For they know within themselves that it is a lie.  Their one hope hangs on God because His thoughts are not their thoughts, nor His ways their ways; because He seeth the end from the beginning; because in Him there is no variableness, neither shadow that is caused by turning; because no man shall see His face and live.  They, the sinners and the saints, do not want to be told that they, within themselves, can heal themselves and that sin has no real sinfulness.  That is tempting them to the final denial, the last depth of betrayal, the blurring of moral values, the calling of evil good and the saying that good is evil.  They know that this is the unpardonable madness.  In the hours when they, the saints and sinners, wipe their mouths and say, “We have done no harm”; in the days when what they love is ugliness because it is ugly and shameless, and reckless expression because it is so terrible, so secretly appalling, so bittersweet with the sweetness of death, they know that it is the last affront to have the church—­the one place where men expect they will be made to face the facts—­bow these facts out of doors.

No, we readily grant that the religious approach to the whole truth and to final reality is like any other one, either scientific, economic, political, a partial approach.  It sets forth for the most part only a group of facts.  When it does not emphasize other facts, it does not thereby deny them.  But it insists that the truth of man’s differences, man’s helplessness which the differences reveal, and man’s fate hanging therefore upon a transcendent God, are the key truths for the religious life.  It is with that aspect of life the preacher deals, and if he fails to grapple with these problems and considerations, ignores these facts, his candlestick has been removed.

The argument for a God, then, within His world, but also distinct from it, above its evil custom and in some sense untouched by its all-leveling life, is essential to the preservation of human personality, and personality is essential to dignity, to decency, to hope.  The clearest and simplest thing to be said about the Hebrew God, lofty and inaccessible Being, with whom nevertheless His purified and obedient children might have relationships, or about the “living God” of Greek theology, far removed from us but with whose deathless goodness, beauty and truth our mortality by some mediator may be endowed, is that the argument that supports such transcendence is the argument from necessity.  It is the facts of experience, the very stuff of human life, coming down alike from Hebraic and Hellenic civilization, which demand Him.  Immanence and transcendence are merely theistic terms for identity and difference.  Through them is revealed and discovered personality, the “I” which is the ultimate fact of my consciousness.  I can but reckon from the known to the unknown.  The world which produced me is also, then, a cosmic identity and difference.  In that double fact is found