And since love is
the essence of personality, it has thereby stripped preaching of the
emotional energy, of the universal human interests and the
prophetic insight which only love can bestow. Over against this
depersonalization, we must find some way to return to expressing the
religious view and utilizing the religious power of the human spirit.
CHAPTER THREE
EATING, DRINKING AND BEING MERRY
We ventured to say in the preceding chapter that, under the influences
of more than three centuries of humanism, the spiritual solidarity of
mankind is breaking down. For humanism makes an inhuman demand upon
the will; it minimizes the force of the subrational and it largely
ignores the superrational elements in human experience; it does not
answer enough questions. Indeed, it is frankly confessed, particularly
by students of the political and economic forces now working in
society, that the new freedom born in the Renaissance is, in some
grave sense, a failure. It destroyed what had been the common moral
authority of European civilization in its denial of the rule of the
church. But for nearly four centuries it has become increasingly clear
that it offered no adequate substitute for the supernatural moral and
religious order which it supplanted. John Morley was certainly one of
the most enlightened and humane positivists of the last generation.
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