multitudes of lethargic souls who would otherwise have continued to sleep on in the sleep of spiritual death. But with the Christian Churches it is different. It ill becomes them to treat the horrors of the war as a novelty in human experience. All that the war can mean for them was summarized long ago by the man who saw the "whole creation groaning and travailing in pain together until now."

We can change the nature of our religious perplexities, change them from things that depress into things that exalt us. But we cannot banish them altogether. At the end of our labours, as at the beginning, we shall find ourselves perplexed, but not unto despair. These last words make the difference, and it is immense. They were uttered by one who was deeply versed in the spiritual life.

"The present crisis in religion" is another phrase which recent discussion has made familiar. That such a crisis exists no one in his senses can doubt. But the phrase is often used in a way which suggests that the "crisis" has no right to exist, that it constitutes a misfortune peculiar to our own time, that it is an unnatural thing, and that religion will never come to its own until the "crisis" has passed away.

We find, however, that a "crisis" in religion is no new experience, peculiar to the present day. The only ages of the past when a "crisis" in religion did not exist were the spiritually dead ages. Whenever the spirit of God has breathed upon the souls of men the effect has been to awaken the sense of a great crisis. The Epistles of St Paul are full of it. In the Confessions of St Augustine, written in the fifth century, we see how critical he felt the then passing moment to be. There was a crisis at the Reformation, and at the Renaissance. There was a crisis when printing was invented, and when the Bible was translated. There was a crisis when Whitefield and Wesley were urging the masses to flee from the wrath to come. A more recent example can be found in the writings of Carlyle. Everything that has been said since the Great War about the spiritual bankruptcy of Europe, about the need of religious reconstruction, about a change of heart in nations, and governments and individuals, as the only alternative to a complete disaster, was said by Carlyle three-quarters of a century ago, and said by him with a force and trenchancy not since surpassed. Here, for example, is what he wrote in the year 1850.

"In the days that are passing over us, even fools are arrested to ask the meaning of them; few of the generations of men have seen more impressive days. Days of endless calamity, disruption, dislocation, confusion worse confounded.... It is not a small hope that will suffice us, the ruin being clearly ... universal. There must be a new world if there is to be a world at all. That human beings in Europe can ever return to the old sorry routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance therein—this small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of universal death must be days of universal rebirth, if the ruin is not to be total and final. It is a time to make the dullest man consider whence he came and whither he is bound. A veritable New Era to the foolish as well as to the wise" (Latter-Day Pamphlets).

That was written seventy-two years ago, and when was it truer than to-day? The "religious crisis" is perennial, now taking one form, now another, but always demanding from those who have to face it the utmost of their courage, loyalty and love.

The religious crises which take place in the great world, in the conditions of the age and so forth, are only the enlarged reflections of personal crises constantly occurring to ourselves, which, even if they were absent from the general conditions of the age, would still present themselves, in our private experience, so long as suffering and death were elements in life. The existence of a crisis is not unnatural to religion, but perfectly natural, the atmosphere in which it breathes most freely, the soil in which it strikes its deepest root. We are wholly mistaking what religion is when we think of it as some secret or power which is going to banish the great crises of our experience and leave us with none to face. The truth is the very opposite.

The penalty—no, not the penalty but the high reward—of having any religion that is worth the name, is that it will conduct us into critical situations, that it will reveal perplexities where without it none would exist. From some perplexities religion does indeed give release. It gives release from those that are not worthy of us, that belittle us when we indulge them, that make us selfish, timid and unloving—the care for self, the fear that something dreadful may happen to us, either in this world or in the next, unless we take immense precautions against its happening. But in releasing from these perplexities, which are not worthy of us, it confronts us with others on a higher level, where our finer essence finds the employment for which it was made. Instead of hiding the great crises, instead of banishing them, or giving us anæsthetics to make us unconscious of their presence, religion reveals them, makes us aware of them, sharpens our consciousness of their presence; but at the same time reveals us to ourselves as beings who are capable of overcoming them. If on the one hand it uncovers the pain of life and makes us feel it with a new intensity, on the other it liberates the love that conquers pain, a power mightier than death and sharper than agony.

One might almost define religion in these terms. That in each of us, and in all of us which faces the crisis, which rises to meet it, which feels, when confronted by it, that its hour is come and for this cause it came into the world.

Do you say it is hard? It would be if we were made of poorer stuff. But made as we are anything less would be too small for us, would leave us dissatisfied, hungry and half employed. Yes, half employed, and not the best half either. We are so made that until we "grasp the nettle of life" the best part of us has nothing to do, loitering, so to speak, at the street corners of life, like a starving labourer out of work. On that upper level, where the best that is in us confronts the highest that is demanded of us, we discover how finely the nature of man is adapted to the world in which he lives, how well the two accord, the noblest element in the one corresponding to the most challenging element in the other, so that deep answers unto deep and the two make music together. On the lower levels there is no adaptation; our selfish desires are at odds with nature; we are out for a good time and get no response; and there all is disenchantment, disappointment and misery. But the keynote of the higher level is joy—the joy of the labourer who has found his work, of the lover who has seen his object, of the hero who has received his commission and his sword.

Towards the end of the war, or perhaps shortly afterwards, somebody coined a more attractive phrase which was much on the lips of exuberant reformers. They were going to make, so they said, "A world fit for heroes to live in."

What kind of a world is that? Is comfort the keynote of it? Does it provide the hero with an assured income and an easy life? Does it guarantee him a pension for any heroism he displays? Does it ask of its heroes only a limited term of service, and then superannuate them at an early age, exposing them to peril for a short time and after that withdrawing dangers from their path and surrounding them with the safeguards of a protected respectability?

No; what these arrangements provide for is not the life of heroism, but its death. Give the hero a world like that and what will he say? "This world," he will say, "is not fit for me to live in. It spells extinction to all that makes life worth living to me. It is the flat opposite to what I desire. It lacks everything that makes the world divine. No God can dwell within it. No Christ will ever visit its melancholy shores."

And yet, is it not