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. But we shall be equally foolish
if now, in the interests of a new artificial clearness, we deny
another portion of experience just as our fathers ignored certain
other facts in the interests of their too well-defined systems. We
cannot hold to the old world view which would bend the modern mind to
the support of an inherited interpretation of experience and therefore
would not any longer really explain or confirm it. Neither can we hold
new views which mutilate the experience and leave out some of the most
precious elements in it, even if in so doing we should simplify the
problem for the mind. It would be an unreal simplification; it would
darken, not illumine, the understanding; we should never rest in it.
Nor do we need to be concerned if the intellect cannot perfectly
order or easily demonstrate the whole of the religious life, fit each
element with a self-verifying defense and explanation. No man of the
world, to say nothing of a man of faith or imagination, has ever yet
trusted to a purely intellectual judgment.
So we reject the old dualism, its dichotomized universe, its two sorts
of authority, its prodigious and arbitrary supernaturalism. But we do
not reject what lay behind it. Still we wrestle with the angel, lamed
though we are by the contest, and we cannot let him go until the day
breaks and the shadows flee away. It would be easier perhaps to give
up the religious point of view, but for that ease we should pay with
our life. For that swift answer, achieved by leaving out prime factors
in the problem, we should be betraying the self for whose sake alone
any answer is valuable. It does not pay to cut such Gordian knots! Our
task, then, is to preach transcendence again, not in terms of the old
absolutist philosophy, but in terms of the perceptions, the needs, the
experience of the human heart and mind and will which produced that
philosophy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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