were not "His alone,"—emphatically not that—our personal meritorious achievement, the praiseworthy product of our innate spirituality. It was a mood which came dangerously near to making religion itself the handmaid and confederate of that pride which is the final blasphemy and the basic sin of man.
To-day the scene is changed. When you go forth as preachers bearing Christ's commission, it is to a generation which has very largely repudiated the confident optimism of its predecessors. The great tower of Babel—collective man's monumentum aere perennius—has crashed, and the world is littered with the wreckage of disillusionment.
Back in 1918, a few days after the signing of the Armistice, Lord Curzon, moving the Address in the House of Lords, quoted the chorus from Shelley's Hellas:
The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return.
Such sanguine words sound almost sardonic now. "We are living," confessed Aldous Huxley, "in a rather grisly morning-after." The shining dream has proved to be a mirage. Of what profit is man's creative power, theme of his proudest boasts, if it is to become by a strange irony of fate the very instrument of his self-destruction? The old, ruthless dilemma, to which St. Paul gave classic expression in the seventh of Romans, has man in its torturing grip. And across the human scene to-day there echoes the haunting, unbearably poignant cry of Jeremiah long ago: "The
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