d ministering service is both necessary and right. And
why is the reformatory replacing the prison? Because we have learned
that the obvious, natural way of dealing with the criminal certainly
destroys him and threatens to destroy us; and that the hard, difficult
path of reeducating and reforming a vicious life is the one which the
state for her own safety must follow.

Genuine preaching, then, first of all, calls men to repentance, bids
them turn away from their natural selves, and, to find that other and
realer self, enter the straight and narrow gate. The call is not an
arbitrary command, born of a negative and repressive spirit. It is a
profound exhortation based upon a fundamental law of human progress,
having behind it the inviolable sanction of the truth. Such preaching
would have the authentic note. It is self-verifying. It stirs to
answer that quality--both moral and imaginative--in the spirit of man
which craves the pain and difficulty and satisfaction of separation
from the natural order. It appeals to a timeless worth in man which
transcends any values of mere intelligence which vary with the ages,
or any material prosperity which perishes with the using, or any
volitional activity that dies in its own expenditure. Much of the
philosophy of Socrates was long ago outmoded, but Socrates himself, as
depicted in the Phaedo, confronting death with the cup of hemlock in
his hand, saying with a smile, "There is no evil which can happen to
a good man living or dead," has a more-than-natural, an enduring and
transcendent quality. Whenever we preach to the element in mankind
which produces such attitudes toward life and bid it assert itself,
then we are doing religious preaching, and then we speak with power.
Jesus lived within the inexorable circle of the ideas of His time;
He staked much on the coming of the new kingdom which did not appear
either when or as He had first expected it. He had to adjust, as do we
all, His life to His experience, His destiny to His fate. But when He
was hanging on His cross, forgotten of men and apparently deserted by
His God, something in Him that had nothing to do with nature or the
brute rose to a final expression and by its more-than-natural reality,
sealed and authenticated His life. Looking down upon His torturers,
understanding them far better than they understood themselves, He
cried, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." That
cry has no place in nature; it has