There are honest doubters whose sincerity we recognize and respect, but occasionally I find young men who think it smart to be skeptical; they talk as if it were an evidence of larger intelligence to scoff at creeds and to refuse to connect themselves with churches.  They call themselves “Liberal,” as if a Christian were narrow minded.  Some go so far as to assert that the “advanced thought of the world” has discarded the idea that there is a God.  To these young men I desire to address myself.

Even some older people profess to regard religion as a superstition, pardonable in the ignorant but unworthy of the educated.  Those who hold this view look down with mild contempt upon such as give to religion a definite place in their thoughts and lives.  They assume an intellectual superiority and often take little pains to conceal the assumption.  Tolstoy administers to the “cultured crowd” (the words quoted are his) a severe rebuke when he declares that the religious sentiment rests not upon a superstitious fear of the invisible forces of nature, but upon man’s consciousness of his finiteness amid an infinite universe and of his sinfulness; and this consciousness, the great philosopher adds, man can never outgrow.  Tolstoy is right; man recognizes how limited are his own powers and how vast is the universe, and he leans upon the arm that is stronger than his.  Man feels the weight of his sins and looks for One who is sinless.

Religion has been defined by Tolstoy as the relation which man fixes between himself and his God, and morality as the outward manifestation of this inward relation.  Every one, by the time he reaches maturity, has fixt some relation between himself and God and no material change in this relation can take place without a revolution in the man, for this relation is the most potent influence that acts upon a human life.

Religion is the foundation of morality in the individual and in the group of individuals.  Materialists have attempted to build up a system of morality upon the basis of enlightened self-interest.  They would have man figure out by mathematics that it pays him to abstain from wrong-doing; they would even inject an element of selfishness into altruism, but the moral system elaborated by the materialists has several defects.  First, its virtues are borrowed from moral systems based upon religion.  All those who are intelligent enough to discuss a system of morality are so saturated with the morals derived from systems resting upon religion that they cannot frame a system resting upon reason alone.  Second, as it rests upon argument rather than upon authority, the young are not in a position to accept or reject.  Our laws do not permit a young man to dispose of real estate until he is twenty-one.  Why this restraint?  Because his reason is not mature; and yet a man’s life is largely moulded by the environment of his youth.  Third, one never knows just how much of his decision