th Absolute Being and of the
obligation to standards higher than those of the world, which that
communion brings. Out of this identification of man with nature has
come the preaching which ignores the fact of sin; which reduces free
will and the moral responsibility of the individual to the vanishing
point; which stresses the control of the forces of inheritance and
environment to the edge of fatalistic determinism; which leads man
to regard himself as unfortunate rather than reprehensible when moral
disaster overtakes him; which induces that condoning of the moral
rebel which is born not of love for the sinner but of indifference to
his sin; which issues in that last degeneration of self-pity in
which individuals and societies alike indulge; and in that repellent
sentimentality over vice and crime which beflowers the murderer while
it forgets its victim, which turns to ouija boards and levitated
tables to obscure the solemn finality of death and to gloze over the
guilty secrets of the battlefield.

Thus it has come about that we preach of God in terms of the
drawing-room, as though he were some vast St. Nicholas, sitting up
there in the sky or amiably informing our present world, regarding
with easy benevolence His minute and multifarious creations, winking
at our pride, our cruelty, our self-love, our lust, not greatly
caring if we break His laws, tossing out His indiscriminate gifts,
and vaguely trusting in our automatic arrival at virtue. Even as in
philosophy, it is psychologists, experts in empirical science and
methods, and sociologists, experts in practical ethics, who may be
found, while the historian and the metaphysician are increasingly
rare, so in preaching we are amiable and pious and ethical and
practical and informative, but the vision and the absolutism of
religion are a departing glory.

What complicates the danger and difficulty of such a position, with
its confusion of natural and human values, and its rationalizing
and secularizing of theistic thinking, is that it has its measure of
reality. All these observations of naturalist and humanist are half
truths, and for that very reason more perilous than utter falsehoods.
For the mind tends to rest contented within their areas, and so the
partial becomes the worst enemy of the whole. What we have been doing
is stressing the indubitable identity between man and nature and
between the Creator and His creatures to the point of unreality,
forgetting the