God within themselves, ifthey think they need to find Him at all, seems not to comprehend thispassion of pride and humility, this inner perception of the futilityand the blunder of the self-contained life. Life is so obviouslynot worth its brevity, its suffering, its withheld conclusions, itsrelative insignificance, if it must thus stand alone. All that cansave it, preserve to it worth and dignity, maintain its self-respectand mastery, is to find that abundant power without which confesses, certifies and seals the divinity within. 

How foredoomed to failure, then, especially in an age when men aresurmounting life by placating it, enjoying it by being easy withthemselves--how foredoomed to failure is the preaching which continuesin the world of religion this exaltation of human sufficiency andnatural values, domesticating them within the church. It is to laughto see them there! It means so transparent a surrender, so pitiable aconfession of defeat. If anything can bring the natural man into thesanctuary it is that there he has to bring his naturalness to the barof a more-than-natural standard. If he comes at all, it will notbe for entertainment and expansion but because there we insist onreverence and restraint. If church and preacher offer only a pietizedand decorous naturalism, when he can get the real thing in naked andunashamed brutality without; if they offer him only another form ofhumanistic living, he will stay away. Such preaching is as boresomeas it is unnecessary. Such exercise of devotion is essentiallysuperfluous and a rather humorous imposition upon the world. The onlything that will ever bring the natural man to listen to preaching iswhen it insists upon something more-than-the-natural and calls him toaccount regarding it; when it speaks of something different and betterfor him than this world and what it can offer. "Take my _yoke_ uponyou" is the attractive invitation, "make inner obeisance and outwardobedience to something higher than thy poor self. "

It is clear, then, that these observations have a bearing upon ourpreaching of the doctrine of God. There is a certain illogicality, something humorous, in going into a church, of all places in theworld, to be told how like we are to Him. The dull and averagepersonality, the ordinary and not very valuable man, can probablylisten indifferently and with a slow-growing hardness and dimresentment to that sort of preaching for a number of years. But thevaluable, the highly personalized people, the saints and the sinners, the great rebels and the great disciples, who are the very folk forwhom the church exists, would hate it, and they would know the finalbitterness of despair if they thought that this was so. Either saintor sinner would consider it the supreme insult, the last pitch ofinsolence, for the church to be telling them that it is true. 

For they know within themselves that it is a lie. Their one hope hangson God because His thoughts are not their thoughts, nor His ways theirways; because He seeth the end from the beginning; because in Himthere is no variableness, neither shadow that is caused by turning;because no man shall see His face and live. They, the sinners and thesaints, do not want to be told that they, within themselves, can healthemselves and that sin has no real sinfulness. That is tempting themto the final denial, the last depth of betrayal, the blurring of moralvalues, the calling of evil good and the saying that good is evil. They know that this is the unpardonable madness. In the hours whenthey, the saints and sinners, wipe their mouths and say, "We have doneno harm"; in the days when what they love is ugliness because it isugly and shameless, and reckless expression because it is so terrible, so secretly appalling, so bittersweet with the sweetness of death, they know that it is the last affront to have the church--the oneplace where men expect they will be made to face the facts--bow thesefacts out of doors. 

No, we readily grant that the religious approach to the whole truthand to final reality is like any other one, either scientific, economic, political, a partial approach. It sets forth for the mostpart only a group of facts. When it does not emphasize other facts, it does not thereby deny them. But it insists that the truth of man'sdifferences, man's helplessness which the differences reveal, andman's fate hanging therefore upon a transcendent God, are the keytruths for the religious life. It is with that aspect of life thepreacher deals, and if he fails to grapple with these problems andconsiderations, ignores these facts, his candlestick has been removed. 

The argument for a God, then, within His world, but also distinctfrom it, above its evil custom and in some sense untouched byits all-leveling life, is essential to the preservation of humanpersonality, and personality is essential to dignity, to decency, tohope. The clearest and simplest thing to be said about the Hebrew God, lofty and inaccessible Being, with whom nevertheless His purified andobedient children might have relationships, or about the "livingGod" of Greek theology, far removed from us but with whose deathlessgoodness, beauty and truth our mortality by some mediator may beendowed, is that the argument that supports such transcendence isthe argument from necessity. It is the facts of experience, the verystuff of human life, coming down alike from Hebraic and Helleniccivilization, which demand Him. Immanence and transcendence are merelytheistic terms for identity and difference. Through them is revealedand discovered personality, the "I" which is the ultimate fact ofmy consciousness. I can but reckon from the known to the unknown. The world which produced me is also, then, a cosmic identity anddifference. In that double fact is found divine personality. Butthat aspect of His Person, that portion of the fact which feedsthe imaginative and volitional life, is the glorious and savingunlikeness of God--His unthinkable and inexpressible glory; His uttercomprehension and unbelievable compassion; His justice which knows noflaw and brooks no evasion and cannot be swerved; His power whichmay not be withstood and hence is a sure and certain tenderness; Hishatred of sin, terrible and flaming, a hatred which will send sinfulmen through a thousand hells, if they will have them, and can only besaved thereby; His love for men, which is what makes Him hate theirsin and leads Him by His very nature as God to walk into hell with thesinner, suffering with him a thousand times more than the sinner isable to understand or know, --like the Paul who could not wish himself, for himself, in hell, but who did wish himself accursed of God forhis brethren's sake; like Jesus, who, in Gethsemane, would for Himselfavoid His cross, but who accepted it and was willing to hang, forsakenof God, upon it, for the lives of men, identifying Himself to theuttermost with their fate. Yes; it is such a supernal God--that Godwho is apart, incredible, awful--that the soul of humanity craves andneeds. 

Of course, here again, as throughout these discussions, we arereturning to a form of the old dualism. We cannot seem to help it. Wemay construct philosophies like Hegel's in which thesis and antithesismerge in a higher synthesis; we may use the dual view of the world asrepresenting only a stage, a present achievement in cosmic progress orhuman understanding. But that does not alter the incontestable witnessof present experience that the religious consciousness is based upon, interwoven with, the sense of the cosmic division without, and theunresolved moral dualism within the individual life. It is importantenough to remember, however, that we have rejected, at least for thisgeneration, the old scholastic theologies founded on this generalexperience. Fashions of thought change with significant facility;there is not much of the Absolute about them! Nevertheless we cannotthink with forgotten terms. Therefore ours is no mechanically dividedworld where man and God, nature and supernature, soul and body, belongto mutually exclusive territories. We do not deny the principle ofidentity. Hence we have discarded that old view of the world and allthe elder doctrines of an absentee creator, a worthless and totallydepraved humanity, a legalistic or substitutionary atonement, amagical and non-understandable Incarnation which flowed from it. Butwe are not discarding with them that other aspect of the truth, theprinciple of separateness, nor those value judgments, that perpetualvision of another nature, behind and beneath phenomena, from whichthe old dualism took its rise. It is the form which it assumed, theinterpretation of experience which it gave, not the facts themselves, obscure but stubborn as they are, which it confessed, that we havedropped. Identity and difference are still here; man is a part of hisworld, but he is also apart from it. God is in nature and in us; Godis without and other than nature and most awfully something other thanus. 

Indeed, the precise problem of the preacher today is to keep the oldsupernatural values and drop the old vocabulary with the philosophywhich induced it. We must acknowledge the universe as one, and yet beable to show that the He or the It, beyond and without the world, isits only conceivable beginning, its only conceivable end, the chiefhope of its brevity, the only stay of its idealism. It was thearbitrary and mechanical completeness of the old division, not thereality that underlay the distinction itself, which parted companywith truth and hence lost the allegiance of the mind. It was that theold dualism tried to lock up this, the most baffling of all realities, in a formula, --that was what undid it. But we shall be equally foolishif now, in the interests of a new artificial clearness, we denyanother portion of experience just as our fathers ignored certainother facts in the interests of their too well-defined systems. Wecannot hold to the old world view which would bend the modern mind tothe support of an inherited interpretation of experience and thereforewould not any longer really explain or confirm it. Neither can we holdnew views which mutilate the experience and leave out some of the mostprecious elements in it, even if in so doing we should simplify theproblem for the mind. It would be an unreal simplification; it woulddarken, not illumine, the understanding; we should never rest in it. Nor do we need to be concerned if the intellect cannot perfectlyorder or easily demonstrate the whole of the religious life, fit eachelement with a self-verifying defense and explanation. No man of theworld, to say nothing of a man of faith or imagination, has ever yettrusted to a purely intellectual judgment. 

So we reject the old dualism, its dichotomized universe, its two sortsof authority, its prodigious and arbitrary supernaturalism. But we donot reject what lay behind it. Still we wrestle with the angel, lamedthough we are by the contest, and we cannot let him go until the daybreaks and the shadows flee away. It would be easier perhaps to giveup the religious point of view, but for that ease we should pay withour life. For that swift answer, achieved by leaving out prime factorsin the problem, we should be betraying the self for whose sake aloneany answer is valuable. It does not pay to cut such Gordian knots! Ourtask, then, is to preach transcendence again, not in terms of the oldabsolutist philosophy, but in terms of the perceptions, the needs, theexperience of the human heart and mind and will which produced thatphilosophy. 

Nor is this so hard to do. Now, as always for the genuinely religioustemperament, there are abundant riches of material lying ready to itshand. It is not difficult to make transcendence real and to reveal tomen their consummate need of it when we speak of it in the languageof experience and perception. What preaching should avoid isthe abstractions of an archaic system of thought with all theirprovocative and contentious elements, the mingled dogmatism andincompleteness which any worked-out system contains. It is so foolishin the preacher to turn himself into a lay philosopher. Let him keephis insight clear, through moral discipline keep his intuitions high, his spirit pure, and then he can furnish the materials for philosophy. 

Thus an almost universal trait of the religious temperament is inits delight in beauty. Sometimes it is repressed by an irreligiousasceticism or narrowed and stunted by a literal and external faith. But when the religious man is left free, it is appropriate to hisgenius that he finds the world full of a high pleasure crowded withsound, color, fragrance, form, in which he takes exquisite delight. There is, in short, a serene and poetic naturalism, loosely called"nature-worship, " which is keenly felt by both saints and sinners. All it needs for its consecration and perfection is to help men tosee that this naturalism is vital and precious because, as a matterof fact, it is something more than naturalism, and more than pleasureobjectified. 

Recall, for instance, the splendors of the external world and thatbest season of our climate, the long, slow-breathing autumn. Whathigh pleasure we take in those hushed days of mid-November in thesoft brown turf of the uplands, the fragrant smell of mellow earth andburning leaves, the purple haze that dims and magnifies the quiescenthills. Who is not strangely moved by that profound and brooding peaceinto which Nature then gathers up the multitudinous strivings, themyriad activities of her life? Who does not love to lie, in thoseslow-waning days upon the sands which hold within their golden cup themurmuring and dreaming sea? The very amplitude of the natural world, its far-flung grace and loveliness, spread out in rolling moor andwinding stream and stately forest marching up the mountain-side, subdues and elevates the spirit of a man. 

Now, so it has always been and so men have always longed to be theworshipers of beauty. Therefore they have believed in a conscious andeternal Spirit behind it. Because again we know that personality isthe only thing we have of absolute worth. A man cannot, therefore, worship beauty, wholly relinquish himself to its high delights, if heconceives of this majestic grace as impersonal and inanimate. For thatwhich we worship must be greater than we. Behind it, therefore, justbecause it seems to us so beautiful, must be something that calls tothe hidden deeps of the soul, something intimately akin to our ownspirits. So man worships not nature, but the God of nature; senses anEternal Presence behind all gracious form. For that interprets beautyand consecrates the spell of beauty over us. This gives a finalmeaning to what the soul perceives is an utter loveliness. This givesto beauty an eternal and cosmic significance commensurate to its charmand power. As long as men's hearts surge, too, when the tide yearnsup the beach; as long as their souls become articulate when the birdssing in the dawn, and the flowers lift themselves to the sun; so longwill men believe that only from a supreme and conscious Loveliness, a joyous and a gracious Spirit could have come the beauty which is sointimately related to the spirit of a man. 

But not all saints and sinners are endowed with this joy and insight, this quick sensitiveness to beauty. Some of them cannot find theeternal and transcendent God in a loveliness which, by temperament, they either underrate or do not really see. There are a great manygood people who cannot take beauty seriously. They become wooden andsuspicious and uncomfortable whenever they are asked to perceive orenjoy a lovely object. Incredible though it seems, it appears to themto be unworthy of any final allegiance, any complete surrender, anyunquestioning joy. But there are other ways in which they, too, maycome to this sense of transcendence, other aspects of experience whichalso demand it. Most often it is just such folk who cannot perceivebeauty, because they are practical or scientific or condemned to meansurroundings, who do feel to the full the grim force and terror ofthe external world. Prudence, caution, hard sense are to the fore withthem! Very well; there, too, in these perceptions is an open door forthe human spirit to transcend its environment, get out of its physicalshell. The postulate of the absolute worth of beauty may be anargument for God drawn from subjective necessity. But the postulate ofsovereign moral Being behind the tyranny and brutality of nature isan argument of objective necessity as well; here we all need God toexplain the world. 

For we deal with what certainly appear to be objective aspects of thetruth, when we regard ourselves in our relation to the might of thephysical universe. For even as men feed upon its beauty, so they havefound it necessary to discover something which should enable them tolive above and unafraid of its material and gigantic power. We havealready seen how there appears to be a cosmic hostility to human lifewhich sobers indeed those who are intelligent enough to perceiveit. It is only the fool or the brute or the sentimentalist who isunterrified by nature. The man of reflection and imagination sees hisrace crawling ant-like over its tiny speck of slowly cooling earth andsurrounded by titanic and ruthless forces which threaten at any momentto engulf it. The religious man knows that he is infinitely greaterthan the beasts of the field or the clods of the highway. Yet Vesuviusbelches forth its liquid fire and in one day of stark terror the greatcity which was full of men is become mute and desolate. The proudliner scrapes along the surface of the frozen berg and crumples likea ship of cards. There is a splash, a cry, a white face, a liftedarm, and then all the pride and splendor, all the hopes and fears, thegorgeous dreams, the daring thoughts are gone. But the ice floats onunscarred and undeterred and the ocean tosses and heaves just as itdid before. 

Now, if this is all, if there is for us only the physical might ofnature and the world is only what it seems to be; if there is no otherGod except such as can be found within this sort of cosmic process, then human life is a sardonic mockery, and self-respect a sillyfarce, and all the heroism of the heart and the valor of the mind theunmeaning activities of an insignificant atom. The very men who willnaturally enter your churches are the ones who have always found thattheory of life intolerable. It doesn't take in all the facts. Theycould not live by it and the soul of the race, looking out upon thisuniverse of immeasurable material bulk, has challenged it and dared toassert its own superiority. 

So by this road these men come back to the transcendent God withoutwhom they cannot guard that integrity of personality which we are allset to keep. For here there is no way of believing in oneself, noway of enduring this world or our place in it and no tolerable way ofunderstanding it except we look beneath this cosmic hostility andfind our self-respect and a satisfying cosmic meaning in perceivingspiritual force, a conscious ethical purpose, which interpenetratesthe thunder and the lightning, which lies behind the stars as theymove in their perpetual courses. "Through it the most ancient heavensare fresh and strong. " Integrity of personality in such a world asthis, belief in self, without which life is dust and ashes in themouth, rest on the sublime assumption that suffusing material forceis ethical spirit, more like unto us than it, controlling force in theinterest of moral and eternal purposes. In these purposes living, notmechanical, forces play a major part. 

Of course, to all such reasoning the Kantians and humanists reply thatthese notions of an objective and eternal beauty, of a transcendentand actual Cosmic Being exist within the mind. They are purelysubjective ideas, they are bounded by the inexorable circle of ourexperience, hence they offer no proof of any objective reality whichmay in greater or less degree correspond to them. 

However, there must be a "source" of these ideas. To which thephilosophers reply, Yes, they are "primitive and necessary, " producedby reason only, without borrowing anything from the senses or theunderstanding. Yet there is no sufficient evidence that the idea ofGod is thus produced by any faculty of mind acting in entire freedomfrom external influence. On the contrary, the idea appears to owe muchto the operation of external things upon the mind; it is not then thewholly unaffected product of reason. It is a response no less thanan intuition. Like all knowledge a discovery, but the discovery ofsomething there which could be discovered, hence, in that sense, arevelation. 

It is not necessary, then, for men to meet their situation in thecosmos by saying with Kant: We will act as though there were a God, although we are always conscious that we have no real knowledge ofHim as an external being. In the light of the tragic circumstances ofhumanity, this is demanding the impossible. No sane body of men willever get sufficient inspiration for life or find an adequate solutionfor the problem of life by resting upon mere value judgments whichthey propose, by an effort of will, to put in the place of genuinereality judgments. Indeed, there is a truly scholastic naïveté, asort of solemn and unconscious humor, in seriously proposing thatmen should vitalize and consecrate their deepest purposes and mostdifficult experiences by hypothesizing mere appearances and illusions. 

Nor are we willing either to say with Santayana that all our sense ofthe beauty of the world is merely pleasure objectified and that we caninfer no eternal Beauty from it. We are aware that there cannot be animmediate knowledge of a reality distinct from ourselves, that allour knowledge must be, in the nature of the case, an idea, a mentalrepresentation, that we can never know the Thing Itself. But if webelieve, as we logically and reasonably may, that our subjective ideasare formed under the influence of objects unknown but without us, produced by stimuli, real, if not perceived apart from our ownconsciousness, then we may say that what we have is a mediate orrepresentative knowledge not only of an Eternal Being but formed underthe influence of that Being. Nor does the believer ask for more. Hedoes not expect to see the King in His beauty; he only needs to knowthat He is, that He is there. 

How self-verifying and moving, then, are the appeals ready to ourhands. As long as man with the power to question, to strive, toaspire, to endure, to suffer, lives in a universe of ruthless andoverwhelming might, so long, if he is to understand it or maintainhis reason and his dignity, he will believe it to be controlled by aSpirit beyond no less than within, from whom his spirit is derived. Itis out of the struggle to revere and conserve human personality, outof the belief in the indefectible worth and honor of selfhood thatour race has fronted a universe in arms, and pitting its soul againstnature has cried, "God is my refuge: underneath me, at the very momentwhen I am engulfed in earthquake shock or shattered in the battle'sroar, there are everlasting arms!" There is something which is toodeep for tears in the unconquerable idealism, the utter magnanimityof the faith of the human spirit in that which will answer to itself, as evidenced in this forlorn and glorious adventure of the soul. Sometimes we are constrained to ask ourselves, How can the heart ofman go so undismayed through the waste places of the world?

But, of course, the preacher's main task is to interpret man's moralexperience, which drives him out to search for the eternal inthe terms of the "other" and redeeming God. We have spoken of thedepersonalizing of religion which paganism and humanism alike havebrought upon the world. One evidence of that has been the way inwhich we have confounded the social expressions of religion with itsindividual source. We are so concerned with the effect of our religionupon the community that we have forgotten that the heart of religionis found in the solitary soul. All of which means that we have hereagain yielded to the time spirit that enfolds us and have come tothink of man as religious if he be humane. But that is not true. Noman is ever religious until he becomes devout. And indeed no man ofour sort--the saint and sinner sort--is ever long and truly humaneunless the springs of his tenderness for men are found in his everwidening and deepening gratitude to God! Hence no man was ever yetable to preach the living God until he understood that the centralneed in human life is to reconcile the individual conscience toitself, compose the anarchy of the spiritual life. Men want to behappy and be fed; but men must have inward peace. 

We swing back, therefore, to the native ground of preaching, approachthe religious problem, now, not from the aesthetic or the scientific, but from the moral angle. Here we are dealing with the most poignantof all human experiences. For it is in this intensely personal worldof moral failure and divided will that men are most acutely aware ofthemselves and hence of their need of that other-than-self beyond. The sentimental idealizing of contemporary life, the declension of thehumanist's optimism into that superficial complacency which will notsee what it does not like or what it is not expedient to see, makesone's mind to chuckle while one's heart doth ache. There is a briefheyday, its continuance dependent upon the uncontrollable factorsof outward prosperity, physical and nervous vigor, capacity forpreoccupation with the successive novelties of a diversified andcomplicated civilization, in which even men of religious temperamentcan minimize or ignore, perhaps sincerely disbelieve in, their dividedlife. Sometimes we think we may sin and be done with it. But always inthe end man must come back to this moral tragedy of the soul. Becausesin will not be done with us when we are done with it. Every evilis evil to him that does it and sooner or later we are compelledto understand that to be a sinner is the sorest and most certainpunishment for sinning. 

Then the awakening begins. Then can preaching stir the heart untildeep answereth unto deep. It can talk of the struggle with moraltemptation and weakness; of the unstable temperament which oscillatesbetween the gutter and the stars; of the perversion or abuse ofimpulses good in themselves; of the dreadful dualism of the soul. Forthese are inheritances which have made life tragic in every generationfor innumerable human beings. Whoever needed to explain to a companyof grown men and women what the cry of the soul for its release frompassion is? Every generation has its secret pessimists, brooding overthe anarchy of the spirit, the issues of a distracted life. We neednot ask with Faust, "Where is that place which men call 'Hell'?" norwait for Mephistopheles to answer, "Hell is in no set place, nor is it circumscribed, For where we are--is Hell!"

Now, it is from such central and poignant experiences as these thatmen have been constrained to look outward for a God. For these markthe very disintegration of personality, the utter dissipation ofselfhood. That is the inescapable horror of sin. That is what we meanwhen we say sinners are lost; so they are, they are lost to their ownselves. With what discriminating truth the father in the parable ofthe lost boy speaks. "This, my son, " he says, "was dead though he isalive again. " So it is with us; being is the price we pay for sinning. The more we do wrong the less we are. How then shall we become aliveagain?

It is out of the shame and passion, the utter need of the human heart, which such considerations show to be real that men have built up theirredemptive faiths. For all moral victory is conditioned upon help fromwithout. To be sure each will and soul must strive desperately, evenunto death, yet all that strife shall be in vain unless One stoopsdown from above and wrestles with us in the conflict. For the sinnermust have two things, both of them beyond his unaided getting, or hewill die. He must be released from his captivity. Who does not knowthe terrible restlessness, that grows and feeds upon itself and thendoes grow some more, of the man bound by evil and wanting to get out?The torture of sin is that it deprives us of the power to expressourselves. The cry of moral misery, therefore, is always the groaningof the prisoner. Oh, for help to break the bars of my intolerableand delicious sin that I may be myself once more! Oh, for some powergreater than I which, being greater, can set me free!

But more than the sinner wants to be free does he want to be kept. Along with the passion for liberty is the desire for surrender. Again, then, he wants something outside himself, some Being so far above theworld he lives in that it can take him, the whole of him, break hislife, shake it to its foundations, then pacify, compose it, make itanew. He is so tired of his sin; he is so weary with striving; hewants to relinquish it all; get far away from what he is; flee likea bird to the mountain; lay down his life before the One like whom hewould be. So he wants power, he wants peace. He would be himself, hewould lose himself. He prays for freedom, he longs for captivity. 

Now, out of these depths of human life, these vast antinomies of thespirit, has arisen man's belief in a Saviour-God. Sublime and awfulare the sanctions upon which it rests. Out of the extremity anddefiniteness of our need we know that He must be and we know what Hemust be like. He is the One to whom all hearts are open, all desiresknown, from whom no secrets are hid. Who could state the mingling ofdesire and dread with which men strive after, and hide from, sucha God? We want Him, yet until we have Him how we fear Him. For thatinclusive knowledge of us which is God, if only we can bear to come toit, endows us with freedom. For then all the barriers are down, thereis nothing to conceal, nothing to explain, nothing to hold back. Thenreality and appearance coincide, character and condition correspond. I am what I am before Him. Supreme reality from without answers andcompletes my own, and makes me real, and my reality makes me free. 

But if He thus knows me, and through that knowledge every innerinhibition melts in His presence and every damning secret's out, andall my life is spread like an open palm before His gaze, and I am comeat last, through many weary roads, unto my very self, why then I canlet go, I can relinquish myself. The dreadful tension's gone and inutter surrender the soul is poured out, until, spent and expressed, rest and peace flood back into the satisfied life. So the life isfree; so the life is bound. So a man stands upon his feet; so heclings to the Rock that is higher than he. So the life is cleansed inburning light; so the soul is hid in the secret of God's presence. Somen come to themselves; so men lose themselves in the Eternal. Thereis perfect freedom at last because we have attained to completecaptivity. There is power accompanied by peace. That is the gift whichthe vision of a God, morally separate from, morally other than we, brings to the inward strife, the spiritual agony of the world. Thisis the need which that faith satisfies. It is, I suppose, in thisexulting experience of moral freedom and spiritual peace which comesto those men who make the experiment of faith that they, for the mostpart, find their sufficient proof of the divine reality. Who everdoubted His existence who could cry with all that innumerable companyof many kindreds and peoples and tongues:

 "He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay; And he set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings. And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God. "

Here, then, is the preaching which is religious. How foolish are wenot to preach it more! How trivial and impertinent it is to questionthe permanence of the religious interpretation of the world! Whata revelation of personal insignificance it is to fail to revere themajesty of the devout and aspiring life! That which a starved andrestless and giddy world has lost is this pool of quietness, thistower of strength, this cleansing grace of salvation, this haven ofthe Spirit. Belief in a transcendent deity is as natural as hungerand thirst, as necessary as sleep and breathing. It was the inner andessential needs of our fathers' lives which drove them out to searchfor Him. It will be the inner and essential needs of the lives of ourchildren that shall bring them to the altar where their fathers andtheir fathers' fathers bowed down before them. Are we going to beafraid to keep its fires burning?

And so we come to our final and most difficult aspect of thistranscendent problem. We have talked of the man who is separate fromnature, and who knows himself as man because behind nature he seesthe God from whom he is separate, too. We have seen how he needsthat "otherness" in God to maintain his personality and how the gulfbetween him and that God induces that sense of helplessness whichmakes the humility and penitence of the religious life. We must comenow to our final question. How is he to bridge the gulf? By what powercan he go through with this experience we have just been relating andfind his whole self in a whole world? How can he dare to try it? Howcan he gain power to achieve it?

Perhaps this is the central difficulty of all religion. It iscertainly the one which the old Greeks felt. Plato, the father ofChristian theology, and all neo-platonists, knew that the gulf ishere between man and God and they knew that something or someone mustbridge it for us. They perceived that man, unaided, cannot leap it ata stride. We proceed, driven by the facts of life, to the point wherethe soul looks up to the Eternal and confesses the kinship, and knowsthat only in His light shall it see light, and that it only shall besatisfied when it awakes in His likeness. But how shall the connectionbe made? What shall enable us to do that mystic thing, come backto God? We have frightful handicaps in the attempt. How shall thedistrust that sin creates, the hardness that sin forms, the despairand helplessness that sin induces, the dreadful indifference whichis its expression, --how shall they be removed? How shall the unfaithwhich the mystery, the suffering, the evil of the world induce beovercome? Being a sinner I do not dare, and being ignorant I do notbelieve, to come. God is there and God wants us; like as a fatherpitieth his children so He pitieth us. He knoweth our frame, Heremembereth that we are dust. We know that is true; again we do notknow it is true. All the sin that is in us and all which that sinhas done to us insists and insists that it is not true. And the mindwonders--and wonders. What shall break that distrust; and melt awaythe hardness so that we have an open mind; and send hope into despair, hope with its accompanying confidence to act; change unfaith tobelief, until, in having faith, we thereby have that which faithbelieves in? How amazing is life! We look out into the heavenlycountry, we long to walk therein, we have so little power to stir handor foot to gain our entrance. We know it is there but all the facts ofour rebellious or self-centered life, individual and associated alike, are against it and therefore we do not know that it is there. 

Philosophy and reason and proofs of logic cannot greatly help us here. No man was ever yet argued into the kingdom of God. We cannot convinceourselves of our souls. For we are creatures, not minds; lives, notideas. Only life can convince life; only a Person but, of course, a transcendent person that is more like Him than like us, can makethat Other-who-lives certain and sure for us. This necessity for someintermediary who shall be a human yet more-than-human proof thatGod is and that man may be one with Him; this reinforcing of the oldargument from subjective necessity by its verification in the actualstuff of objective life, has been everywhere sought by men. 

Saviours, redeemers, mediators, then, are not theological manikins. They are not superfluous figures born of a mistaken notion ofthe universe. They are not secondary gods, concessions to ourchildishness. They, too, are called for in the nature of things. Butto really mediate they must have the qualities of both that which theytransmit and of those who receive the transmission. Most of all theymust have that "other" quality, so triumphant and self-verifying thatseeing it constrains belief. A mediator wholly unlike ourselves wouldbe a meaningless and mocking figure. But a mediator who was chieflylike ourselves would be a contradiction in terms!

So we come back again to the old problem. Man needs some proof that hewho knows that he is more than dust can meet with that other life fromwhose star his speck has been derived. Something has got to give himpowerful reinforcement for this supreme effort of will, of faith. Ifonly he could know that he and it ever have met in the fields of timeand space, then he would be saved. For that would give him the will tobelieve; that would prove the ultimate; give him the blessed assurancewhich heals the wounds of the heart. Then he would have power tosurrender. Then he would no longer fear the gulf, he would walk outonto it and know that as he walked he was with God. 

Some such reasoning as this ought to make clear the place that Jesusholds in Christian preaching and why we call Him Saviour and whysalvation comes for us who are of His spiritual lineage, through Him. Of course it is true that Jesus shows to all discerning eyes what manmay be. But that is not the chief secret of His power; that is notwhy churches are built to Him and His cross still fronts, defeatedbut unconquerable, our pagan world. Jesus was more-than-nature andmore-than-human. It is this "other" quality, operative and objectifiedin His experience within our world, which gives Him the absolutenesswhich makes Him indispensable and precious. The mystery is deepesthere. For here we transfer the antinomy from thought to conduct; frominner perception to one Being's actual experience. Here, in Him, wesay we see it resolved into its higher synthesis in actual operation. 

Here, then, we can almost look into it. Yet when we do gaze, our eyesdazzle, our minds swerve, it is too much. It is not easy, indeed, atthe present time it seems to be impossible to reconcile the Christof history with the Christ of experience. Yet there would be neitherright nor reason in saying that the former was more of a realitythan the latter. And all the time the heart from which great thoughtsarise, "the heart which has its reasons of which the mind knowsnothing, " says, Here in Him is the consummate quality, the absolutenote of life. Here the impossible has been accomplished. Here theopposites meet and the contradictions blend. Here is something soincredible that it is true. 

Of course, Jesus is of us and He is ours. That is true and it isinexpressibly sweet to remember it. Again, to use our old solecism, that is the lesser part of the truth; the greater part, for men ofreligion, is that Jesus is of God, that He belongs to Him. His chiefoffice for our world has not been to show us what men can be like; ithas been to give us the vision of the Eternal in a human face. For ifHe does reveal God to man then He must hold, as President Tucker says, the quality and substance of the life which He reveals. 

Here is where He differs immeasurably from even a Socrates. What menwant most to believe about Jesus is this, that when we commune withHim, we are with the infinite; that man's just perception of theEternal Spirit, his desire to escape from time into reality, may befulfilled in Jesus. That is the Gospel: Come unto Him, all ye thatlabor and are heavy laden, for He will give you rest. Whosoeverdrinketh of this water shall thirst again. But whosoever drinketh ofthe water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water thatI shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up intoeverlasting life. If the Son therefore shall make you free, you shallbe free indeed. 

Now, if all this is true, what is the religious preaching of Jesus, what aspect of His person meets the spiritual need? Clearly, it is Histranscendence. It is not worthy of us to evade it because we cannotexplain it. Surely what has hastened our present paganism has been theremoval from the forefront of our consciousness of Jesus the Saviour, the divine Redeemer, the absolute Meeter of an absolute need. Of suchpreaching of Jesus we have today very little. The pendulum has swungfar to the left, to the other exclusive emphasis, too obviouslyinfluenced by the currents of the day. It was perhaps inevitablethat He should for a time drop out of His former place in Christianpreaching under this combined humanistic and naturalistic movement. But it means that again we have relinquished those values which havemade Jesus the heart of humanity. 

Of course, He was a perfected human character inspired above allmen by the spirit of God, showing the capacity of humanity to holdDivinity. This is what Mary celebrates in her paean, "He that ismighty has magnified me and holy is his name. " But is this what menhave passionately adored in Jesus? Has love of Him been self-love? Isthis why He has become the sanctuary of humanity? I think not. We havefor the moment no good language for the other conception of Him. Heis indeed the pledge of what we may be, but how many of us would everbelieve that pledge unless there was something else in Him, more thanwe, that guaranteed it? What, as President Tucker asks, is this powerwhich shall make "maybe" into "is" for us? "Without doubt the trend ofmodern thought and faith is toward the more perfect identificationof Christ with humanity. We cannot overestimate the advantage toChristianity of this tendency. The world must know and feel thehumanity of Jesus. But it makes the greatest difference in resultwhether the ground of the common humanity is in Him or in us. Toborrow the expressive language of Paul, was He 'created' in us? Or arewe 'created' in Him? Grant the right of the affirmation that 'thereis no difference in kind between the divine and the human'; allow theinterchange of terms so that one may speak of the humanity of Godand the divinity of man; appropriate the motive which lies in theseattempts to bring God and man together and thus to explain thepersonality of Jesus Christ, it is still a matter of infinite concernwhether His home is in the higher or the lower regions of divinity. After all, very little is gained by the transfer of terms. Humanityis in no way satisfied with its degree of divinity. We are still asanxious as ever to rise above ourselves and in this anxiety we want toknow concerning our great helper, whether He has in Himself anythingmore than the possible increase of a common humanity. What is Hispower to lift and how long may it last? Shall we ever reach His level, become as divine as He, or does He have part in the absolute andinfinite? This question may seem remote in result but it is everythingin principle. The immanence of Christ has its present meaning andvalue because of His transcendence. "[40]

[Footnote 40: "The Satisfaction of Humanity in Jesus Christ, " _AndoverReview_, January, 1893. ]

Preaching today is not moving on the level of this discussion, isneither asking nor attempting to answer its questions. Great preachingin some way makes men see the end of the road, not merely thedirection in which it travels. The power to do that we have lost if wehave lost the more-than-us in Jesus. Humanity, unaided, cannot lookto that end which shall explain the beginning. And does Jesus meanvery much to us if He is only "Jesus"? Why do we answer the greatinvitation, "Come unto me"? Because He is something other than us?Because He calls us away from ourselves? back to home? Most of usno longer know how to preach on that plane of experience or from thepoint of view where such questions are serious and real. Our fathershad a world view and a philosophy which made such preaching easy. Buttheir power did not lie in that world view; it lay in this vision ofJesus which produced the view. Is not this the vision which we need?

CHAPTER SEVEN

WORSHIP AS THE CHIEF APPROACH TO TRANSCENDENCE

Whatever becomes the inward and the invisible grace of the Christiancommunity such will be its outward and visible form. Those regulativeideas and characteristic emotions which determine in any age thequality of its religious experience will be certain to shape thenature and conduct of its ecclesiastical assemblies. Their influencewill show, both in the liturgical and homiletical portions of publicworship. If anything further were needed, therefore, to indicatethe secularity of this age, its substitutes for worship and itscharacteristic type of preaching would, in themselves, reveal thesituation. So we venture to devote these closing discussions to someobservations on the present state of Protestant public worship and theprevailing type of Protestant preaching. For we may thus ascertainhow far those ideas and perceptions which an age like ours needsare beginning to find an expression and what means may be taken toincrease their influence through church services in the community. 

We begin, then, in this chapter, not with preaching, but with worship. It seems to me clear that the chief office of the church is liturgicalrather than homiletical. Or, if that is too technical a statement, it may be said that the church exists to set forth and foster thereligious life and that, because of the nature of that life, it findsits chief opportunity for so doing in the imaginative rather than therationalizing or practical areas of human expression. Even as MichaelAngelo, at the risk of his life, purloined dead bodies that hemight dissect them and learn anatomy, so all disciples of the art ofreligion need the discipline of intellectual analysis and of knowledgeof the facts of the religious experience if they are to be leaders infaith. There is a toughness of fiber needed in religious people thatcan only come through such mental discipline. But anatomists are notsculptors. Michael Angelo was the genius, the creative artist, notbecause he understood anatomy, but chiefly because of those as yetindefinable and secret processes of feeling and intuition in man, which made him feel rather than understand the pity and the terror, the majesty and the pathos of the human spirit and reveal them insignificant and expressive line. Knowledge supported rather thanrivaled insight. In the same way, both saint and sinner need religiousinstruction. Nevertheless they are what they are because they arefirst perceptive rather than reasoning beings. They both owe, the onehis salvation, the other his despair, to the fact that they have seenthe vision of the holy universe. Both are seers; the saint has givenhis allegiance to the heavenly vision. The sinner has resolved to bedisobedient unto it. Both find their first and more natural approachto religious truth, therefore, through the creative rather than thecritical processes, the emotional rather than the informative powers. 

There are, of course, many in our churches who would dissent fromthis opinion. It is characteristic of Protestantism, as of humanism ingeneral, that it lays its chief emphasis upon the intelligence. If wego to church to practice the presence of God, must we not first knowwho and what this God is whose presence with us we are there askedto realize? So most Protestant services are more informative thaninspirational. Their attendants are assembled to hear about God ratherto taste and see that the Lord is good. They analyze the religiousexperience rather than enjoy it; insensibly they come to regardthe spiritual life as a proposition to be proved, not a power tobe appropriated. Hence our services generally consist of some"preliminary exercises, " as we ourselves call them, leading up to theclimax--when it is a climax--of the sermon. 

Here is a major cause for the declension of the influence ofProtestant church services. They go too much on the assumption thatmen already possess religion and that they come to church to discussit rather than to have it provided. They call men to be listenersrather than participants in their temples. Of course, one may findGod through the mind. The great scholar, the mathematician or theastronomer may cry with Kepler, "Behold, I think the thoughts of Godafter him!" Yet a service which places its chief emphasis upon theappeal to the will through instruction has declined from that realmof the absolutes where religion in its purest form belongs. For sincepreaching makes its appeal chiefly through reason, it thereby attemptsto produce only a partial and relative experience in the life of thelistener. It impinges upon the will by a slow process. Sometimes onegets so deadly weary of preaching because, in a world like ours, thereasonable process is so unreasonable. That's a half truth, of course, but one that the modern world needs to learn. 

Others would dissent from our position by saying that service, thelife of good will, is a sufficient worship. The highest adoration isto visit the widows and the fatherless in their affliction. _Laborareest orare_. What we do speaks so loud God does not care for whatwe say. True: but the value of what we do for God depends upon thegodliness of the doer and where shall he find that godliness save inthe secret place of the Most High? And the greatest gift we can giveour fellows is to bring them into the divine presence. "There is, "says Dr. William Adams Brown, "a service that is directed to thesatisfaction of needs already in existence, and there is a servicethat is itself the creator of new needs which enlarge the capacity ofthe man to whom it would minister. To this larger service religionis committed, and the measure of a man's fitness to render it is hiscapacity for worship. " But no one can give more than he has. If we areto offer such gifts we must ourselves go before and lead. To createthe atmosphere in which the things of righteousness and holinessseem to be naturally exalted above the physical, the commercial, thedomestic affairs of men; to lift the level of thought and feelingto that high place where the spiritual consciousness contributes itsinsights and finds a magnanimous utterance--is there anything that ourworld needs more? There are noble and necessary ministries to the bodyand the mind, but most needed, and least often offered, there is aministry to the human spirit. This is the gift which the worshiper canbring. Knowledge of God may not be merely or even chiefly comprehendedin a concept of the intelligence; knowledge of Him is that vitalizingconsciousness of the Presence felt in the heart, which opens our eyesthat we may see that the mountain is full of horses and chariots offire round about us and that they who fight with us are more thanthey who fight with them. This is the true and central knowledge thatprivate devotion and public worship alone can give; preaching canbut conserve and transmit this religious experience through the mind, worship creates it in the heart. Edwards understood that neitherthought nor conduct can take its place. "The sober performance ofmoral duty, " said he, "is no substitute for passionate devotion to aBeing with its occasional moments of joy and exaltation. "

We should then begin with worship. A church which does not emphasizeit before everything else is trying to build the structure of aspiritual society with the corner stone left out. Let us try, first of all, to define it. An old and popular definition of thedescriptive sort says that "worship is the response of the soul tothe consciousness of being in the presence of God. " A more moderndefinition, analyzing the psychology of worship, defines it as "theunification of consciousness around the central controlling idea ofGod, the prevailing emotional tone being that of adoration. " Evidentlywe mean, then, by worship the appeal to the religious will throughfeeling and the imagination. Worship is therefore essentiallycreative. Every act of worship seeks to bring forth then and therea direct experience of God through high and concentrated emotion. It fixes the attention upon Him as an object in Himself supremelydesirable. The result of this unified consciousness is peace and theresult of this peace and harmony is a new sense of power. Worship, then, is the attainment of that inward wholeness for which in one formor another all religion strives by means of contemplation. So by itsvery nature it belongs to the class of the absolutes. 

Many psychologies of religion define this contemplation as aesthetic, and make worship a higher form of delight. This appears to me a quitetypical non-religious interpretation of a religious experience. Thereare four words which need explaining when we talk of worship. Theyare: wonder, admiration, awe, reverence. Wonder springs from therecognition of the limitations of our knowledge; it is an experienceof the mind. Admiration is the response of a growing intelligence tobeauty, partly an aesthetic, partly an intellectual experience. Thesedistinctions Coleridge had in mind in his well-known sentence "Inwonder all philosophy began; in wonder it ends; and admiration fillsup the interspace. But the first wonder is the offspring of ignorance;the last is the parent of adoration. " Awe is the sense-perceptionof the stupendous power and magnitude of the universe; it is, quiteliterally, a godly fear. But it is not ignoble nor cringing, itis just and reasonable, the attitude, toward the Whole, of acomprehensive sanity. 

Thus "I would love Thee, O God, if there were no heaven, _and if therewere no hell, I would fear Thee no less_. " Reverence is devotion togoodness, sense of awe-struck loyalty to a Being manifestly under theinfluence of principles higher than our own. [41] Now it is with theselast two, awe and reverence, rather than wonder and admiration, thatworship has to do. 

[Footnote 41: For a discussion of these four words see Allen, _Reverence as the Heart of Christianity_, pp. 253 ff. ]

Hence the essence of worship is not aesthetic contemplation. Withoutdoubt worship does gratify the aesthetic instinct and most properlyso. There is no normal expression of man's nature which has not itsaccompanying delight. The higher and more inclusive the expressionthe more exquisite, of course, the delight. But that pleasure is theby-product, not the object, of worship. It itself springs partly fromthe awe of the infinite and eternal majesty which induces the desireto prostrate oneself before the Lord our Maker. "I have heard of Theeby the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefore Iabhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. " It also springs partlyfrom passionate devotion of a loyal will to a holy Being. "Behold, asthe eyes of servants look unto the hand of their masters and as theeyes of a maid unto the hand of her mistress; so our eyes wait uponthe Lord. " Thus reverence is the high and awe-struck hunger forspiritual communion. "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?"

There is a noble illustration of the nature and the uses of worshipin the Journals of Jonathan Edwards, distinguished alumnus of YaleCollege, and the greatest mind this hemisphere has produced. Youremember what he wrote in them, as a youth, about the young woman wholater became his wife: "They say there is a young lady in New Havenwho is beloved of that great Being who made and rules the world, andthat there are certain seasons in which this great Being in some wayor other invisible comes to her and fills her mind with exceedingsweet delight, and that she hardly cares for anything except tomeditate on Him. Therefore if you present all the world before her, with the richest of its treasures, she disregards and cares not forit and is unmindful of any pain or affliction. She has a strangesweetness in her mind, and singular purity in her affections, is mostjust and conscientious in all her conduct, and you could not persuadeher to do anything wrong or sinful if you would give her all theworld, lest she should offend this great Being. She is of wonderfulcalmness and universal benevolence of mind, especially after thisgreat God has manifested Himself to her mind. She will sometimes goabout from place to place singing sweetly and seems to be always fullof joy and pleasure, and no one knows for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and groves, and seems to have some one invisiblealways conversing with her. "

Almost every element of worship is contained in this description. First, we have a young human being emotionally conscious of thepresence of God, who in some way or other directly but invisibly comesto her. Secondly, we have her attention so fixed on the adoration ofGod that she hardly cares for anything except to meditate upon Him. Thirdly, as the result of this worshipful approach to religiousreality, we have the profound peace and harmony, the _summum bonum_of existence, coupled with strong moral purpose which characterizeher life. Here, then, is evidently the unification of consciousness inhappy awe and the control of destiny through meditation upon infinitematters, that is, through reverent contemplation of God. Is it notone of those ironies of history wherewith fate is forever mockingand teasing the human spirit, that the grandson of this lady and ofJonathan Edwards should have been Aaron Burr?

Clearly, then, the end of worship is to present to the mind, throughthe imagination, one idea, majestic and inclusive. So it presents itchiefly through high and sustained feeling. Worship proceeds on theunderstanding that one idea, remaining almost unchanged and holdingthe attention for a considerable length of time, so directs theemotional processes that thought and action are harmonized with it. If one reads the great prayers of the centuries they indicate, for themost part, an unconscious understanding of this psychology of worship. Take, for instance, this noble prayer of Pusey's. 

"Let me not seek out of Thee what I can find only in Thee, O Lord, peace and rest and joy and bliss, which abide only in thine abidingjoy. Lift up my soul above the weary round of harassing thoughts, toThy eternal presence. Lift up my soul to the pure, bright, serene, radiant atmosphere of Thy presence, that there I may breathe freely, there repose in Thy love, there be at rest from myself and from allthings that weary me, and thence return arrayed with Thy peace, to doand bear what shall please Thee. "

This prayer expresses the essence of worship which is the seeking, through the fixation of attention, not the delight but rather thepeace and purity which can only be found in the consciousness of God. This peace is the necessary outcome of the indwelling presence. Itensues when man experiences the radiant atmosphere of the divinecommunion. 

The same clear expression of worship is found in another familiar andnoble prayer, that of Johann Arndt. Here, too, are phrases descriptiveof a unified consciousness induced by reverent loyalty. 

"Ah, Lord, to whom all hearts are open, Thou canst govern the vesselof my soul far better than can I. Arise, O Lord, and command thestormy wind and the troubled sea of my heart to be still, and at peacein Thee, that I may look up to Thee undisturbed and abide in unionwith Thee, my Lord. Let me not be carried hither and thither bywandering thoughts, but forgetting all else let me see and hear Thee. Renew my spirit, kindle in me Thy light that it may shine within me, and my heart burn in love and adoration for Thee. Let Thy Holy Spiritdwell in me continually, and make me Thy temple and sanctuary, andfill me with divine love and life and light, with devout and heavenlythoughts, with comfort and strength, with joy and peace. "

Thus here one sees in the high contemplation of a transcendent Godthe subduing and elevating of the human will, the restoration andcomposure of the moral life. Finally, in a prayer of St. Anselm'sthere is a sort of analysis of the process of worship. 

"O God, Thou _art_ life, wisdom, truth, bounty and blessedness, theeternal, the only true Good. My God and my Lord, Thou art my hope andmy heart's joy. I confess with thanksgiving that Thou hast made me inThine image, that I may direct all my thoughts to Thee and love Thee. Lord, make me to know Thee aright that I may more and more love andenjoy and possess Thee. "

One cannot conclude these examples of worshipful expression withoutquoting a prayer of Augustine, which is, I suppose, the most perfectbrief petition in all the Christian literature of devotion and whichgives the great psychologist's perception of the various steps inthe unification of the soul with the eternal Spirit through sublimeemotion. 

"Grant, O God, that we may desire Thee, and desiring Thee, seek Thee, and seeking Thee, find Thee, and finding Thee, be satisfied with Theeforever. "

I think one may see, then, why worship as distinct from preaching, or the hearing of preaching, is the first necessity of the religiouslife. It unites us as nothing else can do with God the whole and Godthe transcendent. The conception of God is the sum total of humanneeds and desires harmonized, unified, concretely expressed. It is thefaith of the worshiper that this concept is derived from a real andobjective Being in some way corresponding to it. No one can measurethe influence of such an idea when it dominates the consciousness ofany given period. It can create and set going new desires and habits, it can minish and repress old ones, because this idea carries, withits transcendent conception, the dynamic quality which belongs tothe idea of perfect power. But this transcendent conception, beingessentially of something beyond, without and above ourselves can onlybe "realized" through the feeling and the imagination, whose provinceit is to deal with the supersensuous values, with the fringes ofunderstanding, with the farthest bounds of knowledge. These make thespringboard, so to speak, from which man dares to launch himself intothat sea of the infinite, which we can neither understand nor measure, but which nevertheless we may perceive and feel, which in some sensewe know to be there. 

So, if we deal first with worship, we are merely beginning at thebeginning and starting at the bottom. And, in the light of thisobservation, it is appalling to survey the non-liturgical churchestoday and see the place that public devotion holds in them. It is nottoo much, I think, to speak of the collapse of worship in Protestantcommunities. No better evidence of this need be sought than in thenature of the present attempts to reinstate it. They have a naïveté, an incongruity, that can only be explained on the assumption of theirimpoverished background. 

This situation shows first in the heterogeneous character of ourexperiments. We are continually printing on our churches' calendarswhat we usually call "programs, " but which are meant to be ordersof worship. We are also forever changing them. There is nothinginevitable about their order; they have no intelligible, self-verifying procedure. Anthems are inserted here and there withoutany sense of the progression or of the psychology of worship. Gloriasare sung sometimes with the congregation standing up and sometimeswhile they are sitting down. There is no lectionary to determine acomprehensive and orderly reading of Scripture, not much sequence ofthought or progress of devotion either in the read or the extemporeprayers. There is no uniformity of posture. There are two historicattitudes of reverence when men are addressing the Almighty. They arethe standing upon one's feet or the falling upon one's knees. Forthe most part we neither stand nor kneel; we usually loll. Some of uscompromise by bending forward to the limiting of our breath and thediscomfort of our digestion. It is too little inducive to physicalease or perhaps too derogatory to our dignity to kneel before the Lordour Maker. All this seems too much like the efforts of those who haveforgotten what worship really is and are trying to find for it somecomfortable or attractive substitute. 

Second: we show our inexperience by betraying the confusionof aesthetic and ethical values as we strive for variety andentertainment in church services; we build them around wonder andadmiration, not around reverence and awe. But we are mistaken ifwe suppose that men chiefly desire to be pleasantly entertained orextraordinarily delighted when they go into a church. They go therebecause they desire to enter a Holy Presence; they want to approachOne before whom they can be still and know that He is God. All"enrichments" of a service injected into it here and there, designedto make it more attractive, to add color and variety, to arrestthe attention of the senses are, as ends, beside the point, and ourdependence upon them indicates the unhappy state of worship in ourday. That we do thus make our professional music an end in itself isevident from our blatant way of advertising it. In the same way weadvertise sermon themes, usually intended to startle the pious andprovoke the ungodly. We want to arouse curiosity, social or politicalinterest, to achieve some secular reaction. We don't advertise thattomorrow in our church there is to be a public worship of God, andthat everything that we are going to do will be in the awe-strucksense that He is there. We are afraid that nobody would come if wemerely did that!

What infidels we are! Why are we surprised that the world is passingus by? We say and we sing a great many things which it is incredibleto suppose we would address to God if we really thought He werepresent. Yet anthems and congregational singing are either a sacrificesolemnly and joyously offered to God or else all the singing is less, and worse, than nothing in a church service. But how often sentimentaland restless music, making not for restraint and reverence, notfor the subduing of mind and heart but for the expression of thoseexpansive and egotistical moods which are of the essence of romanticsinging, is what we employ. There is a great deal of truly religiousmusic, austere in tone, breathing restraint and reverence, quietlywritten. The anthems of Palestrina, Anerio, Viadana, Vittoria amongthe Italians; of Bach, Haydn, Handel, Mozart among the Germans; andof Tallis, Gibbons and Purcell among the English, are all of the trulydevout order. Yet how seldom are the works of such men heard in ourchurches, even where they employ professional singers at substantialsalaries. We are everywhere now trying to give our churches splendidand impressive physical accessories, making the architecture more andmore stately and the pews more and more comfortable! Thus we attemptan amalgam of a mediaeval house of worship with an American domesticinterior, adoring God at our ease, worshiping Him in armchairs, offering prostration of the spirit, so far as it can be achieved alongwith indolence of the body. 

So we advertise and concertize and have silver vases and costlyflowers and conventional ecclesiastical furniture. But we still hold a"small-and-early" in the vestibule before service and a "five o'clock"in the chapel afterward. Sunday morning church is a this-worldfunction with a pietized gossip and a decorous sort of sociable withan intellectual fillip thrown in. Thus we try to make our servicesattractive to the secular instincts, the non-religious things, inman's nature. We try to get him into the church by saying, "You willfind here what you find elsewhere. " It's rather illogical. The churchstands for something different. We say, "You will like to come and beone of us because we are not different. " The answer is, "I can get thethings of this world better in the world, where they belong, than withyou. " Thus we have naturalized our very offices of devotion! Hencethe attempts to revive worship are incongruous and inconsistent. Hencethey have that sentimental and accidental character which is thesign of the amateur. They do not bring us very near to the heavenlycountry. It might be well to remember that the servant of Jahweh dothnot cry nor lift up his voice nor cause it to be heard in the streets. 

Now, there are many reasons for this anomalous situation. One of themis our inheritance of a deep-rooted Puritan distrust of a liturgicalservice. That distrust is today a fetish and therefore much morepotent that it was when it was a reason. Puritanism was born in theReformation; it came out from the Roman church, where worship wasregarded as an end in itself. To Catholic believers worship is acontribution to God, pleasing to Him apart from any effect it may haveon the worshiper. Such a theory of it is, of course, open to graveabuse. Sometimes it led to indifference as to the effect of theworship upon the moral character of the communicant, so that worshipcould be used, not to conquer evil, but to make up for it, and thussin became as safe as it was easy. Inevitably also such a theoryof worship often degenerated into an utter formalism which madehyprocrisy and unreality patent, until the _hoc est corpus_ of themass became the hocus-pocus of the scoffer. 

Here is a reason, once valid because moral, for our present situation. Yet it must be confessed that again, as so often, we are doing whatthe Germans call "throwing out the baby with the bath, " namely, repudiating a defect or the perversion of an excellence and, in sodoing, throwing away that excellence itself. It is clear that noProtestant is ever tempted today to consider worship as its own reasonand its own end. We are, in a sense, utilitarian ritualists. Worshipto us is as valuable as it is valid because it is the chief avenueof spiritual insight, a chief means of awakening penitence, obtainingforgiveness, growing in grace and love. These are the ultimates; theseare pleasing to God. 

A second reason, however, for our situation is not ethical andessential, but economic and accidental. Our fathers' communities werea slender chain of frontier settlements, separated from an ancientcivilization by an unknown and dangerous sea on the one hand, menacedby all the perils of a virgin wilderness upon the other. All theirlife was simple to the point of bareness; austere, reduced to themost elemental necessities. Inevitably the order of their worshipcorresponded to the order of their society. It is certain, I think, that the white meeting-house with its naked dignity, the old servicewith its heroic simplicity, conveyed to the primitive society whichproduced them elements both of high formality and conscious reverencewhich they could not possibly offer to our luxurious, sophisticatedand wealthy age. 

Is it not a dangerous thing to have brought an ever increasingformality and recognition of a developed and sophisticated communityinto our social and intellectual life but to have allowed ourreligious expression to remain so anachronistic? Largely for socialand economic reasons we send most of our young men and young womento college. There we deliberately cultivate in them the perceptionof beauty, the sense of form, various expressions of the imaginativelife. But how much has our average non-liturgical service to offerto their critically trained perceptions? Our church habits are prettylargely the transfer into the sanctuary of the hearty conventions ofmiddle-class family life. The relations in life which are preciousto such youth, the intimate, the mystical and subtle ones, get smallrecognition or expression. A hundred agencies outside the church arestimulating in the best boys and girls of the present generation finesensibilities, critical standards, the higher hungers. Our services, chiefly instructive and didactic, informal and easy in character, irritate them and make them feel like truculent or uncomfortablemisfits. 

A third reason for the lack of corporate or public offices of devotionin our services lies in the intellectual character of the Protestantcenturies. We have seen how they have been centuries of individualism. Character has been conceived of as largely a personal affair expressedin personal relationships. The believer was like Christian in Bunyan's_Pilgrim's Progress_. He started for the Heavenly Country becausehe was determined to save his own soul. When he realized that he wasliving in the City of Destruction it did not occur to him that, asa good man, he must identify his fate with it. On the contrary, hedeserted wife and children with all possible expedition and got himout and went along through the Slough of Despond, up to the narrowgate, to start on the way of life. It was a chief glory of mediaevalsociety that it was based upon corporate relationships. Its cathedralswere possible because they were the common house of God for everyelement of the community. Family and class and state were dominantfactors then. But we have seen how, in the Renaissance and theRomantic Movement, individualism supplanted these values. Now, Protestantism was contemporary with that new movement, indeed, a partof it. Its growing egotism and the colossal egotism of the modernworld form a prime cause for the impoverishment of worship inProtestant churches. 

And so this brings us, then, to the real reason for our devotionalimpotence, the one to which we referred in the opening sentences ofthe chapter. It is essentially due to the character of the regulativeideas of our age. It lies in that world view whose expressions inliterature, philosophy and social organizations we have beenreviewing in these pages. The partial notion of God which our age hasunconsciously made the substitute for a comprehensive understanding ofHim is essentially to blame. For since the contemporary doctrine isof His immanence, it therefore follows that it is chiefly throughobservation of the natural world and by interpretation of contemporaryevents that men will approach Him if they come to Him at all. Moreover, our humanism, in emphasizing the individual and exalting hisself-sufficiency, has so far made the mood of worship alien and theneed of it superfluous. The overemphasis upon preaching, the generalpassion of this generation for talk and then more talk, and thenendless talk, is perfectly intelligible in view of the regulativeideas of this generation. It seeks its understanding of the worldchiefly in terms of natural and tangible phenomena and chiefly bymeans either of critical observation or of analytic reasoning. Hencepreaching, especially that sort which looks for the divine principlein contemporary events, has been to the fore. But worship, which findsthe divine principle in something more and other than contemporaryevents--which indeed does not look outward to "events" at all--hasbeen thrown into the background. 

It seems to me clear, then, that if we are to emphasize thetranscendent elements in religion; if they represent, as we have beencontending, the central elements of the religious experience, itscreative factors, then the revival of worship will be a prime stepin creating a more truly spiritual society. I am convinced that ahomilizing church belongs to a secularizing age. One cannot forgetthat the ultimate, I do not say the only, reason for the foundingof the non-liturgical churches was the rise of humanism. Onecannot fail to see the connection between humanistic doctrine andmoralistic preaching, or between the naturalism of the moment andthe mechanicalizing of the church. "The Christian congregation, "said Luther, child of the humanistic movement, "should never assembleexcept the word of God be preached. " "In other countries, " says oldIsaac Taylor, "the bell calls people to worship; in Scotland itcalls them to a preachment. " And one remembers the justice of CharlesKingsley's fling at the Dissenters that they were "creatures whowent to church to hear sermons!" It would seem evident, then, that arenewal of worship would be the logical accompaniment of a return todistinctly religious values in society and church. 

What can we do, then, better for an age of paganism than to cultivatethis transcendent consciousness? Direct men away from God theuniversal and impersonal to God the particular and intimate. Nothingis more needed for our age than to insist upon the truth that thereare both common and uncommon, both secular and sacred worlds; thatthese are not contradictory; that they are complementary; that theyare not identical. It is the church's business to insist that menmust live in the world of the sacred, the uncommon, the particular, in order to be able to surmount and endure the secular, the common andthe universal. It is her business to insist that through worshipall this can be accomplished. But can worship be taught? Is not thedevotee, like the poet or the lover or any other genius, born andnot made? Well, whether it can be taught or not, it at least can becultivated and developed, and there are three very practical ways inwhich this cultivation can be brought about. 

One of them is by paying intelligent attention to the physicalsurroundings of the worshiper. The assembly room for worship obviouslyshould not be used for other purposes; all its suggestions andassociations should be of one sort and that sort the highest. Quiteaside from the question of taste, it is psychologically indefensibleto use the same building, and especially the same room in thebuilding, for concerts, for picture shows, for worship. Here we atonce create a distracted consciousness; we dissipate attention; wedeliberately make it harder for men and women to focus upon one, andthat the most difficult, if the most precious, mood. 

For the same reason, the physical form of the room should be onethat does not suggest either the concert hall or the playhouse, butsuggests rather a long and unbroken ecclesiastical tradition. Untilthe cinema was introduced into worship, we were vastly improving inthese respects, but now we are turning the morning temple into anevening showhouse. I think we evince a most impertinent familiaritywith the house of God! And too often the church is planned so thatit has no privacies or recesses, but a hideous publicity pervades itsevery part. We adorn it with stenciled frescoes of the same patternswhich we see in hotel lobbies and clubs; we hang up maps behind thereading desk; we clutter up its platform with grand pianos. 

It is a mere matter of good taste and good psychology to begin ourpreparation for a ministry of worship by changing all this. Thereshould be nothing in color or ornament which arouses the restless moodor distracts the eye. Severe and simple walls, restrained and devoutfigures in glass windows, are only to be tolerated. Descriptivewindows, attempting in a most untractable medium a sort of naïverealism, are equally an aesthetic and an ecclesiastical offense. Figures of saints or great religious personages should be typical, impersonal, symbolic, not too much like this world and the things ofit. There is a whole school of modern window glass distinguished byits opulence and its realism. It ought to be banished from houses ofworship. Since it is the object of worship to fix the attention uponone thing and that thing the highest, the room where worship is heldshould have its own central object. It may be the Bible, idealized asthe word of God; it may be the altar on which stands the Cross of theeternal sacrifice. But no church ought to be without one fixed pointto which the eye of the body is insensibly drawn, thereby making iteasier to follow it with the attention of the mind and the wishes ofthe heart. At the best, our Protestant ecclesiastical buildings areall empty! There are meeting-houses, not temples assembly rooms, not shrines. There is apparently no sense in which we are willingto acknowledge that the Presence is on their altar. But at least theattention of the worshiper within them may focus around some symbol ofthat Presence, may be fixed on some outward sign which will help theinward grace. 

But second: our chief concern naturally must be with the content ofthe service of worship itself, not with its physical surroundings. Andhere then are two things which may be said. First, any formal order ofworship should be historic; it should have its roots deep in the past;whatever else is true of a service of worship it ought not to suggestthat it has been uncoupled from the rest of time and allowed to runwild. Now, this means that an order of worship, basing itself on thedevotion of the ages, will use to some extent their forms. I do notsee how anyone would wish to undertake to lead the same company ofpeople week by week in divine worship without availing himself of thehelp of written prayers, great litanies, to strengthen and complementthe spontaneous offices of devotion. There is something almostincredible to me in the assumption that one man can, supposedlyunaided, lead a congregation in the emotional expression of itsdeepest life and desires without any assistance from the greatsacramentaries and liturgies of the past. Christian literature is richwith a great body of collects, thanksgivings, confessions, variousspecial petitions, which gather up the love and tears, the visionand the anguish of many generations. These, with their phrases madeunspeakably precious with immemorial association, with their subtlefitting of phrase to insight, of expression to need, born of longcenturies of experiment and aspiration, can do for a congregation whatno man alone can ever hope to accomplish. The well of human needs anddesires is so deep that, without these aids, we have not much to drawwith, no plummet wherewith to sound its dark and hidden depths. 

I doubt if we can overestimate the importance of giving this sense ofcontinuity in petitions, of linking up the prayer of the moment andthe worship of the day with the whole ageless process so that it seemsa part of that volume of human life forever ascending unto the eternalspirit, just as the gray plume of smoke from the sacrifice ever curledupward morning by morning and night by night from the altar of thetemple under the blue Syrian sky. We cannot easily give this sense ofcontinuity, this prestige of antiquity, this resting back on a greatbody of experience, unless we know and use the language and thephrases of our fathers. It is to the God who hath been our dwellingplace in all generations, that we pray; to Him who in days of oldwas a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night to His faithfulchildren; to the One who is the Ancient of Days, Infinite Watcher ofthe sons of men. Only by acquaintance with the phrases, the petitionsof the past, and only by a liberal use of them can we give backgroundand dignity, or anything approaching variety and completeness, to ourown public expression and interpretation of the devotional life. Ifanyone objects to this use of formal prayers on the ground of theirformality, let him remember that we, too, are formal, only we, alas, have made a cult of formlessness. It would surprise the averageminister to know the well-worn road which his supposedly spontaneousand extempore devotions follow. Phrase after phrase following in thesame order of ideas, and with the same pitiably limited vocabulary, appear week by week in them. How much better to enrich this painfullyindividualistic formalism with something of the corporate glories ofthe whole body of Christian believers. 

But, second: there should be also the principle of immediacy in theservice, room for the expression of individual needs and desiresand for reference to the immediate and local circumstances of thebeliever. A church in which there is no spontaneous and extemporeprayer, which only harked backward to the past, might build the tombsof the prophets but it might also stifle new voices for a new age. But extempore prayer should not be impromptu prayer. It should havecoherence, dignity, progression. The spirit should have been humblyand painstakingly prepared for it so that sincere and ardent feelingmay wing and vitalize its words. The great prayers of the ages, knownof all the worshipers, perhaps repeated by them all together, tie inthe individual soul to the great mass of humanity and it moves on, with its fellows, toward salvation as majestically and steadily asgreat rivers flow. The extempore and silent prayer, not unpremeditatedbut still the unformed outpouring of the individual heart, gives eachman the consciousness of standing naked and alone before his God. Boththese, the corporate and the separate elements of worships are vital;there should be a place for each in every true order of worship. 

But, of course, the final thing to say is the first thing. Whatevermay be the means that worship employs, its purpose must be to make andkeep the church a place of repose, to induce constantly the life ofrelinquishment to God, of reverence and meditation. And this it willdo as it seeks to draw men up to the "otherness, " the majesty, thealoofness, the transcendence of the Almighty. To this end I would usewhatever outward aids time and experience have shown will strengthenand deepen the spiritual understanding. I should not fear to usethe cross, the sacraments, the kneeling posture, the great picture, the carving, the recitation of prayers and hymns, not alone tointensify this sense in the believer but equally to create it in thenon-believer. The external world moulds the internal, even as theinternal makes the external. If these things mean little in thebeginning, there is still truth in the assertion of the devotee thatif you practice them they will begin to mean something to you. This isnot merely that a meaning will be self-induced. It is more than that. They will put us in the volitional attitude, the emotional mood, wherethe meaning is able to penetrate. Just as all the world acknowledgesthat there is an essential connection between good manners and goodmorals, between military discipline and physical courage, so thereis a connection between a devotional service and the gifts of thespiritual life. Such a service not merely strengthens belief inthe High and Holy One, it has a real office in creating, in makingpossible, that belief itself. 

We shall sum it all up if we say in one word that the offices ofdevotion emphasize the cosmic character of religion. They take us outof the world of moral theism into the world of a universal theism. They draw us away from religion in action to religion in itself;they give us, not the God of this world, but the God who is fromeverlasting to everlasting, to whom a thousand years are but asyesterday when it is past and as a watch in the night. Thus they helpus to make for ourselves an interior refuge into whose precinctsno eye may look, into whose life no other soul may venture. In thatrefuge we can be still and know that He is God. There we can eat themeat which the world knoweth not of, there have peace with Him. Itis in these central solitudes, induced by worship, that the visionis clarified, the perspective corrected, the vital forces recharged. Those who possess them are transmitters of such heavenly messages;they issue from them as rivers pour from undiminished mountainstreams. Does the world's sin and pain and weakness come and emptyitself into the broad current of these devout lives? Then theirfearless onsweeping forces gather it all up, carry it on, cleanse andpurify it in the process. Over such lives the things of this worldhave no power. They are kept secretly from them all in His pavilionwhere there is no strife of tongues. 

CHAPTER EIGHT

WORSHIP AND THE DISCIPLINE OF DOCTRINE

If one were to ask any sermon-taster of our generation what is theprevailing type of discourse among the better-known preachers of theday, he would probably answer, "The expository. " Expository preachinghas had a notable revival in the last three decades, especiallyamong liberal preachers; that is, among those who like ourselves havediscarded scholastic theologies, turned to the ethical aspects ofreligion for our chief interests and accepted the modern view of theBible. To be sure, it is not the same sort of expository preachingwhich made the Scottish pulpit of the nineteenth century famous. Itis not the detailed exposition of each word and clause, almost of eachcomma, which marks the mingled insight and literalism of a Chalmers, an Alexander Maclaren, a Taylor of the Broadway Tabernacle. For thatassumed a verbally inspired and hence an inerrant Scripture; it dealtwith the literature of the Old and New Testaments as being divinerevelations. The new expository preaching proceeds from almost anopposite point of view. It deals with this literature as being atranscript of human experience. Its method is direct and simple and, within sharp limits, very effective. The introduction to one of thesemodern expository sermons would run about as follows:

"I suppose that what has given to the Old and New Testament Scripturestheir enduring hold over the minds and consciences of men has beentheir extraordinary humanity. They contain so many vivid and accuraterecitals of typical human experience, portrayed with self-verifyinginsight and interpreted with consummate understanding of the issues ofthe heart. And since it is true, as Goethe said, 'That while mankindis always progressing man himself remains ever the same, ' and weare not essentially different from the folk who lived a hundredgenerations ago under the sunny Palestinian sky, we read these ancienttales and find in them a mirror which reflects the lineaments of ourown time. For instance, . . . "

Then the sermonizer proceeds to relate some famous Bible story, resolving its naïve Semitic theophanies, its pictorial narration, its primitive morality, into the terms of contemporary ethical orpolitical or economic principles. Take, for instance, the account ofthe miracle of Moses and the Burning Bush. The preacher will pointout that Moses saw a bush that burned and burned and that, unlike mostfurze bushes of those upland pastures which were ignited by the hotSyrian sun, was not consumed. It was this enduring quality of the bushthat interested him. Thus Moses showed the first characteristic ofgenius, namely, capacity for accurate and discriminating observation. And he coupled this with the scientific habit of mind. For he said, "I will now turn aside and see why!" Thus did he propose to piercebehind the event to the cause of the event, behind the movement to theprinciple of the movement. What a modern man this Moses was! It seemsalmost too good to be true!

But as yet we have merely scratched the surface of the story. Forhe took his shoes from off his feet when he inspected this newphenomenon, feeling instinctively that he was on holy ground. Thusthere mingled with his scientific curiosity the second great qualityof genius, which is reverence. There was no complacency here but anapproach to life at once eager and humble; keen yet teachable andmild. And now behold what happens! As a result of this combination ofqualities there came to Moses the vision of what he might do to leadhis oppressed countrymen out of their industrial bondage. Whereuponhe displayed the typical human reaction and cried, "Who am I, that Ishould go unto Pharoah or that I should lead the children of Israelout of Egypt!" My brother Aaron, who is an eloquent person--and as itturned out later also a specious one--is far better suited for thisundertaking. Thus he endeavored to evade the task and cried, "Letsomeone else do it!" Having thus expounded the word of God (!) thesermon proceeds to its final division in the application of thisshrewd and practical wisdom to some current event or parochialsituation. 

Now, such preaching is indubitably effective and not whollyillegitimate. Its technique is easily acquired. It makes us realizethat the early Church Fathers, who displayed a truly appallingingenuity in allegorizing the Old Testament and who found "types" ofChrist and His Church in frankly sensual Oriental wedding songs, havemany sturdy descendants among us to this very hour! Such preachinggives picturesqueness and color, it provides the necessary sugarcoating to the large pill of practical and ethical exhortation. Tobe sure, it does not sound like the preaching of our fathers. The oldsermon titles--"Suffering with Christ that we may be also glorifiedwith Him, " for instance--seem very far away from it. Nor is it to besupposed that this is what its author intended the story we have beenusing to convey nor that these were the reactions that it arousedin the breasts of its original hearers. But as the sermonizer woulddoubtless go on to remark, there is a certain universal quality in allgreat literature, and genius builds better than it knows, and so eachman can draw his own water of refreshment from these great wells ofthe past. And indeed nothing is more amazing or disconcerting than themutually exclusive notions, the apparently opposing truths, which canbe educed by this method, from one and the same passage of Scripture!There is scarcely a chapter in all the Old Testament, and to aless degree in the New Testament, which may not be thus ingeniouslytransmogrified to meet almost any homiletical emergency. 

Now, I may as well confess that I have preached this kind of sermonlo! these many years _ad infinitum_ and I doubt not _ad nauseam_. Wehave all used in this way the flaming rhetoric of the Hebrew prophetsuntil we think of them chiefly as indicters of a social order. Theywere not chiefly this but something quite different and more valuable, namely, religious geniuses. First-rate preaching would deal with Amosas the pioneer in ethical monotheism, with Hosea as the first poet ofthe divine grace, with Jeremiah as the herald of the possibility ofeach man's separate and personal communion with the living God. But, of course, such religious preaching, dealing with great doctrines offaith, would have a kind of large remoteness about it; it would payvery little attention to the incidents of the story, and indeed, would tend to be hardly expository at all, but rather speculative anddoctrinal. 

And that brings us to the theme of this final discussion. For I am oneof those who believe that great preaching is doctrinal preaching andthat it is particularly needed at this hour. The comparative neglectof the New Testament in favor of the Old in contemporary preaching;the use and nature of the expository method--no less than theunworshipful character of our services--appear to me to offer a finaland conclusive proof of the unreligious overhumanistic emphases of ourinterpretation of religion. And if we are to have a religious revival, then it seems to me worshipful services must be accompanied byspeculative preaching and I doubt if the one can be nobly maintainedwithout the other. For we saw that worship is the direct experienceof the Absolute through high and concentrated feeling. Even sospeculative and, in general, doctrinal preaching is the same returnto first principles and to ultimate values in the realm of ideas. It turns away from the immediate, the practical, the relative to thefinal and absolute in the domain of thought. 

Now, obviously, then, devout services and doctrinal preaching shouldgo together. No high and persistent emotions can be maintained withoutclear thinking to nourish and steady them. There is in doctrinalpreaching a certain indifference to immediate issues; to detailedapplications. It deals, by its nature, with comprehensive and abstractrather than local and concrete thinking; with inclusive feeling, transcendent aspiration. It does not try to pietize the ordinary, commercial and domestic affairs of men. Instead it deals with thehighest questions and perceptions of human life; argues from thosesublime hypotheses which are the very subsoil of the religioustemperament and understanding. It deals with those aspects of humanlife which indeed include, but include because they transcend, thecommercial and domestic, the professional and political affairs ofdaily living. We have been insisting in these chapters that it is thatportion of human need and experience which lies between the knowableand the unknowable with which it is the preacher's chief province todeal. Doctrinal preaching endeavors to give form and relations to itsintuitions and high desires, its unattainable longings and insights. There is a native alliance between the doctrine of Immanence andexpository preaching. For the office of both is to give us the God ofthis world in the affairs of the moment. There is a native alliancebetween expository preaching and humanism which very largely accountsfor the latter's popularity. For expository preaching, as at presentpracticed, deals mostly with ethical and practical issues, with thesetting of the house of this world in order. There is also a nativeand majestic alliance between the idea of transcendence and doctrinalpreaching and between the facts of the religious experience and thecontent of speculative philosophy. Not pragmatism but pure metaphysicsis the native language of the mind when it moves in the spiritualworld. 

But I am aware that already I have lost my reader's sympathy. You donot desire to preach doctrinal sermons and while you may read withamiable patience and faintly smiling complacency this discussion, you have no intention of following its advice. We tend to think thatdoctrinal sermons are outmoded--old-fashioned and unpopular--and wedread as we dread few other things, not being up to date. Besides, doctrinal preaching offers little of that opportunity which is foundin expository and yet more in topical preaching for exploiting ourown personalities. Some of us are young. It is merely a polite way ofsaying that we are egotistical. We know in our secret heart of heartsthat the main thing that we have to give the world is our own new, fresh selves with their corrected and arresting understanding of theworld. We are modestly yet eagerly ready to bestow that gift of oursupon the waiting congregation. One of the few compensations of growingold is that, as the hot inner fires burn lower, this self-absorptionlessens and we become disinterested and judicial observers of life andfind so much pleasure in other people's successes and so much wisdomin other folk's ideas. But not so for youth; it isn't what the past orthe collective mind and heart have formulated: it's what you've gotto say that interests you. Hence it is probably true that doctrinalpreaching, in the very nature of things, makes no strong appeal to menwho are beginning the ministry. 

But there are other objections which are more serious, becauseinherent in the very genius of doctrinal preaching itself. First:such preaching is more or less remote from contemporary and practicalissues. It deals with thought, not actions; understanding rather thanefficiency; principles rather than applications. It moves among thebasic concepts of the religious life; deals with matters beyond andabove and without the tumultuous issues of the moment. So it followsthat doctrinal preaching has an air of detachment, almost of seclusionfrom the world; the preacher brings his message from some pale worldof ideas to this quick world of action. And we are afraid of thisdetachment, the abstract and theoretical nature of the thinker'ssermon. 

I think the fear is not well grounded. What is the use of preachingsocial service to the almost total neglect of setting forth theintellectual and emotional concept of the servant? It is the qualityof the doer which determines the value of the deed. Why keep oninsisting upon being good if our hearers have never been carefullyinstructed in the nature and the sanctions of goodness? Has not thetrouble with most of our political and moral reform been that we havehad a passion for it but very little science of it? How can we knowthe ways of godliness if we take God Himself for granted? No: ourchief business, as preachers, is to preach the content rather than theapplication of the truth. Not many people are interested in tryingto find the substance of the truth. It is hated as impractical bythe multitude of the impatient, and despised as old-fashioned bythe get-saved-quick reformers. Nevertheless we must find out thedistinctions between divine and human, right and wrong, and why theyare what they are, and what is the good of it all. There is no morevaluable service which the preacher can render his community than todeliberately seclude himself from continual contact with immediateissues and dwell on the eternal verities. When Darwin published _TheDescent of Man_ at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, the _LondonTimes_ took him severely to task for his absorption in purelyscientific interests and hypothetical issues. "When the foundationsof property and the established order were threatened with the firesof the Paris Commune; when the Tuileries were burning--how could aBritish subject be occupying himself with speculations in naturalscience in no wise calculated to bring aid or comfort to those whohad a stake in the country!" Well, few of us imagine today thatDarwin would have been wise to have exchanged the seclusion and theimpractical hours of the study for the office or the camp, the marketor the street. 

Yet the same fear of occupying ourselves with central and abstractmatters still obsesses us. At the Quadrennial Conference of theMethodist Episcopal Church held recently at Des Moines, thirty-fourbishops submitted an address in which they said among other things:"Of course, the church must stand in unflinching, uncompromisingdenunciation of all violations of laws, against all murderous childlabor, all foul sweat shops, all unsafe mines, all deadly tenements, all excessive hours for those who toil, all profligate luxuries, allstandards of wage and life below the living standard, all unfairnessand harshness of conditions, all brutal exactions, whether of theemployer or union, all overlordships, whether of capital or labor, all godless profiteering, whether in food, clothing, profits or wages, against all inhumanity, injustice and blighting inequality, againstall class-minded men who demand special privileges or exceptions onbehalf of their class. "

These are all vital matters, yet I cannot believe that it is thechurch's chief business thus to turn her energies to the problemsof the material world. This would be a stupendous program, evenif complete in itself; as an item in a program it becomes almost a_reductio ad absurdum_. The _Springfield Republican_ in an editorialcomment upon it said: "It fairly invites the question whether thechurch is not in some danger of trying to do too much. The fund ofenergy available for any human undertaking is not unlimited; energyturned in one direction must of necessity be withdrawn from anotherand energy diffused in many directions cannot be concentrated. Countthe adjectives--'murderous, ' 'foul, ' 'unsafe, ' 'deadly, ' 'excessive, ''profligate, ' 'brutal, ' 'godless, ' 'blighting'--does not each involveresearch, investigation, comparison, analysis, deliberation, a heavytax upon the intellectual resources of the church if any result worthhaving is to be obtained? Can this energy be found without subtractingenergy from some other sphere?"

The gravest problems of the world are not found here. They arefound in the decline of spiritual understanding, the decay of moralstandards, the growth of the vindictive and unforgiving spirit, thelapse from charity, the overweening pride of the human heart. Withthese matters the church must chiefly deal; to their spiritualinfidelity she must bring a spiritual message; to their poor thinkingshe must bring the wisdom of the eternal. This task, preventive notremedial, is her characteristic one. Is it not worth while to rememberthat the great religious leaders have generally ignored contemporarysocial problems? So have the great artists who are closely alliedto them. Neither William Shakespeare nor Leonardo da Vinci werereformers; neither Gautama nor the Lord Jesus had much to say aboutthe actual international economic and political readjustments whichwere as pressing in their day as ours. They were content to preach thetruth, sure that it, once understood, would set men free. 

But a second reason why we dislike doctrinal preaching is because weconfound it with dogmatic preaching. Doctrinal sermons are those whichdeal with the philosophy of religion. They expound or defend or relatethe intellectual statements, the formulae of religion. Such discoursesdiffer essentially from dogmatic sermonizing. For what is a doctrine?A doctrine is an intellectual formulation of an experience. Supposea man receives a new influx of moral energy and spiritual insight, through reading the Bible, through trying to pray, through loving andmeditating upon the Lord Jesus. That experience isn't a speculativeproposition, it isn't a faith or an hypothesis; it's a fact. Like theman in the Johannine record the believer says, "Whether he be a sinnerI know not: but one thing I know, that, whereas I was blind, now Isee. "

Now, let this new experience of moral power and spiritual insightexpress itself, as it normally will, in a more holy and moreuseful life, in the appropriate terms of action. There you get thatconfession of experience which we call character. Or let it expressitself in the appropriate emotions of joy and awe and reverence sothat, like Ray Palmer, the convert writes an immortal hymn, or a bodyof converts like the early church produces the _Te Deum_. There is theconfession of experience in worship. Or let a man filled with this newlife desire to understand it; see what its implications are regardingthe nature of God, the nature of man, the place of Christ in the scaleof created or uncreated Being. Let him desire to thus conserve andinterpret that he may transmit this new experience. Then he will beginto define it and to reduce it, for brevity and clearness, to someabstract and compact formula. Thus he will make a confession ofexperience in doctrine. 

Doctrines, then, are not arbitrary but natural, not accidental butessential. They are the hypotheses regarding the eternal nature ofthings drawn from the data of our moral and spiritual experience. Theyare to religion just what the science of electricity is to a trolleycar, or what the formula of evolution is to natural science, or whatthe doctrine of the conservation of energy is, or was, to physics. Doctrines are signposts; they are placards, index fingers, noticessumming up and commending the proved essences of religious experience. Two things are always true of sound doctrine. First: it is notconsidered to have primary value; its worth is in the experienceto which it witnesses. Second: it is not fixed but flexible andprogressive. Someone has railed at theology, defining it as thehistory of discarded errors. That is a truth and a great complimentand the definition holds good of the record of any other science. 

Now, if doctrines are signposts, dogmas are old and now misleadingmilestones. For what is a dogma? It may be one of two things. Usuallyit is a doctrine that has forgotten that it ever had a history;a formula which once had authority because it was a genuineinterpretation of experience but which now is so outmoded in fashionof thought, or so maladjusted to our present scale of values, as tobe no longer clearly related to experience and is therefore acceptedmerely on command, or on the prestige of its antiquity. Or it may bea doctrine promulgated _ex cathedra_, not because religious experienceproduced it, but because ecclesiastical expediencies demand it. Thus, to illustrate the first sort of dogma, there was once a doctrine ofthe Virgin Birth. Men found, as they still do, both God and man inJesus; they discovered when they followed Him their own real humanityand true divinity. They tried to explain and formalize the experienceand made a doctrine which, for the circle of ideas and the extentof the factual knowledge of the times, was both reasonable andvaluable. The experience still remains, but the doctrine is nolonger psychologically or biologically credible. It no longeroffers a tenable explanation; it is not a valuable or illuminatinginterpretation. Hence if we hold it at all today, it is either forsentiment or for the sake of mere tradition, namely, for reasons otherthan its intellectual usefulness or its inherent intelligibility. Soheld it passes over from doctrine into dogma. Or take, as anexample of the second sort, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, promulgated by Pius IX in the year 1854, and designed to strengthenthe prestige of the Papal See among the Catholic powers of Europe andto prolong its hold upon its temporal possessions. De Cesare describesthe promulgation of the dogma as follows:

"The festival on that day, December 8, 1854, sacred to the Virgin, wasmagnificent. After chanting the Gospel, first in Latin, then in Greek, Cardinal Macchi, deacon of the Sacred College, together with thesenior archbishops and bishops present, all approached the Papalthrone, pronouncing these words in Latin, 'Deign, most Holy Father, to lift your Apostolic voice and pronounce the dogmatic Decree of theImmaculate Conception, on account of which there will be praise inheaven and rejoicings on earth. ' The Pope replying, stated that hewelcomed the wish of the Sacred College, the episcopate, the clergy, and declared it was essential first of all to invoke the help of theHoly Spirit. So saying he intoned _in Veni Creator_, chanted in chorusby all present. The chant concluded, amid a solemn silence Pius IX'sfinely modulated voice read the following Decree:

"'It shall be Dogma, that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the firstinstant of the Conception, by singular privilege and grace of God, in virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of mankind, waspreserved from all stain of original sin. ' The senior cardinal thenprayed the Pope to make this Decree public, and, amid the roar ofcannon from Fort St. Angelo and the festive ringing of church bells, the solemn act was accomplished. '"[42] Here is an assertion regardingMary's Conception which has only the most tenuous connection withreligious experience and which was pronounced for ecclesiastical andpolitical reasons. Here we have dogma at its worst. Here, indeed, itis so bad as to resemble many of the current political and economicpronunciamentos!

[Footnote 42: _The Last Days of Papal Rome_, pp. 127 ff. ]

Now, nobody wants dogmatic preaching, but there is nothing that weneed more than we do doctrinal preaching and nothing which is moreinteresting. The specialization of knowledge has assigned to thepreacher of religion a definite sphere. No amount of secondaryexpertness in politics or economics or social reform or even moralscan atone for the abandonment of our own province. We are set to thinkabout and expound religion and if we give that up we give up our placein a learned profession. Moreover, the new conditions of the modernworld make doctrine imperative. That world is distinguished byits free inquiry, its cultivation of the scientific method, itsabandonment of obscuranticisms and ambiguities. It demands, then, devout and holy thinking from us. Who would deny that the revivalof intellectual authority and leadership in matters of religionis terribly needed in our day? Sabatier is right in saying that areligion without doctrine is a self-contradictory idea. Harnack is notwrong in saying that a Christianity without it is inconceivable. 

And now I know you are thinking in your hearts, Well, whatinconsistency this man shows! For a whole book he has been insistingon the prime values of imagination and feeling in religion and now heconcludes with a plea for the thinker. But it is not so inconsistentas it appears. It is just because we do believe that the discovery, the expression and the rewards of religion lie chiefly in thesuperrational and poetic realms that therefore we want thisintellectual content to accompany it, not supersede it, as a balancinginfluence, a steadying force. There are grave perils in worshipfulservices corresponding to their supreme values. Mystical preachinghas the defects of its virtues and too often sinks into that vaguesentimentalism which is the perversion of its excellence. Howinsensibly sometimes does high and precious feeling degenerate intoa sort of religious hysteria! It needs then to be always tested andcorrected by clear thinking. 

But we in no way alter our original insistence that in our realm aspreachers, unlike the scientist's realm of the theologians, thoughtis the handmaid, not the mistress. Our great plea, then, for doctrinalpreaching is that by intellectual grappling with the final andspeculative problems of religion we do not supersede but feed theemotional life and do not diminish but focus and steady it. It isthat you and I may have reserves of feeling--indispensable to greatpreaching--sincerity and intensity of emotion, that disciplinedimagination which is genius, that restrained passion which is art, and that our congregations may have the same, that we must strive forintellectual power, must do the preaching that gives people somethingto think about. These are the religious and devout reasons whywe value intellectual honesty, precision of utterance, reserve ofstatement, logical and coherent thinking. 

We are come, then, to the conclusion of our discussions. They havebeen intended to restore a neglected emphasis upon the imaginative andtranscendent as distinguished from the ethical and humanistic aspectsof the religious life. They have tried to show that the reaching outby worship to this "otherness" of God and to the ultimate in life isman's deepest hunger and the one we are chiefly set to feed. I am surethat the chief ally of the experience of the transcendence of God andthe cultivation of the worshipful faculties in man is to be found insevere and speculative thinking. I believe our almost unmixed passionfor piety, for action, for practical efficiency, betrays us. Itindicates that we are trying to manufacture effects to conceal theabsence of causes. We may look for a religious revival when men haveso meditated upon and struggled with the fundamental ideas of religionthat they feel profoundly its eternal mysteries. 

And finally, we have the best historical grounds for our position. Sometimes great religious movements have been begun by unlearned anduncritical men like Peter the hermit or John Bunyan or Moody. But wemust not infer from this that religious insight is naturally repressedby clear thinking or fostered by ignorance. Dr. Francis GreenwoodPeabody has pointed out that the great religious epochs in Christianhistory are also epochs in the history of theology. The Paulineepistles, the _Confessions of Augustine_, the _Meditations_ of Anselm, the _Simple Method of How to Pray_ of Luther, the _Regula_ of Loyola, the _Monologen_ of Schleiermacher, these are all manuals of thedevout life, they belong in the distinctively religious world ofsupersensuous and the transcendent, and one thing which accounts forthem is that the men who produced them were religious geniuses becausethey were also theologians. [43]

[Footnote 43: See the "Call to Theology, " _Har. Theo. Rev. _, vol. I, no. 1, pp. 1 ff. ]

It is to be remembered that we are not saying that the theologianmakes the saint. I do not believe that. Devils can believe andtremble; Abelard was no saint. But we are contending that thegreat saint is extremely likely to be a theologian. Protestantism, Methodism, Tractarianism, were chiefly religious movements, interestedin the kind of questions and moved by the sorts of motives whichwe have been talking about. They all began within the precinctsof universities. Moreover, the Lord Jesus, consummate mystic, incomparable artist, was such partly because He was a great theologianas well. His dealings with scribe and Pharisee furnish some ofthe world's best examples of acute and courageous dialectics. Histheological method differed markedly from the academicians of Hisday. Nevertheless it was noted that He spoke with an extraordinaryauthority. "He gave, " as Dr. Peabody also points out, "new scopeand significance to the thought of God, to the nature of man, to thedestiny of the soul, to the meaning of the world. He would have beenreckoned among the world's great theologians if other endowments hadnot given Him a higher title. "[44]

[Footnote 44: "Call to Theology, " _Har. Theo. Rev. _, vol. I, no. 1, p. 8. ]

It is a higher title to have been the supreme mystic, the perfectseer. All I have been trying to say is that it is to these sortsof excellencies that the preacher aspires. But the life of Jesussupremely sanctions the conviction that preaching upon high andabstract and even speculative themes and a rigorous intellectualdiscipline are chief accompaniments, appropriate and indispensableaids, to religious insight and to the cultivating of worshipfulfeeling. So we close our discussions with the supreme name uponour lips, leaving the most fragrant memory, the clearest picture, remembering Him who struck the highest note. It is to His life andteaching that we humbly turn to find the final sanction for thedistinctively religious values. Who else, indeed, has the words ofEternal Life?

 * * * * *

LYMAN BEECHER LECTURESHIP ON PREACHING

YALE UNIVERSITY

 1871-72 Beecher, H. W. , Yale Lectures on Preaching, first series. New York, 1872. 

 1872-73 Beecher, H. W. , Yale Lectures on Preaching, second series. New York, 1873. 

 1873-74 Beecher, H. W. , Yale Lectures on Preaching, third series. New York, 1874. 

 1874-75 Hall, John, God's Word through Preaching. New York, 1875. 

 1875-76 Taylor, William M. , The Ministry of the Word. New York, 1876. 

 1876-77 Brooks, P. , Lectures on Preaching. New York, 1877. 

 1877-78 Dale, R. W. , Nine Lectures on Preaching. New York, 1878. 

 1878-79 Simpson, M. , Lectures on Preaching. New York, 1879. 

 1879-80 Crosby, H. , The Christian Preacher. New York, 1880. 

 1880-81 Duryea, J. T. , and others (not published). 

 1881-82 Robinson, E. G. , Lectures on Preaching. New York, 1883. 

 1882-83 (No lectures. )

 1883-84 Burton, N. J. , Yale Lectures on Preaching, and other writings. New York, 1888. *

 1884-85 Storrs, H. M. , The American Preacher (not published). 

 1885-86 Taylor, W. M. , The Scottish Pulpit. New York, 1887. 

 1886-87 Gladden, W. , Tools and the Man. Boston, 1893. 

 1887-88 Trumbull. H. C. , The Sunday School. Philadelphia, 1888. 

 1888-89 Broadus, J. A. , Preaching and the Ministerial Life (not published). 

 1889-90 Behrends, A. J. F. , The Philosophy of Preaching. New York, 1890. 

 1890-91 Stalker, J. , The Preacher and His Models. New York, 1891. 

 1891-92 Fairbarn, A. M. , The Place of Christ in Modern Theology. New York, 1893. 

 1892-93 Horton, R. F. , Verbum Dei. New York, 1893. *

 1893-94 (No lectures. )

 1894-95 Greer, D. H. , The Preacher and His Place. New York, 1895. 

 1895-96 Van Dyke, H. , The Gospel for an Age of Doubt. New York, 1896*

 1896-97 Watson, J. , The Cure of Souls. New York, 1896. 

 1897-98 Tucker, W. J. , The Making and the Unmaking of the Preacher. Boston, 1898. 

 1898-99 Smith, G. A. , Modern Criticism and the Old Testament. New York, 1901. 

 1899-00 Brown, J. , Puritan Preaching in England. New York, 1900. 

 1900-01 (No lectures. )

 1901-02 Gladden, W. , Social Salvation. New York, 1902. 

 1902-03 Gordon, G. A. , Ultimate Conceptions of Faith. New York, 1903. 

 1903-04 Abbott, L. , The Christian Ministry. Boston, 1905. 

 1904-05 Peabody, F. G. , Jesus Christ and the Christian Character. New York, 1905. *

 1905-06 Brown, C. R. , The Social Message of the Modern Pulpit. New York, 1906. 

 1906-07 Forsyth, P. T. , Positive Preaching and Modern Mind. New York, 1908. *

 1907-08 Faunce, W. H. P. , The Educational Ideal in the Ministry. New York, 1908. 

 1908-09 Henson, H. H. , The Liberty of Prophesying. New Haven, 1910. *

 1909-10 Jefferson, C. E. , The Building of the Church. New York, 1910. 

 1910-11 Gunsaulus, F. W. , The Minister and the Spiritual Life. New York, Chicago, 1911. 

 1911-12 Jowett, J. H. , The Preacher; His Life and Work. New York, 1912. 

 1912-13 Parkhurst, C. H. , The Pulpit and the Pew. New Haven. 1913. *

 1913-14 Home, C. Silvester, The Romance of Preaching. New York, Chicago, 1914. 

 1914-15 Pepper, George Wharton, A Voice from the Crowd. New Haven, 1915. *

 1915-16 Hyde, William DeWitt, The Gospel of Good Will as Revealed in Contemporary Scriptures. New York, 1916. 

 1916-17 McDowell, William Fraser, Good Ministers of Jesus Christ. New York and Cincinnati, 1917. 

 1917-18 Coffin, Henry Sloane, In a Day of Social Rebuilding. New Haven. *

 1918-19 Kelman, John, The War and Preaching, New Haven. *

 1919-20 Fitch, Albert Parker, Preaching and Paganism. New Haven. *

*Also published in London. 

PRINTED BY E. L. HILDRETH & COMPANY BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT, U. S. A.