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