54 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING
intellectual system. We are not referring to the fact that men sometimes dishonestly subscribe to creeds which they do not believe, but to the psychological necessity men are under of attaching to the terms of formulas which they honestly accept meanings which are determined by their own systems of ideas. It is interesting, for instance, to consider what different meanings may be borne by the word " God " in the minds of people who are of different grades of cul ture or whose minds have been formed in different environ ments. In the mind of a person bred in a gentle and cul tured Christian home, it has one meaning ; in the mind of a savage, quite another. In the mind of an ignorant rustic it calls up one set of associations ; in the mind of the phil osopher Spinoza it had quite another. Contrast the mean ing which it conveys to the mind of a Wall Street broker with that which it conveyed to Francis, the saint, or to Swedenborg, the mystic, or to Herbert Spencer, the agnos tic. And when particular theological terms, which connote such great varieties of meaning in different minds, are com bined into a lengthy formula, it is inevitable that this will stand for a widely different content of meaning in each mind. The practical significance of this fact grows when it is remembered that, by reason of the continual differen tiation of occupations and other influences tending in the same direction, the mental systems of men are becoming more and more varied and divergent.
The divergence of meanings increases as the mental sys tems become more critically organized. When the emphasis is put upon the uses or functions of things men s ideas of those things approximate more closely, and this is the more true as those uses or functions concern us in more common ways and in the more simple and ordinary situations. For instance, three persons are looking at a locomotive engine. One of them is a little child ; to it the engine is just a big thing with big wheels, which puffs out smoke and pulls the train. Another is the engineer ; to him it is a complicated piece of machinery, which he more or less adequately under-
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