Article August 25, 1917 Issue

From Our Exchanges

with contributions from George Jackson, A. Maude Royden, F. S. Guy Warman, S. A. Alexander, Peter Ainslee

[Rev. George Jackson in The Methodist Recorder]

All real religions, a great writer has said, are at bottom an attempt to make the universe and its ways by some means intelligible to us; but the fear that sometimes haunts our minds is lest our religion should not prove equal to the strain which today is putting upon it. These things that are happening all about us—can faith interpret them? Can it rationalize them? Can it do anything with them? Or must it submit to be trampled to death under the iron hoof of the hard, brute facts of life? And that which tries us most is the seeming silence and passiveness of God. By day and by night we say, "O God, hear us." Yet still there is no voice, nor any answer, nor any that regardeth, unless indeed it be the taunt of some modern mocker—He is musing, or He is gone aside, or He is on a journey, or peradventure He sleepeth and must be awaked. ...

One thing at least is clear: for so great a need we need a great gospel. The day has gone now for little, fiddling recipes. You cannot cure earthquakes with pills; you cannot put out Vesuvius with a garden hose, and a need like the need of today is not to be met by anything in the gospel that is secondary or inferential. If Christianity can do anything for us, if it can make room for us in our straits, it can do it only by virtue of that in it which is deepest and most central. We may go about saying to men and women, "Let not your heart be troubled;" but if we stop there, if we cannot go on and say with Jesus, and say it too with the kind of conviction that begets conviction, "Ye believe in God, believe also in me," we had better hold our peace; our rope is too short for the depth of man's need. And perhaps one of the good things amid the many evil things for which this war is responsible, is the way in which it is driving us all back to the things that matter most.

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