Preaching and Paganism | Page 6

thyself; for the soul is dyed by its thoughts."
But such an undertaking, calling for wide and exact scholarship, large

reserves of extra-professional learning, does not primarily belong to a
discussion within the department of practical theology. Besides which
there is a task, closely allied to it, but creative rather than critical,
prophetic rather than philosophic, which does fall within the precise
area of this field. I mean the endeavor to describe the mind and heart of
our generation, appraise the significant thought-currents of our time.
This would be an attempt to give some description of the chief
impulses fermenting in contemporary society, to ask what relation they
hold to the Christian principle, and to inquire what attitude toward them
our preaching should adopt. If it be true that what is most revealing in
any age is its regulative ideas, then what is more valuable for the
preacher than to attempt the understanding of his generation through
the defining of its ruling concepts? And it is this audacious task which,
for two reasons, we shall presume to undertake.
The first reason is that it is appropriate both to the temperament and the
training of the preacher. There are three grand divisions, or rather
determining emphases, by which men may be separated into vocational
groups. To begin with, there is the man of the scientific or intellectual
type. He has a passion for facts and a strong sense of their reality. He
moves with natural ease among abstract propositions, is both critical of,
and fertile in, theories; indicates his essential distinction in his love of
the truth for the truth's sake. He looks first to the intrinsic
reasonableness of any proposition; tends to judge both men and
movements not by traditional or personal values, but by a detached and
disinterested appraisal of their inherent worth. He is often a dogmatist,
but this fault is not peculiar to him, he shares it with the rest of
mankind. He is sometimes a literalist and sometimes a slave to logic,
more concerned with combating the crude or untenable form of a
proposition than inquiring with sympathetic insight into the worth of its
substance. But these things are perversions of his excellencies, defects
of his virtues. His characteristic qualities are mental integrity, accuracy
of statement, sanity of judgment, capacity for sustained intellectual toil.
Such men are investigators, scholars; when properly blended with the
imaginative type they become inventors and teachers. They make good
theologians and bad preachers.

Then there are the practical men, beloved of our American life. Both
their feet are firmly fixed upon the solid ground. They generally know
just where they are, which is not surprising, for they do not, for the
most part, either in the world of mind or spirit, frequent unusual places.
The finespun speculations of the philosophers and the impractical
dreams of the artist make small appeal to them; the world they live in is
a sharply defined and clearly lighted and rather limited place. They like
to say to this man come and he cometh, and to that man go and he
goeth. They are enamored of offices, typewriters, telegrams,
long-distance messages, secretaries, programs, conferences and drives.
Getting results is their goal; everything is judged by the criterion of
effective action; they are instinctive and unconscious pragmatists. They
make good cheer leaders at football games in their youth and
impressive captains of industry in their old age. Their virtues are
wholesome, if obvious; they are good mixers, have shrewd judgment,
immense physical and volitional energy. They understand that two and
two make four. They are rarely saints but, unlike many of us who once
had the capacity for sainthood, they are not dreadful sinners. They are
the tribe of which politicians are born but, when they are blended with
imaginative and spiritual gifts, they become philanthropists and
statesmen, practical servants of mankind. They make good, if
conservative, citizens; kind, if uninspiring, husbands and deplorable
preachers.
Then there are those fascinating men of feeling and imagination, those
who look into their own hearts and write, those to whom the inner
dominions which the spirit conquers for itself become a thousand-fold
more real than the earth whereon they stamp their feet. These are the
literary or the creative folk. Their passion is not so much to know life
as to enjoy it; not to direct it, but to experience it; not even to make
understanding of it an end, but only a means to interpreting it. They do
not, as a rule, thirst for erudition, and they are indifferent to those
manipulations of the externals of life which are dear to the lovers of
executive power. They know less but they understand more than their
scholastic brethren. As a class they are sometimes disreputable but
nearly always unworldly; more distinguished by