Chapter VI — Faith's Greatest Obstacle

Daily Readings

The speculative doubts leave many minds untouched, but one universal human experience sooner or later faces every serious life with questions about God's goodness. We all meet trouble, in ourselves or others, and oftentimes the wonder why in God's world such calamities should fall, such wretchedness should continually exist, plunges faith into perplexity. Few folk of mature years can fail to understand Edwin Booth when he wrote to a friend, "Life is a great big spelling book, and on every page we turn the words grow harder to understand the meaning of." Now, the basis of any intelligent explanation of faith's problem must rest in a right practical attitude toward trouble. To the consideration of that we turn in the daily readings.

Sixth Week, First Day

Beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you; but rejoice to the extent that you partake of Christ's sufferings, that when His glory is revealed, you may also be glad with exceeding joy. If you are reproached for the name of Christ, blessed are you, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. But let none of you suffer as a murderer, a thief, an evildoer, or as a busybody in other people's matters. Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in this matter.... Therefore let those who suffer according to the will of God commit their souls to Him in doing good, as to a faithful Creator. —1 Peter 4:12–16, 19 (NKJV)

Such an attitude toward trouble as Peter here recommends is the most wholesome and hopeful possible. And it is reasonable too, if only on the ground that trouble develops in us the essential qualities of strong character. Our highest admiration is always reserved for those who master difficult crises. If the story of Joseph, begun beside Bedouin camp fires centuries ago, can easily be naturalized beside modern radiators; if Robinson Crusoe, translated into every tongue is understood by all, the reason lies in the depth of the human heart, where to make the most out of untoward situations is a daily problem. Not everyone can grasp the argument or perceive the beauty of "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained," but one thing about them everyone appreciates — the blind Milton, sitting down to write them:

The full understanding of Ole Bull's playing on the violin was necessarily restricted to the musical, but no restriction bounds our admiration when in a Munich concert, his A string snaps and he finishes the composition on three strings. That is the human problem in epitome. Getting music out of life's remainders after the break has come; winning the battle with what is left from a defeat; going blind, like Milton, and writing sublimest poetry, or deaf, like Beethoven, and composing superb sonatas; being reared in an almshouse and buried from Westminster Abbey, like Henry M. Stanley; or, like Kernahan, born without arms or legs and yet sitting at last in the British Parliament — all such hardihood and undiscourageable pluck reach back in our hearts beyond the strings that ease and luxury can touch, and strike there an iron, reverberating chord. Nothing in human life is so impressive as pluck, "fighting with the scabbard after the sword is gone." And no one who deeply considers life can fail to see that our best character comes when, as Peter says, we "suffer as a Christian."

O Lord our God, let our devout approach to You be that of the heart, not of the lips. Let it be in obedience to Your spiritual law, not to any outward ritual. You desire not temples nor offerings, but the sacrifice of a lowly and grateful heart You will not despise. Merciful Father, to all Your dealings we would submit ourselves, not grudgingly, not merely of necessity, but because we believe in Your wisdom, Your universal rule, and Your goodness. In bereavement and in sorrow, in death as in life, in joys and in happiness, we would see Your Hand. Teach us to see it; increase our faith where we cannot see; teach us also to love justice, and to do mercy, and to walk humbly with You our God. Make us at peace with all, gentle to those who offend us, faithful in all duties, and sincere in sorrow when we fail in duty. Make us loving to one another, patient in distress, and ever thankful to Your Divine power, which keeps, and guides, and blesses us every day. Lord, accept our humble prayer, accomplish in us Your holy will. Let Your peace reign in our hearts, and enable us to walk with You in love; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. —Francis W. Newman, 1805.

Sixth Week, Second Day

Even to the present hour we both hunger and thirst, and we are poorly clothed, and beaten, and homeless. And we labor, working with our own hands. Being reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we endure; being defamed, we entreat. We have been made as the filth of the world, the offscouring of all things until now. —1 Corinthians 4:11–13 (NKJV)

If Paul could be questioned about the experience of trouble which these verses vividly express, would he not say that there had been qualities of character in him and resources in his relationship with God which he never would have known about had it not been for the test of adversity? Trouble not only develops but also reveals character; we do not know ourselves until we have been tried out in calamity. The simplest demand of adversity on every person is that they be "game." Henry Newbolt is not indulging in rhetoric when he tells of a Sudan battle where a British square made up of Clifton graduates is hard beset by a charge of fierce enemies, and, in that crisis, makes the cry of a Clifton football captain, "Play up, boys, play the game!" rally the men and save the day. At school or in the Sudan the problem is the same; the sling with which David plays in his youth is his chief reliance when Goliath comes; a "game" spirit is essential to character from birth to death. We turn from the story of Nelson at Aboukir, nailing six flags to his mast so that if even five were shot away no one would dream that he had surrendered, to find that the spirit there exemplified is applicable to our most common day. The quality which made Nelson an Admiral of England, in spite of his lost arm, his lost eye, his small stature, and his feeble health is one of our elemental needs. And to a supreme degree this quality was in great Christians like Paul. Read his letter to the Philippians and see! Adversity brought his spirit to light, and made it an asset of the cause. In a real sense, trouble, however forbidding, was one of Paul's best friends, and there was a good reason why he should "glory in tribulations" (Romans 5:3 NKJV).

O Father of spirits! You love whom You chasten! Correct us in our weakness as children, that we may love You in our strength as children of God. May the same mind be in us which was also in Jesus Christ, that we may never shrink, when our hour comes, from drinking of the cup that He drank of. Wake in us a soul to obey You, not with the weariness of servile spirits, but with the eagerness of the holy angels. Fill us with a contempt of evil pleasures and unfaithful ease; sustain us in the strictness of a devout life. Daily may we crucify every selfish affection, and delight to bear one another's burdens, to uphold each other's faith and charity, being tender-hearted and forgiving as we hope to be forgiven. Hold us to the true humility of the soul that has not yet attained; and may we be modest in our desire, diligent in our trust, and content with the disposals of Your Providence. O Lord of life and death! Your counsels are secret; Your wisdom is infinite: we know not what a day may bring forth. When our hour arrives, and the veil between the worlds begins to be lifted before us, may we freely trust ourselves to You, and say, "Father, into Your hands I commend my spirit." Amen. —James Martineau.

Sixth Week, Third Day

If adversity, rightly used, so develops and reveals character, we may expect to find trouble as a background to the most admirable people of the race. We read the luminous histories of Francis Parkman and do not perceive, behind the printed page, the original manuscript, covered with a screen of parallel wires, along which the blind author ran his pencil that he might write legibly. We think of James Watt as a genius at invention, and perhaps recall that Wordsworth said of him, "I look upon him, considering both the magnitude and the universality of his genius, as perhaps the most extraordinary man that this country ever produced." But Watt himself we forget — sickly of body, starving on eight shillings a week, and saying, "Of all things in life there is nothing more foolish than inventing." Kant's philosophy was a turning point in human thought, but lauding Kant, how few recall his struggle with a broken body! Said he, speaking of his incurable illness, "I have become master of its influence in my thoughts and actions by turning my attention away from this feeling altogether, just as if it did not at all concern me." Wilberforce, the liberator of British slaves, we know, and beside his grave in Westminster Abbey we recall the superb title that he earned, "the attorney general of the unprotected and of the friendless," but the Wilberforce who for twenty years was compelled to use opium to keep himself alive, and had the resolution never to increase the dose — who knows of him? One of the chief rewards of reading biography is this introduction that it gives to handicapped people; the knowledge it imparts of the world's great saints and scripture makers, conquerors and reformers, who, in the words of Thucydides, "dared beyond their strength, hazarded against their judgment, and in extremities were of excellent hope." And when one turns to the supreme Character, could the dark background be eliminated and still leave Him?

But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that He, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone. For it was fitting for Him, for whom are all things and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings. —Hebrews 2:9–10 (NKJV)

O God, who are unsearchable in Your judgments, and in Your ways past finding out, we bow before the mystery of Your Being, and confess that we know nothing, and can say nothing worthy of You. We cannot understand Your dealings with us. We have faith, not sight; when we cannot see, we may only believe. Sometimes You seem to have no mercy upon us. You pierce us through our most tender affections, quenching the light of our eyes in dreadful darkness. Death tears from us all that we love, and You are seemingly deaf to all our cries. Our earthly circumstances are reversed and bitter poverty is appointed us, yet You take no heed, and bring no comfort to the sorrow and the barrenness of our life. Still would we trust in You and cling to that deepest of our instincts which tells us that we come from You and return to You. Be with us, Father of Mercies, in love and pity and tenderness unspeakable. Lift our souls into Your perfect calm, where all our wills are in harmony with Yours. Amen. —Samuel McComb.

Sixth Week, Fourth Day

To one perplexed and disheartened by adversity, a theoretical explanation is generally not half as valuable as concrete instances of courage and fortitude, founded on faith. Whether we be theologians or scientists or as ignorant of both as Caliban, there is an immediate, personal call to arms in the brave fight of George Matheson, one of Scotland's great preachers for all his blindness, or in Louis Pasteur's indomitable will, making his discoveries despite the paralytic stroke that in his forty-sixth year crippled his strength. The qualities which we admire in them are a sort of apotheosis of the qualities which we need in ourselves. For we all are handicapped, some by ill-starred heredity, by unhappy environment, or by the consequences of our own neglect and sin; some by poverty, some by broken bodies, or by broken family ties — and all of us by unfortunate dispositions. It does us good then to know that Phillips Brooks failed as a teacher. His biographer tells us that so did his first ambition to be an educator cling to him, that in the prime of life, when he was the prince of preachers, he came from President Eliot's office, pale and trembling, because he had refused a professorship at Harvard. So Robertson, of Brighton, whose sermons began a new epoch in British Christianity, was prevented from being a soldier only by the feebleness of his body, and Sir Walter Scott, who wanted to be a poet, turned to novel writing, anonymously and tentatively trying a new role, because, as he frankly put it, "Because Byron beat me." An excellent cook is one who knows how to make a good dinner out of the left-overs, and hardly a more invigorating truth is taught by history than that most of the finest banquets spread for the delectation of the race have been prepared by people who made them out of the leavings of disappointed hopes.

Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who endured such hostility from sinners against Himself, lest you become weary and discouraged in your souls. —Hebrews 12:1–3 (NKJV)

Our Father, we thank You that while we are sure of Your protecting care, Your providential oversight which foresees all things, we can bear the sorrows of this world, and do its duties, and endure its manifold and heavy cross. We thank You that when distress comes upon us, and our mortal schemes vanish into thin air, we know there is something solid which we can lay hold of, and not be frustrated in our hopes. Yes, we thank You that when death breaks the slender thread of life on which our family jewels are strung, and the precious stones of our affection fall from our arms or neck, we know You take them and elsewhere give them a heavenly setting, wherein they shine before the light of Your presence as morning stars, brightening and brightening to more perfect glory, as they are transfigured by Your own almighty power.

We thank You for all the truth which the stream of time has brought to us from many a land and every age. We thank You for the noble examples of human nature which You have raised up, that in times of darkness there are wise people, in times of doubt there are firm people, and in every peril there stand up heroes of the soul to teach us feebler ones our duty, and to lead all of Your children to trust in You. Father, we thank You that the seed of righteousness is never lost, but through many a deluge is carried safe, to make the wilderness bloom and blossom with beauty ever fragrant and ever new, and the desert bear corn for us and sustain the souls of the feeble when they faint. Amen. —Theodore Parker.

Sixth Week, Fifth Day

One distinguishing mark of the people who have won their victories with the remnants of their defeat is that they refuse to describe their unideal conditions in negative terms. If they cannot live in southern California where they would choose to live, but must abide in New England instead, they do not describe New England in terms of its deficiencies — no orange groves, no acres of calla lilies, no palm trees. There are compensations even in New England, if one will carefully take account of stock and see what positively is there! Or if one would choose to live in Boston and must live in Labrador, the case of Grenfell suggests that a positive attitude toward necessity will discover worth, and material for splendid triumphs even on that inhospitable coast. The mark of the handicapped people who have made the race's history glorious has always been their patriotism for the country where they had to live. They do not stop long to pity themselves, or to envy another's opportunity, or to blame circumstances for their defeat, or to dream of what might have been, or to bewail their disappointed hopes. If the soil of their condition will not grow one crop, they discover what it will grow. They have insight, as did Moses, to see holy ground where an ordinary person would have seen only sand and sagebrush and sheep.

Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian. And he led the flock to the back of the desert, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed. Then Moses said, "I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn." So when the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, "Moses, Moses!" And he said, "Here I am." Then He said, "Do not draw near this place. Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground." —Exodus 3:1–5 (NKJV)

Father of life, and God of the living, Fountain of our being and Light of all our day; we thank You for that knowledge of Yourself which lights our life with eternal splendor, for that giving of Yourself which has made us partakers of Your divine nature. We bless You for everything around us which ministers You to our minds; for the greatness and glory of nature, for the history of our race, and the lives of noble people; for the thoughts of You expressed in human words, in the art of painters and musicians, in the work of builders and craftsmen. We bless You for the constant memories of what we are that rise within ourselves; for the pressure of duty, the hush of solemn thoughts, for moments of insight when the veil on the face of all things falls away, for hours of high resolve when life is quickened within, for seasons of communion when, earth and sense forgotten, heaven holds our silent spirits raptured and aflame.

We have learned to praise You for the darker days when we had to walk by faith, for weary hours that strengthened patience and endeavor, for moments of gloom and times of depression which taught us to trust, not to changing tides of feeling, but to You who change not. And now since Christ has won His throne by His cross of shame, risen from His tomb to reign forever in the hearts of people, we know that nothing can ever separate us from You; that in all conflicts we may be more than conquerors; that all dark and hostile things shall be transformed and work for good to those who know the secret of Your love.

Glory be to You, O Lord. Amen. —W. E. Orchard.

Sixth Week, Sixth Day

When folk have seen into human life deeply enough so that they perceive how adversity can be used to high issues, faith in God becomes not so much a speculative problem as a practical need. They want to deal with trouble nobly. They see that faith in God gives the outlook on life which makes the hopeful facing of adverse situations reasonable and which supplies power to make it possible. The result is that the great sufferers have been the great believers. The idea that fortunate circumstances make vital faith in God probable is utterly unsupported by history. Hardly an outstanding champion of faith who has left an indelible impress on our spiritual life can anywhere be found, who has not won their faith and confirmed it in the face of trouble. What is true of individuals is true of generations. The days of Israel's triumphant faith did not come in Solomon's reign, when wealth was plentiful and national ambitions ran high. The great prophets and the great psalms stand out against the dark background of the Exile and its consequences.

"Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord! Awake as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Are You not the arm that cut Rahab apart, and wounded the serpent? Are You not the One who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep; that made the depths of the sea a road for the redeemed to cross over? So the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing, with everlasting joy on their heads. They shall obtain joy and gladness; sorrow and sighing shall flee away. I, even I, am He who comforts you. Who are you that you should be afraid of a man who will die, and of the son of a man who will be made like grass? And you forget the Lord your Maker, who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth; you have feared continually every day because of the fury of the oppressor, when he has prepared to destroy. And where is the fury of the oppressor? The captive exile hastens, that he may be loosed, that he should not die in the pit, and that his bread should not fail. But I am the Lord your God, who divided the sea whose waves roared — the Lord of hosts is His name. And I have put My words in your mouth; I have covered you with the shadow of My hand, that I may plant the heavens, lay the foundations of the earth, and say to Zion, 'You are My people.'" —Isaiah 51:9–16 (NKJV)

That is a voice out of the Exile. Such great believers, whose faith shone brightest when the night was darkest, have not pretended to know the explanation of suffering in God's world. But they have had insight to see a little and trust for the rest. Stevenson has expressed their faith: "If I from my spy-hole, looking with purblind eyes upon a least part of a fraction of the universe, yet perceive in my own destiny some broken evidences of a plan, and some signals of an overruling goodness; shall I then be so mad as to complain that all cannot be deciphered? Shall I not rather wonder, with infinite and grateful surprise, that in so vast a scheme I seem to have been able to read, however little, and that little was encouraging to faith?"

We thank You, O God, that You ride upon the cloud, and govern the storm. All that to us is dark is light to You. The night shines as the day. All that which seems to us irregular and ungoverned, is held in Your hand, even as the steed by the rein. From age to age You control the long procession of events, discerning the end from the beginning; and all the wild mixture, all the confusion, all the sorrow and the suffering, is discerned of You. As is the palette to the color, as is violence to development in strength, as is the crushing of the grape to the wine, so in Your sight all things are beneficent that to us are most confusing and seemingly conflicting and threatening. Sorrow and pain and disaster are woven in the loom of God; and in the end we, too, shall be permitted to discern the fair pattern, and understand how that which brought tears here shall bring righteousness there.

O, how good it is to trust You, and to believe that You are wise, and that You are full of compassion, as You carry on Your great work of love and benevolence, sympathizing with all who suffer on the way, and gathering them at last with an exceeding great salvation! We trust You, not because we understand You, but because in many things You have taught us where we should have been afraid to trust. We have crossed many a gulf and many a roaring stream upon the bridge of faith, and have exulted to find ourselves safe landed, and have learned to trust You, as a child a parent, as a passenger the master of a ship, not because we know, but because You know. Amen. —Henry Ward Beecher.

Sixth Week, Seventh Day

"Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock. But everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall." —Matthew 7:24–27 (NKJV)

An important fact is here asserted by the Master, which is commonly obscured in the commentaries. He says that no matter whether a person's life be built on sand or on rock, the blasts of adversity will still come; on both houses alike "the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew." The Master repeatedly affirmed that trouble comes without necessary reference to character, that while we may always argue that sin causes suffering, we never can confidently argue that suffering comes from sin (Luke 13:4; John 9:1–3). Folks needlessly and unscripturally harass their souls when they suppose that some special trouble must have befallen them because of some special sin. The book of Job was written to disprove that, and as for the Master, He distinctly says that the person of faith with their house on a rock faces the same storm that wrecks the faithless. The difference is not in the adversity, but in the adversity's effect. No more important question faces any soul than this: seeing that trouble is an unavoidable portion of every life, good or bad, what am I to do with it? Says Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Did you ever happen to see that most soft-spoken and velvet-handed steam-engine at the Mint? The smooth piston slides backward and forward as a lady might slip her delicate finger in and out of a ring. The engine lays one of its fingers calmly, but firmly, upon a bit of metal; it is a coin now, and will remember that touch, and tell a new race about it, when the date upon it is crusted over with twenty centuries. So it is that a great silent-moving misery puts a new stamp on us in an hour or a moment — as sharp an impression as if it had taken half a lifetime to engrave it." The only flaw in that simile is that the coin cannot decide what impression shall be made. But we can. Rebellion, despair, bitterness, or triumphant faith — we can say which impression adversity shall leave upon us.

O God of our life, whom we dimly apprehend and never can comprehend, to whom nevertheless we justly ascribe all goodness as well as all greatness; as a father teaches his children, so teach us, Lord, truer thoughts of You. Teach us to aspire, so far as we may lawfully aspire, to a knowledge of You. You are not only a God to be honored in times of rest and ease, You are also the Refuge of the distressed, the Comforter of the afflicted, the Healer of the contrite, and the Support of the unstable. As we sympathize with those who are sorely smitten by calamity, wounded by sudden accident, wrecked in the midst of security, so must we believe that Your mighty all-embracing heart sympathizes. Pitier of the orphan, God of the widow, cause us to share Your pity and become Your messengers of tenderness in our small measure. Be the Stay of all in life and death. Teach all to know and trust You, give us a portion here and everywhere with Your saints; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. —Francis W. Newman, 1805.

Comment for the Week

I

Few who have sincerely tried to believe in God's goodness and who have lived long enough to face the harrowing facts of human wretchedness will doubt what obstacle most hampers faith. The major difficulty which perplexes many Christians, when they try to reconcile God's love with their experience, is not belief's irrationality but life's injustice. According to the Psalmist, "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God'" (Psalm 14:1 NKJV). But the fool is not the only one who has said that. He said it, jeering; he announced it in derision; he did not want God, and contemptuous denial was a joy. It was the temper of his negation that made him a fool. But many hearts, in tones far different from his, have said, "There is no God." Parents cry it brokenheartedly beside the graves of children; the diseased cry it, suffering from keener agony than they can bear; fathers cry it when their battle against poverty has failed and their children plead in vain for bread; and people who care about their kind say it as they watch the anguish with which war, drunkenness, lust, disease, and poverty afflict the race. No person of moral insight will call such folk fools. The wretchedness and squalor, the misery and sin which rest upon so much of humankind are a notorious difficulty in the way of faith.

In dealing with this problem two short cuts are often tried, and by them some minds endeavor to evade the issue which faith ought to meet. Some minimize the suffering which creation cost and which people and animals are now enduring. We must grant that when we read the experience of animals in terms of our own life, we always exaggerate their pain. Animals never suffer as we do; their misery is not compounded by our mental agonies of regret and fear; and even their physical wretchedness is as much lower in intensity as their nerves are less exquisitely tuned. Darwin, who surely did not underestimate the struggle for existence, said in a letter, "According to my judgment, happiness decidedly prevails. All sentient beings have been formed so as to enjoy, as a general rule, happiness." We must grant also that our practical attitude toward life gives the lie to pessimism. Only the suicides are the logical pessimists, and all the rest of us, most with good heart and multitudes with jubilant enthusiasm, do actually cling to life. Indeed, all normal people discover that, within limits, their very hardships are a condition of their happiness and do not so much abate their love of life as they add zest and tang. We must grant further that suffering should be measured not by quantity, but by intensity. One sensitive person enduring bereavement, poverty, or disease represents all the suffering that ever has been or ever can be felt. To speak of limitless suffering, therefore, is false. There is no more wretchedness anywhere nor in all the world together, than each one can know in their own person.

When all this, however, has been granted, the facts of the world's misery are staggering. Modern science has given terrific sweep and harrowing detail to Paul's assertion, "For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now" (Romans 8:22 NKJV). Let one whose insight into misery's meanings is quickened by even a little imagination, try to sum up the agony of drunkards' homes, of bereaved families, of hospitals, insane asylums, jails, and prisons, of war with its unmentionable horrors — its blinded, deafened, maddened, violated — and no small palliatives can solve the problem. Rather one understands the picture which James Russell Lowell said he saw years ago in Belgium: an angel holding back the Creator and saying, "If about to make such a world, stay thine hand."

Another short cut by which some endeavor to simplify the problem and content their thought is to lift responsibility for life's wretchedness from God's shoulders and to put it upon ours. Were our sin no factor in the world, some say, life's miseries would cease; all the anguish of our earthly lot stands not to God's responsibility but to our shame. But the sufferings of God's creatures did not begin with humanity's arrival, and the pain of creation before we sinned is a longer story than earth's misery since. Let Romanes picture the scene: "Some hundred of millions of years ago, some millions of millions of animals must be supposed to have become sentient. Since that time till the present, there must have been millions and millions of generations of millions and millions of individuals. And throughout all this period of incalculable duration, this inconceivable host of sentient organizations have been in a state of unceasing battle, dread, ravin, pain. Looking to the outcome, we find that more than one-half of the species which have survived the ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life, feasting on higher and sentient forms, we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers molded for torture — everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in deaths of cruel torture." Are we responsible for that? For cold that freezes God's living creatures, for lightning that kills them, for volcanoes that burn them, for typhoons that crush them — are we responsible? By no such easy evasion may we escape the problem which faith must meet. "In sober truth," as John Stuart Mill exclaimed, "nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are Nature's everyday performances." Who can avoid seeing the patent contrast between the Father of Jesus and the Creator of such a world? "The power that launches earthquakes and arms cuttlefish," said one perplexed believer, "has but a meager relationship to the power that blesses infants and forgives enemies."

II

Could we hold this problem at arm's length, discussing it in speculative moods when we grow curious about the makeup of the universe, our case would be more simple. But of all life's problems, this most certainly — sometimes creeping, sometimes crashing — invades our private lives. Everyone has a date with adversity which must be kept and which adversity does not forget. One notes the evidence of this in every normally maturing life. As children we wanted happiness and were impatient, lacking it. Our cups of pleasure easily brimmed and overflowed. A Christmas tree or a birthday party — and our hearts were like sun-parlors on cloudless days with all the windows open to the light! But the time comes to all when happiness like this is not our problem; we recognize that it is gone; our Edens are behind us with flaming angels at the gate. We have had friends and lost them and something has gone from our hearts that does not return; we have won successes which we do not estimate as highly in possession as we did in dreams, and it may be have lost what little we achieved; we have sinned, and though forgiven, the scars are still upon us; we have been weathered by the rains and floods and winds. Happiness in the old fashion we no longer seek. We want peace, the power to possess our souls in patience and to do our work. We want joy, which is a profound and spiritually begotten grace as happiness is not. This maturity which so has faced the tragic aspects of our human life is not less desirable than childhood; it may be richer, fuller, steadier. We may think of it as Wordsworth did about the English landscape — that not for all the sunny skies of Italy would he give up the mists that spiritualize the English hills. But when trouble comes, life faces a new set of problems that childhood little knew. We have joined the human procession that moves out into the inevitable need of comfort and fortitude.

The decisive crisis in many lives concerns the attitude which this experience evokes. Some are led by it more deeply into the meanings of religion. The Bible grows in their apprehension with the enlarging of their life; new passages become radiant as, in a great landscape, hills and valleys lately unillumined catch the rays of the rising sun. At first the human friendliness of Jesus is most real, and the Bible's stories of adventure for God's cause; then knightly calls to character and service become luminous; but soon or late another kind of passage grows meaningful: "Now may our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, and our God and Father, who has loved us and given us everlasting consolation and good hope by grace, comfort your hearts and establish you" (2 Thessalonians 2:16–17 NKJV). Others, so far from being led by adversity into the deeper meanings of faith, renounce faith altogether, and fling themselves into open rebellion against life and any God who may be responsible for its tragedy. They may not dare to say what James Thomson did, but they think it —

Many, however, are not by adversity made more sure of God, nor are they driven into rebellion against Him. They are perplexed. It had been so much easier, in the sheltered and innocent idealism of their youth, to believe in God than it is now. As children they looked on life as they might have listened to Mozart's music, ravished with unqualified delight; but now they know that Mozart died in abject poverty, that the coffin which his wife could not buy was donated by charity, that as the hearse went to the grave the driver loudly damned the dead because no drink money had been given him, and that to this day no one knows where Mozart's body lies. Maturity has to deal with so much more tragic facts than youth can ever know. With all the philosophy that our wit can supply, the wisest find themselves saying what Emerson did, two years after his son's death: "I have had no experience, no progress to put me into better intelligence with my calamity than when it was new." And in this inevitable wrestling with adversity, our cry is not simply for more courage. We might easily steady our hearts to endure and overcome, were only one question's answer clear — is there any sense in life's suffering? The one unsupportable thought is that all life's pain and hardship is meaningless and futile, that it has no worthy origin, serves no high purpose, that in misery we are the sport of forces that have no consciousness of what they do, no meaning in it and no care. Such folk want to believe in God, but — can they?

III

Two preliminary facts about Christianity's relationship with our problem may help to clarify our thought. The doubt sometimes obtrudes itself on minds perplexed about life's tragedies that the Christian's faith in a God of love is an idealistic dream. Such faiths as the Fatherhood of God have come to us, they think, in happy hours when calamity was absent or forgotten; they are the fruition of our fortunate days. And born thus of a view of life from which the miseries of humanity had been shut out, this happy, ideal faith comes back to painful realities with a shock which it cannot sustain. But is Christian faith thus the child of our happy days? Rather the very symbol of Christianity is the Cross. Our faith took its rise in one of history's most appalling tragedies, and the Gospel of a loving God, so far from being an ideal dream, conceived apart from life's forbidding facts, has all these centuries been intertwined with the public brutality of a crucifixion. Every emphasis of the Christian's faith has the mark of the Cross upon it. Jesus had said in words that God was love, but it was at Calvary that the words took fire: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son" (John 3:16 NKJV). Jesus had preached the divine forgiveness, but on Golgotha the message grew imperative: "God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8 NKJV). Jesus had put into parables the individual care of the Father for every child, but it was the Cross that drove the great faith home: Christ tasted "death for everyone" (Hebrews 2:9 NKJV). Nothing in Christian faith has escaped the formative influence of the Tragedy. The last thing to be said about the Gospel is that it is a beautiful child-like dream which has not faced the facts of suffering. In the New Testament are all the miseries on which those who deny God's love count for support. We are at home there with suffering people: "they were stoned, they were sawn in two, were tempted, were slain with the sword. They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented — of whom the world was not worthy — wandering in deserts and mountains, in dens and caves of the earth" (Hebrews 11:37–38 NKJV). The people with whom Christianity began were not strangers to such trouble, so that some modern need remind their innocent and dreaming faith that life is filled with mysterious adversity. Christianity was suckled on adversity; it was cradled in pain. At the heart of its Book and its Gospel is a Good Man crowned with thorns, nailed to a cross, with a spear wound in His side.

Nor have the great affirmations of faith in God's fatherhood ever been associated with people of ease in fortunate circumstance. The voice that cried "Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit" (Luke 23:46 NKJV) spoke in agonizing pain. And through history one finds those words best spoken with a cross for a background. Thomas á Becket said them, martyred in his own cathedral; John Huss said them, going to the stake at Constance; George Wishart said them, roasted at the foot of the sea-tower of St. Andrews. Christian faith is not a dream that came in hours when human trouble had been forgotten; it has furnished from the beginning an interpretation of human trouble and an attitude in meeting it that has made people "more than conquerors."

The second preliminary fact is this: Christianity has never pretended to supply a theoretical explanation of why suffering had to be. This seeming lack has excellent reason, for such an explanation, if it be complete, is essentially beyond the reach of any finite mind. The most comprehensive question ever asked, some philosopher has said, was put by a child. "Why was there ever anything at all?" No finite mind can answer that. And next in comprehensiveness, and in penetration to the very pith of creation's meaning, is this query, "Why, if something had to be, was it made as it is?" One must be God to fully answer that, or to comprehend the answer, could it be written down. To expect therefore, from Christianity or from any other source a theoretical explanation that will plumb the depths of the mystery of suffering is to cry for the essentially impossible. So Carlyle says with typical vividness: "To the minnow every cranny and pebble, and quality and accident of its little native creek may have become familiar; but does the minnow understand the Ocean Tides and periodic Currents, the Trade-winds, and Monsoons, and Moon's Eclipses; by all which the condition of its little Creek is regulated, and may, from time to time (un-miraculously enough), be quite overset and reversed? Such a minnow is Man; his Creek this Planet Earth; his Ocean the immeasurable All; his Monsoons and periodic Currents the mysterious Course of Providence through Aeons of Aeons."

So little is this inability of ours to know all that we wish about the world a cause for regret, that it ought to be an occasion of positive rejoicing. If we could understand the universe through and through, how small and meager the universe would have to be! The fact is that we cannot understand anything through and through. If one is disheartened because the heart of Providence cannot be pierced and all its secrets known, let that person try their hand upon a pebble and see how much better they will fare. What is a pebble? If one defines it roughly as granite one must ask what granite is; if that be defined in terms of chemical properties, one must ask what they are; if they be defined as ultimate forms of matter, one must inquire what matter is; and then one will be told that matter is a "mode of motion," or will be assured by a more candid scientist, like Professor Tait, that "we do not know and are probably incapable of discovering what matter is." No one ever solves the innermost problems of a stone, but what can be done with stones our engineering feats are evidence.

If, therefore, we recognize at the beginning that the question why suffering had to be is an ultimate problem, essentially insoluble by finite minds, we need not be dismayed. Two opposing mysteries are in the world — goodness and evil. If we deny God, then goodness is a mystery, for no one has ever yet suggested how spiritual life could rise out of an unspiritual source, how souls could come from dust. If we affirm God, then evil is a mystery, for why, we ask, should love create a world with so much pain and sin? Our task is not to solve insoluble problems; it is to balance these alternatives — no God and the mystery of our spiritual life, against God and the mystery of evil. Such a comparison is not altogether beyond our powers, nor are weighty considerations lacking to affect our choice.

IV

For one thing, we may well inquire, when we complain of this world's misery, what sort of world we are seeking in its place. Are we asking for a perfectly happy world? But happiness, at its deepest and its best, is not the portion of a cushioned life which never struggled, overpassed obstacles, bore hardship, or adventured in sacrifice for costly aims. A heart of joy is never found in luxuriously coddled lives, but in people who achieve and dare, who have tried their powers against antagonisms, who have met even sickness and bereavement and have tempered their souls in fire. Joy is begotten not chiefly from the impression of happy circumstance, but from the expression of overcoming power. Were we set upon making a happy world, therefore, we could not leave struggle out nor make adversity impossible. The unhappiest world conceivable would be a world with nothing hard to do, no conflicts to wage for ends worth while; a world where courage was not needed and sacrifice was a superfluity. Beside such an inane lotos-land of tranquil ease this present world with all its suffering is a paradise. People in fact find joy where in philosophy we might not look for it. Said MacMillan, after a terrific twelve-month with Peary on the Arctic continent: "This has been the greatest year of my life."

The impossibility of imagining a worth-while world from which adversity had all been banished is even more evident when one grows ill-content to think of happiness as the goal of life. That we should be merely happy is not an adequate end of the creative purpose for us, or of our purpose for ourselves. In our best hours we acknowledge this in the way we handle trouble. However much in doubt we may be about the theory of suffering, we know infallibly how suffering practically should be met. To be rebellious, cursing fate and hating life; to pity oneself, nursing one's hurts in morbid self-commiseration — the ignobility of such dealing with calamity we indubitably know. Even where we fall feebly short of the ideal, we have no question what the ideal is. When in biography or among our friends we see folk face crushing trouble, not embittered by it, made cynical, or thrust into despair, but hallowed, sweetened, illumined, and empowered, we are aware that noble characters do not alone bear trouble; they use it. As people at first faced electricity in dread, conceiving toward it no attitude beyond building lightning-rods to ward away its stroke, but now with greater understanding harness it to do their will, so people, as they grow wise and strong, deal with their suffering. They make it the minister of character; they set it to build in them what nothing save adversity can ever build — patience, courage, sympathy, and power. They even choose it in vicarious sacrifice for the good of others, and by it save the world from evils that nothing save someone's suffering could cure. They act as though character, not happiness, were the end of life. And when they are at their best they do this not with stoic intrepidity, as though trouble's usefulness were but their fancy, but joyfully, as though a good purpose in the world included trouble, even though not intending it. So Robert Louis Stevenson, facing death, writes to a friend about an old woman whose ventriloquism had frightened the natives of Vailima, "All the old women in the world might talk with their mouths shut and not frighten you or me, but there are plenty of other things that frighten us badly. And if we only knew about them, perhaps we should find them no more worthy to be feared than an old woman talking with her mouth shut. And the names of some of these things are Death and Pain and Sorrow."

Whatever, then, may be our theoretical difficulty about suffering, this truth is clear: when we are at our best we practically deal with suffering as though moral quality were the goal of life. We use adversity, as though discipline were its purpose and good its end. It is worth noting that the only theory which fully fits this noblest attitude toward trouble is Christianity. People may think God a devil, as James Thomson sang, and yet may be practically brave and cheerful, but their theory does not fit their life. People may believe in no God and no purpose in the world, and yet may face adversity with courage and hope, but their spirit belies their philosophy. When we are at our best in hardship we act as though the Christian faith in God were true, as though moral quality were the purpose of creation.

If now, we really want a world in which character is the end and aim — and no other world is worth God's making — we obviously may not demand the abolition of adversity. If one imagines a life from its beginning lapped in ease and utterly ignorant what words like hardship, sorrow, and calamity imply, one must imagine a life lacking every virtue that makes human nature admirable. Character grows on struggle; without the overcoming of obstacles great quality in character is unthinkable. Whoever has handled well any calamitous event possesses resources, insights, wise attitudes, qualities of sympathy and power that by no other road could have come to them. For all our complaints against life's misery, therefore, and for all our inability to understand it in detail, who would not hesitate, foreseeing the consequence, to take adversity away from us? Whoever banishes hardship banishes hardihood; and out of the same door with Calamity walk Courage, Fortitude, Triumphant Faith, and Sacrificial Love. If we abolish the cross in the world, we make impossible the Christ in humanity. It becomes more clear the more one ponders it, that while this is often a hard world in which to be happy, to people of insight and faith it may be a great world in which to build character.

V

Before too confidently, however, we accept this conclusion, there is one objection to be heard. So far is the world from being absolved from cruelty, on the plea of moral purpose, one may say, that its injustice is the very crux of its offense. See how negligent of justice the process of creation is! Its volcanoes and typhoons slay good and bad alike, its plagues are utterly indifferent to character; and in the human world which it embosoms some drunken Caesar sits upon the throne while Christ hangs on the cross. Who for a single day can watch the gross inequities of life, where good people so often suffer and bad people go free, and still think that the world has moral purpose in it? The Bible itself is burdened with complaint against the seeming senselessness and injustice of God. Moses cries: "Lord, why have You brought trouble on this people? ... You have not delivered Your people at all" (Exodus 5:22–23 NKJV); Elijah laments, "O Lord my God, have You also brought tragedy on the widow with whom I lodge, by killing her son?" (1 Kings 17:20 NKJV); Habakkuk complains, "Why do You look on those who deal treacherously, and hold Your tongue when the wicked devours a person more righteous than he?" (Habakkuk 1:13 NKJV); and Job protests, "Although You know that I am not wicked, ... yet You would destroy me" (Job 10:7–8 NKJV). Our loss of faith springs often from this utter disparity between desert and fortune. The time comes to almost everyone when they look on, indignant, desperate, at some gross horror uninterrupted, some innocent victim treated cruelly. They understand Carlyle's impatient cry, "God sits in heaven and does nothing!"

Natural as is this attitude, and unjust as many of life's tragic troubles are, we should at least see this: we must not demand that goodness straightway receive its pay and wrong its punishment. We may not ask that every virtuous deed be at once rewarded by proportionate happiness and every sin be immediately punished by proportionate pain. That, some might suppose, would put justice into life. But whatever it might put into life, such an arrangement obviously would take out character. The people whose moral quality we most highly honor were not paid for their goodness on Saturday night and did not expect to be. They chose their course for righteousness' sake alone, although they knew what crowns of thorns, what scornful crowds about their cross might end the journey. They did not drive close bargains with their fate, demanding insurance against trouble as the price of goodness. They chose the honorable deed for honor's sake; they chose it the more scrupulously, the more pleasure was offered for dishonor; their tone in the face of threatened suffering was like Milne's, Scotland's last martyr: "I will not recant the truth, for I am corn and no chaff; and I will not be blown away with the wind nor burst with the flail, but I will abide both."

Everyone is instinctively aware and by their admiration makes it known, that the kind of character which chooses right, willing to suffer for it, is our noblest quality. The words in which such character has found utterance are our spiritual battle cries. Esther, going before the King, saying, "If I perish, I perish" (Esther 4:16 NKJV); the three Hebrews, facing the fiery furnace saying, "Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us from your hand, O king. But if not, let it be known to you, O king, that we do not serve your gods" (Daniel 3:17–18 NKJV); Peter and the apostles, facing the angry Council, saying, "We ought to obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29 NKJV); Anaxarchus, the martyr, crying, "Beat on at the case of Anaxarchus; Anaxarchus himself you cannot touch"; Luther, defying the Emperor, "Here stand I; I can do no other" — most words are easily dispensable, but no words like these can we afford to spare. They are our best. And this sort of goodness has been possible, because God had not made the world as our complaints sometimes would have it. For such character, a system where goodness costs is absolutely necessary. A world where goodness was paid cash in pleasant circumstance would have no such character to show. Right and wrong for their own sakes would be impossible; only prudence and imprudence for happiness' sake could there exist. Out of the same door with the seeming injustice of life goes the possibility of our noblest quality — our goodness "in scorn of consequence." Many special calamities no one on earth can hope to understand. But when one has granted that fitness to grow character is the only worthy test of creation, it evidently is not so simple as at first it seemed to improve the fundamental structure of the world.

VI

Indeed, when one in imagination assumes the task of omnipotence and endeavors to construct a universe that shall be fitted for the growth of character, there can be little hesitation concerning certain elements which must be there. A system of regular law would have to be the basis of that world, for only in a law-abiding universe could obedience be taught. If the stars and planets behaved "like swarms of flies" and nothing could be relied upon to act twice in the same way, character and intelligence alike would be impossible. In this new world, remolded, "nearer to our heart's desire," progress also would be a necessity. A stagnant world cannot grow character. There must be real work to do, aims to achieve; there must be imperfections to overpass and wrongs to right. Only in a system where the present situation is a point of departure and a better situation is a possibility, where ideal and hope, courage and sacrifice are indispensable can character grow. In this improved world of our dreams, free-will in some measure must be granted us. If character is to be real, we must not in our choice between right and wrong be as Spinoza pictured, a stone hurled through the air, which thinks that it is flying; we must have some control of conduct, some genuine, though limited, power of choice. And in this universe which we are planning for character's sake, individuals could not stand separate and unrelated; they must be woven into a community. Love which is the crown of character, lacking this, would be impossible. What happens to one must happen to all; good and ill alike must be contagious in a society where we are "members one of another."

No one of these four elements could be omitted from a world whose test was its adaptability for character. People with genuine power of choice, fused into a fellowship of social life, living in a law-abiding and progressive world — on no other terms imaginable could character be possible. Yet these four things contain all the sources of our misery. Physical law — what tragic issues its stern, unbending course brings with terrific incidence on us! Progress — how obviously it implies conditions imperfect, wrong, through which we have to struggle toward the best! Free-will — what a nightmare of horror our misuse of it has caused since sin began! Social fellowship — how surely the innocent must suffer with the guilty, how impossible for any person to bear the consequence of their own sin alone! We may not see why these general conditions should involve the particular calamities which we bewail, but even our finite minds can see thus far into the mystery of suffering: all our trouble springs from four basic factors in the universe, without any one of which, great character would be impossible.

While, therefore, if one deny God, the mystery of goodness lacks both sense and solution; one may affirm God and find the mystery of evil, mysterious still but suffused with light. God is working out a spiritual purpose here by means without which no spiritual purpose is conceivable. Fundamentally creation is good. We misuse it, we fail to understand its meaning and to appropriate its discipline, and impatient because the eternal purpose is not timed by our small clocks, we have to confess with Theodore Parker, "The trouble seems to be that God is not in a hurry and I am." In hours of insight, however, we perceive how little our complaints will stand the test of dispassionate thought. Our miseries are not God's inflictions on us as individuals, so that we may judge His character and His thought of us by this special favor or by that particular calamity. The most careless thinker feels the poor philosophy of Lord Londonderry's petulant entry in his journal: "Here I learned that Almighty God, for reasons best known to himself, had been pleased to burn down my house in the county of Durham." One must escape such narrow egoism to understand the purposes of God; one must rise to look on a creation, with character at all costs for its aim, and countless ages for its settling. In the making of this world God has limited Himself; He cannot lightly do what He will. He has limited Himself in creating a law-abiding system where His children must learn obedience without special exemptions; in ordaining a progressive system where what is is the frontier from which we seek what ought to be; in giving us the power to choose right, with its inevitable corollary, the power to choose wrong; in weaving us into a communal fellowship where none can escape the contagious life of all. What Martineau said of the first of these is true in spirit of them all: "The universality of law is God's eternal act of self limitation or abstinence from the movements of free affection, for the sake of a constancy that shall never falter or deceive."

When once we have risen to the vision of so splendid a purpose in so great a world, we rejoice in the outlook. Granted that now we see in a mirror darkly, that many a cruel event in human life perplexes still — we have seen enough to give solid standing to our faith. What if an insect, someone has suggested, were born just after a thunderstorm began and died just before it stopped — how dark would be its picture of creation! But we who span a longer period of time, are not so obsessed by thunderstorms, although we may not like them. They have their place and serve their purpose; we see them in a broader perspective than an insect knows and on sultry days we even crave their coming. A broken doll is to a child a cruel tragedy, but to the father watching the child's struggle to accept the accident, to make the best of it and to come off conqueror, the event is not utterly undesirable. He is not glad at the child's suffering, but with his horizons he sees in it factors which she does not see. So God's horizons infinitely overpass our narrow outlooks. There is something more than whimsy in the theologian's saying, which President King reports, that an insect crawling up a column of the Parthenon, with difficulty and pain negotiating passage about a pore in the stone, is as well qualified to judge of the architecture of the Parthenon, as we of the infinitude of God's plans. Seeing as much as we have seen of sense and purpose in the structure of creation, we have seen all that our finite minds with small horizons could have hoped. We have gained ample justification for the attitude toward suffering which Dolly Winthrop in Silas Marner has immortalized: "Eh, there's trouble i' this world, and there's things as we can niver make out the rights on. And all as we've got to do is to trusten, Master Marner — to do the right thing as far as we know and to trusten. For if us, as knows so little, can see a bit o' good and rights, we may be sure as there's a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know — I feel it i' my own inside as it must be so."

VII

We may not truthfully leave our subject in such a case that faith's concern with human misery will seem to lie merely in giving adversity an explanation. Faith is concerned not alone to explain misery but to heal it. For while it is impossible without hardship to develop character, there are woeful calamities on earth that do not help our moral quality; they crush and mutilate it; they are barbarous intruders on the plan of God and they have no business in His world. Some ills are such that no theory can reconcile them with the love of God and no one ought to desire such reconciliation; in the love of God they ought to be abolished. Slavery must be a possibility in a world where we are free; but God's goodness was not chiefly vindicated by such a theory of explanation. It was chiefly vindicated by slavery's abolishment. The liquor traffic and war, needless poverty in a world so rich, avoidable diseases that science can overcome — how long a list of woes there is that faith should not so much explain as banish! When some ills like drunkenness and war and economic injustice are thrust against our faith, and people ask that the goodness of God be reconciled with these, faith's first answer should be not speculation but action. Such woes, so far from being capable of reconciliation with God's goodness, are irreconcilable with a decent world. God does not want to be reconciled with them; He hates them "with a perfect hatred." We may not make ourselves patient with them by any theory of their necessity. They are not necessary; they are perversions of human life; and the best defense of faith is their annihilation.

Indeed, a person who, rebellious in complaint, has clamorously asked an explanation of life's ills as the price of faith in God, may well in shame consider God's real saints. When things were at their worst, when wrong was conqueror and evils that seemed blatantly to deny the love of God were in the saddle, these spiritual soldiers went out to fight. The winds of ill that blow out our flickering faith made their religion blaze — a pillar of fire in the night. The more evil they faced, the more religion they produced to answer it. They were the real believers, who "through faith subdued kingdoms, worked righteousness, obtained promises" (Hebrews 11:33 NKJV). In comparison with such, it is obviously paltry business to drive a bargain with God that if all goes well we will believe in Him, but if things look dark, then faith must go.

Many a person, therefore, who is no philosopher can be a great defender of the faith. They may not weave arguments to prove that such a world as this in its fundamental structure is fitted to a moral purpose. But they can join the battle to banish from the world those ills that have no business here and that God hates. They can help produce that final defense of the Christian faith — a world where it is easier to believe in God.