assured of
the unreality of sin, offered the subtle satisfactions of a cultivated
intelligence. In just so far as they are genuine men and women, they
resent such preaching as an insult, a mockery and an offense. No, no;
something more is needed than the humanist can offer for those who are
hard-pressed participants in the stricken fields of life.

Religious preaching, then, begins with these two things: man's
solitary place in nature, man's inability to hold that place alone.
Hence two more things are necessary as essentials of great preaching
in a pagan day. The clear proclamation of the superhuman God, the
transcendent spirit who is able to control and reinforce the spirit of
man, and the setting forth of some way or some mediator, through whom
man may meet and touch that Spirit so far removed yet so infinitely
near and dear to him. It is with these matters that we shall be
occupied in the next chapter.

CHAPTER SIX

THE ALMIGHTY AND EVERLASTING GOD

If the transcendent element in man which endows him with the proud if
tragic sense of personality is the first message of the preacher to
a chattering and volatile world, and the second is the setting forth
of what this endowment demands and how pitiably man fails to meet it,
then the third message is of the Rock that is higher than he, even
inclusive of his all, in whose composed and comprehensive Being his
baffled and divided person may be gathered up, brought to its own
consummation of self. The rivers that pour tumultuously to their ocean
bed, the ascending fire ever falling backward but leaping upward to
the sun, are poor figures to express the depth and irresistible urge
of the passion in man for completeness, for repose, for power, for
self-perception in self-expression, for victory and the attainment
of the end. Conscious and divided spirit that he is, man turns away,
sooner or later, with utter weariness and self-disgust from the nature
which pleases him by betraying him, which maims his person that he
may enjoy his senses, and reaches out after the other-worldly, the
supernatural, the invisible and eternal Hope and Home of the Soul.

Humanism which bids men sufficiently find God within themselves, if
they think they need to find Him at all, seems not to comprehend this
passion of pride and humility, this inner perception of the futility
and the blunder of the self-contained life. Life is so obviously
not worth its brevity, its suffering, its withh