inquire what attitude toward them our preaching should adopt. If it be
true that what is most revealing in any age is its regulative ideas,
then what is more valuable for the preacher than to attempt the
understanding of his generation through the defining of its ruling
concepts? And it is this audacious task which, for two reasons, we
shall presume to undertake.

The first reason is that it is appropriate both to the temperament
and the training of the preacher. There are three grand divisions,
or rather determining emphases, by which men may be separated into
vocational groups. To begin with, there is the man of the scientific
or intellectual type. He has a passion for facts and a strong sense of
their reality. He moves with natural ease among abstract propositions,
is both critical of, and fertile in, theories; indicates his essential
distinction in his love of the truth for the truth's sake. He looks
first to the intrinsic reasonableness of any proposition; tends to
judge both men and movements not by traditional or personal values,
but by a detached and disinterested appraisal of their inherent worth.
He is often a dogmatist, but this fault is not peculiar to him, he
shares it with the rest of mankind. He is sometimes a literalist and
sometimes a slave to logic, more concerned with combating the crude
or untenable form of a proposition than inquiring with sympathetic
insight into the worth of its substance. But these things are
perversions of his excellencies, defects of his virtues. His
characteristic qualities are mental integrity, accuracy of statement,
sanity of judgment, capacity for sustained intellectual toil. Such
men are investigators, scholars; when properly blended with the
imaginative type they become inventors and teachers. They make good
theologians and bad preachers.