al value, its appeal to something beyond
man. Has Christianity brought us to this: that the Christian nations are
to be the first in the world's history to try the experiment of a life
without faith--that life which you and I, at any rate, are agreed in
thinking a life worthy only of the brute?

'Oh forgive me! These things must hurt you--they would have hurt me in
old days--but they burn within me, and you bid me speak out. What if it
be God Himself who is driving His painful lesson home to me, to you, to
the world? What does it mean, this gradual growth of what we call
infidelity, of criticism and science on the one hand, this gradual death
of the old traditions on the other? _Sin_, you answer, _the enmity of
the human mind against God, the momentary triumph of Satan._ And so you
acquiesce, heavy-hearted, in God's present defeat, looking for vengeance
and requital hereafter. Well, I am not so ready to believe in man's
capacity to rebel against his Maker! Where you see ruin and sin, I see
the urgent process of Divine education, God's steady ineluctable command
"to put away childish things," the pressure of His spirit on ours
towards new ways of worship and new forms of love!'

* * * * *

And after a while, it was with these 'new ways of worship and new forms
of love' that the mind began to be perpetually occupied. The break with
the old things was no sooner complete than the eager soul, incapable
then, as always, of resting in negation or opposition, pressed
passionately forward to a new synthesis, not only speculative, but
practical. Before it rose perpetually the haunting vision of another
palace of faith--another church or company of the faithful, which was to
become the shelter of human aspiration amid the desolation and anarchy
caused by the crashing of the old! How many men and women must have gone
through the same strait as itself--how many must be watching with it
through the darkness for the rising of a new City of God!

One afternoon, close upon Christmas, he found himself in Parliament
Square, on his way towards Westminster Bridge and the Embankment. The
beauty of a sunset sky behind the Abbey arrested him, and he stood
leaning over the railings beside the Peel statue to look.

The day before he had passed the same spot with a German friend. His
companion--a man of influence and mark in his own country, who had been
brought up, however, in England, and knew it well--had sto