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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 WESLEY
COOPER OF THE CLASS OF 1865, YALE COLLEGE
THE FORTY-SIXTH SERIES OF THE LYMAN BEECHER LECTURESHIP ON PREACHING
IN 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 University
Press on the James Wesley Cooper Memorial Publication Fund. This
Foundation was established March 30, 1918, by a gift to Yale
University 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 for
twenty-five years pastor of the South Congregational Church of New
Britain, Connecticut. For thirty years he was a corporate member of
the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and from 1885
until the time of his death was a Fellow of Yale University, serving
on 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 that
they pretend to no final solution of the problem which they discuss.
How to assert the eternal and objective reality of that Presence, the
consciousness of Whom is alike the beginning and the end, the motive
and the reward, of the religious experience, is not altogether clear
in an age that, for over two centuries, has more and more rejected the
transcendental ideas of the human understanding. Yet the consequences
of that rejection, in the increasing individualism of conduct which
has kept pace with the growing subjectivism of thought, are now
sufficiently apparent and the present plight of our civilization
is already leading its more characteristic members, the political
scientists and the economists, to reëxamine and reappraise the
concepts upon which it is founded. It is a similar attempt to
scrutinize and evaluate the significant aspects of the interdependent
thought and conduct of our day from the standpoint of religion which
is here attempted. Its sole and modest purpose is to endeavor to
restore some neglected emphases, to recall to spiritually minded men
and women certain half-forgotten values in the religious experience
and to add such observations regarding them as may, by good fortune,
contribute something to that future reconciling of the thought
currents and value judgments of our day to these central and precious
facts of the religious life.
Many men and minds have contributed to these pages. Such sources of
suggestion and insight have been indicated wherever they could be
identified. In especial I must record my grateful sense of obligation
to Professor Irving Babbitt's _Rousseau and Romanticism_. The chapter
on 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 Lyman
Beecher Foundation, after he has accepted the appalling fact that he
must hitch his modest wagon, not merely to a star, but rather to an
entire constellation, is the delimitation of his subject. There are
many inquiries, none of them without significance, with which he might
appropriately concern himself. For not only is the profession of the
Christian ministry a many-sided one, but scales of value change
and emphases shift, within the calling itself, with our changing
civilization. The mediaeval world brought forth, out of its need, the
robed and mitered ecclesiastic; a more recent world, pursuant to its
genius, demanded the ethical idealist. Drink-sodden Georgian England
responded to the open-air evangelism of Whitefield and Wesley; the
next century found the Established Church divided against itself
by the learning and culture of the Oxford Movement. Sometimes
a philosopher and theologian, like Edwards, initiates the Great
Awakening; sometimes an emotional mystic like Bernard can arouse
all Europe and carry men, tens of thousands strong, over the Danube
and over the Hellespont to die for the Cross upon the burning sands
of Syria; sometimes it is the George Herberts, in a hundred rural
parishes, who make grace to abound through the intimate and precious
ministrations of the country parson. Let us, therefore, devote this
chapter to a review of the several aspects of the Christian ministry,
in order to set in its just perspective the one which we have chosen
for these discussions and to see why it seems to stand, for the
moment, 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 and
prestige of a venerable organization? Is it the curate of souls,
patient shepherd of the silly sheep? Is it the theologian, the
administrator, the prophet--who?
One might think profitably on that first question in these very
informal days. We are witnessing a breakdown of all external forms of
authority which, while salutary and necessary, is also perilous. Not
many of us err, just now, by overmagnifying our official status.
Many of us instead are terribly at ease in Zion and might become less
assured and more significant by undertaking the subjective task of
a study in ministerial personality. "What we are," to paraphrase
Emerson, "speaks so loud that men cannot hear what we say." Every
great calling has its characteristic mental attitude, the unwritten
code of honor of the group, without a knowledge of which one could
scarcely be an efficient or honorable practitioner within it. One of
the perplexing and irritating problems of the personal life of the
preacher today has to do with the collision between the secular
standards of his time, this traditional code of his class, and
the requirements of his faith. Shall he acquiesce in the smug
conformities, the externalized procedures of average society, somewhat
pietized, and join that large company of good and ordinary people,
of whom Samuel Butler remarks, in _The Way of All Flesh_, that they
would be "equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted,
or at seeing it practised?" There are ministers who do thus content
themselves with being merely superrespectable. Shall he exalt the
standards of his calling, accentuate the speech and dress, the code
and manners of his group, the historic statements of his faith, at the
risk of becoming an official, a "professional"? Or does he possess the
insight, and can he acquire the courage, to follow men like Francis
of Assisi or Father Damien and adopt the Christian ethic and thus join
that company of the apostles and martyrs whose blood is the seed of
the church? A good deal might be said today on the need of this sort
of personal culture in the ministerial candidate. But, provocative and
significant though the question is, it is too limited in scope, too
purely subjective in nature, to suit the character and the urgency of
the needs of this moment.
Again, every profession has the prized inheritance of its own
particular 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 the
background of all great preaching. No man, whether learned or pious,
or both, is equipped for the pulpit without the addition of that
intuitive discernment, that quick and varied appreciation, that sane
and tolerant knowledge of life and the world, which is the reward
given to the friends and lovers of mankind. For the preacher deals not
with the shallows but the depths of life. Like his Master he must be a
great humanist. To make real sermons he has to look, without dismay or
evasion, far into the heart's impenetrable recesses. He must have had
some experience with the absolutism of both good and evil. I think
preachers who regard sermons on salvation as superfluous have not had
much experience with either. They belong to that large world of the
intermediates, neither positively good nor bad, who compose the mass
of the prosperous and respectable in our genteel civilization. Since
they belong to it they cannot lead it. And certainly they who do
not know the absolutism of evil cannot very well understand sinners.
Genuine satans, as Milton knew, are not weaklings and traitors who
have declined from the standards of a respectable civilization. They
are positive and impressive figures pursuing and acting up to their
own ideal of conduct, not fleeing from self-accepted retribution or
falling away from a confessed morality of ours. Evil is a force even
more than a folly; it is a positive agent busily building away at the
City of Dreadful Night, constructing its insolent and scoffing society
within the very precincts of the City of God.
He must know, then, that evil and suffering are not temporary elements
of man's evolution, just about to be eliminated by the new reform,
the last formula, the fresh panacea. To those who have tasted grief
and smelt the fire such easy preaching and such confident solutions
are a grave offense. They know that evil is an integral part of our
universe; suffering an enduring element of the whole. So he must
preach upon the chances and changes of this mortal world, or go to
the house of shame or the place of mourning, knowing that there is
something past finding out in evil, something incommunicable about
true sorrow. They are not external things, alien to our natures, that
happen one day from without, and may perhaps be avoided, and by and
by are gone. No; that which makes sorrow, sorrow, and evil, evil, is
their naturalness; they well up from within, part of the very texture
of our consciousness. He knows you can never express them, for truly
to 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 not
external 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 saint
and to recognize the mystery of godliness in the sinner. It is his
business to revere the child and yet watch him that he may make a
man of him. He must say, so as to be understood, to those who balk at
discipline, and rail at self-repression, and resent pain: you have
not yet begun to live nor made the first step toward understanding the
universe and yourselves. To avoid discipline and to blench at pain is
to evade life. There are limitations, occasioned by the evil and the
suffering of the world, in whose repressions men find fulfillment.
When you are honest with yourself you will know what Dante meant when
he 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 yet
speak to them the truth in love; his task to understand the bitterness
and assuage the sorrows of old age. I suppose the greatest influence
a preacher ever exercises, and a chief source of the material and
insight of his preaching, is found in this intimate contact with
living and suffering, divided and distracted men and women. When
strong men blench with pain and exquisite grief stirs within us at
the sight and we can endure naught else but to suffer with them, when
youth 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 blot
me out of Thy book of life--for who could bear to live in a world
where such things are the end!--then, through the society of sorrow,
and the holy comradeship in shame, we begin to find the Lord and to
understand both the kindness and the justice of His world. In the
moment when sympathy takes the bitterness out of another's sorrow and
my suffering breaks the captivity of my neighbor's sin--then, when
because "together," with sinner and sufferer, we come out into the
quiet land of freedom and of peace, we perceive how the very heart of
God, upon which there we know we rest, may be found in the vicarious
suffering and sacrifice called forth by the sorrow and the evil
of mankind. Then we can preach the Gospel. Because then we dimly
understand 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 with
professional scholarship, or contented with moral conformities, can
minister to the sorrow and the mystery, the mingled shame and glory of
a human being? This is why the average theologue, in his first parish,
is like the well-meaning but meddling engineer endeavoring with clumsy
tools and insensitive fingers to adjust the delicate and complicated
mechanism of a Genevan watch. And here is one of the real reasons why
we deprecate men entering our calling, without both the culture of
a liberal education and the learning of a graduate school. Clearly,
therefore, one real task of such schools and their lectureships is to
offer men wide and gracious training in the art of human contacts,
so that their lives may be lifted above Pharisaism and moral
self-consciousness, made acquainted with the higher and comprehensive
interpretations of the heart and mind of our race. For only thus can
they approach life reverently and humbly. Only thus will they revere
the integrity of the human spirit; only thus can they regard it with
a magnanimous and catholic understanding and measure it not by the
standards of temperamental or sectarian convictions, but by what
is best and highest, deepest and holiest in the race. No one needs
more than the young preacher to be drawn out of the range of narrow
judgments, of exclusive standards and ecclesiastical traditions and to
be flung out among free and sensitive spirits, that he may watch their
workings, master their perceptions, catch their scale of values.
A discussion, then, dealing with this aspect of our problem, would
raise many and genuine questions for us. There is the more room for it
in this time of increasing emphasis upon machinery when even ministers
are being measured in the terms of power, speed and utility. These are
not real ends of life; real ends are unity, repose, the imaginative
and spiritual values which make for the release of self, with its
by-product of happiness. In such days, then, when the old-time
pastor-preacher is becoming as rare as the former general
practitioner; when the lines of division between speaker, educator,
expert in social hygiene, are being sharply drawn--as though new
methods insured of themselves fresh inspiration, and technical
knowledge was identical with spiritual understanding--it would be
worth while to dwell upon the culture of the pastoral office and to
show that ingenuity is not yet synonymous with insight, and that, in
our profession at least, card-catalogues cannot take the place of
the personal study of the human heart. But many discussions on this
Foundation, and recently those of Dr. Jowett, have already dealt with
this sort of analysis. Besides, today, when not merely the preacher,
but the very view of the world that produced him, is being threatened
with temporary extinction, such a theme, poetic and rewarding though
it is, becomes irrelevant and parochial.
Or we might turn to the problem of technique, that professional
equipment for his task as a sermonizer and public speaker which is
partly a native endowment and partly a laborious acquisition on the
preacher's part. Such was President Tucker's course on _The Making
and Unmaking of the Preacher_. Certainly observations on professional
technique, especially if they should include, like his, acute
discussion of the speaker's obligation to honesty of thinking, no less
than integrity of conduct; of the immorality of the pragmatic standard
of mere effectiveness or immediate efficiency in the selection of
material; of the aesthetic folly and ethical dubiety of simulated
extempore speaking and genuinely impromptu prayers, would not be
superfluous. But, on the other hand, we may hope to accomplish
much of this indirectly today. Because there is no way of handling
specifically either the content of the Christian message or the
problem of the immediate needs and temper of those to whom it is to
be addressed, without reference to the kind of personality, and the
nature of the tools at his disposal, which is best suited to commend
the one and to interpret the other.
Hence such a discussion as this ought, by its very scale of values--by
the motives that inform it and the ends that determine it--to condemn
thereby the insincere and artificial speaker, or that pseudo-sermon
which is neither as exposition, an argument nor a meditation but a
mosaic, a compilation of other men's thoughts, eked out by impossibly
impressive or piously sentimental anecdotes, the whole glued together
by platitudes of the Martin Tupper or Samuel Smiles variety. It is
certainly an obvious but greatly neglected truth that simplicity
and candor in public speaking, largeness of mental movement, what
Phillips Brooks called direct utterance of comprehensive truths, are
indispensable prerequisites for any significant ethical or spiritual
leadership. But, taken as a main theme, this third topic, like the
others, seems to me insufficiently inclusive to meet our present
exigencies. It deals more with the externals than with the heart of
our subject.
Again we might address ourselves to the ethical and practical
aspects of preaching and the ministry. Taking largely for granted
our understanding of the Gospel, we might concern ourselves with its
relations to society, the detailed implications for the moral and
economic problems of our social and industrial order. Dean Brown, in
_The Social Message of the Modern Pulpit_, and Dr. Coffin in _In a
Day of Social Rebuilding_, have so enriched this Foundation. Moreover,
this is, at the moment, an almost universally popular treatment of
the preacher's opportunity and obligation. One reason, therefore,
for not choosing this approach to our task is that the preacher's
attention, partly because of the excellence of these and other
books and lectures, and partly because of the acuteness of the
political-industrial crisis which is now upon us, is already focused
upon it.
Besides, our present moment is changing with an ominous rapidity. And
one is not sure whether the immediate situation, as distinguished from
that of even a few years ago, calls us to be concerned chiefly with
the practical and ethical aspects of our mission, urgent though the
need and critical the pass, to which the abuses of the capitalistic
system have brought both European and American society. In this day of
those shifting standards which mark the gradual transference of power
from one group to another in the community, and the merging of a
spent epoch in a new order, neither the chief opportunity nor the most
serious peril of religious leadership is met by fresh and energetic
programs of religion in action. In such days, our chief gift to the
world cannot be the support of any particular reforms or the alliance
with any immediate ethical or economic movement. For these things at
best would be merely the effects of religion. And it is not religion
in its relations, nor even in its expression in character--it is the
thing in itself that this age most needs. What men are chiefly asking
of life at this moment is not, What ought we to do? but the deeper
question, What is there we can believe? For they know that the answer
to this question would show us what we ought to do.
Nor do our reform alliances and successive programs and crusades
always seem to me to proceed from any careful estimate of the
situation as a whole or to be conceived in the light of comprehensive
Christian principle. Instead, they sometimes seem to draw their
inspiration more from the sense of the urgent need of presenting to an
indifferent or disillusioned world some quick and tangible evidence
of a continuing moral vigor and spiritual passion to which the deeper
and more potent witnesses are absent. It is as though we thought the
machinery of the church would revolve with more energy if geared into
the wheels of the working world. But that world and we do not draw
our power from the same dynamo. And surely in a day of profound
and widespread mental ferment and moral restlessness, some more
fundamental gift than this is asked of us.
If, therefore, these chapters pay only an incidental attention
to the church's social and ethical message, it is partly because
our attention is, at this very moment, largely centered upon this
important, yet secondary matter, and more because there lies beneath
it a yet more urgent and inclusive task which confronts the spokesman
of organized religion.
You will expect me then to say that we are to turn to some speculative
and philosophic study, such as the analysis of the Christian idea in
its world relationships, some fresh statement of the Gospel, either by
way of apologia for inherited concepts, or as attempting to make a new
receptacle for the living wine, which has indeed burst the most of
its ancient bottles. Such was Principal Fairbairn's monumental task in
_The Place of Christ in Modern Theology_ and also Dr. Gordon's in his
distinguished 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 ancient
organizations, that they shall seek refuge from the difficulties of
thought in the opportunities of action. They need to be continually
reminded that reforms begin in the same place where abuses do,
namely, in the notion of things; that only just ideas can, in the
long run, purify conduct; that clear thinking is the source of
all high and sustained feeling. I wish that we might essay the
philosopher-theologian's task. This generation is hungry for
understanding; it perishes for lack of knowledge. One reason for
the indubitable decline of the preacher's power is that we have been
culpably indifferent in maintaining close and friendly alliances
between the science and the art, the teachers and the practitioners of
religion. Few things would be more ominous than to permit any further
widening of the gulf which already exists between these two. Never
more than now does the preacher need to be reminded of what Marcus
Aurelius said: "Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also shall be
thyself; for the soul is dyed by its thoughts."
But such an undertaking, calling for wide and exact scholarship, large
reserves of extra-professional learning, does not primarily belong
to a discussion within the department of practical theology. Besides
which there is a task, closely allied to it, but creative rather than
critical, prophetic rather than philosophic, which does fall within
the precise area of this field. I mean the endeavor to describe
the mind and heart of our generation, appraise the significant
thought-currents of our time. This would be an attempt to give some
description of the chief impulses fermenting in contemporary society,
to ask what relation they hold to the Christian principle, and to
inquire what attitude toward them our preaching should adopt. If it be
true that what is most revealing in any age is its regulative ideas,
then what is more valuable for the preacher than to attempt the
understanding of his generation through the defining of its ruling
concepts? And it is this audacious task which, for two reasons, we
shall presume to undertake.
The first reason is that it is appropriate both to the temperament
and the training of the preacher. There are three grand divisions,
or rather determining emphases, by which men may be separated into
vocational groups. To begin with, there is the man of the scientific
or intellectual type. He has a passion for facts and a strong sense of
their reality. He moves with natural ease among abstract propositions,
is both critical of, and fertile in, theories; indicates his essential
distinction in his love of the truth for the truth's sake. He looks
first to the intrinsic reasonableness of any proposition; tends to
judge 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, he
shares it with the rest of mankind. He is sometimes a literalist and
sometimes a slave to logic, more concerned with combating the crude
or untenable form of a proposition than inquiring with sympathetic
insight into the worth of its substance. But these things are
perversions of his excellencies, defects of his virtues. His
characteristic qualities are mental integrity, accuracy of statement,
sanity of judgment, capacity for sustained intellectual toil. Such
men are investigators, scholars; when properly blended with the
imaginative type they become inventors and teachers. They make good
theologians and bad preachers.
Then there are the practical men, beloved of our American life. Both
their feet are firmly fixed upon the solid ground. They generally
know just where they are, which is not surprising, for they do not,
for the most part, either in the world of mind or spirit, frequent
unusual places. The finespun speculations of the philosophers and the
impractical dreams of the artist make small appeal to them; the world
they live in is a sharply defined and clearly lighted and rather
limited place. They like to say to this man come and he cometh, and to
that man go and he goeth. They are enamored of offices, typewriters,
telegrams, long-distance messages, secretaries, programs, conferences
and drives. Getting results is their goal; everything is judged by the
criterion of effective action; they are instinctive and unconscious
pragmatists. They make good cheer leaders at football games in their
youth and impressive captains of industry in their old age. Their
virtues are wholesome, if obvious; they are good mixers, have shrewd
judgment, immense physical and volitional energy. They understand that
two and two make four. They are rarely saints but, unlike many of
us who once had the capacity for sainthood, they are not dreadful
sinners. They are the tribe of which politicians are born but, when
they are blended with imaginative and spiritual gifts, they become
philanthropists and statesmen, practical servants of mankind. They
make good, if conservative, citizens; kind, if uninspiring, husbands
and deplorable preachers.
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]
[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 preëmpting 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.
We begin, then, with the humanist. He is the man who ignores, as
unnecessary, any direct reference to, or connection with, ultimate or
supernatural values. He lives in a high but self-contained world. His
is 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 the
collective experience of his generation or his race. He believes,
centrally, in the trustworthiness of human nature, in its group
capacity. Men, as a race, have intelligently observed and experimented
with both themselves and the world about them. Out of centuries of
critical reflection and sad and wise endeavor, they have evolved
certain criteria of experience. These summations could hardly be
called eternal laws but they are standards; they are the permits and
prohibitions for human life. Some of them affect personal conduct
and are moral standards; some of them affect civil government and are
political axioms; some of them affect production and distribution and
are economic laws; some of them affect social relationships. But in
every case the humanist has what is, in a sense, an objective because
a formal standard; he looks without himself as an individual, yet to
himself as a part of the composite experience and wisdom of his race,
for understanding and for guides. Thus the individual conforms to the
needs and wisdom of the group. Humanism, at its best, has something
heroic, unselfish, noble about it. Its votaries do not eat to their
liking nor drink to their thirst. They learn deep lessons almost
unconsciously; to conquer their desires, to make light of toil and
pain and discomfort; the true humanist is well aware that Spartan
discipline is incomparably superior to Greek accidence. This is what
one of the greatest of them, Goethe, meant when he said: "Anything
which emancipates the spirit without a corresponding growth in
self-mastery is pernicious."
All humanists then have two characteristics in common: first,
they assume that man is his own arbiter, has both the requisite
intelligence and the moral ability to control his own destiny;
secondly, they place the source and criterion of this power in
collective wisdom, not in individual vagary and not in divine
revelation. They assert, therefore, that the law of the group, the
perfected and wrought out code of human experience, is all that is
binding and all that is essential. To be sure, and most significantly,
this authority is not rigid, complete, fixed. There is nothing
complete in the humanist's world. Experience accumulates and man's
knowledge grows; the expectation and joy in progress is a part of it;
man's code changes, emends, expands with his onward marching. But the
humanistic point of view assumes something relatively stable in life.
Hence our phrase that humanism gives us a classic, that is to say, a
simple and established standard.
It is to be observed that there is nothing in humanism thus defined
which need be incompatible with religion. It is not with its content
but its incompleteness that we quarrel. Indeed, in its assertion of
the trustworthiness of human experience, its faith in the dignity and
significance of man, its respect for the interests of the group, and
its conviction that man finds his true self only outside his immediate
physical person, beyond his material wants and desires, it is quite
genuinely a part of the religious understanding. But we shall have
occasion to observe that while much of this may be religious this is
not the whole of religion. For the note of universality is absent.
Humanism is essentially aristocratic. It is for a selected group that
it is practicable and it is a selected experience upon which it rests.
Its standards are esoteric rather than democratic. Yet it is hardly
necessary to point out the immense part which humanism, as thus
defined, is playing in present life.
But there is another law which, from remotest times, man has
followed whenever he dared. It is not the law of the group but of
the individual, not the law of civilization but of the jungle. "Most
men," says Aristotle, "would rather live in a disorderly than a sober
manner." He means that most men would rather consult and gratify their
immediate will, their nearest choices, their instantaneous desires,
than conform the moment to some regulated and considerate, some
comprehensive scheme of life and action. The life of unreason is their
desire; the experience whose bent is determined by every whim, the
expression which has no rational connection with the past and no
serious consideration for the future. This is of the very essence of
lawlessness because it is revolt against the normal sequence of law
and effect, in mind and conduct, in favor of untrammeled adventure.
Now this is naturalism or paganism as we often call it. Naturalism
is a perversion of that high instinct in mankind which issues in the
old concept of supernaturalism. The supernaturalist, of a former and
discredited type, believed that God violates the order of nature
for sublime ends; that He "breaks into" His own world, so to speak,
"revealing" Himself in prodigious, inexplicable, arbitrary ways. By a
sort of degradation of this notion, a perversion of this instinct, the
naturalist assumes that he can violate both the human and the divine
law for personal ends, and express himself in fantastic or indecent
or impious ways. The older supernaturalism exalts the individualism
of the Creator; naturalism the egotism of the creature. I make the
contrast not merely to excoriate naturalism, but to point out the
interdependence between man's apparently far-separated expressions
of his spirit, and how subtly misleading are our highly prized
distinctions, how dangerous sometimes that secondary mental power
which multiplies them. It sobers and clarifies human thinking a
little, perhaps, to reflect on how thin a line separates the sublime
and the ridiculous, the saint and the sensualist, the martyr and the
fool, the genius and the freak.
Now, with this selfish individualism which we call naturalism we shall
have much to do, for it plays an increasing rôle in the modern
world; it is the neo-paganism which we may see spreading about us.
Sophistries of all kinds become the powerful allies of this sort of
moral and aesthetic anarchy. Its votaries are those sorts of
rebels who invariably make their minds not their friends but their
accomplices. They are ingenious in the art of letting themselves go
and at the same time thinking themselves controlled and praiseworthy.
The naturalist, then, ignores the group; he flaunts impartially
both the classic and the religious law. He is equally unwilling to
submit to a power imposed from above and without, or to accept those
restrictions of society, self-imposed by man's own codified and
corrected observations of the natural world and his own impulses. He
jeers at the one as hypocrisy and superstition and at the other as
mere "middle-class respectability." He himself is the perpetual Ajax
standing defiant upon the headland of his own inflamed desires,
and scoffing at the lightnings either of heaven or society. Neither
devoutness nor progress but mere personal expansion is his goal. The
humanist curbs both the flesh and the imagination by a high doctrine
of expediency. Natural values are always critically appraised in the
light of humane values, which is nearly, if not quite, the same as
saying that the individual desires and delights must be conformed
to the standards of the group. There can be no anarchy of the
imagination, 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 and
representative, but the unique and spectacular is his goal. Novelty
and expansion, not form and proportion, are his goddesses. Not truth
and duty, but instinct and appetite, are in the saddle. He will try
any horrid experiment from which he may derive a new sensation.
Over against them both stands the man of religion with his vision of
the whole and his consequent law of proud humility. The next three
chapters will try to discuss in detail these several attitudes toward
life and their respective manifestations in contemporary society.
CHAPTER TWO
THE CHILDREN OF ZION AND THE SONS OF GREECE