Thus it has come about that we preach of God in terms of the
drawing-room, as though he were some vast St. Nicholas, sitting up
there in the sky or amiably informing our present world, regarding
with easy benevolence His minute and multifarious creations, winking
at our pride, our cruelty, our self-love, our lust, not greatly
caring if we break His laws, tossing out His indiscriminate gifts,
and vaguely trusting in our automatic arrival at virtue. Even as in
philosophy, it is psychologists, experts in empirical science and
methods, and sociologists, experts in practical ethics, who may be
found, while the historian and the metaphysician are increasingly
rare, so in preaching we are amiable and pious and ethical and
practical and informative, but the vision and the absolutism of
religion are a departing glory.
What complicates the danger and difficulty of such a position, with
its confusion of natural and human values, and its rationalizing
and secularizing of theistic thinking, is that it has its measure of
reality. All these observations of naturalist and humanist are half
truths, and for that very reason more perilous than utter falsehoods.
For the mind tends to rest contented within their areas, and so the
partial becomes the worst enemy of the whole. What we have been doing
is stressing the indubitable identity between man and nature and
between the Creator and His creatures to the point of unreality,
forgetting the equally important fact of the difference, the
distinction between the two.
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