this was so. Either saint
or sinner would consider it the supreme insult, the last pitch of
insolence, for the church to be telling them that it is true.

For they know within themselves that it is a lie. Their one hope hangs
on God because His thoughts are not their thoughts, nor His ways their
ways; because He seeth the end from the beginning; because in Him
there is no variableness, neither shadow that is caused by turning;
because no man shall see His face and live. They, the sinners and the
saints, do not want to be told that they, within themselves, can heal
themselves and that sin has no real sinfulness. That is tempting them
to the final denial, the last depth of betrayal, the blurring of moral
values, the calling of evil good and the saying that good is evil.
They know that this is the unpardonable madness. In the hours when
they, the saints and sinners, wipe their mouths and say, "We have done
no harm"; in the days when what they love is ugliness because it is
ugly and shameless, and reckless expression because it is so terrible,
so secretly appalling, so bittersweet with the sweetness of death,
they know that it is the last affront to have the church--the one
place where men expect they will be made to face the facts--bow these
facts out of doors.

No, we readily grant that the religious approach to the whole truth
and to final reality is like any other one, either scientific,
economic, political, a partial approach. It sets forth for the most
part only a group of facts. When it does not emphasize other facts,
it does not thereby deny them. But it insists that the truth of man's
differences, man's helplessness which the differences reveal, and
man's fate hanging therefore upon a transcendent God, are the key
truths for the religious life. It is with that aspect of life the
preacher deals, and if he fails to grapple with these problems and
considerations, ignores these facts, his candlestick has been removed.

The argument for a God, then, within His world, but also distinct
from it, above its evil custom and in some sense untouched by
its all-leveling life, is essential to the preservation of human
personality, and personality is essential to dignity, to decency, to
hope. The clearest and simplest thing to be said about the Hebrew God,
lofty and inaccessible Being, with whom nevertheless His purified and
obedient children might have relationships, or about the "living
God" of Greek theology, far removed fr