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The emphasis of current thought lies on light rather than on heat. A bright man is listed at a higher figure than a man with fervid impulses. Brain counts for a good deal more to-day than heart does. It will win more applause, and earn a larger salary. Emotion we are a little afraid of. We caution people not to let their feelings run away with them. We want to know that a conclusion has been reached in cold blood before we are disposed to assent to it, or to submit our own judgment to it. Convictions formed heatedly we are not supposed to publish till they have been reviewed and revised at a low temperature. Exuberance is in bad odour. Appeals to the heart are not thought to quite be in good taste. People are not disposed to surrender themselves to any influence or impression that they cannot intellectually construe. The current demand is for ideas. But the fact that our thinking is keen and alert is no indication that we reach, or have any relish for, the inward substance of the truth upon whose glittering surface our thoughts so jauntily divert themselves. This holds of religious truths exactly as much as of any other. If a preacher handles his matter with dexterity, and if in the process his own mind is quickened into any degree of activity, this activity of his will communicate itself to the machinery of his hearers. minds, just as the movement of one cog-wheel communicates revolution to the companion wheel that it gears into. This movement of their intellectual gearing amuses them. They enjoy the sensation of feeling it go. The point is, that intellectual activity upon Christian themes is not Christianity, any more than working a flying trapeze m a church is "godly exercise." An ox can devour the painting accidentally left upon the easel out in the pasture where he is grazing, but that does not help to make the ox aesthetic. The creature has dealt with the painting purely on the basis of his brutality; he has not chewed it with any reference to the spirit of beauty which the canvas incarnates. So it is the peculiar function of pure intellect to deal with the forms of truth, with the shell in which the truth is encased, without any necessary regard being had to the meat that is packed inside the shell; just as children can play with diamonds, and yet if you take away the diamonds and give them cheap beads, or even white beans, the probability is that they will go on with their play just as satisfiedly, because it is the shape and the glisten of the thing and not the quality of its interior substance that amuses them. That is the kind of thing pure intellect is; not to be trusted to prick through the cuticle of truth into its quick; brilliant as winter sunshine, but cold and surface-grazing as the frosty splendour of January; which has scintillant agility enough to whiten the hair without being competent to brush away the snow, eat through the ice, bore into the ground, unlock the fountains of fertility, fire the pulse of this ague-stricken old earth, warm it into springtime, and garnish it with summer life and loveliness. It is worth a great deal to have blood, and it is as essential to the intelligence as it is to the body. There has never been a thing said, more fundamental to the appreciation of the matter we have just now in hand, than what Solomon said three thousand years ago: "The issues of life are out of the heart." Passion is axial. Power begins in heat. In the last analysis there is scarcely a terrestrial activity in either earth, sea, or air, that does not owe itself to the great sphere of material passion that we call the Sun. The throb of the sea, the currents of the air, the very coal on the hearth, that converts winter into summer, and turns evening into daytime, is every whir of it old sunshine, cosmic fire, preserved and translated into instant effect. God means something by all that. It is a Divine satire on cold-bloodedness, and it is the way Heaven takes to rebuke the notion that results in the intellectual, artistic, moral, and spiritual world can be hammered out by cold calculation. All the best thoughts in the world, into however solid and granitic a form they may eventually have become chilled and compacted, are ingots moulded from metal once molten, mayhap a thousand, two, five thousand years ago. Man's first language is music. Prose is poetry cooled down. Geology tells us that the world began hot; so every thought that has had a history began as a passion. You can manufacture in cold weather, but all creating is done under a high temperature. What is true of thought is just as true of art. Art is enthusiasm become shape. The grand cathedrals are old, petrified pulse-beats. The master paintings — and they are all religious — are holy medieval passion flung on to canvas. Art is imitative now rather than creative, because the thermometer is down. We can make waxwork with the mercury at zero, but we cannot grow flowers there. Moses built the tabernacle, and he patterned it from what he caught, up in the Mount. A man can be an acute theologian without having any juice. It is clear, then, that we are not criticising Christian truth; our censure is only upon intellectual dexterity considered as a means of dealing with it. Intellectual dexterity cannot deal with it. Intellectual dexterity does not know how to deal with it. Truth has a heart, and only heart can find it. What we understand by dogma to-day is what is left of some old holy vision, but with all the original heavenly light died out of it. It is truth s body, but in which the warm currents of truth's blood no longer circulate. The theologian constructs his system of theology out of truths that have ceased to beat, very much as the botanist constructs his herbarium out of dead flowers. All the theology that is in the Church to-day is in the Epistles, but it is not there as theology. So all the bone-dust that is in our graveyards to-day was once in society, but it was not there as bone-dust, Intellect is not vision. The sum of the whole matter is this: that In the sphere of truth, in the domain of life, and in the higher ranges of religious discernment and of Christian appreciation and aspiration, pure calculating intellect is being worked for a great deal more than it is worth. It is heat that makes the world a live world, and not light. It is heart that composes the core of Christianity, and not head.

(C. H. Parkhurst, D. D.).

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Parallel Verses

KJV: In Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream by night: and God said, Ask what I shall give thee.

WEB: In Gibeon Yahweh appeared to Solomon in a dream by night; and God said, "Ask what I shall give you."