do not say that heaven is here or
nowhere; but I do believe that it ought to be here, in its degree, as
truly as anywhere else. If we can think of contempt as part of the
Being of God, surely this must be His feeling for much of the wrong and
suffering that finds a place in the human world. It is so gratuitous,
so insensate, so unnecessary. Is it not a terrible reflection upon
some of us, that after the Cross has been silently teaching the world
these well-nigh two thousand years, it can yet be said with some show
of reason, that the two forces that keep society, as we know it,
together, are the ignorance and the patience of the poor? Why should
they be so long ignorant? Why should they be so chronically patient?
The sorrow of God must be, not only that they suffer, but that they are
so patient under it as to make it scarcely distinguishable from
content. And why are they so patient? This is the question God is
asking through every thoughtful and humane man of us; and one day--man
with God speed its coming--we shall be numerous enough, and in earnest
enough, to establish some real harmony, some true correspondence,
between the inner dignity and the outward lot of the individual, and,
through him, of the community. In the meantime, then, instead of
asking, how can God be God and permit wrong to be in the world? let us
face the truth, however it may smite us, the truth that wrong is in the
world for this reason--that we permit it.

Growing out of what has been advanced, suffer me to press the subject a
little further, under one or two statements. I purpose to do little
more than indicate them, and to ask for them your good consideration.

God is faithful: therefore good must be possible. I was talking some
time ago with a very intelligent man, who has a well-known name in the
world of letters, and he said to me: "I admit that we have made
something that answers to progress in material things, but I deny that
we have made any advance in moral attainment. A few rise above the
average level, for the rest it is the old story of cycles of abortive
effort with no lasting good to the race. We may theorize and idealize
as we like," he went on to say, "but Bebel is right when he tells us
that 'every man is the product of his times and the instrument of his
circumstances.'"

It was talk that exactly expresses much of the "time-spirit" of our
modern day. It is a doctrine with no God in it, and no invisible
world. I