justice of His world.  In the moment when sympathy takes the bitterness out of another’s sorrow and my suffering breaks the captivity of my neighbor’s sin—­then, when because “together,” with sinner and sufferer, we come out into the quiet land of freedom and of peace, we perceive how the very heart of God, upon which there we know we rest, may be found in the vicarious suffering and sacrifice called forth by the sorrow and the evil of mankind.  Then we can preach the Gospel.  Because then we dimly understand why men have hung their God upon the Cross of Christ!

[Footnote 1:  The Divine Comedy:  Hell; canto I.]

Is it not ludicrous, then, to suppose that a man merely equipped with professional scholarship, or contented with moral conformities, can minister to the sorrow and the mystery, the mingled shame and glory of a human being?  This is why the average theologue, in his first parish, is like the well-meaning but meddling engineer endeavoring with clumsy tools and insensitive fingers to adjust the delicate and complicated mechanism of a Genevan watch.  And here is one of the real reasons why we deprecate men entering our calling, without both the culture of a liberal education and the learning of a graduate school.  Clearly, therefore, one real task of such schools and their lectureships is to offer men wide and gracious training in the art of human contacts, so that their lives may be lifted above Pharisaism and moral self-consciousness, made acquainted with the higher and comprehensive interpretations of the heart and mind of our race.  For only thus can they approach life reverently and humbly.  Only thus will they revere the integrity of the human spirit; only thus can they regard it with a magnanimous and catholic understanding and measure it not by the standards of temperamental or sectarian convictions, but by what is best and highest, deepest and holiest in the race.  No one needs more than the young preacher to be drawn out of the range of narrow judgments, of exclusive standards and ecclesiastical traditions and to be flung out among free and sensitive spirits, that he may watch their workings, master their perceptions, catch their scale of values.

A discussion, then, dealing with this aspect of our problem, would raise many and genuine questions for us.  There is the more room for it in this time of increasing emphasis upon machinery when even ministers are being measured in the terms of power, speed and utility.  These are not real ends of life; real ends are unity, repose, the imaginative and spiritual values which make for the release of self, with its by-product of happiness.  In such days, then, when the old-time pastor-preacher is becoming as rare as the former general practitioner; when the lines of division between speaker, educator, expert in social hygiene, are being sharply drawn—­as though new methods insured of themselves fresh inspiration, and technical knowledge was identical with spiritual