The re-enthronement of faith is the need of the hour. Science we have, and scholarship: but hesitancy and doubt rule the scientific spirit, and timidity is the vice of the scholar. The soldier who hesitates and doubts and grows timid will not win a single battle. His must be the prophetic spirit of faith which "laughs at impossibilities, and cries, It shall be done." But the Church militant has been ridiculed out of the warrior spirit, and has laid aside its mightiest weapon, faith; and as to leadership, many are pointing to science and scholarship and crying, "These be thy gods, O Israel!" Science and scholarship have their place and their power, but they are not the Christian's mightiest weapons. Learning cannot take the place of the inspiration of faith; statistics can never teach morals as forcibly as "Thus saith the Lord." More than this: statistics can never overturn the "Thou shalt not" of an Almighty God. David has essayed to go forth to meet Goliath, well loaded down with Saul's armour, and David will meet with the defeat he deserves if he does not repent of the folly of matching such weapons against one who defies the armies of the living God. The warfare is a spiritual not a carnal one. What wonder that with such weapons courage has failed, the citadel is imperilled, and "counsels of despair" are urged. But these shall not prevail. That unrepentant soul shall not go unpunished by the wrath of a just God, who enters into complicity with the vice of fornication by consenting to the proposal for its State management. But can this vice ever be actually exterminated? Probably never entirely by human law; but neither can stealing, so far as we are able to judge. The vice of stealing is likely to continue so long as the city of London exists, in spite of the most excellent human laws. Shall we then license stealing? No one who has a purse to be protected would advocate such rash legislation. A conclusive answer to the plea of "a necessary evil" has been already given by our Judge. Looking upon the vices of those about Him, and the inevitable crop of increasing vice, with its attendant misery, to which his people were tending, He cried: "It must needs be that offences come; but," He added, "_woe to that man_ by whom the offence cometh!" And shall we listen to proposals to set aside the sentence of Divine Justice for the tradition of men, and embody in human legislation the teaching, "It must needs be that offences come; but _peace_ to that man by whom the offence cometh"? Let us rather, answer every specious array of misleading statistics, every false doctrine of medicine, every fresh cry of alarm, every blasphemous utterance against Christ's sufficient power to redeem, every infidel attack upon the sanctity of God's holy law, with the inexorable "Thou shalt not" of God's eternal commandment. FOOTNOTES: