also the present economic, political and ecclesiastical institutions
which more or less consistently express them. Hence, the term as
used will include concepts not always agreeing with each other, and
sometimes only semi-related to the main stream of the movement. This
need not trouble us. Strict intellectual consistency is a fascinating
and impossible goal of probably dubious value. Moreover, it is
this whole expression of the time spirit which bathes the sensitive
personality of the preacher, persuading and moulding him quite as much
by its derived and concrete manifestations in contemporary society as
by its essential and abstract principles.

There are then two sets of media through which humanism has affected
preaching. The first are philosophical and find their expression in a
large body of literature which has been moulding thought and feeling
for nearly four centuries. Humanism begins with the general abstract
assumption that all which men can know, or need to know, are "natural"
and human values; that they have no means of getting outside the
inexorable circle of their own experience.

Much, of course, depends here upon the sense in which the word
"experience" is used. The assumption need not necessarily be
challenged except where, as is very often the case, an arbitrarily
limited definition of experience is intended. From this general
assumption flows the subjective theory of morals; from it is derived
the conviction that the rationalistic values in religion are the only
real, or at least demonstrable, ones; and hence from this comes the
shifting of the seat of religious authority from "revelation" to
experience. In so far as this is a correction of emphasis only, or the
abandonment of a misleading term rather than the denial of one of the
areas and modes of understanding, again we have no quarrel with it.