Humanism which bids men sufficiently find God within themselves, if they think they need to find Him at all, seems not to comprehend this passion of pride and humility, this inner perception of the futility and the blunder of the self-contained life.  Life is so obviously not worth its brevity, its suffering, its withheld conclusions, its relative insignificance, if it must thus stand alone.  All that can save it, preserve to it worth and dignity, maintain its self-respect and mastery, is to find that abundant power without which confesses, certifies and seals the divinity within.

How foredoomed to failure, then, especially in an age when men are surmounting life by placating it, enjoying it by being easy with themselves—­how foredoomed to failure is the preaching which continues in the world of religion this exaltation of human sufficiency and natural values, domesticating them within the church.  It is to laugh to see them there!  It means so transparent a surrender, so pitiable a confession of defeat.  If anything can bring the natural man into the sanctuary it is that there he has to bring his naturalness to the bar of a more-than-natural standard.  If he comes at all, it will not be for entertainment and expansion but because there we insist on reverence and restraint.  If church and preacher offer only a pietized and decorous naturalism, when he can get the real thing in naked and unashamed brutality without; if they offer him only another form of humanistic living, he will stay away.  Such preaching is as boresome as it is unnecessary.  Such exercise of devotion is essentially superfluous and a rather humorous imposition upon the world.  The only thing that will ever bring the natural man to listen to preaching is when it insists upon something more-than-the-natural and calls him to account regarding it; when it speaks of something different and better for him than this world and what it can offer.  “Take my yoke upon you” is the attractive invitation, “make inner obeisance and outward obedience to something higher than thy poor self.”

It is clear, then, that these observations have a bearing upon our preaching of the doctrine of God.  There is a certain illogicality, something humorous, in going into a church, of all places in the world, to be told how like we are to Him.  The dull and average personality, the ordinary and not very valuable man, can probably listen indifferently and with a slow-growing hardness and dim resentment to that sort of preaching for a number of years.  But the valuable, the highly personalized people, the saints and the sinners, the great rebels and the great disciples, who are the very folk for whom the church exists, would hate it, and they would know the final bitterness of despair if they thought that this was so.  Either saint or sinner would consider it the supreme insult, the last pitch of insolence, for the church to be telling them that it is true.