jeers at the one as hypocrisy and superstition and at the other as mere “middle-class respectability.”  He himself is the perpetual Ajax standing defiant upon the headland of his own inflamed desires, and scoffing at the lightnings either of heaven or society.  Neither devoutness nor progress but mere personal expansion is his goal.  The humanist curbs both the flesh and the imagination by a high doctrine of expediency.  Natural values are always critically appraised in the light of humane values, which is nearly, if not quite, the same as saying that the individual desires and delights must be conformed to the standards of the group.  There can be no anarchy of the imagination, no license of the mind, no unbridled will.  Humanism, no less than religion, is nobly, though not so deeply, traditional.  But there is no tradition to the naturalist; not the normal and representative, but the unique and spectacular is his goal.  Novelty and expansion, not form and proportion, are his goddesses.  Not truth and duty, but instinct and appetite, are in the saddle.  He will try any horrid experiment from which he may derive a new sensation.

Over against them both stands the man of religion with his vision of the whole and his consequent law of proud humility.  The next three chapters will try to discuss in detail these several attitudes toward life and their respective manifestations in contemporary society.

CHAPTER TWO

THE CHILDREN OF ZION AND THE SONS OF GREECE

We are not using the term “humanism” in this chapter in its strictly technical sense.  Because we are not concerned with the history of thought merely, but also with its practical embodiments in various social organizations as well.  So we mean by “humanism” not only those modes and systems of thought in which human interests predominate but also the present economic, political and ecclesiastical institutions which more or less consistently express them.  Hence, the term as used will include concepts not always agreeing with each other, and sometimes only semi-related to the main stream of the movement.  This need not trouble us.  Strict intellectual consistency is a fascinating and impossible goal of probably dubious value.  Moreover, it is this whole expression of the time spirit which bathes the sensitive personality of the preacher, persuading and moulding him quite as much by its derived and concrete manifestations in contemporary society as by its essential and abstract principles.

There are then two sets of media through which humanism has affected preaching.  The first are philosophical and find their expression in a large body of literature which has been moulding thought and feeling for nearly four centuries.  Humanism begins with the general abstract assumption that all which men can know, or need to know, are “natural” and human values; that they have no means of getting outside the inexorable circle of their own experience.