Before going on, in a future chapter, to discuss the question as to what kind of preaching such a world-view, seen from the Christian standpoint, needs, we are now to inquire what the effect of this humanistic movement upon Christian preaching has already been.  That our preaching should have been profoundly influenced by it is inevitable.  Religion is not apart from the rest of life.  The very temperament of the speaker makes him peculiarly susceptible to the intellectual and spiritual movements about him.  What, then, has humanism done to preaching?  Has it worked to clarify and solidify the essence of the religious position?  Or has preaching declined and become neutralized in religious quality under it?

First:  it has profoundly affected Christian preaching about God.  The contemporary sermon on Deity minimizes or leaves out divine transcendence; thus it starves one fundamental impulse in man—­the need and desire to look up.  Instead of this transcendence modern preaching emphasizes immanence, often to a naive and ludicrous degree.  God is the being who is like us.  Under the influence of that monistic idealism, which is a derived philosophy of the humanistic impulse, preaching lays all the emphasis upon divine immanence in sharpest contrast either to the deistic transcendence of the eighteenth century or the separateness and aloofness of the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, or of the classic Greek theologies of Christianity.  God is, of course; that is, He is the informing principle in the natural and human universe and essentially one with it.  Present preaching does not confess this identification but it evades rather than meets the logical pantheistic conclusion.  So our preaching has to do with God in the common round of daily tasks; with sweeping a room to His glory; with adoration of His presence in a sunset and worship of Him in a star.  Every bush’s aflame with Him; there are sermons in stones and poems in running brooks.  Before us, even as behind, God is and all is well.  We are filled with a sort of intoxication with this intimate and protective company of the Infinite; we are magnificently unabashed as we familiarly approach Him.  “Closer is He than breathing; nearer than hands or feet.”  Not then by denying or condemning or distrusting the world in which we live, not by asserting the differences between God and humanity do we understand Him.  But by closest touch with nature do we find Him.  By a superb paradox, not without value, yet equally ineffable in sentimentality and sublime in its impiety we say, beholding man, “that which is most human is most divine!”