And now I know you are thinking in your hearts, Well, what inconsistency this man shows!  For a whole book he has been insisting on the prime values 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 effects to conceal the absence of causes.  We may look for a religious revival when men have so meditated upon and struggled with the fundamental ideas of religion that they feel profoundly its eternal mysteries.