or we cast current sagacity behind the back.
People crowd each other to the wall. The weak of communities and nations
are too often crushed. Redress is in the air. The longed-for wisdom of
to-day shows a kaleidoscopic front, in which are turning the
slum-dweller and the millionaire; the white man, the yellow, and the
black; the town and the territorial possession. The slave-colony,
garbage-laws, magistrates, and murderers are mixed in motley, and there
are whirling vacant-lot schemes abroad, potato-patches, wood-yards,
organized charity, Wayfarers' Lodges, resounding cries of municipal
reform, and various other interests of the wisdom-scale.

Hence, wisdom has not yet been arrived at: we are still on the run. This
twentieth century will find new problems, new queries, new cranks, and
new dismays!

One thing, however, shines out clear: Wisdom is being recognized as
having a moral aspect, and men are looking for a Religion which shall
sum up the learning of the sages, the information of the race.

When we look down into the physical universe, the primary thing that we
find there is gravitation. When we look into the moral universe, the
primary thing that we find there is also gravitation--a sinking to a
Lower. This is sin--a contrariness of things--which makes the world an
evil place to live in, instead of a good; which wrecks character and
states, eats the hearts out of cultures and civilizations, destroys
strong races, leaves a stain upon even the youngest child, and which is
constantly drawing the race downward, instead of upward.

Sin, sin, sin! Everywhere the fact glares upon us, and cannot be hid, or
put away. Sin is not an intellectual toy, for philosophers to play with
or define as "a limitation of being." Sin is a reality, for men to
feel, recoil from, and of which one must repent.

Sin is energy deliberately misplaced: energy directed against the course
of things, the infinite development, the will of God. Sin is corruption,
and desolation, and decay. Death broods over the spirit of man, unless a
Redeemer come. The unredeemed ages hang over history like a pall. In
them there are monumental oppression, cruelties, and crimes. The breath
of myriad millions went out in darkness, and there was none to save. A
plague swept over all the race.

Hence, even scientifically considered, the final aim of thinking must
be, to arrive at some thought which will take hold of this primary fact
of sin and uproot it; which wi