uitful source of religious
scepticism; it is not the abstract question whether there is a God, but
the practical and insistent problem whether the Divine goodness can be
reconciled with the facts of life and experience, that is agitating
men's minds, and sways their decision for or against religion.

Everyone knows that this is what Mr. Mallock some time ago called "the
crux of Theism"; that "crux," to use his own language, is not "the
existence of intelligent purpose in the universe," which may be freely
conceded, but whether the processes of nature are or are not consistent
with "a God possessing the character which it is the essence of Theism
to attribute to Him, and which alone could render Him an object of
religion, or even of interest, to mankind." Sometimes in accents of
wistful {90} wonder, sometimes in tones of revolt and defiant unbelief,
the question is asked:--Why does God allow dire calamity, painful
disease, earthquakes and shipwrecks, and accidents of the mine? Why
does He permit war, or vivisection, or poverty, or vice--in fact any of
"the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to"?
We should stop these things if we could; why does not He? One is
reminded of Mr. William Watson's passionate arraignment of the Powers
of Europe at the time of the Armenian massacres:--

Yea, if ye could not, though ye would, lift hand--
Ye halting leaders--to abridge Hell's reign. . .
If such your plight, most hapless ye of men!
_But if ye could and would not_, oh, what plea,
Think ye, shall stead you at your trial, when
The thundercloud of witnesses shall loom
At the Assizes of Eternity?

The application of these burning lines is painfully obvious. It would
be a positive relief were it thinkable that the Eternal would, but
cannot, stem

the flood that rolls
Hoarser with anguish as the ages roll;

or if one might, with a modern novelist, compare the case to that of "a
practitioner doing his best for a wilful patient, with poor appliances
and indifferent nursing." _But if He could and will not--oh, what
plea?_

What frankly appals men and freezes the worshipful instinct in their
hearts is the {91} apparent Divine indifference, the silence of God, in
the presence of so much human wretchedness. If one could only feel
that He cared for and sympathised with His suffering creatures, it
would be a help, like the sympathetic pressure of the hand from a
friend, which doe