eld conclusions, its
relative insignificance, if it must thus stand alone. All that can
save it, preserve to it worth and dignity, maintain its self-respect
and mastery, is to find that abundant power without which confesses,
certifies and seals the divinity within.

How foredoomed to failure, then, especially in an age when men are
surmounting life by placating it, enjoying it by being easy with
themselves--how foredoomed to failure is the preaching which continues
in the world of religion this exaltation of human sufficiency and
natural values, domesticating them within the church. It is to laugh
to see them there! It means so transparent a surrender, so pitiable a
confession of defeat. If anything can bring the natural man into the
sanctuary it is that there he has to bring his naturalness to the bar
of a more-than-natural standard. If he comes at all, it will not
be for entertainment and expansion but because there we insist on
reverence and restraint. If church and preacher offer only a pietized
and decorous naturalism, when he can get the real thing in naked and
unashamed brutality without; if they offer him only another form of
humanistic living, he will stay away. Such preaching is as boresome
as it is unnecessary. Such exercise of devotion is essentially
superfluous and a rather humorous imposition upon the world. The only
thing that will ever bring the natural man to listen to preaching is
when it insists upon something more-than-the-natural and calls him to
account regarding it; when it speaks of something different and better
for him than this world and what it can offer. "Take my _yoke_ upon
you" is the attractive invitation, "make inner obeisance and outward
obedience to something higher than thy poor self."

It is clear, then, that these observations have a bearing upon our
preaching of the doctrine of God. There is a certain illogicality,
something humorous, in going into a church, of all places in the
world, to be told how like we are to Him. The dull and average
personality, the ordinary and not very valuable man, can probably
listen indifferently and with a slow-growing hardness and dim
resentment to that sort of preaching for a number of years. But the
valuable, the highly personalized people, the saints and the sinners,
the great rebels and the great disciples, who are the very folk for
whom the church exists, would hate it, and they would know the final
bitterness of despair if they thought that