IT is not so many years since a noted infidel delivered a lecture on the above question, the published report of which was interspersed with the bracketed comments of his audience, such as "laughter," "renewed laughter," "roars of laughter," etc. Think of a set of mortals, conscious of the sad need of the world, making merry over the question that the relentless curse of sin and suffering has wrung from agonized lips since the beginning of time! Yet, in spite of their untimely mirth, in spite of the speaker's ridicule, there must have been in the hearts of both lecturer and people a pathetic yearning to know, after all, what can deliver mankind from their unhappiness and misery.
This question still presses for reply in every sin-burdened, pain-racked heart, and God pity those who make light of its prayer, or who turn aside the anxious hope of humanity as having no possible fulfilment on earth. If the unwonted merriment in this instance was over the spectacle of a theology that assumes to interpret the purpose and will of God, yet which offers no remedy or redemption to mortals in their present woes, which gives them no hope of deliverance until evil, having accomplished their doom, has no more that it can do, then these brackets had better have been used for tears. There is no sadder thing in all Christendom than the belief that the Christ, redemptive Truth, has come and gone, and left mortals helpless, at the mercy of pain and sorrow and death. If atheists laugh, angels might well weep over such a pitiful belief.
The intensity of human suffering is such as to melt even adamant hearts to sympathy, or almost to excuse the scoffer's derision of a religious belief whose false sense of God would keep Him an indifferent spectator in heaven while all goes wrong in the world. Each generation of mortals has been ushered into the endurance of unutterable pain and poverty and crime, and has passed out with a note of despair for all its unanswered prayers, its unheeded tears, its passionate but fruitless longings, its unfulfilled hopes of freedom from evil. Is there then nothing to save men from their troubles, no succor from earthly miseries, no redeemer from the doom of mortality, no truth to remedy error, no God?
