to be a world at all. That human beings in Europe
can ever return to the old sorry routine, and proceed with any
steadiness or continuance therein--this small hope is not now a tenable
one. These days of universal death must be days of universal rebirth,
if the ruin is not to be total and final. It is a time to make the
dullest man consider whence he came and whither he is bound. A
veritable New Era to the foolish as well as to the wise" (_Latter-Day
Pamphlets_).

That was written seventy-two years ago, and when was it truer than
to-day? The "religious crisis" is perennial, now taking one form, now
another, but always demanding from those who have to face it the utmost
of their courage, loyalty and love.

The religious crises which take place in the great world, in the
conditions of the age and so forth, are only the enlarged reflections
of personal crises constantly occurring to ourselves, which, even if
they were absent from the general conditions of the age, would still
present themselves, in our private experience, so long as suffering and
death were elements in life. The existence of a crisis is not
unnatural to religion, but perfectly natural, the atmosphere in which
it breathes most freely, the soil in which it strikes its deepest root.
We are wholly mistaking what religion is when we think of it as some
secret or power which is going to banish the great crises of our
experience and leave us with none to face. The truth is the very
opposite.

The penalty--no, not the penalty but the high reward--of having any
religion that is worth the name, is that it will conduct us into
critical situations, that it will reveal perplexities where without it
none would exist. From some perplexities religion does indeed give
release. It gives release from those that are not worthy of us, that
belittle us when we indulge them, that make us selfish, timid and
unloving--the care for self, the fear that something dreadful may
happen to us, either in this world or in the next, unless we take
immense precautions against its happening. But in releasing from these
perplexities, which are not worthy of us, it confronts us with others
on a higher level, where our finer essence finds the employment for
which it was made. Instead of hiding the great crises, instead of
banishing them, or giving us anaesthetics to make us unconscious of
their presence, religion reveals them, makes us aware of them, sharpens
our consciousness of