Page:Heralds of God.djvu/87

THE PREACHER'S THEME development of culture and the application of logic and intelligence, the natural virtues of the human heart and the attention to good works—what more, it is asked, does man require for his deliverance? But our age, perhaps more than any of its predecessors, is being visited by doubts. It suspects that the malady is too radical to yield to any of these expedients. It has had such an appalling insight into what the apostle called "the mystery of iniquity" that its poise and confidence have been irreparably disturbed. It dare not face a future in which man is his own redeemer.

Wherefore God be thanked that right down in the heart of that situation you can set the Cross! Rising out of the midnight of man's despair, smiting the darkness like a sudden dawn, comes the solving word, the divine decisive deed; and all the classic answers of Jew and Greek and Roman fade away before the glory of it.

Now when you set the Cross in the context of the world's sin, there will be three main notes in your preaching.

You will preach the Cross, first, as Revelation. Where else does the terrible truth about sin stand so nakedly revealed as at the place where it crucifies the Son of God? All the habitual rationalizations which reduce sin to ignorance, or biological maladjustment, a thing to be cured by education, social planning or psychological suggestion, are seen at Calvary to be bland distortions of the truth. Let your preaching of the Cross drive home the fact that the same sins which 81