of imagination and feeling in religion and now he
concludes with a plea for the thinker. But it is not so inconsistent
as it appears. It is just because we do believe that the discovery,
the expression and the rewards of religion lie chiefly in the
superrational and poetic realms that therefore we want this
intellectual content to accompany it, not supersede it, as a balancing
influence, a steadying force. There are grave perils in worshipful
services corresponding to their supreme values. Mystical preaching
has the defects of its virtues and too often sinks into that vague
sentimentalism which is the perversion of its excellence. How
insensibly sometimes does high and precious feeling degenerate into
a sort of religious hysteria! It needs then to be always tested and
corrected by clear thinking.

But we in no way alter our original insistence that in our realm as
preachers, unlike the scientist's realm of the theologians, thought
is the handmaid, not the mistress. Our great plea, then, for doctrinal
preaching is that by intellectual grappling with the final and
speculative problems of religion we do not supersede but feed the
emotional life and do not diminish but focus and steady it. It is
that you and I may have reserves of feeling--indispensable to great
preaching--sincerity and intensity of emotion, that disciplined
imagination which is genius, that restrained passion which is art,
and that our congregations may have the same, that we must strive for
intellectual power, must do the preaching that gives people something
to think about. These are the religious and devout reasons why
we value intellectual honesty, precision of utterance, reserve of
statement, logical and coherent thinking.

We are come, then, to the conclusion of our discussions. They have
been intended to restore a neglected emphasis upon the imaginative and
transcendent as distinguished from the ethical and humanistic aspects
of the religious life. They have tried to show that the reaching out
by worship to this "otherness" of God and to the ultimate in life is
man's deepest hunger and the one we are chiefly set to feed. I am sure
that the chief ally of the experience of the transcendence of God and
the cultivation of the worshipful faculties in man is to be found in
severe and speculative thinking. I believe our almost unmixed passion
for piety, for action, for practical efficiency, betrays us. It
indicates that we are trying to manufacture effe