And so those who to-day have faith in a living and personal Christ must not lose courage, even if they do find the envelope in which that faith was wrapped being torn asunder. This particular envelope may have served its turn. We have this treasure in earthen vessels. We may ask as a matter of intellectual curiosity as to the form in which men expressed their belief some centuries ago, but the vital thing for us is that to-day we shall have such a form as shall be intelligible and arresting for us and our contemporaries. Wherever the Spirit of Christ is quick there will always be the double process in action, the challenging of old forms and the creation of new. The speech in the process may vary from generation to generation, but the process itself is a symptom of life. The desire for change is no evidence of impiety; it may be the setting forth of the prophet. The ages which are the ages of godlessness are those in which there has been no challenging of the accepted thing. In social as in religious life there are always multitudes whose motto is "Leave well alone." The position is a complete begging of the question. Is the situation really "well"? Many to-day in the Old Country sigh for the industrial conditions of forty years ago, when labor was subservient and cheap, and when taxation was low. At that time it never seemed to occur to any one that there was something wrong with a system in which one-third of the population of a great city like Glasgow lived in houses of one room, where women went barefoot throughout the winter months, where the question of the next meal was an insistent one with tens of thousands. Because the system had existed so long, the sufferers under it did not challenge it, while those who profited by it had no sense of the anomaly of a situation which worked comfortably for them. It was not that men were heartless or unbelieving. They were tender in their affections and quick with their charities. But the existence of this condition of great wealth alongside of abject poverty and degradation was regarded with the inevitableness of fate. It existed and therefore it was accepted. It had the sanction of age and was not to be challenged. The public conscience was not awake. There was no vision and the people perished. The last seven years have wrought a mighty change. Apart from any immediate economic issue there has been an alteration in the general attitude toward the question of wages. A community is not stable in its ordering nor is it genuinely prosperous if one main element in its financing is the maintenance of vast industries by labor so cheap as to be always upon the verge of destitution. The economic considerations are not the only ones, nor indeed are they the primary ones. A healthy and contented population is real wealth. A generation ago our cities emptied their filth into the rivers and lakes at their doors, and then used dredges to remove the sludge.