morrow covered the fundamentals of faith.

The weakest religions, and the weakest phases in the history of every religion, are those which spend most energy in defending themselves; the strongest are those which attack the oppositions, difficulties, disproportions, iniquities, perils and mysteries that beset the soul.

Seen on the self-defensive, religion is apt to appear at its worst. It rises to its best in the moment of attack. It represents the expeditionary force of the soul, in its native element where mysteries are encountered, where the seemingly impossible has to be attempted, where creative work has to be done and where the call to play the man is never silent. Most of the quarrels and divisions among believers, which exhaust the energies meant for a Diviner Object, and deface the history of religion, turn on the question of its defence. On the side of defence religion falls asunder into sects which spend themselves in achieving mutual paralysis. On the side of attack its forces converge. Religion is rather that which defends us than that which we have to defend. It stands for the attack upon the powers of darkness and of spiritual wickedness, in high places and in low.

The defence of religion has been overdone. We have cooped up the faith in theological fortresses, surrounding it with an immense array of outworks—creeds, dogmas, apologetics, institutions—and we have used up our resources in holding our "positions" against one another when we ought to have been attacking the common enemy in the open field. These outworks and defences, intended to save us from perplexity, have become a greater source of perplexity than all the rest. It takes a lifetime to understand them, and when understood most of them turn out futile.

It is the fashion nowadays to express alarm about the future of religion. Hardly a day passes but we hear some utterance, read some document, which sounds that note. But look closely and you will often discover that what these people are really alarmed about is not religion itself, but one or other of the entrenched camps in which religion has been cooped up. Where is the church, where is the sect, where is the creed-bolstered institution, unhampered by the cares of these great fortresses? And indeed they are not safe. There is no place on earth where a man's soul is less safe than when it immures itself in one of these masterpieces of military architecture, mostly mediæval. We live in an age of long-range artillery and of high explosives.

Are you then in search of a religion which will relieve you of perplexity, remove peril out of your path, and surround your soul with an unassailable rampart against doubt? I have to confess that I know of none such. But I know of at least one religion which does far greater things than these.

In the first place, the religion I am thinking of brings all our perplexities to a focus; lifts them up on high; concentrates them on two or three burning points, and shows us with a clearness that admits of no mistaking what a tremendous mystery we are up against in life.

That is the first thing that a true religion does. But if it did that only, it would do us no good but harm, for it would overwhelm us. So it does the second. While on the one hand it reveals to us, as I have said, the deep and amazing mystery of our existence, on the other it reveals something yet deeper and more amazing in ourselves, something divine in everyone of us, which is more than a match for what it has to face. A true religion does both things, does them together, in the same moment, in the same act. It throws a searchlight on our perplexities and raises them to a high level. But in the very act of so doing it raises the greatness of man to a higher level still. It sharpens our consciousness of evil; thereby deepening our consciousness of that in ourselves which opposes evil. Hear the Baron von Hügel. "Christianity has not explained suffering and evil; no one has done so; no one can do so. Yet it has done two things greater, more profound and more profitable for us. From the first it has immensely widened and deepened the fact, the reality, the awful potency and baffling mystery of sorrow, pain, sin, things which abide with man across the ages. But Christianity has also, from the first, increased the capacity, the wondrous secret and force, which issues in a practical, living, loving transcendence, utilization, transformation of sorrow and pain and even of sin. Christianity gave to our souls the strength and the faith to grasp life's nettle."

Observe that Christianity has done this from the first. And to the last it will do the same. So far as I can see the religious perplexities of to-day are not essentially different from those of other times. They have indeed become more vocal, and there are more people who can talk about them intelligently. But their nature is unchanged. The first point to be noted about the religious perplexities of to-day is their essential identity with those of yesterday. They spring from the same root and they gather round the same centres. Too much is being made of the special difficulties besetting religion at the passing moment, those, for example, connected with the progress of science and with the higher criticism—as though this were the age of religious difficulty par excellence. Surely that is a mistake. The difficulties of faith have always been up to the limit of human endurance. Religious belief has always required the full courage of the soul to sustain its high propositions. It has always been a "near thing," and those who speak of past ages when it was easy are grossly misreading the history of the human mind. What science and the higher criticism have done is to turn attention upon new points, to divert perplexities into new channels, but not to alter their essential character, not to change the stuff of which they are made. The fact of evil is no discovery of the present age; it has been challenging the faith of men for thousands of years; there is nothing more poignant to be said about it to-day than was said ages ago by the patriarch Job. The great troubles have not changed. Suffering and death, the agony of bereavement, the tragedies of blighted hopes and shipwrecked lives—these are not things peculiar to the twentieth century.

In stressing the difficulties that come from science and criticism, are we not in danger of losing sight of those greater and permanent difficulties that enter into the very structure of human life, and "abide with men across the ages"? A broken heart is the same in one age, in one place, as in another: and wherever it exists the soul of man has all that it can bear. Those who have faced these major perplexities and conquered them, those who have passed through the Valley of Humiliation and emerged victorious at the other end, will not be greatly troubled by science and the higher criticism. But those who begin their approach to religion by reconciling science with faith, or adjusting the Creeds to the higher criticism, or solving conundrums about the omnipotence of God, or making one set of abstractions fit in with another, will find that all this argumentation avails them very little when the lightning falls on the roof tree, or the Angel of Death spreads his black wings over the house.

We are sometimes told that the Great War has enormously increased the religious perplexities of mankind. I cannot see that it has. All the problems it suggests, all the questions it raises, were equally contained in the lesser wars that went before it, and even if the great one had never occurred, there would still be enough suffering in the world to challenge the strongest faith. An age which has needed the Great War to rouse it to a sense of tragedy must have been living in a fool's paradise up to date. Every problem suggested by the Great War has been there, plain for all ages to see, since suffering and death, since folly and wickedness, first came into the world. I do not doubt that the war has administered a salutary shock to