But, of course, the preacher’s main task is to interpret man’s moral experience, which drives him out to search for the eternal in the terms of the “other” and redeeming God.  We have spoken of the depersonalizing of religion which paganism and humanism alike have brought upon the world.  One evidence of that has been the way in which we have confounded the social expressions of religion with its individual source.  We are so concerned with the effect of our religion upon the community that we have forgotten that the heart of religion is found in the solitary soul.  All of which means that we have here again yielded to the time spirit that enfolds us and have come to think of man as religious if he be humane.  But that is not true.  No man is ever religious until he becomes devout.  And indeed no man of our sort—­the saint and sinner sort—­is ever long and truly humane unless the springs of his tenderness for men are found in his ever widening and deepening gratitude to God!  Hence no man was ever yet able to preach the living God until he understood that the central need in human life is to reconcile the individual conscience to itself, compose the anarchy of the spiritual life.  Men want to be happy and be fed; but men must have inward peace.

We swing back, therefore, to the native ground of preaching, approach the religious problem, now, not from the aesthetic or the scientific, but from the moral angle.  Here we are dealing with the most poignant of all human experiences.  For it is in this intensely personal world of moral failure and divided will that men are most acutely aware of themselves and hence of their need of that other-than-self beyond.  The sentimental idealizing of contemporary life, the declension of the humanist’s optimism into that superficial complacency which will not see what it does not like or what it is not expedient to see, makes one’s mind to chuckle while one’s heart doth ache.  There is a brief heyday, its continuance dependent upon the uncontrollable factors of outward prosperity, physical and nervous vigor, capacity for preoccupation with the successive novelties of a diversified and complicated civilization, in which even men of religious temperament can minimize or ignore, perhaps sincerely disbelieve in, their divided life.  Sometimes we think we may sin and be done with it.  But always in the end man must come back to this moral tragedy of the soul.  Because sin will not be done with us when we are done with it.  Every evil is evil to him that does it and sooner or later we are compelled to understand that to be a sinner is the sorest and most certain punishment for sinning.