to the
opposite extreme, so in the theology of these recent years we have
taught a very mild, benignant sort of deity. One of our popular
drinking songs sums up this aspect of our new theology:

"God is not censorious
When His children have their fling."

Indeed, the god of the new theology has not seemed to care acutely
about sin; certainly he has not been warranted to punish heavily; he
has been an indulgent parent and when we have sinned, a polite "Excuse
me" has seemed more than adequate to make amends. John Muir, the
naturalist, was accustomed during earthquake shocks in California to
assuage the anxieties of perturbed Eastern visitors by saying that it
was only Mother Earth trotting her children on her knee. Such
poetizing is quite in the style of the new theology. Nevertheless, the
description, however pretty, is not an adequate account of a real
earthquake, and in this moral universe there are real earthquakes, as
this generation above all others ought to know, when man's sin, his
greed, his selfishness, his rapacity roll up across the years an
accumulating mass of consequence until at last in a mad collapse the
whole earth crashes into ruin. The moral order of the world has not
been trotting us on her knees these recent years; the moral order of
the world has been dipping us in hell; and because the new theology had
not been taking account of such possibilities, had never learned to
preach on that text in the New Testament, "It is a fearful thing to
fall into the hands of the living God," we were ill prepared for the
experience.

Many factors like those which we have named have contributed to create
our modern negligence of the problem of sin, but under all of them and
permeating them has been the idea that automatic progress is inherent
in the universe. This evolving cosmos has been pictured as a
fool-proof world where men could make and love their lies, with their
souls dead and their stomachs well alive, with selfish profit the
motive of their economic order and narrow nationalism the slogan of
their patriotism, and where still, escaping the consequences, they
could live in a progressive society. A recent writer considers it
possible that "over the crest of the hill the Promised Land stretches
away to the far horizons smiling in eternal sunshine." The picture is
nonsense. All the progress this world ever will know waits upon the
conquest of sin. Strange as it may sound to the ears of this