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THE PREACHER'S THEME Yet I should pity the man who has to stand and face a congregation with no surer word than that. And I would implore you not to mock the bitterness of human hearts with facile phrases about the nobility of pain, nor to invade with well-meaning platitudes the holy ground where angels fear to tread. There are experiences—desolating experiences of calamity, of wrecked homes and shattered dreams, of frantic pain, of the tragic and apparently senseless waste of precious lives—in the face of which the most rational and philosophical interpretation and even the best theistic theories must sound hollow and irrelevant. It were better, if there is no clearer light to give, to be silent altogether in the presence of the ultimate mystery; or else to leave with those who suffer the immeasurably poignant message of one who died some twenty years before Christ was born: "O passi graviora, dabit deus his quoque finem."

But the least in the Kingdom of God is greater than Vergil when he penned that mighty line. For we have seen the Cross. We have found the clue to the enigma. Long ago there was a prophet who, bewildered by the ways of Providence and appalled by the grim and harrowing aspect of the world, took counsel with his soul and made a high resolve: "I will stand upon my watch-tower, and set me upon the outlook-turret, and will watch to see what He will say unto me" And a great part of our task as preachers is to help others, battered and besieged by the assaults of doubt, to climb to that high rampart above the dust and smoke 77