Its object is not so much moralizing or instructing as it is
interpreting and revealing; not the plotting out of the landscape
at our feet, but the lifting of our eyes to the hills, to the fixed
stars. Then we really do see things that are large as large and things
that are small as small. We need that vision today from religious
leaders more than we need any other one thing.
For humanism and naturalism between them have brought us to an almost
complete secularization of preaching, in which its characteristic
elements, its distinctive contribution, have largely faded from
liberal speaking and from the consciousness of its hearers. We have
emphasized man's kinship with nature until now we can see him again
declining to the brute; we have proclaimed the divine Immanence
until we think to compass the Eternal within a facile and finite
comprehension. By thus dwelling on the physical and rational elements
of human experience, religion has come to concern itself to an
extraordinary degree with the local and temporal reaches of faith.
We have lost the sense of communion with Absolute Being and of the
obligation to standards higher than those of the world, which that
communion brings. Out of this identification of man with nature has
come the preaching which ignores the fact of sin; which reduces free
will and the moral responsibility of the individual to the vanishing
point; which stresses the control of the forces of inheritance and
environment to the edge of fatalistic determinism; which leads man
to regard himself as unfortunate rather than reprehensible when moral
disaster overtakes him; which induces that condoning of the moral
rebel which is born not of love for the sinner but of indifference to
his sin; which issues in that last degeneration of self-pity in
which individuals and societies alike indulge; and in that repellent
sentimentality over vice and crime which beflowers the murderer while
it forgets its victim, which turns to ouija boards and levitated
tables to obscure the solemn finality of death and to gloze over the
guilty secrets of the battlefield.
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