e
remote and imaginative estimates of his own intended worth and those
consequent exacting demands upon himself which are a part of the
religious interpretation of life. Humanistic writing is full of the
exulting sense of this emancipation. These superconsiderations do not
belong in the world of experience as the humanist ordinarily conceives
of it. Hence, man lives in an immensely contracted, but a very real
and tangible world and within the small experimental circumference of
it, he holds a far larger place (from one viewpoint, a far smaller one
from another) than that of a finite creature caught in the snare of
this world and yet a child of the Eternal, having infinite destinies.
The humanist sees man as freed from the tyranny of this supernatural
revelation and laws. He rejoices over man because now he stands,

"self-poised on manhood's solid earth
Not forced to frame excuses for his birth,
Fed from within with all the strength he needs."

It is this sense of independence which arouses in Goethe a perennial
enthusiasm. It is the greatest bliss, he says, that the humanist won
back for us. Henceforth, we must strive with all our power to keep it.

We have attempted this brief sketch of one of the chief sources of the
contemporary thought movement, that we may realize the pit whence we
were digged, the quarry from which many corner stones in the present
edifice of civilization were dug. The preacher tends to underestimate
the comprehensive character of the pervasive ideas, worked into many
institutions and practices, which are continually impinging upon him
and his message. They form a perpetual attrition, working silently and
ceaselessly day and night, wearing away the distinctively religious
conceptions of the community. Much of the vagueness and sentimentalism
of present preaching, its uncritical impressionism, is due to the
influence of the non-religious or, at least, the insufficiently
religious character of the ruling ideas and motives outside the church
which are impinging upon it, and upon the rest of the thinking of the
moment.

Now, this _abstract_ humanism of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries had a considerable influence upon early American preaching.
The latter part of the eighteenth century marked a breaking away from
the Protestant scholasticism of the Reformation theology. The French
Revolution accented and made operative, even across the Atlantic, the
typical humanistic concepts