time, this traditional code of his class, and the requirements of his faith.  Shall he acquiesce in the smug conformities, the externalized procedures of average society, somewhat pietized, and join that large company of good and ordinary people, of whom Samuel Butler remarks, in The Way of All Flesh, that they would be “equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, or at seeing it practised?” There are ministers who do thus content themselves with being merely superrespectable.  Shall he exalt the standards of his calling, accentuate the speech and dress, the code and manners of his group, the historic statements of his faith, at the risk of becoming an official, a “professional”?  Or does he possess the insight, and can he acquire the courage, to follow men like Francis of Assisi or Father Damien and adopt the Christian ethic and thus join that company of the apostles and martyrs whose blood is the seed of the church?  A good deal might be said today on the need of this sort of personal culture in the ministerial candidate.  But, provocative and significant though the question is, it is too limited in scope, too purely subjective in nature, to suit the character and the urgency of the needs of this moment.

Again, every profession has the prized inheritance of its own particular and gradually perfected human skill.  An interesting study, then, would be the analysis of that rich content of human insights, the result of generations of pastoral experience, which form the background of all great preaching.  No man, whether learned or pious, or both, is equipped for the pulpit without the addition of that intuitive discernment, that quick and varied appreciation, that sane and tolerant knowledge of life and the world, which is the reward given to the friends and lovers of mankind.  For the preacher deals not with the shallows but the depths of life.  Like his Master he must be a great humanist.  To make real sermons he has to look, without dismay or evasion, far into the heart’s impenetrable recesses.  He must have had some experience with the absolutism of both good and evil.  I think preachers who regard sermons on salvation as superfluous have not had much experience with either.  They belong to that large world of the intermediates, neither positively good nor bad, who compose the mass of the prosperous and respectable in our genteel civilization.  Since they belong to it they cannot lead it.  And certainly they who do not know the absolutism of evil cannot very well understand sinners.  Genuine satans, as Milton knew, are not weaklings and traitors who have declined from the standards of a respectable civilization.  They are positive and impressive figures pursuing and acting up to their own ideal of conduct, not fleeing from self-accepted retribution or falling away from a confessed morality of ours.  Evil is a force even more than a folly; it is a positive agent busily building away at the City of Dreadful Night, constructing its insolent and scoffing society within the very precincts of the City of God.