"Now we can only approach, in the hope of a day of better things, the great practical and intellectual problems of our times from the standpoint of faith's recovery, for it is only in their relationship to faith they can be viewed intelligently by the Christian. And it will be found that at the root of all our difficulties and all our negligences--so many of them unconscious--and as the cause of our vain expediencies and attempts to justify the corporate spiritual situation, is the absence of vital faith and a _whole_ obedience to which God alone has conditioned results. We need sorely to reconsider what faith really is, and when we have recovered in some measure that knowledge of it in experience, which declared its unspeakable worth in the early Church and in later periods of ecclesiastical history which stand out before all others, we shall look back upon our past distrust of God and His promises with shame and wonderment, and proceed to revise our cataloguing of spiritual values and degrees of sin. For the really destructive thing, _before all others,_ is a weakened faith that compromises in a half obedience to Christ and a search for earthly props. The work of Satan has even been the prompting of distrust of God in the human family, just as the work of redemption means so largely the re-establishing of it in the Person of Jesus Christ. From the first temptation of man to the present moment, all the forces of evil have concentrated upon breaking man's trust in God and His promises; every sin has had that as its ultimate end, and every disaster, ill and trial, in the world and individual life, is subtly presented by the enemy of God and man (knowing our haziness of vision), so as to place the appearances against the Creator in a blind disregard for the created; just as in the life of the Incarnate Son all the great power of the forces of darkness were brought to bear unsuccessfully upon the snapping of His faith in His Father--from the time He was tempted to believe Himself forgotten, when hungering and physically reduced in the wilderness after His long fast, until the dreadful cry of dereliction from the Cross at the very end.