People are falling away from their religious beliefs. In a world of increasing stress and strain they are abandoning the sheet anchor of religion and drifting with the storm. But religion dies hard, if it dies at all. God will not lightly sacrifice His interests in a human soul and the struggle to escape from the Hound of Heaven is sometimes one's psychological undoing. Heights and depths. Up vista'd hopes and adown titanic glooms! Fear still wists not to evade as love wists to pursue.
This is all very real;-this desire of the human soul for God, in spite of its attempts to stifle such desire, this eternal dissatisfaction with man-made heavens that can never utterly satisfy a soul made for God and eternal Heaven. For surely there is a realism that is of Heaven as well as the realism that is of the earth, earthly. Surely the stars that dot the Milky Way are just as real as the mud in the muddy Whangpoo. The moon that shines down on the battlefield is not less rea] than the stark, staring, sightless eyes of the unnumbered dead.
The God in Heaven who loves me is just as real as the dear father or mother or devoted wife, whose loss has blighted so many a noble soul on earth. God the Infinite, the all-powerful the maker of earth and all that is on the earth, the God of the sun and the moon and the stars, the birds, the trees, the flowers, the golden sunset, the dewdrop glistening on the rose and the laughter in the eyes of little children. This God of beauty and love that surpasseth understanding, this God loves me, is interested in me and my little doings far more, interested than my closest and dearest friend. This, dear friends, is realism, the realism of eternity, the realism that will endure when our earthly fears have been stilled forever and life's fitful fever is o'er. Some day, He who loves us will give us back the loved ones we only seem to have lost, to be eternally reunited in His Kingdom where earth's weary v agers shall find rest at last and where sorrow shall be no more."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.