We call these few days that we spend together a spiritual retreat, because it is a time when we try to get away as much as possible from the ordinary occupations of daily life and spend our spare moments in humble prayer and serious consideration of spiritual realities. The things you are going to hear are not new. You have heard them often before, But they are important, because they are the basic truths of your faith, the foundation stones upon which your religion rests, and common sense dictates that we should examine them from time to time in order to make sure that they have not been weakened by the stress and strain of our every day life.
You men and women live in the world and in your business, social wand intellectual lives you are continually rubbing elbows with the spirit of the world which Our Divine Saviour tells us is opposed to and makes war on the spirit of God. You know from your own experience that the spirit of the world has a tendency to rob you of your birth right; that it tends to bring you down to the level of brute creation by destroying everything that i sacred in human nature and in human relationships; that it makes you forget your duties to God. You know, too, that the predominant tendency in the. world to-day to deny the very existence of a personal God, the existence of an immortal soul and the necessity or usefulness of having a religion at all. Not so many years ago a person who did not believe in God or who had no religion at all was something of a social outcast,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.