would bend the modern mind to
the support of an inherited interpretation of experience and therefore
would not any longer really explain or confirm it. Neither can we hold
new views which mutilate the experience and leave out some of the most
precious elements in it, even if in so doing we should simplify the
problem for the mind. It would be an unreal simplification; it would
darken, not illumine, the understanding; we should never rest in it.
Nor do we need to be concerned if the intellect cannot perfectly
order or easily demonstrate the whole of the religious life, fit each
element with a self-verifying defense and explanation. No man of the
world, to say nothing of a man of faith or imagination, has ever yet
trusted to a purely intellectual judgment.

So we reject the old dualism, its dichotomized universe, its two sorts
of authority, its prodigious and arbitrary supernaturalism. But we do
not reject what lay behind it. Still we wrestle with the angel, lamed
though we are by the contest, and we cannot let him go until the day
breaks and the shadows flee away. It would be easier perhaps to give
up the religious point of view, but for that ease we should pay with
our life. For that swift answer, achieved by leaving out prime factors
in the problem, we should be betraying the self for whose sake alone
any answer is valuable. It does not pay to cut such Gordian knots! Our
task, then, is to preach transcendence again, not in terms of the old
absolutist philosophy, but in terms of the perceptions, the needs, the
experience of the human heart and mind and will which produced that
philosophy.

Nor is this so hard to do. Now, as always for the genuinely religious
temperament, there are abundant riches of material lying ready to its
hand. It is not difficult to make transcendence real and to reveal to
men their consummate need of it when we speak of it in the language
of experience and perception. What preaching should avoid is
the abstractions of an archaic system of thought with all their
provocative and contentious elements, the mingled dogmatism and
incompleteness which any worked-out system contains. It is so foolish
in the preacher to turn himself into a lay philosopher. Let him keep
his insight clear, through moral discipline keep his intuitions high,
his spirit pure, and then he can furnish the materials for philosophy.

Thus an almost universal trait of the religious temperament is in
its delight in beauty. Someti