The plain man well knows the problem that I have just been
characterising. He knows how it may enter his religious life. Only he
does not usually think of it abstractly. It pierces his heart. Stunned
by a grief, he may say: "I have trusted God, and now he forsakes me.
How can a good God permit this horror in my life?" Yet the plain man,
if religiously minded, also knows what is meant by saying, "Out of the
depths have I cried." And he knows, too, that part of the preciousness
of his {229} very idea of God depends upon the fact that there are
depths, and that out of them one can cry, and that God is precisely a
being who somehow hears the cry from the depths. God, "pragmatically
viewed," as some of our recent teachers express the matter, is thus
often defined for the plain man's religious experience as a helper in
trouble. Were there no trouble, there would be, then, it would seem,
no cry of the soul for such a being, and very possibly no such being
conceived by the soul that now cries. Yet this very God--one cries to
him because he is supposed to be all-powerful, and to do all things
well, and therefore to be a very present help in time of trouble. All
this seems clear enough at the time when one is on the way up, out of
the depths, or when one begins to praise God in the Psalmist's words,
because, as one now says: "He hath planted my feet upon a rock, and
hath established my goings." But how does all this seem at the moment
when one suddenly falls into the pit of sorrow, and when one's eyes
are turned downward; when he who doeth all things well permits the
utmost treachery of fortune, and when the one who can hear every cry
seems deaf to one's most heartrending pleadings? The familiar
explanation that all this is a penalty for one's sins may awaken an
echo of Job's protest in the mind of the man who knows not how he has
deserved this woe, or may arouse the deeper and now consciously
dialectical comments on the mystery involved in the fact that God
{230} permits sin. "Why was I made thus blind and sinful?" one may
cry. And hereupon religious insight becomes, indeed, confused enough,
and may turn for relief to that well-known type of defiance which, if
not religious, is at least moral; for it is a protest against evil. If
at such moments God is, indeed, to our darkened vision, and, for us,
who wait for his blessing, as if he were sleeping or on a journey, one
can at least, as moral agent, utter this protest against ill, a