s 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 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