of mankind. Then we can preach the Gospel. Because then we dimly
understand why men have hung their God upon the Cross of Christ!

[Footnote 1: _The Divine Comedy: Hell_; canto I.]

Is it not ludicrous, then, to suppose that a man merely equipped with
professional scholarship, or contented with moral conformities, can
minister to the sorrow and the mystery, the mingled shame and glory of
a human being? This is why the average theologue, in his first parish,
is like the well-meaning but meddling engineer endeavoring with clumsy
tools and insensitive fingers to adjust the delicate and complicated
mechanism of a Genevan watch. And here is one of the real reasons why
we deprecate men entering our calling, without both the culture of
a liberal education and the learning of a graduate school. Clearly,
therefore, one real task of such schools and their lectureships is to
offer men wide and gracious training in the art of human contacts,
so that their lives may be lifted above Pharisaism and moral
self-consciousness, made acquainted with the higher and comprehensive
interpretations of the heart and mind of our race. For only thus can
they approach life reverently and humbly. Only thus will they revere
the integrity of the human spirit; only thus can they regard it with
a magnanimous and catholic understanding and measure it not by the
standards of temperamental or sectarian convictions, but by what
is best and highest, deepest and holiest in the race. No one needs
more than the young preacher to be drawn out of the range of narrow
judgments, of exclusive standards and ecclesiastical traditions and to
be flung out among free and sensitive spirits, that he may watch their
workings, master their perceptions, catch their scale of values.

A discussion, then, dealing with this aspect of our problem, would