Is there really an all-wise Lord, looking on and listening when you say your evening prayers? How many ears and eyes He must have, when so many people are doing the same thing at the same time--hundreds, thousands, millions--all talking to Him at once--in different languages and about different things! It was the same way about Santa Claus. How could he be bringing so many presents to so many people, all over the world, and delivering them personally, on the same Christmas eve? It would have taken him years to get through with all the houses in New York City alone--without thinking of London and Paris and all the other places. In the past, when such a question came to mind and found expression, the answer was comparatively simple and direct. Religion is a matter of faith, not argument; the ways of the Lord surpass the human understanding: the Bible and the church are the authority, what they teach and ordain is to be accepted and obeyed. To doubt, or question, or disbelieve is the beginning of sin, and the consequences may be terrible. When the individual was trained to the habit of obedience--when the attitude of the spirit within was one of respect and reverence for established authority and established traditions--that was one thing. If mothers and fathers and neighbors and wiser heads everywhere accepted this great mystery unqualifiedly, on faith, as the guiding light of their lives, was it not enough for their sons and daughters to follow their example and do likewise? But in the new generation, as we have seen, the twig has already been bent in a different direction. Before the time comes for the young person to be bothered with thoughts about religion, he or she has already acquired the notion that the example of mother and father does not need to be followed in many things. Some of their ideas and traditions have become antiquated and more or less ridiculous in the light of the new movement. When one begins to make enquiries about this question of the Bible, enough has been said and heard to indicate that certain of its assumptions, at least, will no longer hold water and have been discarded by the ministers, themselves. So, say many of the new generation, when you come down to it, what is there to prove that these religious beliefs may not, after all, be only a legend, something like the one about Santa Claus, evolved in the distant past, kept alive and adhered to, generation after generation, for the same sort of reason? A far greater number find it more convenient to refrain from expressing themselves. They may even go to church, occasionally, and they observe a superficial deference for the established forms of religion. But they are very little concerned in the sayings of the Bible, or the sermons of the ministers; they don't ask, or expect, any help from the Lord--nor do they live in fear of His punishment.