tion it is to protect his children from suffering and to minister to their earthly happiness. His love is revealed, not so much as expressing a benevolent sentiment, as being an inspiring ideal and a purifying flame. If "His mercy is over all His works," that mercy is plainly exhibited in no indulgent shielding from the effects of human tyranny and suffering, but rather, in the impartation of the strength to endure and the bestowal of the spirit of heroism, discipline and self-sacrifice. What some one has called "the grandmotherly notion of God" has gone forever and we have in its place the ideal of One who is able to console because He Himself has willed to enter personally into the sphere of human experience and share to the fullest degree the lot of mankind on this material earth. In other words the only God in whom henceforth it would seem possible for reflecting persons to believe is the God and Father of the Incarnate Son, even Jesus Christ, the suffering and crucified man of Galilee. No other God will be adequate to human requirements or deemed worthy to receive the love and reverence of a grief-stricken world. The alternative to the Christian God is not some remote and absolute deity of the philosophers, or the finite god of human invention, but blank atheism with its despairing watchword, "Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die." Those who shall have passed through the fiery furnace of the war will know the naked realities of life and will be stripped of all their pleasing illusions. They will either emerge with an unwavering faith in God and in true religion, or they will have become fatalists and infidels. To which of the alternatives the majority will incline it is impossible to say. We who cherish the Christian belief are hoping and praying that a new and stronger faith may animate the world after the war. We are looking to the younger men when they shall return to their homes to give the impulse to higher and nobler ideals of life and to take the lead in a fresh movement which shall put a new spirit into religion and lift this generation out of the rut of convention and indifference in which it has so long been sunk. The revival cannot come from us for we are the creatures of an old order and lack the initiative to strike out

into new and untried paths. Even the pressure of the war has not so far served to arouse the present generation out of its religious apathy and indifference. One would have supposed that the catastrophe the world is now facing would have forced even those who are only nominally Christian to seek for consolation and succor in the great Source whence these things proceed; but judging from superficial evidence, such as attendance at the Church services, there is no slightest movement in this direction. Perhaps the small minority of sincerely devoted Christians may have undergone a chastening of the spirit, but as far as the vast majority is concerned there is no sign as yet of an awakened interest in fundamental religion. "Business and pleasure as usual" seems to be the prevailing sentiment. In the presence of the most tremendous crisis in the world's history one looks in vain for any evidence of a genuine spiritual awakening or for the consciousness of a desperate need of divine succor. As it was in the days of Lot when they did eat and drink, bought and sold, planted and builded, until the day came when Sodom was destroyed with the rain of fire and brimstone, even so it would seem to be with this generation. But perhaps before the crisis passes, when the days of lamentation and mourning shall arrive for the multitudes who shall never return, the reaction we are looking for may come.

As with religion, so with its outward embodiment in the Church. We cannot doubt that there will be great changes in the ecclesiastical structure following the war. While the Church in its essential features will remain, great and needed reforms will surely take place. For one thing, like all other institutions, it will have to become more democratic if it is to grow and prosper under the new order. The ancient foundations will remain, but the accretions and accidents will have to go. The new age will demand unity and simplicity. There will be no room for unessentials or merely decorative doctrines and practices. The demand will be for reality unencumbered with mere traditional glosses. The Church must furnish a true religious home for the plain people, a body of doctrine which will satisfy the spiritual needs of the way-faring man.

Its pulpit must instruct rather than merely exhort and please. Its altar must attract rather than repel. There will have to be a stronger consciousness of brotherhood among its members, a real discipline for the indifferent and careless, and greater freedom and elasticity in worship. So much would seem imperative.

Undoubtedly in the near future American Churchmen will have to struggle hard to preserve and maintain unimpaired their full Catholic heritage. In the face of a great popular movement for the merging of all the discordant religious forces represented in this country in one main organization and under one polity, the numerically small body to which as Anglican Catholics we owe allegiance will have to fight for its very existence. The pressure which will be exerted both from within and without to force us to abandon, or, at least, to compromise some of the most precious and vital elements of faith and order will be enormous. The temptation to surrender essential points, or those which have always heretofore been regarded as such, will be presented under the most specious and insidious forms. We shall be entreated in behalf of the great cause of "Christian unity," or comity, not to stand aloof from the supreme popular movement of the day, but to readjust our doctrines and our practices in the interest of a common end. The charge will be made, and honestly credited in many quarters, that we care more for the preservation of sectarian identity than for the upbuilding and prosperity of what is euphemistically termed "American Christianity"; that we place narrow ecclesiastical advantages above broad religious interests. Indeed, that charge is being insistently made today and will be certain to gather additional force and plausibility when the war is over, and the most cherished institutions and practices are called in question and challenged to prove their utility and even their right to survive under the new order by a generation detached from the traditions of the past.

What view of the matter the young Churchmen now serving in the ranks may be presumed to take none can say. It is possible that they may tend to regard our continued ecclesiasti

cal aloofness from the main current of sectarian religious life and activity as wholly unjustifiable in view of the supposed advantages which the merging of the various religious forces in this country may be thought to offer. Conscious of the benefits of co-ordination and co-operation in military and civic affairs, and having observed the more or less successful efforts of the various religious agencies in uniting to minister to the spiritual interests of the soldiers, it may be that they will favor an undogmatic form of Christianity, with a Church which has jettisoned her cargo of sacraments and apostolic order, and merged her identity in a heterogeneous society, wherein all its constituent parts have scaled down their doctrines to a bare minimum and pooled their differences in the interest of a colorless religiosity and a vague humanitarianism. On the other hand it may well be that these young Churchmen shall have learned through personal experience to prize even more deeply the ministerial priesthood and the sacramental system which the Church stands for and thus bring to us who shall have remained at home invaluable testimony to the intrinsic importance of the very things, which, in the interest of a delusive compromise, we are now asked to abandon, or, at least, to stress as minor considerations.

The solution of these and similar problems lies hidden in the womb of the future and only time can demonstrate what the ultimate issue will be. In the meanwhile, those of us who are concerned for the extension and prosperity of the Catholic Church and the integrity of its organic life and apostolic heritage can only look forward with hope, mingled with some measure of anxiety, to the new era. The impulse which shall give character and direction to religion and the Church in the succeeding age cannot, as I have said, come from the present generation, but must, under God, find its source and spirit in the next. For us of the present generation it is a counsel of high wisdom to recognize the catastrophic nature of the times in which we are living and to brace ourselves to meet with faith and courage whatever changes may be impending under the new order.

The Religious Use of the Imagination

TH

BY THE RT. REV. CHARLES FISKE, D.D., LL.D.

HIS hardly seems a time in which to write on topics purely devotional. Here we are, living

in a grand and awful time,

In an age on ages telling

To be living is sublime.

Surely, then, one can hardly think of religion save as we bring it into touch with the Great War and its spiritual lessons for the Nation and the Church.

Yet, what does this mean but that men are hungering, as never before, for the old truths-translated, as they must be, of course, into terms of modern thought, to meet modern needs; but old, nevertheless, though ever new in their application.

Both clergy and laity seem to forget this, sometimes. The pulpit becomes too often a mere recruiting platform or a sales dépôt for Liberty Loan bonds. We want the Church to inspire to service and sacrifice, but we want it to do more than this— and when laymen get down to hard thought about it, they discover that they also want it to do more and to be more. A clever English Churchman, who must be something of a thorn in the flesh for his brethren, wrote some years ago on "One of the Chief Causes of the Decay of Religion: viz., the Activity of the Clergy in Every Good Work." How true it is! Were we to preach on all the subjects enthusiastic advocates of various measures ask us to preach on, and pursue with diligence all the matters about which we are told the Church should concern itself, there would be little room for instruction on ordinary matters of faith and morals.

It does seem that the real call now is for a spiritual messageclean, clear, straight-sounding again the old Christian truths without which men would go mad in a world like ours, with Europe soaked in blood and faith trembling in dismay: a message, of course, from men who have faced the difficulties of the