alked together hour after hour
about God and immortality. He said that he could not believe in God.
He wistfully wished that he could. He was sure that it must add
something beautiful to human life, but for himself he thought that
there was no possibility except to live a high, clean, serviceable life
until he should fall on sleep. All the way home that night I thought
of other people whom I know. Here is a man who believes in God. He
always has believed in God. He was brought up to believe in God and he
has never felt with poignant sympathy enough the abysmal, immedicable
woes of human-kind to have his faith disturbed. He never has had any
doubts. The war passed over him and left him as it found him. The
fiercest storm that ever raged over mankind did not touch the surface
of his pool of sheltered faith. How could one help comparing him with
my friend who could not believe? For he, in high emotion, had spoken
of the miseries of men, of multitudes starving, of the horrors of war,
of the poor whose lives are a long animal struggle to keep the body
alive, of the woes that fall with such terrific incidence upon the
vast, obscure, forgotten masses of our human-kind, and out of the very
ardour of his sympathy had cried: "How can you believe that a good
Father made a world like this?"

Now, I believe in God with all my heart. But the God whom I believe in
likes that man. Jesus, were he here on earth as once he was, would
love him. I think Jesus would love him more than the other man who
never had faced human misery with sympathy enough to feel his faith
disturbed. This does not mean that we ought contentedly to see men
ministered to by a God whom they do not recognize. It is a pity to be
served by the Eternal Spirit of all grace and yet not know him. In
Jean Webster's "Daddy Long Legs," Jerusha Abbott in the orphanage is
helped by an unknown friend. Year after year the favours flow in from
this friend whom she does not know. She blossoms out into girlhood and
young womanhood and still she does not know him. One day she sees him
and she does not recognize him. She has always thought of him as
looking other than he does, and so even when she sees him she does not
know him. Suppose that the story stopped there! It would be
intolerable to have a story end so. To be served all one's life by a
friend and then not to know him when he seeks recognition is tragedy.
So it is tragedy when God is unrecognized, but