house of God and the gate of heaven. Hear His voice saying, "This day is the Scripture fulfilled in your ears. This day is salvation come to this house." Then preaching, which might otherwise be a dead formality and a barren routine, an implicit denial of its own high claim, will become a power and a passion; and the note of strong, decisive reality, like a trumpet, will awaken the souls of men.
III
Up to this point, we have been considering the preacher's task as influenced by two crucial factors in the contemporary scene: the tension between disillusionment and hope, and the tension between escapism and realism. We turn now finally to a third characteristic mood with which we have to reckon in our presentation of the Gospel to this age. This is the critical tension between Scepticism and Faith. You are going out to a world which is literally "in a strait betwixt two," torn by an inner conflict between the spirit of denial and the spirit of affirmation, between the loud self-confident dogmatism of the thoroughgoing sceptic and the deep wistfulness of the seeker after God. "Poore intricated soule!" cried John Donne long ago, contemplating the unresolved tensions of man's nature, "Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthicall soule!"
That there has been, on the one hand, a widespread failure of belief is all too apparent. Evidences of it
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