crets
of the body, and can almost conquer death and indefinitely prolong
the span of human days. We face the facts and know the world as our
fathers could never do. We understand the past and foresee the future.
But the most significant thing about our present situation is this:
how little has this wisdom, in and of itself, done for us! It has made
men more cunning rather than more noble. Still the body is ravaged and
consumed by passion. Still men toil for others against their will,
and the strong spill the blood of the weak for their ambition and the
sweat of the children for their greed. Never was learning so diffused
nor the content of scholarship so large as now. Yet the great cities
are as Babylon and Rome of old, where human wreckage multiplies, and
hideous vices flourish, and men toil without expectancy, and live
without hope, and millions exist--not live at all--from hand to mouth.
As we survey the universal unrest of the world today and see the
horrors of war between nation and nation, and between class and class,
it would not be difficult to make out a case for the thesis that the
scientific and intellectual advances of the nineteenth century
have largely worked to make men keener and more capacious in their
suffering. And at least this is true; just so far as the achievement
of the mind has been divorced from the consecration of the spirit,
in just so far knowledge has had no beneficent potency for the human
race.

Is it not clear, then, that preaching must deal again, never more
indeed than now, with the religion which offers a redemption from sin?
This is still foolishness to the Greeks, but to those who believe it
is still the power of God unto salvation. Culture is not religion.
When the preacher substitutes the one for the other, he gives stones
for bread, and the hungry sheep go elsewhere or are not fed. It is
this emasculated preaching, mulcted of its spiritual forces, which
awakes the bitterest distrust and deepest indignation that human
beings know. They are fighting the foes of the flesh and the enemies
of the spirit, enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
standing by the open graves of their friends and kindred, saying
there, "I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me." And then,
with all this mystery and oppression of life upon them they enter the
doors of the house of God and listen to a polite essay, are told of
the consolations of art, reminded of the stupidity of evil,