Page:Heralds of God.djvu/29

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THE PREACHER'S WORLD

whose self-trust has been broken, and there before your very eyes the ancient miracle may be renewed, and the glory of the Lord be revealed. Complacence of any kind—whether it be national or social, intellectual or moral, humanitarian or religious—is God's greatest enemy. But when the foundations are undermined, and the edifice of man's vaunted achievements comes down with a crash, then is the time, declared Jesus, to "look up, and lift up your heads; for redemption draweth nigh."

Thus the very disillusionment of to-day is the raw material of the Christian hope. Men are beginning to suspect that no new order which seeks to erect itself on the ruins of the old can have one atom of survival-value, or be other than a patchwork and a sham, unless it has direct and deliberate reference to the mind and programme of God for humanity. Consider in this connection the following verdict, which comes significantly from Dr. C. E. M. Joad: "There is in many Englishmen to-day, and especially in young people newly come to maturity, a renewed interest in the religious view of the world, and a disposition to examine afresh, in the light of it, the traditional answers to fundamental questions which Christianity has provided. … That the seeds of a spiritual revival are germinating in the minds of the people of this country, I, for one, do not doubt." The fact is that to-day, as so often in past history, the very complexity of the human predicament becomes in Christ's hands a weapon for the further advance of His Kingdom. And

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