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Preaching and Paganism by Albert Parker Fitch
page 7 of 210 (03%)
the church? A good deal might be said today on the need of this sort
of personal culture in the ministerial candidate. But, provocative and
significant though the question is, it is too limited in scope, too
purely subjective in nature, to suit the character and the urgency of
the needs of this moment.

Again, every profession has the prized inheritance of its own
particular and gradually perfected human skill. An interesting study,
then, would be the analysis of that rich content of human insights,
the result of generations of pastoral experience, which form the
background of all great preaching. No man, whether learned or pious,
or both, is equipped for the pulpit without the addition of that
intuitive discernment, that quick and varied appreciation, that sane
and tolerant knowledge of life and the world, which is the reward
given to the friends and lovers of mankind. For the preacher deals not
with the shallows but the depths of life. Like his Master he must be a
great humanist. To make real sermons he has to look, without dismay or
evasion, far into the heart's impenetrable recesses. He must have had
some experience with the absolutism of both good and evil. I think
preachers who regard sermons on salvation as superfluous have not had
much experience with either. They belong to that large world of the
intermediates, neither positively good nor bad, who compose the mass
of the prosperous and respectable in our genteel civilization. Since
they belong to it they cannot lead it. And certainly they who do
not know the absolutism of evil cannot very well understand sinners.
Genuine satans, as Milton knew, are not weaklings and traitors who
have declined from the standards of a respectable civilization. They
are positive and impressive figures pursuing and acting up to their
own ideal of conduct, not fleeing from self-accepted retribution or
falling away from a confessed morality of ours. Evil is a force even
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