of God, that are offered me, the only one I am concerned to believe in, and should find it a calamity not to believe in, is the God who is sympathetic, and actively sympathetic, on the lines of my determination to achieve a better-than-what-is. Omnipotence and Omniscience I could dispense with if need be; the disappearance of the Cosmic Potentate would not leave me orphaned; the Absolute does not enthral me and I should suffer no nightmare were I to learn that it did not exist. But were I forced to admit that the universe, as a whole, is quite indifferent to this desire of mine to achieve a better-than-what-is, that there is nothing in its nature which shares my interest in that matter, nothing there that backs me up, nothing to which the failure or success of my attempt makes the slightest difference, then indeed a dark and cruel blight would fall upon my soul.

"To that blight I may have to submit. But I will not submit until I have tested the universe in the only way that is open to me. I will trust it as a friend. There are those about me who say that my trust will not be betrayed, having made the same experiment themselves. They remind me that the world I am living in is not any kind of world, but just the one particular kind needed by a soul whose business it is to create new values, in the way of Truth, Beauty and Goodness; that its laws, forces and material readily lend themselves to the purpose of anyone who will use them for that high creative end, turning out, in fact, to be the very kind of laws, forces and material which such an one needs. Well then, I will see. I will base my life on the assumption that somewhere, in the height above or in the depth below, Power is waiting to back me up. That Power, if I find it, shall be my God. Is it not reasonable to suppose that, if it exists, it will find some means of making me aware of its presence? That then shall be my experiment, and I will abide by the result."

A person who reasons with himself in this manner is taking the most practical, and the wisest means I know of to determine the question whether God exists. For my own part I should view his experiment with hope proportioned to his sincerity. Frankly, I should expect him to make discovery of the Living God, as a reality, as a companion, as a friend. Whether to the reality, companion, friend, so discovered he gave the name "God," or some other name, I should not regard as a matter of supreme importance. If he chose to call it Christ, or more simply "the Spirit," I should not quarrel with him. The discovery is far too momentous to be imperilled for a name. Its value lies not in its name but in its reality. "Few things are easier," says John Henry Newman, "than to use the name of God and mean nothing by it." Call it then by a name which means something, and not by a name which means nothing.

All religious testimony, so far as I can interpret its meaning, converges towards a single point, namely this. There is that in the world, call it what you will, which responds to the confidence of those who trust it, declaring itself, to them, as a fellow-worker in the pursuit of the Eternal Values, meeting their loyalty to it with reciprocal loyalty to them, and coming in at critical moments when the need of its sympathy is greatest; the conclusion being, that wherever there is a soul in darkness, obstruction or misery, there also is a Power which can help, deliver, illuminate and gladden that soul. This is the Helper of men, sharing their business as Creators of Value, nearest at hand when the worst has to be encountered; the companion of the brave, the upholder of the loyal, the friend of the lover, the healer of the broken, the joy of the victorious—the God who is spirit, the God who is love.

Had more been heard about this, the God of religion, and less about that other—the lawyer's God, whose main concern is the policing of his universe—our religious perplexities would not be what they are. I do not say they would be easier. They might be harder. But they would lose their character as irritants and become, instead, incentives to humane relationships, to noble living and to creative work. For there are two kinds of religious perplexity. In the one, perplexity overcomes religion; in the other, religion overcomes perplexity. "We are perplexed, yet not unto despair."

III

Perplexity in the Christian Religion

Those who are wondering in what form Christianity is destined to survive, or whether it will survive at all,[1] would be well advised to keep in mind two significant facts, discernible enough even when the view is limited to our own country, but obvious on a wider survey of what is going forward in foreign lands: first, that the lay mind has definitely passed beyond clerical control; second, that the most active religious minds, both among the clergy and the laity, but among the laity most of all, are learning to use their own eyes in the search for God, instead of looking for Him through the ill-matched lenses of Jew-Greek binoculars, and are gradually ceasing to think about Christ and his religion in terms of the recognized "isms"—Catholicism, Protestantism, Anglicanism, Modernism, Trinitarianism, Unitarianism, or any other. They have passed beyond all that and are probing deeper ground. They are judging spiritual things by spiritual.

If these things are so, and somewhat exceptional opportunities of observing have convinced me that they are,[2] it would seem to follow that the form in which Christianity is destined to survive (if it survives at all) will not be the form of any of the "isms" aforesaid. In other words, even if the battle of the "isms," as this is now carried on by professional controversalists and mainly on clerical ground, were to issue in the final victory of one of them over the others—of which at present there is little prospect—this would decide nothing as to the fortunes of Christianity in the world at large. Thus, though we have no indication of what the surviving form of Christianity will be, we have a pretty clear indication of what it will not be. Beyond this it seems impossible to cast the horoscope of Christianity at the present time. Its fortunes have always been unpredictable; each new development a surprise to those who witnessed it. "As the lightning ... so shall be the coming of the Son of Man."

The application of this to what follows will be obvious as we proceed.

To Bishop Gore's denial that Christianity has failed, on the ground that "it has never been tried," Mr Graham Wallas makes the effective reply that a religion that has been adopted by the great States of the world for fifteen centuries and never been "tried" is a religion that has failed. In this Mr Wallas follows the proper method of judging Christianity by its own high standards, which certainly require that it should have been tried ere this. "What thou doest do quickly" was spoken to Judas Iscariot. Does it follow that "What thou doest do slowly, putting it off, if it so pleases, for fifteen centuries" was intended to be the motto of the Christian Church?

The command to "sell all that thou hast and give to the poor" was doubtless spoken "to a particular young man on a particular occasion." But the parable of the Good Samaritan, with its pungent ending "go and do thou likewise," was also spoken to a particular lawyer on a particular occasion. And so with the teachings of Christ in general. All his universals were seen in particulars. If, then, we are to discharge everything that was spoken "to particular individuals on particular occasions" as inapplicable to