Is it any wonder then that we cannot compete with the state or the world for the loyalty of men and women?  We have no substitute to offer.  Who need be surprised at the restlessness, the fluidity, the elusiveness of the Protestant laity?  And who need wonder that at this moment we are depending upon the externals of machinery, publicity and money to reinstate ourselves as a spiritual society in the community?  A well-known official of our communion, speaking before a meeting of ministers in New York City on Tuesday, March 23, was quoted in the Springfield Republican of the next day as saying:  “The church holds the only cure for the possible anarchy of the future and offers the only preventative for the hell which we have had for the last five years.  But to meet this challenge the church can only go as far—­as the money permits.”

Has not the time arrived when, if we are to find ourselves again in the world, we should ask, What is this religion in which we believe?  What is the real nature of its resources?  What the real nature of its remedies?  Do we dare define it?  And, if we do, would we dare to assert it, come out from the world and live for it, in the midst of the paganism of this moment?  Is it true that without the loaves and the fishes we can do nothing?  If so, then we, too, have succumbed to naturalism indeed!

CHAPTER FOUR

THE UNMEASURED GULF

You may remember that when Daniel Webster made his reply to Hayne in the Senate he began the argument by a return to first principles.  “When the mariner,” said he, “has been tossed for many days in thick weather and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude, and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course.  Let us imitate this prudence and before we float further on the waves of this debate, refer to the point from which we departed.”  He then asked for the reading of the resolution.

It is to some such rehearsing of our original message, a restatement of the thesis which we, as preachers, are set to commend, that we turn ourselves in these pages.  The brutal dislocations of the war, and the long and confused course of disintegrating life that lay behind it, have driven civilization from its true course and deflected the church from her normal path, her natural undertakings.  Let us try, then, to get back to our charter; define once more what we really stand for; view our human life, not as captain of industry, or international politician, or pagan worldling, or even classic hero, would regard it, but see it through the eyes of a Paul, an Augustine, a Bernard, a Luther, the Lord Jesus.  We have already remarked how timely and necessary is this redefining of our religious values.  If, as Lessing said, it is the end of education to make men to see things that are large as large and things that are