ew song in my mouth, even praise unto our God."

Here, then, is the preaching which is religious. How foolish are we
not to preach it more! How trivial and impertinent it is to question
the permanence of the religious interpretation of the world! What
a revelation of personal insignificance it is to fail to revere the
majesty of the devout and aspiring life! That which a starved and
restless and giddy world has lost is this pool of quietness, this
tower of strength, this cleansing grace of salvation, this haven of
the Spirit. Belief in a transcendent deity is as natural as hunger
and thirst, as necessary as sleep and breathing. It was the inner and
essential needs of our fathers' lives which drove them out to search
for Him. It will be the inner and essential needs of the lives of our
children that shall bring them to the altar where their fathers and
their fathers' fathers bowed down before them. Are we going to be
afraid to keep its fires burning?

And so we come to our final and most difficult aspect of this
transcendent problem. We have talked of the man who is separate from
nature, and who knows himself as man because behind nature he sees
the God from whom he is separate, too. We have seen how he needs
that "otherness" in God to maintain his personality and how the gulf
between him and that God induces that sense of helplessness which
makes the humility and penitence of the religious life. We must come
now to our final question. How is he to bridge the gulf? By what power
can he go through with this experience we have just been relating and
find his whole self in a whole world? How can he dare to try it? How
can he gain power to achieve it?

Perhaps this is the central difficulty of all religion. It is
certainly the one which the old Greeks felt. Plato, the father of
Christian theology, and all neo-platonists, knew that the gulf is
here between man and God and they knew that something or someone must
bridge it for us. They perceived that man, unaided, cannot leap it at
a stride. We proceed, driven by the facts of life, to the point where
the soul looks up to the Eternal and confesses the kinship, and knows
that only in His light shall it see light, and that it only shall be
satisfied when it awakes in His likeness. But how shall the connection
be made? What shall enable us to do that mystic thing, come back
to God? We have frightful handicaps in the attempt. How shall the
distrust that sin creates, the hardness