es in the spiritual experience of most of us when we seem
to have got to the end. There is a deepening sense of failure which is
not, when we analyse it, so much a failure in this or that detail, as a
general sense of the futility of the life of the Church as expressed in
our individual lives. It came to those primitive congregations, you
remember, to which S. Peter was writing; "Where is the promise of his
coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they
were from the beginning of creation." It is the weariness of continuous
effort from which we conclude that we are getting quite
insufficient results.

No doubt that is true. The results are never what we expect, possibly
because the effort is never what we imagine it to be. We continually
underestimate the opposing force of evil, the difficulty of dealing with
a humanity which falls so easily under the slightest temptation. It is
not that sinners decline to hear the Word of God, but that those who
profess themselves to be the servants of God, and who in fact intend to
be such, are so lamentably weak and ineffective. We think of the effort
of God in the Incarnation; we have been following that effort in some
detail through the Passion. We are surprised, shocked, disheartened by
the spectacle of the hatred that innocence stirs up, at the lengths men
will go when they see their personal ends threatened. We are horrified
by Caiphas, Pilate, Herod. But is that the really horrifying thing
about the Passion of our Lord? To me the supreme example of human
incomprehension is that all the disciples forsook Him and fled, that He
was left to die almost alone. There we get the most disheartening
failure in the tragedy.

For we expect the antagonism of the world, especially that part of the
world that has seen and rejected Christ. There we find Satanic
activities. One of the outstanding features of the literature of to-day
in the Western world, the world that had known from childhood the story
of Jesus, is its utter hatred of Christianity; its revolt from all that
Christianity stands for. This is markedly true in regard to the
Christian teaching in the matter of purity. The contemporary English
novel is perhaps the vilest thing that has yet appeared on this earth.
There have been plenty of unclean books written in the course of the
world's history--we have only to recall the literature of the
Renaissance--but for the most part they have been written in careles