ometimes
an expression of spiritual arrogance and sometimes a subtle form of
skepticism. It assumes a special privilege for our profession or a
not-get-at-able defense and sanction by insisting that it differs in
origin and hence in kind from similar expressions of the human spirit.
It hesitates to rely on the normal and the intelligible sources of
ministerial power, to confess the relatively definable origin and
understandable methods of our work. It fears to trust to these alone.

But all these must be trusted. We may safely assert that the preacher
deals with absolute values, for all art does that. But we may not
assert that he is the only person that does so or that his is the only
or the unapproachable way. No; he, too, is an artist. Hence, a sermon
is not a contribution to, but an interpretation of, knowledge, made
in terms of the religious experience. It is taking truth out of its
compressed and abstract form, its impersonal and scientific language,
and returning it to life in the terms of the ethical and spiritual
experience of mankind, thus giving it such concrete and pictorial
expression that it stimulates the imagination and moves the will.

It will be clear then why I have said that the task of appraising the
heart and mind of our generation, to which we address ourselves, is
appropriate to the preaching genius. For only they could attempt
such a task who possess an informed and disciplined yet essentially
intuitive spirit with its scale of values; who by instinct can see
their age as a whole and indicate its chief emphases, its controlling
tendencies, its significant expressions. It is not the scientist but
the seer who thus attempts the precious but perilous task of making
the great generalizations. This is what Aristotle means when he says,
"The poet ranks higher than the historian because he achieves a more
general truth." This is, I suppose, what Houston Stewart Chamberlain
means when he says, in the introduction to the _Foundations of the
Nineteenth Century_: "our modern world represents an immeasurable
array of facts. The mastery of such a task as recording and
interpreting them scientifically is impossible. It is only the genius
of the artist, which feels the secret parallels that exist between
the world of vision and of thought, that can, if fortune be favorable,
reveal the unity beneath the immeasurable complexities and diversities
of the present order." Or as Professor Hocking says: "The prophet