re the balance of the religious
consciousness and to dwell, not on man's identity with Nature, but
on his far-flung difference; not on his self-sufficiency, but on his
tragic helplessness; not on the God of the market place, the office
and the street, an immanent and relative deity, but on the Absolute,
that high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity? Indeed, we are being
solemnly reminded today that the other-worldliness of religion, its
concern with future, supertemporal things, is its characteristic and
most precious contribution to the world. We are seeing how every human
problem when pressed to its ultimate issue becomes theological. Here
is where the fertile field for contemporary preaching lies. It
is found, not in remaining with those elements in the religious
consciousness which it shares in common with naturalism and humanism,
but in passing over to those which are distinctive to itself alone. It
has always been true, but it is especially true at this moment, that
effective preaching has to do chiefly with transcendent values.

Our task is to assert, first, then, the "otherness" of man, his
difference from Nature, to point out the illusoriness of her phenomena
for him, the derived reality and secondary value of her facts.
These are things that need religious elucidation. The phrase
"other-worldliness" has come, not without reason, to have an evil
connotation among us, but there is nevertheless a genuine disdain
of this world, a sense of high superiority to it and profound
indifference toward it, which is of the essence of the religious
attitude. He who knows that here he is a stranger, sojourning in
tabernacles; that he belongs by his nature, not to this world, but
that he seeks a better, that is to say, a heavenly country, will for
the joy that is set before him, endure a cross and will despise
the shame. He will have a conscious superiority to hostile facts of
whatever sort or magnitude, for he knows that they deceive in so
far as they pretend to finality. When religion has thus acquired a
clear-sighted and thoroughgoing indifference to the natural order,
then, and then only, it begins to be potent within that order. Then,
as Professor Hocking says, it rises superior to the world of facts and
becomes irresistible.[31]

[Footnote 31: _The Meaning of God in Human Experience_, p. 518.]

The time is ripe, then, first, for the preacher to emphasize the
inward and essential difference between man and nature whi