ent 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.

So the second problem of the preacher is clear. Man asserts his
potential independence of the natural law. But to realize that, he
must bridge the gulf between himself and the supernatural lawgiver
to whose dictates he confesses he is subject. He is not free from the
bondage of the lower, except through the bondage to the higher. Nor
can he live by that higher law unaided and alone. Here we strike at
the root of humanism. Its kindly tolerance of the church is built
up on the proud conviction that we, with our distinctive doctrine of
salvation, are superfluous, hence sometimes disingenuous and always
negligible. The humanist believes that understanding takes the place
of faith. What men need is not to be redeemed from their sins, but to
be educated out of their follies.

But does right knowing in itself suffice to insure right doing?
Socrates and Plato, with their indentification of kno