THE PREACHER'S THEME
under one but the everlasting snows of Himmalayah, the Earth shrinking to a Planet, and the indigo firmament sowing itself with daylight stars; easy for you, for me: but whither does it lead? Well, I do believe, for one thing, a man has no right to say to his own generation, turning quite away from it, 'Be damned!' It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours. Come back into it, I tell you." So too, in your presentation of the great facts of faith, you must resolutely work out the ethical implications of the doctrines you preach. The suspicion that the Church of Christ lacks zeal for social righteousness can be terribly damaging. Nor can it be denied that too often in the past organized religion has tended to play for safety. As Phillips Brooks once put it: "The pillars of the Church are apt to be like the Pillars of Hercules, beyond which no man might sail." It is the function of economists, not of the pulpit, to work out plans of reconstruction. But it is emphatically the function of the pulpit to stab men broad awake to the terrible pity of Jesus, to expose their hearts to the constraint of that divine compassion which haloes the oppressed and the suffering and flames in judgment against every social wrong. Dr. J. S. Whale has put it forcefully and well: "Any present-day theology which has not a revolutionary sociology as part of its implicit logic is not truly Christian." There is no room for a preaching devoid of ethical directness and social passion, in a day when
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