[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.