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Page 7
[Footnote 2: _The Meaning of God in Human Experience_, p. 518.]
It is then precisely the preacher's task, his peculiar office, to
attempt these vast and perilous summations. What he is set here for
is to bring the immeasurable within the scope of vision. He deals with
the far-flung outposts, no man knows how distant, and the boundless
interspaces of human consciousness; he deals with the beginning, the
middle, the end--the origin, the meaning and the destiny--of human
life. How can anyone give unity to such a prospect? Like any other
artist he gives it the only unity possible, the unity revealed in
his own personality. The theologian should not attempt to evaluate
his age; the preacher may. Because the theologian, like any other
scientist, analyzes and dissects; he breaks up the world. The preacher
in his disciplined imagination, his spiritual intuitiveness,--what we
call the "religious temperament,"--unites it again and makes men see
it whole. This quality of purified and enlightened imagination is of
the very essence of the preacher's power and art. Hence he may attempt
to set forth a just understanding of his generation.
This brings us to the second reason for our topic namely, its
timeliness. All religious values are not at all times equal in
importance. As generations come and go, first one, then another looms
in the foreground. But I sincerely believe that the most fateful
undertaking for the preacher at this moment is that of analyzing his
own generation. Because he has been flung into one of the world's
transition epochs, he speaks in an hour which is radical in changes,
perplexing in its multifarious cross-currents, prolific of new
forms and expressions. What the world most needs at such a moment of
expansion and rebellion, is a redefining of its ideals. It needs to
have some eternal scale of values set before it once more. It needs
to stop long enough to find out just what and where it is, and toward
what it is going. It needs another Sheridan to write a new _School for
Scandal_, another Swift, with his _Gulliver's Travels_, a continuing
Shaw with his satiric comedies, a Mrs. Wharton with her _House of
Mirth_, a Thorstein Veblen with his _Higher Learning in America_, a
Savonarola with his call to repentance and indictment of worldly and
unfaithful living. It is a difficult and dangerous office, this of
the prophet; it calls for a considerate and honest mind as well as a
flashing insight and an eager heart. The false prophet exposes that he
may 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 and
hour are upon us!
I have already spoken to this point at length, in a little book
recently published. I merely add here that in a day of obvious
political disillusionment and industrial revolt, of intellectual
rebellion against an outworn order of ideas and of moral restlessness
and doubt, an indispensable duty for the preacher is this
comprehensive study and understanding of his own epoch. Else, without
realizing it,--and how true this often is,--he proclaims a universal
truth in the unintelligible language of a forgotten order, and applies
a timeless experience to the faded conditions of yesterday.
Indeed, I am convinced that a chief reason why preaching is
temporarily obscured in power, is because most of our expertness in it
is in terms of local problems, of partial significances, rather
than in the wider tendencies that produce and carry them, or in the
ultimate laws of conduct which should govern them. We ought to be
troubled, I think, in our present ecclesiastical situation, with its
taint of an almost frantic immediacy. Not only are we not sufficiently
dealing with the Gospel as a universal code, but, as both cause and
effect of this, we are not applying it to the inclusive life of our
generation. We are tinkering here and patching there, but attempting
no grand evaluation. We have already granted that sweeping
generalizations, inclusive estimates, are as difficult as they are
audacious. Yet we have also seen that these grand evaluations are
of the very essence of religion and hence are characteristic of the
preacher's task. And, finally, it appears that ours is an age which
calls for such redefining of its values, some fresh and inclusive
moral 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 such
a summary is not an easy one. Out of several possible devices I
have taken as the framework on which to hang these discussions three
familiar divisions of thought and feeling, with their accompanying
laws of conduct, and value judgments. They are the humanistic
or classic; the naturalistic or primitive; and the religious or
transcendent interpretation of the world and life. One sets up a
social, one an individual, and one a universal standard. Under the
movements which these headings represent we can most easily and
clearly order and appraise the chief influences of the Protestant
centuries. The first two are largely pre�mpting between them, at this
moment, the field of human thought and conduct and a brief analysis
of them, contrasting their general attitudes, may serve as a fit
introduction to the ensuing chapter.
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