HERALDS OF GOD
But is that true? What if it is only a pose, the silly pretence of the self-deceiving? Was Thomas Hardy perhaps right when he recommended Christianity to "throw up the sponge and say 'I am beaten,' and let another religion take its place"? There is the vast, intolerable mystery of suffering. Is there any word from the Lord about that? There is the more intimate and personal disillusionment, the monotonous misery of defeat in a man's own soul: "the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do. O wretched man that I am!" Is there any word from the Lord about that? Such is the demand which thrusts itself clamorously and uncompromisingly upon the Church to-day. And to that demand, you—please God—shall have a right to speak.
Let me at this point remind you, for your encouragement, that if there is a vast amount of disillusionment going about in the world to-day, there is also an immense stirring of eager and passionate hope. The tension between these two attitudes is indeed one of the cardinal factors in the situation. Nor is this strange blending of disillusionment and hope in the minds of men so paradoxical as at first sight it may appear. For a complete breakdown of humanist self-confidence is a true praeparatio evangelica: it makes straight through the desert a highway for our God. Preach to a soul strong in untroubled egotism, mens sibi conscia recti—and it will be like hammering at granite. But bring the Gospel to bear upon a soul
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