one another which, if enough times magnified, would rival any of the dragons of the prime. XV. FAITH FOUNDED UPON A ROCK I Probably that overwhelming calamity, the World War, set more good people adrift upon the sea of religious doubt and skepticism than all the accumulated evils of the past ten centuries. Men were everywhere outspoken in their want of faith in the Providence in which they had so long trusted. I heard of an English clergyman who declared that 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 Justification of God.” But judging from my own experiences 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 beneficent, 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 oblivious 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 period have passed, who have not learned that the calamities of men and of peoples are not the result of the wrath of some offended divinity, but the ups and downs in the long, hard road of human development, and that, in the nature of things, justice is meted out to all men--if not in a day, then in a year, or in a thousand years; if not to the individual, then to his family, or to his race--those who take no account of all these things soon lose their reckoning in times like ours.