must
find in the current of history a unity corresponding to the unity of
the physical universe, or else he must create it. It is this conscious
unification of history that the religious will spontaneously tends to
bring about."[2]

[Footnote 2: _The Meaning of God in Human Experience_, p. 518.]

It is then precisely the preacher's task, his peculiar office, to
attempt these vast and perilous summations. What he is set here for
is to bring the immeasurable within the scope of vision. He deals with
the far-flung outposts, no man knows how distant, and the boundless
interspaces of human consciousness; he deals with the beginning, the
middle, the end--the origin, the meaning and the destiny--of human
life. How can anyone give unity to such a prospect? Like any other
artist he gives it the only unity possible, the unity revealed in
his own personality. The theologian should not attempt to evaluate
his age; the preacher may. Because the theologian, like any other
scientist, analyzes and dissects; he breaks up the world. The preacher
in his disciplined imagination, his spiritual intuitiveness,--what we
call the "religious temperament,"--unites it again and makes men see
it whole. This quality of purified and enlightened imagination is of
the very essence of the preacher's power and art. Hence he may attempt
to set forth a just understanding of his generation.

This brings us to the second reason for our topic namely, its
timeliness. All religious values are not at all times equal in
importance. As generations come and go, first one, then another looms
in the foreground. But I sincerely believe that the most fateful
undertaking for the preacher at this moment is that of analyzing his
own generation. Because he has been flung into one of the world's
transition epochs, he speaks in an hour which is radical in changes,
perplexing in its multifarious cross-currents, prolific of new
forms and expressions. What the world most needs at such a moment of
expansion and rebellion, is a redefining of its ideals. It needs to
have some eternal scale of values set before it once more. It needs
to stop long enough to find out just what and where it is, and toward
what it is going. It needs another Sheridan to write a new _School for
Scandal_, another Swift, with his _Gulliver's Travels_, a continuing
Shaw with his satiric comedies, a Mrs. Wharton with her _House of
Mirth_, a Thorstein Veblen with his _Higher Learning in America_, a
Savona