It is somewhat singular that the teachers of Protestant theology who have had probably the widest influence have been not professors of divinity, not preachers, not persons of any standing as theological instructors, but unofficial men and women, often laymen and always self-appointed. For I suppose it is unquestionable that poetry and especially hymns have spread theology more widely than have treatises of divinity. Calvinism was stamped upon English-speaking peoples not so much directly by the Institutes as by Milton's Paradise Lost; and even more efficient in establishing the system which came to be known as Evangelicalism were the hymns of the eighteenth century; secondarily those of Newton and the Wesleys but primarily those of Isaac Watts. The formative influence of Watts, especially upon the religious life of New England, has been profound.

In the popular mind, the Book of Revelation is doubtless the most difficult of all New Testament writings. Whether it deserves that reputation may well be doubted, for there are other books of the Bible in which scholars would probably say that the unsolved problems are more fundamental. But the Book of Revelation stands at the end of the collection, and few readers penetrate so far. It seems remote from modern habits of thought and expression. It lends itself for the most part less readily to the practical, if sometimes superficial, use of the ordinary reader.

Recent studies in religious mysticism from the standpoint of psychology have netted, inter alia, the following contributions: (1) The conceptualization of divine reality, apprehended through the peculiar spiritual experience of the mystic, is based, not upon some aboriginal idea of deity, but upon the humanization of some sacred aspect of nature. (2) Mystical intuition is not a unique form of experience, but simply a way of experiencing which involves more of consciousness than is ordinarily exercised in plain matter of fact attention to the familiar object of the world. (3) The objectivity of God aroused as a postulate in the mind under the pressure of an intensified interest in, or concentration upon, the causal meaning of holy aspirations, is but the projection of the idealized self before the retina of the actual self as though it were a disparate entity independent of any necessary connection with consciousness. (4) The ideational aspects of the mystical superself, to which is attributed extraneous being, are such as denote social rather than individual qualities of life. And further (5), this subjective creation appears more intensely real (vital) or dynamic in its manifestations than the normal self, owing of course to the heightened form of the feelings and emotions out of which it is generated. In fine, the nature of the “unchartered reality,” which makes itself felt in the excess of spiritual ecstasy, appears to overlap or transcend the natural bounds which limit human nature and to elicit potentialities of perfection.

With the guns of Flanders and Picardy shaking our deepest being, it has been almost impossible for us during the last two years to think at all. Thinking demands the calm hour and the dispassionate frame of mind, and no one of us has had many such hours or many such mental dispositions for some time past. But it is our duty as moral leaders in our respective communities to think as steadily and dispassionately as we can, so that our leadership shall be, not that of hysteria and emotion, but of a discriminating and inwardly controlled moral intelligence. To that end I invite your attention in this Berry Street Conference—so long devoted to serious discussion of vital topics—to a subject that seems to me of great, if not supreme, importance at the present time, namely, The Nature and Validity of Conscience and Moral Principle.