The cynical and sordid maxim that business is business; that, in the
economic sphere, the standards of the church are not operative and the
responsibility of the church is not recognized--notions which are
a chief heresy and an outstanding disgrace of nineteenth-century
religion, from which we are only now painfully and slowly
reacting--these may be traced back to the influence of humanism upon
Christian thought and conduct.
In general, then, it seems to me abundantly clear that the humanistic
movement has both limited and secularized Christian preaching. It
dogmatically ignores supersensuous values; hence it has rationalized
preaching hence it has made provincial its intellectual approach and
treatment, narrowed and made mechanical its content. It has turned
preaching away from speculative to practical themes. It was,
perhaps, this mental and spiritual decline of the ministry to which a
distinguished educator referred when he told a body of Congregational
preachers that their sermons were marked by "intellectual frugality."
It is this which a great New England theologian-preacher, Dr. Gordon,
means when he says "an indescribable pettiness, a mean kind of retail
trade has taken possession of the preachers; they have substituted the
mill-round for the sun-path."
The whole world today tends toward a monstrous egotism. Man's
attention is centered on himself, his temporal salvation, his external
prosperity.
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