trust in God, I should certainly place none in earthly masters. If I did not believe in a Divine Providence which has ordained this German nation to something good and great, I would at once give up my trade as a statesman, or I would never have gone into the business. Deprive me of this faith, and you deprive me of my fatherland."

These quotations remind us of the utterance of John Quincy Adams, perhaps the most experienced diplomatist of his generation. From youth, as his father's private secretary at foreign courts and important political offices at home, he was familiar with the success of schemes of human ingenuity in statecraft, and as familiar with the occasion of their failure. The great event of Mr. Adams' political life, which he estimated as of more account than his elevation to the Presidency, was the acquisition of Florida during his administration, and largely through his own sagacious conduct of affairs. In his diary we read, "It was, perhaps, one in the morning when I closed the day with ejaculations of fervent gratitude to the Giver of all good. What the consequences may be of this compact this day signed with Spain is known only to the All-wise and Allbeneficent Disposer of events, who has brought it about in a manner utterly unexpected, and by means the most extraordinary and unforeseen.

Let no idle and ungrounded exultation take possession of my mind, as if I could ascribe to my own foresight or exertions any portion of the event. It is the work of an intelligent and all-embracing Cause."

It is sad to have to contrast such sublime and heroic expressions of faith that this is "God's world," and the fine spirituality which feels "God in His world," with the pessimism and cowardice which Mr. Arnold pictures in "Dover Beach":

"The world which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams
So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain:
And we are here as on a darkling plain,
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night."

Do we wonder that skepticism is weak and pusillanimous when confronted with the world's problems? Who would not incline to withdraw from a battlefield “where ignorant armies clash by night"? What mind, created with the instinct of order, will be inspired to even deeply study a world in which he is pre-assured there is "no certitude"? What cheer for philanthropic purpose and sacrifice in a system of things where there is "no help for pain "?

Yet how natural the pessimism of unbelief!

One of the most dismal things that ever ran as black slime from a pen was written by Ernest Renan when he abandoned religious faith. "Since Christianity is not true to me, nothing interests me or appears worth my attention." After reading this one realizes that all the brilliancy of skeptical literature is but the phosphorescent sparkle of dead hearts.

Renan had a peer in literary genius, Frederick W. Robertson. Hear him, "In the midst of a wilderness of shadows, broken and distorted in every way, of one thing I am certainone thing that is real, the life of God in the soul of man. God is seeking us. With the Spirit man finds God. We touch him." The man who wrote this was a great sufferer in body, and through pain could scarcely hold the pen. These bright things were not prosphoresences from a dead heart, nor fire-fly fancies that went out with the utterance. They had in them the glow of sunrise on mountain peaks.

INDEX