racles is regarded as belonging to a far distant past, the
answering of prayer looked upon as the exception instead of the rule,
and the old melody of joy in religion exchanged for the wail of despair
in an interpretation of 'Thy will be done' that is only associated with
human calamity? The reply is as simple as, to the thoughtful person, it
is obvious: we have lost knowledge of a living, vital, conquering faith
that is rooted in God Himself, and have satisfied the hunger of human
sense by placing trust in the things of the earth which we see and
touch, and in so doing lost the power spiritually to achieve.

"Now we can only approach, in the hope of a day of better things, the
great practical and intellectual problems of our times from the
standpoint of faith's recovery, for it is only in their relationship to
faith they can be viewed intelligently by the Christian. And it will be
found that at the root of all our difficulties and all our
negligences--so many of them unconscious--and as the cause of our vain
expediencies and attempts to justify the corporate spiritual situation,
is the absence of vital faith and a _whole_ obedience to which God alone
has conditioned results. We need sorely to reconsider what faith really
is, and when we have recovered in some measure that knowledge of it in
experience, which declared its unspeakable worth in the early Church and
in later periods of ecclesiastical history which stand out before all
others, we shall look back upon our past distrust of God and His
promises with shame and wonderment, and proceed to revise our
cataloguing of spiritual values and degrees of sin. For the really
destructive thing, _before all others,_ is a weakened faith that
compromises in a half obedience to Christ and a search for earthly
props. The work of Satan has even been the prompting of distrust of God
in the human family, just as the work of redemption means so largely the
re-establishing of it in the Person of Jesus Christ. From the first
temptation of man to the present moment, all the forces of evil have
concentrated upon breaking man's trust in God and His promises; every
sin has had that as its ultimate end, and every disaster, ill and trial,
in the world and individual life, is subtly presented by the enemy of
God and man (knowing our haziness of vision), so as to place the
appearances against the Creator in a blind disregard for the created;
just as in the life of the Incarnate Son all the gre