adequate to meet the needs of the day. Most of all is this true of
our institutions--the family, the school, the state, our economic and
industrial systems. If the war has taught us anything it is this,
that face to face with the strain of modern life the individual alone
counts for little. Modern war, as we have been reminded again and
again, is not an affair of armies, but of peoples and of civilizations.
And the same is true of the less dramatic, but no less momentous,
competitions of peace. The great word of our day is organization,
and the test of the civilization of the future will be the fitness of its
institutions to respond to the demands which will be made upon
them.

It is not surprising, then, that we should find men turning with
fresh interest to the Christian Church. Here is an institution which
has lasted nearly two thousand years, whose constituency embraces
nearly a third of the human race, which professes to be the teacher
of Europe and America in morals and religion, and which is carry-
ing on an active missionary propaganda among the more distant
peoples who were drawn against their will into the maelstrom of the
Great War. It is an institution which commands vast financial
resources, disposes of an annual revenue mounting into the hundreds
of millions, numbers its paid ministers by the hundreds of thousands
and its voluntary workers by the million, receives state support in
a country like England where the tradition of the state church still
obtains, yet is no less generously sustained in a democratic country
like America where the voluntary gifts of the faithful replace the
taxes of the citizens. It is an institution which touches life at each
of its great crises--birth, marriage, sickness, and death--which is
entrusted with the moral education of childhood during its forma-
tive period, which maintains in its pulpit a forum for the weekly
discussion of questions of morals and religion, which has been, and
still is, the spring of private charity on an unprecedented scale. In
spite of all its faults, the Church is the one social institution touch-
ing men of all races and nations and callings which exists to spread
faith in a good God and to unite men in a world-wide brotherhood.
Here surely is a factor with which any one must, reckon who, faced
by the unexampled tragedy of our own time, asks with soberness
where men are to turn for help in the stupendous task of world
reconstruction.

It is the more natural that men's thoughts should turn to the

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