perceived apart from our own
consciousness, then we may say that what we have is a mediate or
representative knowledge not only of an Eternal Being but formed under
the influence of that Being. Nor does the believer ask for more. He
does not expect to see the King in His beauty; he only needs to know
that He is, that He is there.

How self-verifying and moving, then, are the appeals ready to our
hands. As long as man with the power to question, to strive, to
aspire, to endure, to suffer, lives in a universe of ruthless and
overwhelming might, so long, if he is to understand it or maintain
his reason and his dignity, he will believe it to be controlled by a
Spirit beyond no less than within, from whom his spirit is derived. It
is out of the struggle to revere and conserve human personality, out
of the belief in the indefectible worth and honor of selfhood that
our race has fronted a universe in arms, and pitting its soul against
nature has cried, "God is my refuge: underneath me, at the very moment
when I am engulfed in earthquake shock or shattered in the battle's
roar, there are everlasting arms!" There is something which is too
deep for tears in the unconquerable idealism, the utter magnanimity
of the faith of the human spirit in that which will answer to itself,
as evidenced in this forlorn and glorious adventure of the soul.
Sometimes we are constrained to ask ourselves, How can the heart of
man go so undismayed through the waste places of the world?

But, of course, the preacher's main task is to interpret man's moral
experience, which drives him out to search for the eternal in
the terms of the "other" and redeeming God. We have spoken of the
depersonalizing of religion which paganism and humanism alike have
brought upon the world. One evidence of that has been the way in
which we have confounded the social expressions of religion with its
individual source. We are so concerned with the effect of our religion
upon the community that we have forgotten that the heart of religion
is found in the solitary soul. All of which means that we have here
again yielded to the time spirit that enfolds us and have come to
think of man as religious if he be humane. But that is not true. No
man is ever religious until he becomes devout. And indeed no man of
our sort--the saint and sinner sort--is ever long and truly humane
unless the springs of his tenderness for men are found in his ever
widening and deepening gratitude to God