nt at the old life and the things that fascinated us in the days
of our spiritual unconsciousness much as we look back at the games that
amused us in our childish hours. The desert of Egypt that we entered
with trepidation and fearful hearts turns out not to be so dreadful as
we imagined, and indeed the flowers spring up under our feet as we
resolutely tread the desert way.

These trials must be the daily experience of those who attempt to put
their religion into practice, and these perplexities must assail them so
long as the Christian community continues to show its present social
incompetence; so long, that is, as we attempt to make the basis of our
social action something other than the principles of the spiritual life.
A Christian society, one would naturally think, would spring out of the
possession of Christian ideals; and doubtless it would if these ideals
were really dominant in life, and not a sort of ornament applied to it.
Any social circle contains men and women of various degrees of
intellectual development and of varying degrees of experience of life;
what holds them together is the pursuit of common objects, the objects
that we sum up as amusement. Now the Christians in a community certainly
have a common object, the cultivation of the spiritual life through the
supernatural means offered by the Church of God. One would think that
this object would have a more constraining power than the attractions of
motoring or golf; but in fact we know that this is not so save in
individual cases. There is not, that is to say, anywhere visible a
Christian community which is wrought into a unity by the solidifying
forces of its professed ideals. Those very people whose paths converge
week by week until they meet at this altar, as they leave the altar,
follow diverging paths and live in isolation for the rest of their time.

One of the constant problems of the Church is that of the loss of those
who have for a time been associated with it--of those who have for a
time seemed to recognise their duty to God, and their privileges as
members of His Son. They drift away into the world. We pray and meditate
and worry over this and try to invent some machinery which will overcome
it. But it cannot be overcome by machinery, especially by the sort of
machinery which consists in transferring the amusements that people find
in the world bodily into the Church itself. It cannot and will not be
overcome until a Christian society ha