To obey a principle
is moral and admirable; to do good and be good because it pays is
sensible; but to act from love of a person is a joyous ecstasy, a
liberation of power; it alone transforms life with an ultimate and
enduring goodness. Genuine Christian preaching makes its final appeal,
not to fear, not to hope, not to future rewards and punishments, not
to reason or prudence or benevolence. It makes its appeal to love,
and that means that it calls men to devotion to a living Being, a
Transcendence beyond and without us. For you cannot love a principle,
or relinquish yourself to an idea. You must love another living
Being. Which amounts to saying that humanism just because it is
self-contained is self-condemned. It minimizes or ignores the living
God, in His world, but not to be identified with it; beyond it and
above it; loving it because it needs to be loved; blessing it because
saving it. In so doing, it lays the axe at the very root of the tree
of religion. Francis Xavier, in his greatest of all hymns, has stated
once for all the essence of the Christian motive and the religious
attitude:
"O Deus, ego amo te
Nec amo te ut salves me
Aut quia non amantes te
Aeternis punis igne.
"Nee praemii illius spe
Sed sicut tu amasti me
Sic amo et amabo te
Solem, quia Rex meus est."
What, then, has been the final effect of humanism upon preaching? It
has tempted the preacher to depersonalize religion.
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