direction it intends to go; sometimes
there are back-eddies so that it seems to be retreating on itself. If a
man has no spiritual interpretation of life, if he does not believe in
God, he may well give up hope and conclude that the human river is
flowing all awry or has altogether ceased to move. A Christian, however,
has a spiritual interpretation of life. He knows that human history is a
river--not a whirlpool, nor a pond, but a river flowing to its end. Just
as, far inland, we can tell that the Hudson is flowing to the sea,
because the waters, when the tide comes in, are tinctured with the
ocean's quality, so now, we believe that we can tell that the river of
human history is flowing out toward the kingdom of our God. Already the
setback of the divine ocean is felt among us in ideals of better life,
personal, social, economic, national. That it is Christianity's function
to believe in these ideals, to have faith in the possibility of their
realization, to supply motives for their achievement, and to work for
them with courage and sacrifice, is the familiar note of modern Christian
hope.

The modern apologetic also is tinctured with this same quality. Not as
of old is it a laboured working out of metaphysical propositions.
Rather, a modern Christian preacher's defense of the Gospel may be
paraphrased in some such strain as this: You never can achieve a decent
human life upon this planet apart from the Christian Gospel. Neither
outward economic comfort nor international treaties of peace can save the
day for humanity. Not even when our present situation is described as "a
race between education and catastrophe" has the case been adequately
stated. What kind of education is meant? If every man and woman on
earth were a Ph. D., would that solve the human problem? Aaron Burr had
a far keener intellect than George Washington. So far as swiftness and
agility of intelligence were concerned, Burr far out-distanced the
slow-pacing mind of Washington. But, for all that, as you watch Burr's
life, and many another's like him, you understand what Macaulay meant
when he exclaimed: "as if history were not made up of the bad actions of
extraordinary men, as if all the most noted destroyers and deceivers of
our species, all the founders of arbitrary governments and false
religions, had not been extraordinary men, as if nine tenths of the
calamities which have befallen the human race had any other origin than
the union o