s services of
the Churches a note that touches their practical needs or their
spiritual ideals. The most successful popular appeal has been made by
those organisations which have endeavoured to add to the zest of life
by exciting music, tuneful hymns, and buoyant rhetoric.

In our unprecedented age of incessant change, continuous revolution,
and swift innovation, we have become accustomed to the idea that the
social order can and must be altered, that men must take things into
their own hands. The fatalism of the old orthodoxy is not for a people
who see that things are accomplished by the human will; such people
are naturally impatient with those who entreat the Deity to do for
them what they can very well do for themselves. The last of the great
fatalists in English literature is Mr. Thomas Hardy. He was moved by
the downfall of the old settled civilisation and the purposeless,
vexing changes which swept like a hurricane on a nation now suddenly
made conscious of its evil lot. He was aware of the "modern vice of
unrest" at a time when the human will had not yet set itself to direct
and organise change. Thus it was that he came to pronounce the last
word about Fatalism, and, in so doing, to reduce it to absurdity. "The
First Cause," as Sue Fawley perceived it, "worked automatically like a
somnambulist, and not reflectively like a sage;" she blamed "things in
general, because they are so horrid and cruel!"

Whatever one's theological views may be, no one to-day tolerates in
the drama of life any god-of-the-machine. In Greece, art and religion
went hand in hand, and this was possible because gods were like men
and manifested themselves through Nature, not in a sphere outside
Nature. No civilisation prior to our own experienced so rapid an
evolution as Athens in the fifth century B.C.; but when that century
was over, it was still possible for a philosopher to draw robust
symbolical illustrations from the old mythology. The Modernists to-day
are only applying a law of history when they say that religion must
evolve with the evolution of human culture. In the first thirteen
centuries, the Christian Church did in practice change and adapt
itself to civilisation. As long as the world was conservative, a
conservative Church could keep pace with it. The first cataclysm came
at the time when civilisation was again rapidly changing, and
Christianity only emerged torn and divided by the Reformation. But the
world to-day is being