The nations have mocked at God and disobeyed His laws. It is the old story over again. “The earth was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.” Christ said, “Why call ye Me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?” Christianity is based on two great laws--love to God and love to one’s neighbour; can any one say that modern civilisation fulfils these demands? We have only to note the fearful corruption in Church and State, in every phase of politics and business, and the unspeakable vices which pollute so-called “society,” and poison our literature and art, to realise that the “cities of the plain” were no whit worse than our own, and merit no less than they a rain of fire. But Christianity itself, as taught by Christ, towers above all “failure,” despite the apathy and hypocrisy of thousands of its professing priests, who in many instances are as selfish and flagrant blasphemers as the worst atheist and iconoclast in _un_christianised and brutalised Germany. Without that heavenly faith which helps us towards the attainment and reverence of the Divine in all things, what has Germany become? More cruel and callous, more lost to every sense of decency and honour than the savages of prehistoric times, she is sowing the wind and will reap the whirlwind. But let us take care that we do not join her in her rush towards annihilation. Political shams and treacherous intrigues would drag us thither--“Unfaith in aught is want of faith in all.” If a weak section of men and women fail to find their souls, Christianity itself has not “failed,” nor will it fail; because it is the divine expression of the unconquerable Spirit of Truth. The most brilliant House of Lies ever built by man’s careful stupidity falls into dust at the lightest breath of a truth based on eternal equities. The microbes in a rotting cheese may deny the existence of the sun because they do not see it, and may ask, “Has the daylight failed?” But the sun pursues its glorious course, lightening the visible universe. So it is with Christianity. And those who presume to ask “Has it failed?” are but the microbes in the rotting cheese. SNOOKS’S OPINION Snooks is one of those entertaining persons who makes a point of giving an “opinion” on everything. From the Almighty downwards he has what he calls a “calm common-sense view” on all subjects in heaven or on earth, and his chief object in life is to get that “calm, common-sense view” on all to the front, so that the poor, purblind, uneducated public who seldom have any time to indulge in “views,” and still less chance to express them, may understand that there yet exists one truly great man of sane and sober judgment--namely, SNOOKS.