rshipful services must be accompanied by
speculative preaching and I doubt if the one can be nobly maintained
without the other. For we saw that worship is the direct experience
of the Absolute through high and concentrated feeling. Even so
speculative and, in general, doctrinal preaching is the same return
to first principles and to ultimate values in the realm of ideas.
It turns away from the immediate, the practical, the relative to the
final and absolute in the domain of thought.

Now, obviously, then, devout services and doctrinal preaching should
go together. No high and persistent emotions can be maintained without
clear thinking to nourish and steady them. There is in doctrinal
preaching a certain indifference to immediate issues; to detailed
applications. It deals, by its nature, with comprehensive and abstract
rather than local and concrete thinking; with inclusive feeling,
transcendent aspiration. It does not try to pietize the ordinary,
commercial and domestic affairs of men. Instead it deals with the
highest questions and perceptions of human life; argues from those
sublime hypotheses which are the very subsoil of the religious
temperament and understanding. It deals with those aspects of human
life which indeed include, but include because they transcend, the
commercial and domestic, the professional and political affairs of
daily living. We have been insisting in these chapters that it is that
portion of human need and experience which lies between the knowable
and the unknowable with which it is the preacher's chief province to
deal. Doctrinal preaching endeavors to give form and relations to its
intuitions and high desires, its unattainable longings and insights.
There is a native alliance between the doctrine of Immanence and
expository preaching. For the office of both is to give us the God of
this world in the affairs of the moment. There is a native alliance
between expository preaching and humanism which very largely accounts
for the latter's popularity. For expository preaching, as at present
practiced, deals mostly with ethical and practical issues, with the
setting of the house of this world in order. There is also a native
and majestic alliance between the idea of transcendence and doctrinal
preaching and between the facts of the religious experience and the
content of speculative philosophy. Not pragmatism but pure metaphysics
is the native language of the mind when it moves in the spiritual