Page:The War and the Churches.djvu/112

 divine action in stars and rocks and reptiles, and on the other hand we have a stupendous mass of suffering, starting millions of years ago at the very birth of consciousness and piled up mountains high in this year 1915, which no thinker has ever yet reconciled with the notion of a divine ruling of the life of man. This is a very grave and plain situation, and if the clergy have nothing more to say about it than to borrow from an ancient Hebrew certain offensive gibes at the unbeliever, or to offer us the kind of apologies we examined in the last chapter, one must conclude that they do not realise the situation. The war has terribly accentuated the most terrible difficulty they ever had to face. Whether there is intelligence manifested in nature is, after all, an academic question which does not profoundly stir the modern world. Whether there is benevolence, a moral personality, reflected in the course of man's history is the much more important question. And this appalling calamity will induce many to take a more candid view of the world-process and conclude that, as far as the critical eye can see, man's world seems to be left entirely to his own efforts, to his own crimes and blunders and aspirations.