A VERY considerable part of the thinking people of today are darkened by doubt, if not despair, on the subject of religion. Because of their disobedience to the command of Jesus to heal the sick according to the way which he taught and exemplified, and because that which calls itself orthodox Christianity persists in representing God as a self-contradictory and wholly illogical being, the pulpits of Christendom have lost much of the power to persuade men which they formerly possessed. Religious periodicals are constantly witnessing to the fact that the pews are growing more and more empty, while the gray mists of distrust seem to have settled around the pulpits.
What is worse, it is a fact, which grows more and more palpable every year, that there are great masses of men, women, and children whose thoughts and lives seem to be barren of all religious hopes, incentives, and ideals. They seem to look upon the grave as the end of man. To them the search after evidences of man's immortality seems to be as foolish as to try to climb a ladder with its top resting against a cloud. To every one who has considered the history of our race it ought to be obvious that the men who give no thought to God and to the divine verities which pertain to man's true place in the universe are traveling the sure road to degeneracy. It is sure to be a dreary and well-nigh hopeless struggle to attempt to eradicate public corruption and private immorality, until the faces of a people have been turned toward the sublime and gladdening planets of religious truth, and away from the gloomy and gruesome specters of atheism and man's annihilation.
The writer knows what it means to have no faith in God, and to have none but negative answers to Job's troubled question, "If a man die, shall he live again?" He knows too well that such unbelief is a cruel and destructive desert, where there are no fountains to quench the thirst, no fruits or food to satisfy the hunger, no flowers to gladden and refine, where even the sky seems to be like the lid of a coffin which, as the hurrying years go by, relentlessly closes down upon us forever. He knows what it means to look into the faces of loved ones and to think that they too are helpless pilgrims through a godless desert.
