then, is a critic, a learner who wants to analyze and
dissect; the man of affairs is a director and builder and wants to
command and construct; the man of this group is a seer. He is a lover
and a dreamer; he watches and broods over life, profoundly feeling it,
enamored both of its shame and of its glory. The intolerable poignancy
of existence is bittersweet to his mouth; he craves to incarnate,
to interpret its entire human process, always striving to pierce to
its center, to capture and express its inexpressible ultimate. He
is an egotist but a valuable one, acutely aware of the depths and
immensities of his own spirit and of its significant relations to
this seething world without. Thus it is both himself and a new vision
of life, in terms of himself, that he desires to project for his
community.

The form of that vision will vary according to the nature of the
tools, the selection of material, the particular sort of native
endowment which are given to him. Some such men reveal their
understanding of the soul and the world in the detached serenity,
the too well-defined harmonies of a Parthenon; others in the dim
and intricate richness, the confused and tortured aspiration of the
long-limbed saints and grotesque devils of a Gothic cathedral. Others
incarnate it in gleaming bronze; or spread it in subtle play of light
and shade and tones of color on a canvas; or write it in great plays
which open the dark chambers of the soul and make the heart stand
still; or sing it in sweet and terrible verse, full-throated utterance
of man's pride and hope and passion. Some act it before the altar or
beneath the proscenium arch; some speak it, now in Cassandra-tones,
now comfortably like shepherds of frail sheep. These folk are the
brothers-in-blood, the fellow craftsmen of the preacher. By a silly
convention, he is almost forbidden to consult with them, and to betake
himself to the learned, the respectable and the dull. But it is with
these that naturally he sees eye to eye.

In short, in calling the preacher a prophet we mean that preaching
is an art and the preacher is an artist; for all great art has the
prophetic quality. Many men object to this definition of the preacher
as being profane. It appears to make secular or mechanicalize their
profession, to rob preaching of its sacrosanctity, leave it less
authority by making it more intelligible, remove it from the realm
of the mystical and unique. This objection seems to me s