the glories of western civilization is its hospitals.  They stand for the supernatural doctrine of the survival of the unfit, the conviction of the community that, to take the easy path of casting out the aged and infirm, the sick and the suffering, would mean incalculable degeneration of national character, and that the difficult and costly path of protection and ministering service is both necessary and right.  And why is the reformatory replacing the prison?  Because we have learned that the obvious, natural way of dealing with the criminal certainly destroys him and threatens to destroy us; and that the hard, difficult path of reeducating and reforming a vicious life is the one which the state for her own safety must follow.

Genuine preaching, then, first of all, calls men to repentance, bids them turn away from their natural selves, and, to find that other and realer self, enter the straight and narrow gate.  The call is not an arbitrary command, born of a negative and repressive spirit.  It is a profound exhortation based upon a fundamental law of human progress, having behind it the inviolable sanction of the truth.  Such preaching would have the authentic note.  It is self-verifying.  It stirs to answer that quality—­both moral and imaginative—­in the spirit of man which craves the pain and difficulty and satisfaction of separation from the natural order.  It appeals to a timeless worth in man which transcends any values of mere intelligence which vary with the ages, or any material prosperity which perishes with the using, or any volitional activity that dies in its own expenditure.  Much of the philosophy of Socrates was long ago outmoded, but Socrates himself, as depicted in the Phaedo, confronting death with the cup of hemlock in his hand, saying with a smile, “There is no evil which can happen to a good man living or dead,” has a more-than-natural, an enduring and transcendent quality.  Whenever we preach to the element in mankind which produces such attitudes toward life and bid it assert itself, then we are doing religious preaching, and then we speak with power.  Jesus lived within the inexorable circle of the ideas of His time; He staked much on the coming of the new kingdom which did not appear either when or as He had first expected it.  He had to adjust, as do we all, His life to His experience, His destiny to His fate.  But when He was hanging on His cross, forgotten of men and apparently deserted by His God, something in Him that had nothing to do with nature or the brute rose to a final expression and by its more-than-natural reality, sealed and authenticated His life.  Looking down upon His torturers, understanding them far better than they understood themselves, He cried, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  That cry has no place in nature; it has no application and no meaning outside the human heart and that which is above, not beneath, the human heart, from which it is derived.  There, then, again was the supernatural law; there was the more-than-nature in man which makes nature into human nature; and there is the thing to whose discovery, cultivation, expression, real preaching is addressed.  Every time a man truly preaches he so portrays what men ought to be, must be, and can be if they will, that they know there is something here