|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 52
But, of course, the preacher's main task is to interpret man's moral
experience, which drives him out to search for the eternal in
the terms of the "other" and redeeming God. We have spoken of the
depersonalizing of religion which paganism and humanism alike have
brought upon the world. One evidence of that has been the way in
which we have confounded the social expressions of religion with its
individual source. We are so concerned with the effect of our religion
upon the community that we have forgotten that the heart of religion
is found in the solitary soul. All of which means that we have here
again yielded to the time spirit that enfolds us and have come to
think of man as religious if he be humane. But that is not true. No
man is ever religious until he becomes devout. And indeed no man of
our sort--the saint and sinner sort--is ever long and truly humane
unless the springs of his tenderness for men are found in his ever
widening and deepening gratitude to God! Hence no man was ever yet
able to preach the living God until he understood that the central
need in human life is to reconcile the individual conscience to
itself, compose the anarchy of the spiritual life. Men want to be
happy and be fed; but men must have inward peace.
We swing back, therefore, to the native ground of preaching, approach
the religious problem, now, not from the aesthetic or the scientific,
but from the moral angle. Here we are dealing with the most poignant
of all human experiences. For it is in this intensely personal world
of moral failure and divided will that men are most acutely aware of
themselves and hence of their need of that other-than-self beyond.
The sentimental idealizing of contemporary life, the declension of the
humanist's optimism into that superficial complacency which will not
see what it does not like or what it is not expedient to see, makes
one's mind to chuckle while one's heart doth ache. There is a brief
heyday, its continuance dependent upon the uncontrollable factors
of outward prosperity, physical and nervous vigor, capacity for
preoccupation with the successive novelties of a diversified and
complicated civilization, in which even men of religious temperament
can minimize or ignore, perhaps sincerely disbelieve in, their divided
life. Sometimes we think we may sin and be done with it. But always in
the end man must come back to this moral tragedy of the soul. Because
sin will not be done with us when we are done with it. Every evil
is evil to him that does it and sooner or later we are compelled
to understand that to be a sinner is the sorest and most certain
punishment for sinning.
Then the awakening begins. Then can preaching stir the heart until
deep answereth unto deep. It can talk of the struggle with moral
temptation and weakness; of the unstable temperament which oscillates
between the gutter and the stars; of the perversion or abuse of
impulses good in themselves; of the dreadful dualism of the soul. For
these are inheritances which have made life tragic in every generation
for innumerable human beings. Whoever needed to explain to a company
of grown men and women what the cry of the soul for its release from
passion is? Every generation has its secret pessimists, brooding over
the anarchy of the spirit, the issues of a distracted life. We need
not ask with Faust, "Where is that place which men call 'Hell'?" nor
wait 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 that
men have been constrained to look outward for a God. For these mark
the very disintegration of personality, the utter dissipation of
selfhood. That is the inescapable horror of sin. That is what we mean
when we say sinners are lost; so they are, they are lost to their own
selves. With what discriminating truth the father in the parable of
the lost boy speaks. "This, my son," he says, "was dead though he is
alive 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 alive
again?
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 their
redemptive faiths. For all moral victory is conditioned upon help from
without. To be sure each will and soul must strive desperately, even
unto death, yet all that strife shall be in vain unless One stoops
down from above and wrestles with us in the conflict. For the sinner
must have two things, both of them beyond his unaided getting, or he
will die. He must be released from his captivity. Who does not know
the terrible restlessness, that grows and feeds upon itself and then
does 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 express
ourselves. The cry of moral misery, therefore, is always the groaning
of the prisoner. Oh, for help to break the bars of my intolerable
and delicious sin that I may be myself once more! Oh, for some power
greater than I which, being greater, can set me free!
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|