the ground
In the bottom of my mind."

Here, then, can we not understand that mingling of mystic dignity
and profound humility, of awe-struck pride and utter self-abnegation,
wherewith the man of religion regards his race and himself? He is the
child of the Eternal; he, being man, alone knows that God is. "When I
consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars
which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him,
or the son of man that Thou visitest him?" Here is the humility: "Why
so hot, little man!" Then comes the awe-struck pride: "Yet Thou hast
made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and
honor." "Alone with the gods, alone!" God is the high and lofty one
which inhabiteth eternity, but He is also nigh unto them who are of a
broken and a contrite heart.

Here we are come to the very heart of religion. Man's proud
separateness in the universe; yet man's moral defection and his
responsibility for it which makes him know that separateness; man's
shame and helplessness under it. Over against the denial or evasion
of moral values by the naturalist and the dullness to the sense
of moral helplessness by the humanist, there stands the sense of
moral difference, the sense of sin, of penitence and confession. No
preaching not founded on these things can ever be called religious or
can ever stir those ranges of the human life for which alone preaching
is supposed to exist.

What is the religious law, then? It is the law of humility. And what
is the religious consciousness? The sense of man's difference from
nature and from God. The sense of his difference from himself within
himself and the longing for an inner harmony which shall unite him
with himself and with the beauty and the spirit without. So what
is the religious passion? Is it to exalt human nature? It would
be more true to say it is to lose it. What is the end for us? Not
identification with nature and the natural self, but pursuit of the
other than nature, the more than natural self. Our humility is not
like that of Uriah Heep, a mean opinion of ourselves in comparison
with other men. It is the profound consciousness of the weakness and
the nothingness of our kind, and of the poor ends human nature sets
its heart upon, in comparison with that Other One above and beyond and
without us, to whom we are kin, from whom we are different, to whom we
aspire, to reach whom we know not how.

This, then, is