some of your predecessors, by having to preach a spiritual view of the world to an age drugged with the narcotic of a thoroughgoing materialism. "We are no longer tempted," wrote Eddington in Science and the Unseen World, "to condemn the spiritual aspects of our nature as illusory because of their lack of concreteness. We have travelled far from the standpoint which identifies the real with the concrete." Many who in the heyday of revolt and emancipation threw over the trammels of orthodoxy are beginning to suspect that the Christian interpretation of life may after all be more credible, more intellectually respectable, than any of the alternatives. Robert Browning's dramatic defence of the faith in Bishop Blougram is doubly cogent now. What the poet saw with piercing clearness was that, if the difficulties facing belief are bad enough, those confronting unbelief are much worse; and that all that scepticism does is to land the mind in problems far more intractable and embarrassing than those it is seeking to escape. This is the fact which is forcing itself into recognition again at the present hour. Hence you start your ministry with an immense advantage. Multitudes of people to-day are haunted by the suspicion that the world is perfectly meaningless apart from God. That is a good atmosphere in which to have to preach the Gospel. If you can bring to troubled hearts the assurance that the Christian faith does make sense of the universe and give a credible interpretation of life, if you can show them God at the heart of their experience, you need never fear that your
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