And finally, we have the best historical grounds for our position.  Sometimes great religious movements have been begun by unlearned and uncritical men like Peter the hermit or John Bunyan or Moody.  But we must not infer from this that religious insight is naturally repressed by clear thinking or fostered by ignorance.  Dr. Francis Greenwood Peabody has pointed out that the great religious epochs in Christian history are also epochs in the history of theology.  The Pauline epistles, the Confessions of Augustine, the Meditations of Anselm, the Simple Method of How to Pray of Luther, the Regula of Loyola, the Monologen of Schleiermacher, these are all manuals of the devout life, they belong in the distinctively religious world of supersensuous and the transcendent, and one thing which accounts for them is that the men who produced them were religious geniuses because they were also theologians.[43]

[Footnote 43:  See the “Call to Theology,” Har.  Theo.  Rev., vol.  I, no. 1, pp. 1 ff.]

It is to be remembered that we are not saying that the theologian makes the saint.  I do not believe that.  Devils can believe and tremble; Abelard was no saint.  But we are contending that the great saint is extremely likely to be a theologian.  Protestantism, Methodism, Tractarianism, were chiefly religious movements, interested in the kind of questions and moved by the sorts of motives which we have been talking about.  They all began within the precincts of universities.  Moreover, the Lord Jesus, consummate mystic, incomparable artist, was such partly because He was a great theologian as well.  His dealings with scribe and Pharisee furnish some of the world’s best examples of acute and courageous dialectics.  His theological method differed markedly from the academicians of His day.  Nevertheless it was noted that He spoke with an extraordinary authority.  “He gave,” as Dr. Peabody also points out, “new scope and significance to the thought of God, to the nature of man, to the destiny of the soul, to the meaning of the world.  He would have been reckoned among the world’s great theologians if other endowments had not given Him a higher title."[44]

[Footnote 44:  “Call to Theology,” Har.  Theo.  Rev., vol.  I, no. 1, p. 8.]

It is a higher title to have been the supreme mystic, the perfect seer.  All I have been trying to say is that it is to these sorts of excellencies that the preacher aspires.  But the life of Jesus supremely sanctions the conviction that preaching upon high and abstract and even speculative themes and a rigorous intellectual discipline are chief accompaniments, appropriate and indispensable aids, to religious insight and to the cultivating of worshipful feeling.  So we close our discussions with the supreme name upon our lips, leaving the most fragrant memory, the clearest picture, remembering Him who struck the highest note.  It is to His life and teaching that we humbly turn to find the final sanction for the distinctively religious values.  Who else, indeed, has the words of Eternal Life?