the hearts of men with the joys of the Vision Splendid?  Why is it that hope has given way to resignation, that the preaching of forgiveness has been dwarfed by the insistence upon penalty, that distinct evils in the physical sphere are attributed to God and, because of that, held up to religious estimation as good; the day of miracles 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 great power of the forces of darkness were brought to bear unsuccessfully upon the snapping of His faith in His Father—­from the time He was tempted to believe Himself forgotten, when hungering and physically reduced in the wilderness after His long fast, until the dreadful cry of dereliction from the Cross at the very end.