Preaching and Paganism — Reading Companion

The Undertone of Melancholy

Fitch identifies a pervasive melancholy beneath modern life's 'glitter of its brilliance' and 'roar of its energy.' He traces this to an unquenched thirst for God, citing the ancient cry 'My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God!' as the mainspring of human activity. The 'great undertone of life' is solemn in its pathetic uniformity, heard by Greek tragedians like Sophocles and modern poets like James Stephens. Fitch quotes Stephens's The Nodding Stars to capture the weary gulf between spirit and clay. This dualism—cosmic and ethical—becomes the preacher's chief theme: the perception of the One behind the many, the thing-in-itself beneath its expressions.

Personality as Unique Marvel

Drawing on Dr. Newman Smyth, Fitch presents personality as 'the unique marvel' that 'becomes conscious of itself as individual and it individualizes the world.' In the midst of natural uniformities, the personal life moves as 'a sphere of being of another order,' subject to its own law and manifesting its own dynamic. This conviction—that One like ourselves walks with us 'in the fiery furnace of our life'—is the source of human dignity and the urge behind metaphysics, literature, and art. Fitch insists that starting from this interpretation, the baffling aspects of the world can begin to be ordered.

The Preacher's Task in a Pagan Age

Fitch's diagnosis of modern paganism is not a simple denunciation but a call to reexamine the concepts underlying contemporary thought and conduct. The 'present plight of our civilization' is leading political scientists and economists to reappraise their foundations, and Fitch extends that scrutiny to religion. The preacher must articulate the 'eternal and objective reality' of divine Presence against a backdrop of increasing subjectivism. Fitch's method is to observe the 'interdependent thought and conduct of our day' and evaluate them from a religious standpoint, aiming to contribute to a future reconciling of modern thought currents with the central facts of religious life.

Readers approaching Preaching and Paganism will find not a manual of homiletic techniques but a reflective diagnosis of the spiritual condition of the early twentieth century. Fitch's lectures reward attention to his recurring motifs—the melancholy undertone, the thirst for transcendence, the marvel of personality—and his engagement with poets and philosophers. The book's value lies less in its proposed solutions than in its careful articulation of the tensions between faith and a secularizing culture, tensions that remain pertinent for contemporary readers.

There’s something in that old lecture series about how we ache for the sacred even when we think we’ve outgrown it. It stayed with me for days. That same ache surfaces in the quiet, wounded honesty of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. Reading it felt like sitting beside someone who understood that longing without needing to fix it. The Expositor's Bible: The Second Epistle to the Corinthians — Story, Setting & Ideas has that same lingering weight, somehow.