We have spoken of the
depersonalizing of religion which paganism and humanism alike have
brought upon the world. One evidence of that has been the way in
which we have confounded the social expressions of religion with its
individual source. We are so concerned with the effect of our religion
upon the community that we have forgotten that the heart of religion
is found in the solitary soul. All of which means that we have here
again yielded to the time spirit that enfolds us and have come to
think of man as religious if he be humane. But that is not true. No
man is ever religious until he becomes devout. And indeed no man of
our sort--the saint and sinner sort--is ever long and truly humane
unless the springs of his tenderness for men are found in his ever
widening and deepening gratitude to God! Hence no man was ever yet
able to preach the living God until he understood that the central
need in human life is to reconcile the individual conscience to
itself, compose the anarchy of the spiritual life. Men want to be
happy and be fed; but men must have inward peace.
We swing back, therefore, to the native ground of preaching, approach
the religious problem, now, not from the aesthetic or the scientific,
but from the moral angle. Here we are dealing with the most poignant
of all human experiences. For it is in this intensely personal world
of moral failure and divided will that men are most acutely aware of
themselves and hence of their need of that other-than-self beyond.
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