of slowly cooling earth and
surrounded by titanic and ruthless forces which threaten at any moment
to engulf it. The religious man knows that he is infinitely greater
than the beasts of the field or the clods of the highway. Yet Vesuvius
belches forth its liquid fire and in one day of stark terror the great
city which was full of men is become mute and desolate. The proud
liner scrapes along the surface of the frozen berg and crumples like
a ship of cards. There is a splash, a cry, a white face, a lifted
arm, and then all the pride and splendor, all the hopes and fears, the
gorgeous dreams, the daring thoughts are gone. But the ice floats on
unscarred and undeterred and the ocean tosses and heaves just as it
did before.

Now, if this is all, if there is for us only the physical might of
nature and the world is only what it seems to be; if there is no other
God except such as can be found within this sort of cosmic process,
then human life is a sardonic mockery, and self-respect a silly
farce, and all the heroism of the heart and the valor of the mind the
unmeaning activities of an insignificant atom. The very men who will
naturally enter your churches are the ones who have always found that
theory of life intolerable. It doesn't take in all the facts. They
could not live by it and the soul of the race, looking out upon this
universe of immeasurable material bulk, has challenged it and dared to
assert its own superiority.

So by this road these men come back to the transcendent God without
whom they cannot guard that integrity of personality which we are all
set to keep. For here there is no way of believing in oneself, no
way of enduring this world or our place in it and no tolerable way of
understanding it except we look beneath this cosmic hostility and
find our self-respect and a satisfying cosmic meaning in perceiving
spiritual force, a conscious ethical purpose, which interpenetrates
the thunder and the lightning, which lies behind the stars as they
move in their perpetual courses. "Through it the most ancient heavens
are fresh and strong." Integrity of personality in such a world as
this, belief in self, without which life is dust and ashes in the
mouth, rest on the sublime assumption that suffusing material force
is ethical spirit, more like unto us than it, controlling force in the
interest of moral and eternal purposes. In these purposes living, not
mechanical, forces play a major part.

Of course, to all s