! Hence no man was ever yet
able to preach the living God until he understood that the central
need in human life is to reconcile the individual conscience to
itself, compose the anarchy of the spiritual life. Men want to be
happy and be fed; but men must have inward peace.

We swing back, therefore, to the native ground of preaching, approach
the religious problem, now, not from the aesthetic or the scientific,
but from the moral angle. Here we are dealing with the most poignant
of all human experiences. For it is in this intensely personal world
of moral failure and divided will that men are most acutely aware of
themselves and hence of their need of that other-than-self beyond.
The sentimental idealizing of contemporary life, the declension of the
humanist's optimism into that superficial complacency which will not
see what it does not like or what it is not expedient to see, makes
one's mind to chuckle while one's heart doth ache. There is a brief
heyday, its continuance dependent upon the uncontrollable factors
of outward prosperity, physical and nervous vigor, capacity for
preoccupation with the successive novelties of a diversified and
complicated civilization, in which even men of religious temperament
can minimize or ignore, perhaps sincerely disbelieve in, their divided
life. Sometimes we think we may sin and be done with it. But always in
the end man must come back to this moral tragedy of the soul. Because
sin will not be done with us when we are done with it. Every evil
is evil to him that does it and sooner or later we are compelled
to understand that to be a sinner is the sorest and most certain
punishment for sinning.

Then the awakening begins. Then can preaching stir the heart until
deep answereth unto deep. It can talk of the struggle with moral
temptation and weakness; of the unstable temperament which oscillates
between the gutter and the stars; of the perversion or abuse of
impulses good in themselves; of the dreadful dualism of the soul. For
these are inheritances which have made life tragic in every generation
for innumerable human beings. Whoever needed to explain to a company
of grown men and women what the cry of the soul for its release from
passion is? Every generation has its secret pessimists, brooding over
the anarchy of the spirit, the issues of a distracted life. We need
not ask with Faust, "Where is that place which men call 'Hell'?" nor
wait for Mephistopheles to answer,

"Hell