But I beg to point out that, on the
whole, we have lost more religiously than we have gained. For we have
made Jesus easy to understand, not as He brings us up to His level,
but as we have reduced Him to ours. Can we afford to do that?
Bernard's mystical line, "The love of Jesus, what it is, none but His
loved ones know," has small meaning here. The argument is very good
humanism but it drops the word "Saviour" out of the vocabulary
of faith. Oh, how many sermons since, let us say, 1890, have been
preached on the text, "He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father."
And how uniformly the sermons have explained that the text means
not that Jesus is like God, but that God is like Jesus--and we have
already seen that Jesus is like us! One only has to state it all to
see beneath its superficial reasonableness its appalling profanity!
Third: we may see the influence of humanism upon our preaching in the
relinquishment of the goal of conversion. We are preaching to educate,
not to save; to instruct, not to transform. Conversion may be gradual
and half-unconscious, a long and normal process under favorable
inheritance and with the culture of a Christian environment. Or it
may be sudden and catastrophic, a violent change of emotional and
volitional activity. When a man whose feeling has been repressed by
sin and crusted over by deception, whose inner restlessness has been
accumulating under the misery and impotence of a divided life, is
brought into contact with Christian truth, he can only accept it
through a volitional crisis, with its cleansing flood of penitence and
confession and its blessed reward of the sense of pardon and peace and
the relinquishment of the self into the divine hands.
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