of strength, this cleansing grace of salvation, this haven of the Spirit.  Belief in a transcendent deity is as natural as hunger and thirst, as necessary as sleep and breathing.  It was the inner and essential needs of our fathers’ lives which drove them out to search for Him.  It will be the inner and essential needs of the lives of our children that shall bring them to the altar where their fathers and their fathers’ fathers bowed down before them.  Are we going to be afraid to keep its fires burning?

And so we come to our final and most difficult aspect of this transcendent problem.  We have talked of the man who is separate from nature, and who knows himself as man because behind nature he sees the God from whom he is separate, too.  We have seen how he needs that “otherness” in God to maintain his personality and how the gulf between him and that God induces that sense of helplessness which makes the humility and penitence of the religious life.  We must come now to our final question.  How is he to bridge the gulf?  By what power can he go through with this experience we have just been relating and find his whole self in a whole world?  How can he dare to try it?  How can he gain power to achieve it?

Perhaps this is the central difficulty of all religion.  It is certainly the one which the old Greeks felt.  Plato, the father of Christian theology, and all neo-platonists, knew that the gulf is here between man and God and they knew that something or someone must bridge it for us.  They perceived that man, unaided, cannot leap it at a stride.  We proceed, driven by the facts of life, to the point where the soul looks up to the Eternal and confesses the kinship, and knows that only in His light shall it see light, and that it only shall be satisfied when it awakes in His likeness.  But how shall the connection be made?  What shall enable us to do that mystic thing, come back to God?  We have frightful handicaps in the attempt.  How shall the distrust that sin creates, the hardness that sin forms, the despair and helplessness that sin induces, the dreadful indifference which is its expression,—­how shall they be removed?  How shall the unfaith which the mystery, the suffering, the evil of the world induce be overcome?  Being a sinner I do not dare, and being ignorant I do not believe, to come.  God is there and God wants us; like as a father pitieth his children so He pitieth us.  He knoweth our frame, He remembereth that we are dust.  We know that is true; again we do not know it is true.  All the sin that is in us and all which that sin has done to us insists and insists that it is not true.  And the mind wonders—­and wonders.  What shall break that distrust; and melt away the hardness so that we have an open mind; and send hope into despair, hope with its accompanying confidence to act; change unfaith to belief, until, in having faith, we thereby have that which faith believes in?  How amazing is life!  We look out into the heavenly country, we long to walk therein, we have so little power to stir hand or foot to gain our entrance.  We know it is there but all the facts of our rebellious or self-centered life, individual and associated alike, are against it and therefore we do not know that it is there.