g of the humanist's emphasis upon
man's native capacity and insist upon the complementary truth which
fulfills this moral heroism of mankind, namely, the divine rescue
which answers to its inadequacy. Man must struggle for his victory; he
can win; he cannot win alone. We must then insist upon the doctrine
of salvation, turning ourselves to the other side of the humanist's
picture. Man cannot live by this more-than-natural law unaided. For
not only has he the power to rise above Nature; the same thing gives
him equal capacity to sink beneath her, and, when left to himself, he
generally does so. The preacher does not dare deny the sovereignty
of sin. Humanism hates the very name of sin; it has never made
any serious attempt to explain the consciousness of guilt. Neither
naturalist nor humanist can afford to admit sin, for sin takes man, as
holiness does, outside the iron chain of cause and effect; it breaks
the law; it is not strictly natural. It makes clear enough that man
is outside the natural order in two ways. He is both inferior and
superior to it. He falls beneath, he rises above it. When he acts like
a beast, he is not clean and beastly, but unclean and bestial. When he
lifts his head in moral anguish, bathes all his spirit in the flood
of awe and repentance, is transfigured with the glorious madness of
self-sacrifice, he is so many worlds higher than the beast that their
relationship becomes irrelevant. So we must deal more completely
than humanists do with the central mystery of our experience; man's
impotent idealism, his insight not matched with consummation; the fact
that what he dares to dream of he is not able alone to do.

For the humanist exalts man, which is good; but then he makes him
self-sufficient for the struggle which such exaltation demands, which
is bad. In that partial understanding he departs from truth. And what
is it that makes the futility of so much present preaching? It is the
acceptance of this doctrine of man's moral adequacy and consequently
the almost total lack either of the assurance of grace or of the
appeal to the will. No wonder such exhortations cannot stem the tide
of an ever increasing worldliness. Such preaching stimulates the mind;
in both the better and the worse preachers, it moves the emotions but
it gives men little power to act on what they hear and feel to the
transformation of their daily existence. Thus the humanistic sense of
man's sufficiency, coupled with the inher