absence of Utopian illusions. It thrusts Golgotha upon men's vision and bids them look at that. The very last charge which can be brought against the Gospel is that of sentimentality, of blinking the facts. It is devastating in its veracity, and its realism is a consuming fire.
This is the message with which we are charged. How grievous the fault if in our hands it becomes tainted with unreality!
Of course, this is an issue which concerns the whole Church, and not only the individual minister. Nothing so gravely compromises the Christian witness as the suspicion that organized religion is failing to practise what it preaches. There are at least three directions in which the Church to-day is having to meet and to answer the challenge of the craving for reality. The first relates to worship. Do our forms of worship convey at every point the ringing note of entire sincerity and truth? The second has to do with the social implications of the Gospel. Has it not happened all too frequently that men of generous and noble nature, tormented by the spectacle of the wrongs of society and the sufferings of humanity, and on fire to help their brethren "bound in affliction and iron," have cried out against what seemed to them the appalling torpor and inaction of the Church, dragging its slow ponderous length along, with leisurely, lumbering organization, and have flung away from it in impatience and despair? The third challenge concerns Christian unity. Is it legitimate, is it convincing, for a Church
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