If, therefore, these chapters pay only an incidental attention to the church’s social and ethical message, it is partly because our attention is, at this very moment, largely centered upon this important, yet secondary matter, and more because there lies beneath it a yet more urgent and inclusive task which confronts the spokesman of organized religion.

You will expect me then to say that we are to turn to some speculative and philosophic study, such as the analysis of the Christian idea in its world relationships, some fresh statement of the Gospel, either by way of apologia for inherited concepts, or as attempting to make a new receptacle for the living wine, which has indeed burst the most of its ancient bottles.  Such was Principal Fairbairn’s monumental task in The Place of Christ in Modern Theology and also Dr. Gordon’s in his distinguished discussions in The Ultimate Conceptions of Faith.

Here, certainly, is an endeavor which is always of primary importance.  There is an abiding peril, forever crouching at the door of ancient organizations, that they shall seek refuge from the difficulties of thought in the opportunities of action.  They need to be continually reminded that reforms begin in the same place where abuses do, namely, in the notion of things; that only just ideas can, in the long run, purify conduct; that clear thinking is the source of all high and sustained feeling.  I wish that we might essay the philosopher-theologian’s task.  This generation is hungry for understanding; it perishes for lack of knowledge.  One reason for the indubitable decline of the preacher’s power is that we have been culpably indifferent in maintaining close and friendly alliances between the science and the art, the teachers and the practitioners of religion.  Few things would be more ominous than to permit any further widening of the gulf which already exists between these two.  Never more than now does the preacher need to be reminded of what Marcus Aurelius said:  “Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also shall be thyself; for the soul is dyed by its thoughts.”

But such an undertaking, calling for wide and exact scholarship, large reserves of extra-professional learning, does not primarily belong to a discussion within the department of practical theology.  Besides which there is a task, closely allied to it, but creative rather than critical, prophetic rather than philosophic, which does fall within the precise area of this field.  I mean the endeavor to describe the mind and heart of our generation, appraise the significant thought-currents of our time.  This would be an attempt to give some description of the chief impulses fermenting in contemporary society, to ask what relation they hold to the Christian principle, and to inquire what attitude toward them our preaching should adopt.  If it be true that what is most revealing in any age is its regulative ideas, then what is more valuable for the preacher than to attempt the understanding of his generation through the defining of its ruling concepts?  And it is this audacious task which, for two reasons, we shall presume to undertake.