to a good deal of sympathy for his inability to follow this tortuous
reasoning with confidence. One cannot entirely blame him for being more
interested in the heart of man than in the petals of a rose.

These considerations are, of course, not novel. I am only applying to
this special case of the war a difficulty that has been discussed in all
ages, and has been acutely felt by very able religious thinkers. How a
group of bishops can sit down to write, in very deliberate and elegant
language, that such a calamity as this makes the soul more sensible of
"the approach of Christ" is one of the many little mysteries of the
clerical mind. It has precisely the opposite effect in any logical mind.
When the way of life is smooth, and our nation or home is prospering, we
may be genially disposed to think that God is near and is looking after
us as well as the sparrows. But when a black storm bursts suddenly and
disastrously on us; when the earth shakes their roofs on ten thousand of
our fellows, or a great ship strikes a rock and pours a laughing crowd
suddenly into the lap of death; when vast provinces are laid desolate by
war, and we see the tens of thousands clasping the hand of their loved
ones for the last time, it seems rather uncanny that this should suggest
to any person the approach of Christ. To very many people it is a
confirmation of the general impression they get from the world-process
and the story of man: that these great forces deploy and interlace and
build up and destroy without the slightest intervention from without.

In our time, we must remember, this difficulty had already been
enormously increased. St. Augustine, who felt the problem acutely in the
prime of his intelligence, had really a very much lighter task than the
modern divine. He had merely to suggest why evil was permitted in the
narrow world he knew; and he had the great advantage of being able to
appeal to a primitive sin and primitive punishment of the race. The