s in things evil, and never assuming any
sanctimonious ways, or thinking himself better than his brethren.

"Dewey is undoubtedly the founder and most conspicuous example of what
is best in the modern school of preaching. The characteristic feature is
the effort to carry the inspiration, the correction, and the riches of
Christian faith into the whole sphere of human life; to make religion
practical, without lowering its ideal; to proclaim our present world and
our mortal life as the field of its influence and realization, trusting
that what best fits men to live and employ and enjoy their spiritual
nature here, is what best prepares them for the future life. Dewey, like
Franklin, who trained the lightning of the sky to respect the safety,
and finally to run the errands of men on earth, brought religion from
its remote home and domesticated it in the immediate present. He first
successfully taught its application to the business of the market and
the street, to the offices of home and the pleasures of society. We are
so familiar with this method, now prevalent in the best pulpits of all
Christian bodies, that we forget the originality and boldness of the
hand that first turned the current of religion into the ordinary channel
of life, and upon the working wheels of daily business. The glory of
the achievement is lost in the magnificence of its success.
Practical preaching, when it means, as it often does, a mere prosaic
recommendation of ordinary duties, a sort of Poor Richard's prudential
[361] maxims, is a shallow and nearly useless thing. It is a kind of
social and moral agriculture with the plough and the spade, but with
little regard to the enrichment of the soil, or drainage from the depths
or irrigation from the heights. The true, practical preaching is that
which brings the celestial truths of our nature and our destiny,
the powers of the world to come and the terrors and promises of our
relationship to the Divine Being, to bear upon our present duties, to
animate and elevate our daily life, to sanctify the secular, to redeem
the common from its loss of wonder and praise, to make the familiar give
up its superficial tameness, to awaken the sense of awe in those who
have lost or never acquired the proper feeling of the spiritual mystery
that envelops our ordinary life. This was Dewey's peculiar skill. Poets
had already done it for poets, and in a sense neither strictly religious
nor expected to be made practical.