"The present crisis in religion" is another phrase which recent discussion has made familiar. That such a crisis exists no one in his senses can doubt. But the phrase is often used in a way which suggests that the "crisis" has no right to exist, that it constitutes a misfortune peculiar to our own time, that it is an unnatural thing, and that religion will never come to its own until the "crisis" has passed away. We find, however, that a "crisis" in religion is no new experience, peculiar to the present day. The only ages of the past when a "crisis" in religion did not exist were the spiritually dead ages. Whenever the spirit of God has breathed upon the souls of men the effect has been to awaken the sense of a great crisis. The Epistles of St Paul are full of it. In the Confessions of St Augustine, written in the fifth century, we see how critical he felt the then passing moment to be. There was a crisis at the Reformation, and at the Renaissance. There was a crisis when printing was invented, and when the Bible was translated. There was a crisis when Whitefield and Wesley were urging the masses to flee from the wrath to come. A more recent example can be found in the writings of Carlyle. Everything that has been said since the Great War about the spiritual bankruptcy of Europe, about the need of religious reconstruction, about a change of heart in nations, and governments and individuals, as the only alternative to a complete disaster, was said by Carlyle three-quarters of a century ago, and said by him with a force and trenchancy not since surpassed. Here, for example, is what he wrote in the year 1850. "In the days that are passing over us, even fools are arrested to ask the meaning of them; few of the generations of men have seen more impressive days. Days of endless calamity, disruption, dislocation, confusion worse confounded.... It is not a small hope that will suffice us, the ruin being clearly ... universal. There must be a new world if there is to be a world at all. That human beings in Europe can ever return to the old sorry routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance therein--this small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of universal death must be days of universal rebirth, if the ruin is not to be total and final. It is a time to make the dullest man consider whence he came and whither he is bound. A veritable New Era to the foolish as well as to the wise" (_Latter-Day Pamphlets_). That was written seventy-two years ago, and when was it truer than to-day? The "religious crisis" is perennial, now taking one form, now another, but always demanding from those who have to face it the utmost of their courage, loyalty and love.