Preaching and Paganism | Page 8

This is what Aristotle means when he says, "The poet
ranks higher than the historian because he achieves a more general
truth." This is, I suppose, what Houston Stewart Chamberlain means

when he says, in the introduction to the Foundations of the Nineteenth
Century: "our modern world represents an immeasurable array of facts.
The mastery of such a task as recording and interpreting them
scientifically is impossible. It is only the genius of the artist, which
feels the secret parallels that exist between the world of vision and of
thought, that can, if fortune be favorable, reveal the unity beneath the
immeasurable complexities and diversities of the present order." Or as
Professor Hocking says: "The prophet must find in the current of
history a unity corresponding to the unity of the physical universe, or
else he must create it. It is this conscious unification of history that the
religious will spontaneously tends to bring about."[2]
[Footnote 2: The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 518.]
It is then precisely the preacher's task, his peculiar office, to attempt
these vast and perilous summations. What he is set here for is to bring
the immeasurable within the scope of vision. He deals with the
far-flung outposts, no man knows how distant, and the boundless
interspaces of human consciousness; he deals with the beginning, the
middle, the end--the origin, the meaning and the destiny--of human life.
How can anyone give unity to such a prospect? Like any other artist he
gives it the only unity possible, the unity revealed in his own
personality. The theologian should not attempt to evaluate his age; the
preacher may. Because the theologian, like any other scientist, analyzes
and dissects; he breaks up the world. The preacher in his disciplined
imagination, his spiritual intuitiveness,--what we call the "religious
temperament,"--unites it again and makes men see it whole. This
quality of purified and enlightened imagination is of the very essence
of the preacher's power and art. Hence he may attempt to set forth a just
understanding of his generation.
This brings us to the second reason for our topic namely, its timeliness.
All religious values are not at all times equal in importance. As
generations come and go, first one, then another looms in the
foreground. But I sincerely believe that the most fateful undertaking for
the preacher at this moment is that of analyzing his own generation.
Because he has been flung into one of the world's transition epochs, he

speaks in an hour which is radical in changes, perplexing in its
multifarious cross-currents, prolific of new forms and expressions.
What the world most needs at such a moment of expansion and
rebellion, is a redefining of its ideals. It needs to have some eternal
scale of values set before it once more. It needs to stop long enough to
find out just what and where it is, and toward what it is going. It needs
another Sheridan to write a new School for Scandal, another Swift,
with his Gulliver's Travels, a continuing Shaw with his satiric comedies,
a Mrs. Wharton with her House of Mirth, a Thorstein Veblen with his
Higher Learning in America, a Savonarola with his call to repentance
and indictment of worldly and unfaithful living. It is a difficult and
dangerous office, this of the prophet; it calls for a considerate and
honest mind as well as a flashing insight and an eager heart. The false
prophet exposes that he may exploit his age; the true prophet portrays
that he may purge it. Like Jeremiah we may well dread to undertake the
task, yet its day and hour are upon us!
I have already spoken to this point at length, in a little book recently
published. I merely add here that in a day of obvious political
disillusionment and industrial revolt, of intellectual rebellion against an
outworn order of ideas and of moral restlessness and doubt, an
indispensable duty for the preacher is this comprehensive study and
understanding of his own epoch. Else, without realizing it,--and how
true this often is,--he proclaims a universal truth in the unintelligible
language of a forgotten order, and applies a timeless experience to the
faded conditions of yesterday.
Indeed, I am convinced that a chief reason why preaching is
temporarily obscured in power, is because most of our expertness in it
is in terms of local problems, of partial significances, rather than in the
wider tendencies that produce and carry them, or in the ultimate laws of
conduct which should govern them. We ought to be troubled, I think, in
our present ecclesiastical situation, with its taint of an almost frantic
immediacy. Not only are we not sufficiently dealing with the Gospel as
a universal code, but, as both cause and effect of this, we are not
applying it