Third:  we may see the influence of humanism upon our preaching in the relinquishment of the goal of conversion.  We are preaching to educate, not to save; to instruct, not to transform.  Conversion may be gradual and half-unconscious, a long and normal process under favorable inheritance and with the culture of a Christian environment.  Or it may be sudden and catastrophic, a violent change of emotional and volitional activity.  When a man whose feeling has been repressed by sin and crusted over by deception, whose inner restlessness has been accumulating under the misery and impotence of a divided life, is brought into contact with Christian truth, he can only accept it through a volitional crisis, with its cleansing flood of penitence and confession and its blessed reward of the sense of pardon and peace and the relinquishment of the self into the divine hands.  But one thing is true of either process in the Christian doctrine of conversion.  It is not merely an achievement, although it is that; it is also a rescue.  It cannot come about without faith, the “will to believe”; neither can it come about by that alone.  Conversion is something we do; it is also something else, working within us, if we will let it, helping us to do; hence it is something done for us.

Now, this experience of conversion is passing out of Christian life and preaching under humanistic influence.  We are accepting the Socratic dictum that knowledge is virtue.  Hence we blur the distinction between the Christian and the non-Christian.  Education supplants salvation.  We bring the boys and girls into the church because they are safer there than outside it; and on the whole it is a good thing to do and really they belong there anyway.  The church member is a man of the world, softened by Christian feeling.  He is a kindly and amiable citizen and an honorable man; he has not been saved.  But he knows the unwisdom of evil; if you know what is right you will do it.  Intelligence needs no support from grace.  It is strange that the church does not see that with this relinquishment of her insistence upon something that religion can do for a man that nothing else can attempt, she has thereby given up her real excuse for being, and that her peculiar and distinctive mission has gone.  It is strange that she does not see that the humanism which, since it is at home in the world, can sometimes make there a classic hero, degenerates dreadfully and becomes unreal in a church where unskilled hands use it to make it a substitute for a Christian saint!  But for how many efficient parish administrators, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, up-to-date preachers, character is conceived of as coming not by discipline but by expansion, not by salvation, but by activity.  Social service solves everything without any reference to the troublesome fact that the value of the service will depend upon the quality of the servant.  Salvation is a combination of intelligence and machinery.  Sin is pure ignorance or just maladjustment to environment.  All we need is to know what is right and wrong; the humane sciences will take care of that; and, then, have an advertising agent, a gymnasium, a committee on spiritual resources, a program, a conference, a drive for money, and behold, the Kingdom of God is among us!