And that brings us to the theme of this final discussion.  For I am one of those who believe that great preaching is doctrinal preaching and that it is particularly needed at this hour.  The comparative neglect of the New Testament in favor of the Old in contemporary preaching; the use and nature of the expository method—­no less than the unworshipful character of our services—­appear to me to offer a final and conclusive proof of the unreligious overhumanistic emphases of our interpretation of religion.  And if we are to have a religious revival, then it seems to me worshipful services must be accompanied by speculative preaching and I doubt if the one can be nobly maintained without the other.  For we saw that worship is the direct experience of the Absolute through high and concentrated feeling.  Even so speculative and, in general, doctrinal preaching is the same return to first principles and to ultimate values in the realm of ideas.  It turns away from the immediate, the practical, the relative to the final and absolute in the domain of thought.

Now, obviously, then, devout services and doctrinal preaching should go together.  No high and persistent emotions can be maintained without clear thinking to nourish and steady them.  There is in doctrinal preaching a certain indifference to immediate issues; to detailed applications.  It deals, by its nature, with comprehensive and abstract rather than local and concrete thinking; with inclusive feeling, transcendent aspiration.  It does not try to pietize the ordinary, commercial and domestic affairs of men.  Instead it deals with the highest questions and perceptions of human life; argues from those sublime hypotheses which are the very subsoil of the religious temperament and understanding.  It deals with those aspects of human life which indeed include, but include because they transcend, the commercial and domestic, the professional and political affairs of daily living.  We have been insisting in these chapters that it is that portion of human need and experience which lies between the knowable and the unknowable with which it is the preacher’s chief province to deal.  Doctrinal preaching endeavors to give form and relations to its intuitions and high desires, its unattainable longings and insights.  There is a native alliance between the doctrine of Immanence and expository preaching.  For the office of both is to give us the God of this world in the affairs of the moment.  There is a native alliance between expository preaching and humanism which very largely accounts for the latter’s popularity.  For expository preaching, as at present practiced, deals mostly with ethical and practical issues, with the setting of the house of this world in order.  There is also a native and majestic alliance between the idea of transcendence and doctrinal preaching and between the facts of the religious experience and the content of speculative philosophy.  Not pragmatism but pure metaphysics is the native language of the mind when it moves in the spiritual world.