“I would think until I found
  Something I can never find
  Something lying on the ground
  In the bottom of my mind.”

Here, then, can we not understand that mingling of mystic dignity and profound humility, of awe-struck pride and utter self-abnegation, wherewith the man of religion regards his race and himself?  He is the child of the Eternal; he, being man, alone knows that God is.  “When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that Thou visitest him?” Here is the humility:  “Why so hot, little man!” Then comes the awe-struck pride:  “Yet Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor.”  “Alone with the gods, alone!” God is the high and lofty one which inhabiteth eternity, but He is also nigh unto them who are of a broken and a contrite heart.

Here we are come to the very heart of religion.  Man’s proud separateness in the universe; yet man’s moral defection and his responsibility for it which makes him know that separateness; man’s shame and helplessness under it.  Over against the denial or evasion of moral values by the naturalist and the dullness to the sense of moral helplessness by the humanist, there stands the sense of moral difference, the sense of sin, of penitence and confession.  No preaching not founded on these things can ever be called religious or can ever stir those ranges of the human life for which alone preaching is supposed to exist.

What is the religious law, then?  It is the law of humility.  And what is the religious consciousness?  The sense of man’s difference from nature and from God.  The sense of his difference from himself within himself and the longing for an inner harmony which shall unite him with himself and with the beauty and the spirit without.  So what is the religious passion?  Is it to exalt human nature?  It would be more true to say it is to lose it.  What is the end for us?  Not identification with nature and the natural self, but pursuit of the other than nature, the more than natural self.  Our humility is not like that of Uriah Heep, a mean opinion of ourselves in comparison with other men.  It is the profound consciousness of the weakness and the nothingness of our kind, and of the poor ends human nature sets its heart upon, in comparison with that Other One above and beyond and without us, to whom we are kin, from whom we are different, to whom we aspire, to reach whom we know not how.

This, then, is what we mean when we turn back from the language of experience to the vocabulary of philosophy and theology and talk about the absolute values of religion.  We mean by “absolute values” that behind the multifarious and ever changing nature, is a single and a steadfast cause—­a great rock in a weary land.  We have lost the old absolute philosophies and dogmatic theologies and that is good