But why is it, we are sometimes tempted to ask, that the way of love stirs up strife and bitterness? Does not that outcome of some of our endeavors argue a failure on our part to express the healing spirit? It may be that, of course; but is it not generally because that method is essentially an appeal to conscience, and a conscience stirred, but not completely won, drives its possessor to an extreme of reaction? It was no accident that some of our leading Christian ministers were the most bitter detractors of conscientious objectors during the war. The very existence of the latter was a continual challenge to the consciences of those ministers. They had to maintain their different attitude the more vehemently. As some of our friends remind us, love is not a mushy thing, and it sometimes has to inflict pain. The world is growing old in its sophistication. The developments in scientific research, during the last century especially, have led many to feel that in the ever-growing complexity of the life of the universe and in the ever-widening reaches of our knowledge there is, each decade, less and less place for God in the world and less and less occasion to pay attention to the words of a half-mythical Syrian teacher. But out of that very sophistication has come the reaction that is leading many to question the whole interlocking system of philosophy, science, industry and politics that sums up the universe in terms of material things. It is time, they say, that we began to cut loose from the machine and get down to the human heart that is the one vital thing in the world: "Not kings and lords, but nations! Not crowns and thrones, but men!" To such comes with new and convincing power that which has been hidden from the wise and prudent, the vision that this is still God's world, in which, for all the learned data we have collected, there are still the almost untapped reservoirs of human possibilities awaiting not the test tubes of the scientist or formulas of the mathematician to bring them out, but merely the spirit of redemptive love as we have learned it in Jesus. Richard Roberts has said it rather finely: "The story of Jesus is 'the instance of love without a limit,' the love that will not let me go or give me up, that flings down party-walls and overleaps frontiers, flings wide the gate of friendship to the enemy, the impulse and the energy that creates the sovereign loveliness, the loveliness of a living society of men, purged of enmities and discords and hatreds, living out its manifold and abundant life in the unbroken harmony of unreserving fellowship." If we can have the humility to see that there lies the heart and glory of the world, we can be content to let the wise ones erect their houses of cards as they may, while within the tottering structure we build the eternal Kingdom of God. We can then greet the new day with Alfred Noyes: