362 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING
that we have in the wonderful resources of inventive human genius at least the clue to adjustment with that part of our environment. At any rate, the sense of maladjustment seems stronger in the field of the human environment. Ethical and social problems are to the front in the conscious ness of modern men. Human intelligence and will are largely preoccupied with the need of establishing and main taining satisfactory relations of men with one another; which is true not so much as to individual contacts as to the many-sided and complicated institutional life. This human and humanly controlled environment presses upon a man from every side; it encompasses him like an atmosphere. With the crowding together of men in dense populations, there come the increasing complexity and interdependence of the social organization and the multiplication of rela tionships ; and in and through it all there is a pervading consciousness of maladjustment and of distress, which at bottom is more moral than it is physical, though elements of the latter are by no means wanting. There is, indeed, the sense of being caught in a vast and tangled maze of problems whose urgency is only equalled by their enor mous difficulty. Nearly all thoughtful minds have a feel ing that, as members of a great social order, we are under the necessity of working out solutions of prob lems whose widely ramifying difficulties are among the most baffling which have ever confronted the human mind. They constitute a most insistent challenge to the intelligence and the conscience of the modern mind, and their emotional ap peal is hardly less strong.
Take but a momentary glance into the vast social life whose tides surge around us. Problems stare at you like sphinxes no matter in what direction you turn your gaze. Now, there are some problems which have a more universal character than others ; some which are more practical than others ; some that are more inevitable than others ; and there are some which are notable in that they have all three char acteristics. They are universal, that is they press upon all
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