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Such preaching would have the authentic note. It is self-verifying. It stirs to answer that quality both moral and imaginative in the spirit of man which craves the pain and difficulty and satisfaction of separation from the natural order.
Most of all they must have that "other" quality, so triumphant and self-verifying that seeing it constrains belief. A mediator wholly unlike ourselves would be a meaningless and mocking figure. But a mediator who was chiefly like ourselves would be a contradiction in terms! So we come back again to the old problem.
We must let that revelation so sink into the heart as to do its self-verifying work there thoroughly, yet with a growth never to be exhausted. We must "bear onwards" evermore "unto perfection" in "knowing Him." So we shall stand, and live, and love, and labour on. HEB. vii. There is a symmetrical dignity all its own in the seventh chapter of the Hebrews.
It would be an unreal simplification; it would darken, not illumine, the understanding; we should never rest in it. Nor do we need to be concerned if the intellect cannot perfectly order or easily demonstrate the whole of the religious life, fit each element with a self-verifying defense and explanation.
Nor does the believer ask for more. He does not expect to see the King in His beauty; he only needs to know that He is, that He is there. How self-verifying and moving, then, are the appeals ready to our hands.
There is nothing inevitable about their order; they have no intelligible, self-verifying procedure. Anthems are inserted here and there without any sense of the progression or of the psychology of worship. Glorias are sung sometimes with the congregation standing up and sometimes while they are sitting down.
They contain so many vivid and accurate recitals of typical human experience, portrayed with self-verifying insight and interpreted with consummate understanding of the issues of the heart.
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