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find out God?" asks an ancient sage. We, too, might ask, "Canst thou by searching find out the secret of the world or of the living self?" But agnosticism is partial; its function is preliminary and negative; it helps to clear the air, tainted with the vapors of superstition, that the fires of faith may burn more brightly.

And so, today, we are facing an immensely significant spiritual situation. The fact is unquestionable that men realize, as they never realized before, that without a God of some kind life is intolerable, and the world drama is no drama at all, but a meaningless series of events which only beguile us with an empty appearance of reason and purpose. The names and characteristics ascribed to God are as various as the minds which conceive them. But beneath the variety there is unity. The demand is for a Power in alliance with which man can realize himself and achieve his destiny. Here and there an individual may be found who rejects both the name and reality of God; yet even such belated spirits maintain that the attitude of soul which belief in a God implies must remain even after the belief has vanished, if man is to attain his highest and live in conformity with his better self. Mr. H. G. Wells, unable to find a God in the calm of his own study, makes his wonderful discovery in the bloodstained trenches of France and Belgium. He is spokesman for thousands of others whose scepticism has been profoundly shaken by the tragic events of the time. Our day, to use the language of the New Testament, is one of the "days of the Son of Man"a day of reckoning, red with judgment and terror, a day which summons all men to take counsel of their hearts, to make account of their inner resources, to get face to face with the primary meanings of things. The unexamined LIVING AGE, VOL. VIII, No. 411.

life is impossible at the present time to any man in whom there is still unquenched a single spark of serious thought. Professor Gilbert Murray has recently said that "what would have been deemed, before the outbreak of the world tragedy, romance and melodrama has become the commonplace experience of multitudes of commonplace persons." The Manin-the-street has in a moment become conscious of deep promptings, of worlds not realized. To his eye the universe has suddenly unveiled itself as something infinitely mysterious, enigmatic, and even menacing. Out of this unwonted experience many are asking today with poignant sincerity-Do we need God? If so, what kind of a God is it that we need?

But the man who asks this question is making a great discovery about himself. He learns that he is greater than all his thinking, that his utmost powers of reason and understanding come out of a self in whose unconscious depths there are needs, impulses, cravings, instincts that are the driving forces of his life. It is because of these needs that there wells up a yearning for satisfaction, which the world denies us. We make a claim on life which is contradicted by life as it is actually lived.

We long for a good which we do not possess. But this contradiction cannot be borne; the whole man cries out against it and gropes in the dark for some Power able to bring about a reconciliation. So much is this the case that Voltaire's oft-quoted saying that "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent one," contains, in spite of its flippant cynicism, a profound truth. We begin thus not with high abstract ideas, from which we descend upon the concrete and living world, but with human nature as seen in ourselves and in others.

and printed words. Letters, newspapers, photographs, memorial volumes, will remain in great numbers to tell the cost of victory. We would not have later generations know the whole agony of our own unhappy day. They will read of brave and wonderful deeds on land, on sea, and in the air, and of the brave and wonderful suffering and endurance of soldiers and sailors and airmen; but not even the numerous records of this generation will preserve the complete picture of that courage and endurance, or of the brave and noble spirit with which stricken wives and mothers, worthy of the men they loved, are bearing a The Times.

burden not the less hard because it is common. We hope to save posterity from the terrible knowledge of what such sufferings are; but we trust that some of the simple and natural expressions of our sorrow which will go down to them will help them to understand something of the price at which their and our freedom is being purchased. We, who know, hope that what will strike a happy and unknowing posterity is not the glory of the coming victory, but the faithfulness unto death which is creating it, and the awful responsibility of those who bring upon the world such things as are happening today.

I.

THE GREAT COMPANION.

An earlier age was very much concerned with high speculative arguments and proofs of the existence of a Deity. Today, these reasonings fail to interest us. We feel that even if they could establish all they set out to do, we still would be left with our vital needs unsatisfied. Granted that you could prove the existence of a Cause adequate to account for the universe of matter and of mind, or could show that the sum of things exhibits "a dramatic tendency, a clearly marked progress of events towards a mighty goal," to be explained only by the working of a master dramatist, of what avail would such achievements be to meet the demands of life or satisfy the ineradicable cravings of heart and soul? Our deepest desire is for comradeship, warmth, and blessedness, a sense of harmony with ourselves and with the universe. And the bloodless categories of philosophic thought can never give us these things. Moreover, our ambitious attempts to compass

the unbounded are doomed to failure. The agnosticism of a generation ago has not passed without teaching us a much needed lesson. It has shown us how great the word "God" is. For now we know that either God is everything to us, or He is nothing. He is either the supreme basic Reality, into which all other realities run down, and in which they find a meaning, or else He is the empty figment of our imagination. Hence, we must treat with tenderness and comprehension those who, because of the very greatness of the assertion, have not the courage to say that they believe in God. Further, it has made all dogmatisms, whether in science or religion, henceforth impossible. Around and beneath us are fathomless abysses. The laws of nature are simply convenient symbols which we use to express a small portion of an inexpressible whole. Our scientific certainties are being constantly threatened with dissolution by some fresh discovery or some newer insight into the facts. "Canst thou by searching

find out God?" asks an ancient sage. We, too, might ask, "Canst thou by searching find out the secret of the world or of the living self?" But agnosticism is partial; its function is preliminary and negative; it helps to clear the air, tainted with the vapors of superstition, that the fires of faith may burn more brightly.

And so, today, we are facing an immensely significant spiritual situation. The fact is unquestionable that men realize, as they never realized before, that without a God of some kind life is intolerable, and the world drama is no drama at all, but a meaningless series of events which only beguile us with an empty appearance of reason and purpose. The names and characteristics ascribed to God are as various as the minds which conceive them. But beneath the variety there is unity. The demand is for a Power in alliance with which man can realize himself and achieve his destiny. Here and there an individual may be found who rejects both the name and reality of God; yet even such belated spirits maintain that the attitude of soul which belief in a God implies must remain even after the belief has vanished, if man is to attain his highest and live in conformity with his better self. Mr. H. G. Wells, unable to find a God in the calm of his own study, makes his wonderful discovery in the bloodstained trenches of France and Belgium. He is spokesman for thousands of others whose scepticism has been profoundly shaken by the tragic events of the time. Our day, to use the language of the New Testament, is one of the "days of the Son of Man"a day of reckoning, red with judgment and terror, a day which summons all men to take counsel of their hearts, to make account of their inner resources, to get face to face with the primary meanings of things. The unexamined LIVING AGE, VOL. VIII, No. 411.

life is impossible at the present time to any man in whom there is still unquenched a single spark of serious thought. Professor Gilbert Murray has recently said that "what would have been deemed, before the outbreak of the world tragedy, romance and melodrama has become the commonplace experience of multitudes of commonplace persons." The Manin-the-street has in a moment become conscious of deep promptings, of worlds not realized. To his eye the universe has suddenly unveiled itself as something infinitely mysterious, enigmatic, and even menacing. Out of this unwonted experience many are asking today with poignant sincerity-Do we need God? If so, what kind of a God is it that we need?

But the man who asks this question is making a great discovery about himself. He learns that he is greater than all his thinking, that his utmost powers of reason and understanding come out of a self in whose unconscious depths there are needs, impulses, cravings, instincts that are the driving forces of his life. It is because of these needs that there wells up a yearning for satisfaction, which the world denies us. We make a claim on life which is contradicted by life as it is actually lived.

We long for a good which we do not possess. But this contradiction cannot be borne; the whole man cries out against it and gropes in the dark for some Power able to bring about a reconciliation. So much is this the case that Voltaire's oft-quoted saying that "If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent one," contains, in spite of its flippant cynicism, a profound truth. We begin thus not with high abstract ideas, from which we descend upon the concrete and living world, but with human nature as seen in ourselves and in others.

And we are impelled to seek for some Reality large enough to answer the demand of our discovery. In other words, the emphasis has been transferred from abstract thought to the vital full-blooded facts of subjective experience.

II.

"Friendship," says Aristotle, "is indispensable to life. For nobody will choose to live without friends, although he were in possession of every other good." The value of friendship lies in the need of perfect understanding which the soul craves, a sharing of its pleasures and pains, an interchange of thought and encouragement, and of moral strength. But in every human friendship there lies implicitly a Friendship of another and a higher order. We idealize our friends, we attribute to them qualities which at best they possess only potentially, and when they fail us we weep the bitter tears of an infinite loss. If beyond and above our human friends, there is no Other, if their goodness and sympathy are the only goodness and sympathy that exist, then, indeed, we are the victims of a tragic fate. For love is ever seeking to go beyond the temporal and the visible, to mingle with the vastness of the infinite and divine. It is true that some, while rejoicing in visible friends, find it impossible to realize friendship with the Invisible. Yet from a psychological point of view there is no line of demarcation between friendship with our fellowmen and friendship with God; both spring out of profound necessities of nature. My consciousness is, by its very constitution, something which implies that others have experiences in common with me, and that we can share these experiences mutually. In other words, sociality is not an accident of human nature, it is one of its structural principles. Yet this inborn instinct

can atrophy by disuse. We can, as Professor Coe says, depersonalize our fellows until they seem to be little more than things. Only by loving, helping, and serving them do they become real to us as persons. It is as we thus set aside our own self-seeking aims and identify ourselves with others that we rise to the conviction that there is a common Will worthy of our utmost devotion. This common Will is God operative in us. We rise to friendship with Him through the cultivation of the impulses which urge to friendship with our fellow-men.

And yet there is an area in every life to which friends have no access. It is, from one point of view, a pathetic reflection, that every man, the humblest as well as the greatest, carries within him a world of thought and desire and emotion unshared by any other creature. Our every thought is a soliloquy. All our mental history is simply a debate in which the speakers are the solitary single self. Of its joys and sorrows, hopes and fears, how little can be communicated to another mind! Yet its experiences constitute the deepest reality of our lives. "To understand all is to forgive all," say the French; but the difficulty lies in the understanding. Unscalable barriers divide personality from personality. Hence we mistake the motives of our fellows, and, in our blindness and ignorance, misjudge them and strike cruel blows at their happiness and peace. "No soul touches another soul except at one or two points," says F. W. Robertson, himself one of the loneliest of men, "and these chiefly external-a fearful and a lonely thought but one of the truest of life."

There are moments when the consciousness of this inner solitude comes home to even the most frivolous. Who that has stood beneath a star-strewn sky at midnight and has glanced at the myriad suns which constitute the

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