“Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye;
    and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of
    thy brother’s eye.”

The world is hungry for faith.  Do not doubt this for a moment.  More men and women to-day would rather believe in the few fundamentals of the Christian religion than have any other gift that lavish fortune could bestow upon them.

But these millions want to believe; they do not want to argue or be argued at.

They want to believe so utterly that their faith amounts to knowledge.  Doubtings are disquieting; pros and cons are monotonous.  We want certainty, we laymen.

For years I have made it a point to get the opinion of the ablest and most widely experienced men and women I met on the subject of immortality.  In all cases I found that the subject in which they were more deeply interested than in all other subjects put together.

“I would rather be sure that when a man dies he will live again with his conscious identity, than to have all the wealth of the United States, or to occupy any position of honor or power the world could possibly give,” said a man whose name is known to the railroad world as one of the ablest transportation men in the United States.

“Do you know when I am by myself I think about a lot of strange things.  Is the soul immortal and what is the soul anyhow?” It is a politician who is talking now, and a ward politician at that, a man whom few would suspect of thinking upon these subjects at all.

So you see, young man, you who are being measured for the Cloth, that all manner and conditions of men are thinking about the great problems of which you are the expounder, and longing for the answer to those problems which it is your business to give them.  That is the condition of the mind of the millions.

Very well!  What is the condition of the mind of the young minister?  A few years ago a certain man, with good opportunities for the investigation and a probability of sincere answers, asked every young preacher whom he met during a summer vacation these questions: 

“First, Yes or no, do you believe in God, the Father; God a person, God a definite and tangible intelligence—­not a congeries of laws floating like a fog through the universe; but God a person in whose image you were made?  Don’t argue; don’t explain; but is your mind in a condition where you can answer yes or no?”

Not a man answered “Yes.”  Each man wanted to explain that the Deity might be a definite intelligence or might not; that the “latest thought” was much confused upon the matter, and so forth and so on.

“Second, Yes or no, do you believe that Christ was the son of the living God, sent by Him to save the world?  I am not asking whether you believe that He was inspired in the sense that the great moral teachers are inspired—­nobody has any difficulty about that.  But do you believe that Christ was God’s very Son, with a divinely appointed and definite mission, dying on the cross and raised from the dead—­yes or no?”