And indeed, since July, 1914, and down to and including this very
hour, this idealizing of time, which we had almost accepted as our
office, has had a ghastly exposure. Because there has come upon us all
one of these irrevocable and irremediable disasters, for which time
has no word of hope, to which Nature is totally indifferent, for which
the God of the outgoings and incomings of the morning is too small.
For millions of living and suffering men and women all temporal
and mortal values have been wiped out. They have been caught in a
catastrophe so ruthless and dreadful that it has strewed their bodies
in heaps over the fields and valleys of many nations. Today central
and south and northeastern Europe and western Asia are filled with
idle and hungry and desperate men and women. They have been deprived
of peace, of security, of bread, of enlightenment alike. Something
more than temporal salvation and human words of hope are needed
here. Something more than ethical reform and social readjustment and
economic alleviation, admirable though these are! Something there must
be in human nature that eclipses human nature, if it is to endure so
much! What has the God of this world to give for youth, deprived of
their physical immortality and all their sweet and inalienable human
rights, who are lying now beneath the acre upon acre of tottering
wooden crosses in their soldier's graves? Is there anything in this
world sufficient now for the widow, the orphan, the cripple, the
starving, the disillusioned and the desperate? What Europe wants to
know is why and for what purpose this holocaust--is there anything
beyond, was there anything before it? A civilization dedicated to
speed and power and utility and mere intelligence cannot answer these
questions. Neither can a religion resolved into naught but the ethics
of Jesus answer them. "If in this world only," cries today the voice
of our humanity, "we have hope, then we are of all men the most
miserable!" When one sees our American society of this moment
returning so easily to the physical and the obvious and the practical
things of life; when one sees the church immersed in programs, and
moralizing, and hospitals, and campaigns, and membership drives, and
statistics, and money getting, one is constrained to ask, "What shall
be said of the human spirit that it can forget so soon?"

Is it not obvious, then, that our task for a pagan society and a
self-contained humanity is to resto