Our task is to assert, first, then, the “otherness” of man, his difference from Nature, to point out the illusoriness of her phenomena for him, the derived reality and secondary value of her facts.  These are things that need religious elucidation.  The phrase “other-worldliness” has come, not without reason, to have an evil connotation among us, but there is nevertheless a genuine disdain of this world, a sense of high superiority to it and profound indifference toward it, which is of the essence of the religious attitude.  He who knows that here he is a stranger, sojourning in tabernacles; that he belongs by his nature, not to this world, but that he seeks a better, that is to say, a heavenly country, will for the joy that is set before him, endure a cross and will despise the shame.  He will have a conscious superiority to hostile facts of whatever sort or magnitude, for he knows that they deceive in so far as they pretend to finality.  When religion has thus acquired a clear-sighted and thoroughgoing indifference to the natural order, then, and then only, it begins to be potent within that order.  Then, as Professor Hocking says, it rises superior to the world of facts and becomes irresistible.[31]

[Footnote 31:  The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 518.]

The time is ripe, then, first, for the preacher to emphasize the inward and essential difference between man and nature which exists under the outward likeness, to remind him of this more-than-nature, this “otherness” of man, without which he would lose his most precious possession, the sense of personality.  Faith begins by recognizing this transcendent element in man and the acceptance of it is the foundation of religious preaching.  What was the worst thing about the war?  Not its destruction nor its horrors nor its futilities, but its shames; the dreadful indignities which it inflicted upon man; it treated men as though they were not souls!  No such moral catastrophe could have overwhelmed us if we had not for long let the brute lie too near the values and practices of our lives, depersonalizing thus, in politics and industry and morals and religion, our civilization.  It all proceeded from the irreligious interpretation of human existence, and the fruits of that interpretation are before us.

The first task of the preacher, then, is to combat the naturalistic interpretation of humanity with every insight and every conviction that is within his power.  If we are to restore religious values, rebuild a world of transcendent ends and more-than-natural beauty, we must begin here with man.  In the popular understanding of the phrase all life is not essentially one in kind; physical self-preservation and reproduction are not the be-all and the end-all of existence.  There is something more to be expressed in man without which these are but dust and ashes in the mouth.  There is another kind of life mixed in with this, the obvious.  If we cannot express the other world, we shall not