Fourth, and most significant:  it is to the humanistic impulse and its derived philosophies that we owe the individualistic ethics, the relative absence of the sense of moral responsibility for the social order which has, from the beginning, maimed and distorted Protestant Christianity.  It was, perhaps, a consequence of the speculative and absolute philosophies of the mediaeval church that, since they endeavored to relate religion to the whole of the cosmos, its remotest and ultimate issues, so they conceived of its absoluteness as concerned with the whole of human experience, with every relation of organized society.  Under their regulative ideas all human beings, not a selected number, had, not in themselves but because of the Divine Sacrifice, divine significance; reverence was had, not for supermen or captains of industry, but for every one of those for whom Christ died.  There were no human institutions which were ends in themselves or more important than the men which created and served them.  The Holy Catholic Church was the only institution which was so conceived; all others, social, political, economic, were means toward the end of the preservation and expression of human personality.  Hence, the interest of the mediaeval church in social ethics and corporate values; hence, the axiom of the church’s control of, the believers’ responsibility for, the economic relations of society.  An unjust distribution of goods, the withholding from the producer of his fair share of the wealth which he creates, profiteering, predatory riches—­these were ranked under one term as avarice, and they were counted not among the venial offenses, like aberrations of the flesh, but avarice was considered one of the seven deadly sins of the spirit.  The application of the ethics of Jesus to social control began to die out as humanism individualized Christian morals and as, under its influence, nationalism tended to supplant the international ecclesiastical order.  The cynical and sordid maxim that business is business; that, in the economic sphere, the standards of the church are not operative and the responsibility of the church is not recognized—­notions which are a chief heresy and an outstanding disgrace of nineteenth-century religion, from which we are only now painfully and slowly reacting—­these may be traced back to the influence of humanism upon Christian thought and conduct.

In general, then, it seems to me abundantly clear that the humanistic movement has both limited and secularized Christian preaching.  It dogmatically ignores supersensuous values; hence it has rationalized preaching hence it has made provincial its intellectual approach and treatment, narrowed and made mechanical its content.  It has turned preaching away from speculative to practical themes.  It was, perhaps, this mental and spiritual decline of the ministry to which a distinguished educator referred when he told a body of Congregational preachers that their sermons were marked by “intellectual frugality.”  It is this which a great New England theologian-preacher, Dr. Gordon, means when he says “an indescribable pettiness, a mean kind of retail trade has taken possession of the preachers; they have substituted the mill-round for the sun-path.”