tion of
goods, the withholding from the producer of his fair share of the
wealth which he creates, profiteering, predatory riches--these were
ranked under one term as avarice, and they were counted not among
the venial offenses, like aberrations of the flesh, but avarice was
considered one of the seven deadly sins of the spirit. The application
of the ethics of Jesus to social control began to die out as
humanism individualized Christian morals and as, under its influence,
nationalism tended to supplant the international ecclesiastical order.
The cynical and sordid maxim that business is business; that, in the
economic sphere, the standards of the church are not operative and the
responsibility of the church is not recognized--notions which are
a chief heresy and an outstanding disgrace of nineteenth-century
religion, from which we are only now painfully and slowly
reacting--these may be traced back to the influence of humanism upon
Christian thought and conduct.

In general, then, it seems to me abundantly clear that the humanistic
movement has both limited and secularized Christian preaching. It
dogmatically ignores supersensuous values; hence it has rationalized
preaching hence it has made provincial its intellectual approach and
treatment, narrowed and made mechanical its content. It has turned
preaching away from speculative to practical themes. It was,
perhaps, this mental and spiritual decline of the ministry to which a
distinguished educator referred when he told a body of Congregational
preachers that their sermons were marked by "intellectual frugality."
It is this which a great New England theologian-preacher, Dr. Gordon,
means when he says "an indescribable pettiness, a mean kind of retail
trade has taken possession of the preachers; they have substituted the
mill-round for the sun-path."

The whole world today tends toward a monstrous egotism. Man's
attention is centered on himself, his temporal salvation, his external
prosperity. Preaching, yielding partly to the intellectual and partly
to the practical environment, has tended to adopt the same secular
scale of values, somewhat pietized and intensified, and to move within
the same area of operation. That is why most preaching today deals
with relations of men with men, not of men with God. Yet human
relationships can only be determined in the light of ultimate ones.
Most preaching instinctively avoids the definitely religious themes;
deals with the ethi