But
we are not discarding with them that other aspect of the truth, the
principle of separateness, nor those value judgments, that perpetual
vision of another nature, behind and beneath phenomena, from which
the old dualism took its rise. It is the form which it assumed, the
interpretation of experience which it gave, not the facts themselves,
obscure but stubborn as they are, which it confessed, that we have
dropped. Identity and difference are still here; man is a part of his
world, but he is also apart from it. God is in nature and in us; God
is without and other than nature and most awfully something other than
us.
Indeed, the precise problem of the preacher today is to keep the old
supernatural values and drop the old vocabulary with the philosophy
which induced it. We must acknowledge the universe as one, and yet be
able to show that the He or the It, beyond and without the world, is
its only conceivable beginning, its only conceivable end, the chief
hope of its brevity, the only stay of its idealism. It was the
arbitrary and mechanical completeness of the old division, not the
reality that underlay the distinction itself, which parted company
with truth and hence lost the allegiance of the mind. It was that the
old dualism tried to lock up this, the most baffling of all realities,
in a formula,--that was what undid it.
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