“that leaps life’s narrow bars
  To claim its birthright with the hosts of heaven! 
    A seed of sunshine that doth leaven
  Our earthly dullness with the beams of stars,
    And glorify our clay
  With light from fountains elder than the Day."[32]

[Footnote 32:  J.R.  Lowell, Commemoration Ode, stanza IV, ll. 30-35.]

Such preaching is a perpetual refutation of and rebuke to the naturalism and imperialism of our present society.  It is the call to the absolute in man, to a clear issue with evil.  It would not cry peace, peace, when there is no peace.  It would be living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing of both joints and marrow, quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.

Following this insistence upon the difference from nature, the more-than-natural in man, the second thing in religious preaching will have to be, obviously, the message of salvation.  That is to say, reducing the statement to its lowest terms, if man is to live by such a law, the law of more-than-nature, then he must have something also more-than-human to help him in his task.  He will need strength from outside.  Indeed, because religion declares that there is such divine assistance, and that faith can command it, is the chief cause and reason for our existence.  When we cease to preach salvation in some form or other, we deny our own selves; we efface our own existence.  For no one can preach the more-than-human in mankind without emphasizing those elements of free will, moral responsibility, the need and capacity for struggle and holiness in human life which it indicates, and which in every age have been a part of the message of Him who said, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father, which is in heaven, is perfect.”

Therefore, as we have previously corrected the half truth of the naturalist who makes a caricature, not a portrait of man, we must now in the same way turn to the correcting of the humanist’s emphasis upon man’s native capacity and insist upon the complementary truth which fulfills this moral heroism of mankind, namely, the divine rescue which answers to its inadequacy.  Man must struggle for his victory; he can win; he cannot win alone.  We must then insist upon the doctrine of salvation, turning ourselves to the other side of the humanist’s picture.  Man cannot live by this more-than-natural law unaided.  For not only has he the power to rise above Nature; the same thing gives him equal capacity to sink beneath her, and, when left to himself, he generally does so.  The preacher does not dare deny the sovereignty of sin.  Humanism hates the very name of sin; it has never made any serious attempt to explain the consciousness of guilt.  Neither naturalist nor humanist can afford to admit sin, for sin takes man, as holiness does, outside the iron chain of cause and effect; it breaks the law; it is not strictly natural.  It makes clear enough that man is outside