millions of living and suffering men and women all temporal and mortal values have been wiped out.  They have been caught in a catastrophe so ruthless and dreadful that it has strewed their bodies in heaps over the fields and valleys of many nations.  Today central and south and northeastern Europe and western Asia are filled with idle and hungry and desperate men and women.  They have been deprived of peace, of security, of bread, of enlightenment alike.  Something more than temporal salvation and human words of hope are needed here.  Something more than ethical reform and social readjustment and economic alleviation, admirable though these are!  Something there must be in human nature that eclipses human nature, if it is to endure so much!  What has the God of this world to give for youth, deprived of their physical immortality and all their sweet and inalienable human rights, who are lying now beneath the acre upon acre of tottering wooden crosses in their soldier’s graves?  Is there anything in this world sufficient now for the widow, the orphan, the cripple, the starving, the disillusioned and the desperate?  What Europe wants to know is why and for what purpose this holocaust—­is there anything beyond, was there anything before it?  A civilization dedicated to speed and power and utility and mere intelligence cannot answer these questions.  Neither can a religion resolved into naught but the ethics of Jesus answer them.  “If in this world only,” cries today the voice of our humanity, “we have hope, then we are of all men the most miserable!” When one sees our American society of this moment returning so easily to the physical and the obvious and the practical things of life; when one sees the church immersed in programs, and moralizing, and hospitals, and campaigns, and membership drives, and statistics, and money getting, one is constrained to ask, “What shall be said of the human spirit that it can forget so soon?”

Is it not obvious, then, that our task for a pagan society and a self-contained humanity is to restore the balance of the religious consciousness and to dwell, not on man’s identity with Nature, but on his far-flung difference; not on his self-sufficiency, but on his tragic helplessness; not on the God of the market place, the office and the street, an immanent and relative deity, but on the Absolute, that high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity?  Indeed, we are being solemnly reminded today that the other-worldliness of religion, its concern with future, supertemporal things, is its characteristic and most precious contribution to the world.  We are seeing how every human problem when pressed to its ultimate issue becomes theological.  Here is where the fertile field for contemporary preaching lies.  It is found, not in remaining with those elements in the religious consciousness which it shares in common with naturalism and humanism, but in passing over to those which are distinctive to itself alone.  It has always been true, but it is especially true at this moment, that effective preaching has to do chiefly with transcendent values.