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 364 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

crisis emphasized them ! This convulsion of the world of humanity has given to all the problems of economic and political adjustment such compelling urgency that they tax the energy of the human spirit to the utmost, and must con tinue to do so after the storm has passed.

If attention be turned to the religious sphere, one surely finds nothing there but bristling problems. But among them all there is none that is more practically pressing and acute than that of the adjustment of the religious forces and groups to one another. Within each separate denomination questions of adjustment are urgent. Between separate de nominational organizations the problem is even more acute. It confronts us most insistently on the home field; it looms large on the foreign mission field; and perhaps no issue in religious debate develops a higher intensity of emotion. Cor relation and co-operation are advocated with profound passion and resisted with a passion even more uncom promising, if not so buoyant and aggressive.

Now, is there any wonder that men living in an environ ment like this, which fairly seethes with problems of ad justing men to one another individually and collectively, per sonally and institutionally, nationally and internationally, should come to have a keen sense of the need of an ade quate social ethic? There has been a lightening of the pressure of need on the one side of life, in respect to one of the great factors of environment, and an aggrava tion of it on another side of life, in respect to the other great factor of the environment. This explains why the religion which would make an effective appeal to modern men, even those who have the strongest religious inclina tions, must make manifest to them its ethical and social values. These values are exactly the most convincing cre dentials which religion can present to the modern mind. The too general failure of current Christianity to meet these needs is one of the most potent reasons for the wide spread scepticism and indifference to organized religion so notable in our great centres of population.

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