Preaching and Paganism | Page 7

an intuitive and
childlike than by an ingenious or sophisticated quality of mind. Ideas

and facts are perceived by them not abstractly nor practically, but in
their typical or symbolic, hence their pictorial and transmissible,
aspects. They read dogma, whether theological or other, in the terms of
a living process, unconsciously translating it, as they go along, out of
its cold propositions into its appropriate forms of feeling and needs and
satisfactions.
The scientist, then, is a critic, a learner who wants to analyze and
dissect; the man of affairs is a director and builder and wants to
command and construct; the man of this group is a seer. He is a lover
and a dreamer; he watches and broods over life, profoundly feeling it,
enamored both of its shame and of its glory. The intolerable poignancy
of existence is bittersweet to his mouth; he craves to incarnate, to
interpret its entire human process, always striving to pierce to its center,
to capture and express its inexpressible ultimate. He is an egotist but a
valuable one, acutely aware of the depths and immensities of his own
spirit and of its significant relations to this seething world without.
Thus it is both himself and a new vision of life, in terms of himself, that
he desires to project for his community.
The form of that vision will vary according to the nature of the tools,
the selection of material, the particular sort of native endowment which
are given to him. Some such men reveal their understanding of the soul
and the world in the detached serenity, the too well-defined harmonies
of a Parthenon; others in the dim and intricate richness, the confused
and tortured aspiration of the long-limbed saints and grotesque devils
of a Gothic cathedral. Others incarnate it in gleaming bronze; or spread
it in subtle play of light and shade and tones of color on a canvas; or
write it in great plays which open the dark chambers of the soul and
make the heart stand still; or sing it in sweet and terrible verse,
full-throated utterance of man's pride and hope and passion. Some act it
before the altar or beneath the proscenium arch; some speak it, now in
Cassandra-tones, now comfortably like shepherds of frail sheep. These
folk are the brothers-in-blood, the fellow craftsmen of the preacher. By
a silly convention, he is almost forbidden to consult with them, and to
betake himself to the learned, the respectable and the dull. But it is with
these that naturally he sees eye to eye.

In short, in calling the preacher a prophet we mean that preaching is an
art and the preacher is an artist; for all great art has the prophetic
quality. Many men object to this definition of the preacher as being
profane. It appears to make secular or mechanicalize their profession,
to rob preaching of its sacrosanctity, leave it less authority by making it
more intelligible, remove it from the realm of the mystical and unique.
This objection seems to me sometimes an expression of spiritual
arrogance and sometimes a subtle form of skepticism. It assumes a
special privilege for our profession or a not-get-at-able defense and
sanction by insisting that it differs in origin and hence in kind from
similar expressions of the human spirit. It hesitates to rely on the
normal and the intelligible sources of ministerial power, to confess the
relatively definable origin and understandable methods of our work. It
fears to trust to these alone.
But all these must be trusted. We may safely assert that the preacher
deals with absolute values, for all art does that. But we may not assert
that he is the only person that does so or that his is the only or the
unapproachable way. No; he, too, is an artist. Hence, a sermon is not a
contribution to, but an interpretation of, knowledge, made in terms of
the religious experience. It is taking truth out of its compressed and
abstract form, its impersonal and scientific language, and returning it to
life in the terms of the ethical and spiritual experience of mankind, thus
giving it such concrete and pictorial expression that it stimulates the
imagination and moves the will.
It will be clear then why I have said that the task of appraising the heart
and mind of our generation, to which we address ourselves, is
appropriate to the preaching genius. For only they could attempt such a
task who possess an informed and disciplined yet essentially intuitive
spirit with its scale of values; who by instinct can see their age as a
whole and indicate its chief emphases, its controlling tendencies, its
significant expressions. It is not the scientist but the seer who thus
attempts the precious but perilous task of making the great
generalizations.