ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



if the Germans won in the war he would never open 

 his Bible again. Another English parson, with the 

 thought of the war weighing upon him, published a 

 volume of discourses which he called " The Justifi- 

 cation of God." But judging from my own ex- 

 periences with the book, the lay mind will find the 

 grounds for justification as hard a riddle to read as 

 the original one. 



Only a faith founded upon the rock of natural law 

 can weather such a storm as the world passed 

 through in the Great War, but unfortunately such 

 a faith is possible to comparatively few — the 

 faith that the universe is radically good and benefi- 

 cent, and that the evils of life grow upon the same 

 tree with the good, and that the fruits called evil 

 bear only a small proportion to those called good. 

 Persons who do not read the book of nature as a 

 whole, who do not try their faith by the records of 

 the rocks and the everlasting stars, who are obliv- 

 ious to the great law of evolution which has worked 

 out the salvation of man and of all living things, 

 through good and ill report, through delays and 

 sufferings and agonies incalculable, but the issues 

 of which have been unfailing, who do not see the 

 natural universal order working in the fiery ordeal 

 through which all nations during the historic pe- 

 riod have passed, who have not learned that the 

 calamities of men and of peoples are not the re- 

 sult of the wrath of some offended divinity, but the 



310 



