needs supervene at a point where two elements can work together, the element of an appealing, vitalizing spirit from the unseen and the element of free human choice.  Being of the spirit, it is the birth into freedom:  it is the soul emerging from its prison into the open air of liberty and light and life.”  Note the element of free choice.  Our first birth is outside our choice and the gifts are unconditioned; our second birth, when again we become as little children, demands our response to the Holy Spirit and our persevering cooperation with Him to make His influence effectual for ourselves and for the “communion of saints” and the corporate religion into which the Spirit also baptizes us.  In a recent sermon a bishop of the Episcopal Church says, “This is the creed of the Church—­the Divine Father and Forgiveness:  the Divine Son and Redemption:  the Divine Spirit and Abundant Life.  Therefore the Church still insists upon the creation of moral rectitude and spiritual character as the end and purpose of religion, aye, as the basic problem underlying all questions relating to human life—­social, industrial, civic, and political.  The Church still preaches the gospel of the Grace of God, the obligation and blessing of worship, the meaning and virtue of the Christian Sacraments.”  Also “My brethren, we shall not be content to criticize and find fault with our own age and time, but rather we shall pray for the power to see within its questionings, unrest and discontent—­aye, its recklessness and apparent failures—­the strivings of the Spirit of God.  But each man has to voice for himself the conviction of the reality of the spiritual order and the spiritual life.  Therefore, let us believe in and practice the worship of God, ‘praying always’ as St. Paul says, ’with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit,’ or as St. Jude says, ’building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit.’”

Let us accept this suggestion and try to find in the unrest of our own time evidences of “the strivings of the Spirit of God,” waiting our perception and response.  The soldier of the Great War, having faced death and imprisonment and suffering in many forms says, “compared with the depth of good in the world the evil is shallow.”  The first evidence of good in our own day is the almost universal discontent with evils and the desire to find a better way.  The humility which recognizes that so widespread a condition cannot be the fault of any one nation or group but is rather the responsibility of each one of us, is cause for hope.  Some of us believe that war can breed only war, hatred only hatred; that governments cannot make peace, but can only cause cessation of open hostilities, and that the real peace, the Great Peace, must await the action of the Spirit.  This Spirit, of love and forgiveness, breeds love and forgiveness, indeed is far more potent than the spirit of hate.  Because of this very strength and potency its evidences are not so immediately apparent,