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Page 6
Then there are those fascinating men of feeling and imagination, those
who look into their own hearts and write, those to whom the inner
dominions which the spirit conquers for itself become a thousand-fold
more real than the earth whereon they stamp their feet. These are the
literary or the creative folk. Their passion is not so much to know
life as to enjoy it; not to direct it, but to experience it; not even
to make understanding of it an end, but only a means to interpreting
it. They do not, as a rule, thirst for erudition, and they are
indifferent to those manipulations of the externals of life which
are dear to the lovers of executive power. They know less but they
understand more than their scholastic brethren. As a class they are
sometimes disreputable but nearly always unworldly; more distinguished
by an intuitive and childlike than by an ingenious or sophisticated
quality of mind. Ideas and facts are perceived by them not abstractly
nor practically, but in their typical or symbolic, hence their
pictorial and transmissible, aspects. They read dogma, whether
theological or other, in the terms of a living process, unconsciously
translating it, as they go along, out of its cold propositions into
its appropriate forms of feeling and needs and satisfactions.
The scientist, then, is a critic, a learner who wants to analyze and
dissect; the man of affairs is a director and builder and wants to
command and construct; the man of this group is a seer. He is a lover
and a dreamer; he watches and broods over life, profoundly feeling it,
enamored both of its shame and of its glory. The intolerable poignancy
of existence is bittersweet to his mouth; he craves to incarnate,
to interpret its entire human process, always striving to pierce to
its center, to capture and express its inexpressible ultimate. He
is an egotist but a valuable one, acutely aware of the depths and
immensities of his own spirit and of its significant relations to
this seething world without. Thus it is both himself and a new vision
of life, in terms of himself, that he desires to project for his
community.
The form of that vision will vary according to the nature of the
tools, the selection of material, the particular sort of native
endowment which are given to him. Some such men reveal their
understanding of the soul and the world in the detached serenity,
the too well-defined harmonies of a Parthenon; others in the dim
and intricate richness, the confused and tortured aspiration of the
long-limbed saints and grotesque devils of a Gothic cathedral. Others
incarnate it in gleaming bronze; or spread it in subtle play of light
and shade and tones of color on a canvas; or write it in great plays
which open the dark chambers of the soul and make the heart stand
still; or sing it in sweet and terrible verse, full-throated utterance
of man's pride and hope and passion. Some act it before the altar or
beneath the proscenium arch; some speak it, now in Cassandra-tones,
now comfortably like shepherds of frail sheep. These folk are the
brothers-in-blood, the fellow craftsmen of the preacher. By a silly
convention, he is almost forbidden to consult with them, and to betake
himself to the learned, the respectable and the dull. But it is with
these that naturally he sees eye to eye.
In short, in calling the preacher a prophet we mean that preaching
is an art and the preacher is an artist; for all great art has the
prophetic quality. Many men object to this definition of the preacher
as being profane. It appears to make secular or mechanicalize their
profession, to rob preaching of its sacrosanctity, leave it less
authority by making it more intelligible, remove it from the realm
of the mystical and unique. This objection seems to me sometimes
an expression of spiritual arrogance and sometimes a subtle form of
skepticism. It assumes a special privilege for our profession or a
not-get-at-able defense and sanction by insisting that it differs in
origin and hence in kind from similar expressions of the human spirit.
It hesitates to rely on the normal and the intelligible sources of
ministerial power, to confess the relatively definable origin and
understandable methods of our work. It fears to trust to these alone.
But all these must be trusted. We may safely assert that the preacher
deals with absolute values, for all art does that. But we may not
assert that he is the only person that does so or that his is the only
or the unapproachable way. No; he, too, is an artist. Hence, a sermon
is not a contribution to, but an interpretation of, knowledge, made
in terms of the religious experience. It is taking truth out of its
compressed and abstract form, its impersonal and scientific language,
and returning it to life in the terms of the ethical and spiritual
experience of mankind, thus giving it such concrete and pictorial
expression that it stimulates the imagination and moves the will.
It will be clear then why I have said that the task of appraising the
heart and mind of our generation, to which we address ourselves, is
appropriate to the preaching genius. For only they could attempt
such a task who possess an informed and disciplined yet essentially
intuitive spirit with its scale of values; who by instinct can see
their age as a whole and indicate its chief emphases, its controlling
tendencies, its significant expressions. It is not the scientist but
the seer who thus attempts the precious but perilous task of making
the great generalizations. This is what Aristotle means when he says,
"The poet ranks higher than the historian because he achieves a more
general truth." This is, I suppose, what Houston Stewart Chamberlain
means when he says, in the introduction to the _Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century_: "our modern world represents an immeasurable
array of facts. The mastery of such a task as recording and
interpreting them scientifically is impossible. It is only the genius
of the artist, which feels the secret parallels that exist between
the world of vision and of thought, that can, if fortune be favorable,
reveal the unity beneath the immeasurable complexities and diversities
of the present order." Or as Professor Hocking says: "The prophet must
find in the current of history a unity corresponding to the unity of
the physical universe, or else he must create it. It is this conscious
unification of history that the religious will spontaneously tends to
bring about."[2]
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