the natural order in two ways.  He is both inferior and superior to it.  He falls beneath, he rises above it.  When he acts like a beast, he is not clean and beastly, but unclean and bestial.  When he lifts his head in moral anguish, bathes all his spirit in the flood of awe and repentance, is transfigured with the glorious madness of self-sacrifice, he is so many worlds higher than the beast that their relationship becomes irrelevant.  So we must deal more completely than humanists do with the central mystery of our experience; man’s impotent idealism, his insight not matched with consummation; the fact that what he dares to dream of he is not able alone to do.

For the humanist exalts man, which is good; but then he makes him self-sufficient for the struggle which such exaltation demands, which is bad.  In that partial understanding he departs from truth.  And what is it that makes the futility of so much present preaching?  It is the acceptance of this doctrine of man’s moral adequacy and consequently the almost total lack either of the assurance of grace or of the appeal to the will.  No wonder such exhortations cannot stem the tide of an ever increasing worldliness.  Such preaching stimulates the mind; in both the better and the worse preachers, it moves the emotions but it gives men little power to act on what they hear and feel to the transformation of their daily existence.  Thus the humanistic sense of man’s sufficiency, coupled with the inherent distrust of any notion of help from beyond and above, any belief in a reinforcing power which a critical rationalism cannot dissect and explain, has gradually ruled out of court the doctrine of salvation until the preacher’s power, both to experience and to transmit it, has atrophied through disuse.

Who can doubt that one large reason why crude and indefensible concepts of the Christian faith have such a disconcerting vitality today is because they carry, in their outmoded, unethical, discredited forms, the truth of man’s insufficiency in himself and the confident assurance of that something coming from without which will abundantly complete the struggling life within?  They offer the assurance of that peace and moral victory which man so ardently desires, because they declare that it is both a discovery and a revelation, an achievement and a rescue.  There are vigorous and rapidly growing popular movements of the day which rest their summation of faith on the quadrilateral of an inerrant and verbally inspired Scripture, the full deity of Jesus Christ, the efficacy of His substitutionary atonement, the speedy second coming of the Lord.  No sane person can suppose that these cults succeed because of the ethical insight, the spiritual sensitiveness, the intellectual integrity of such a message.  It does not possess these things.  They succeed, in spite of their obscurantism, because they do confess and meet man’s central need, his need to be saved.  The power of that fact is what is able to carry so narrow and so indefensible a doctrine.