MAN can have no greater treasure than a vital faith. Such a faith means courage and confidence for our tasks, purpose and unity for our life, moral strength and inward peace, and that fellowship with the Highest which enriches life here and assures the life that is beyond.

Such a faith is not a creed handed down from age to age, nor a system of theology worked out once for all. Every age brings new problems threatening its security. Every age brings also its advance of knowledge and its larger experience. That is why such a faith needs to be constantly restated. That is especially true of our age. History and natural science have given us a new world. Can we hold the old faith in the new world? Every generation of thoughtful men, especially college men, has to face that question anew. That question these pages seek to answer.

But that is not all. Our faith should be richer with every generation. We see that in the field of conduct to-day, in personal ethics, and in social morality.

"New occasions teach new duties;

Time makes ancient good uncouth."¹

That is just as true of religious thought. We are in the midst of a revival of faith. It is a deep conviction that nature is more than a machine, that life is more than material goods, that God is, and that the heart of life is the personal and spiritual. And what is more, men are seeing God and life through the eyes of Jesus Christ. But all this is no mere return to tradition. We must do our religious thinking in the new world, with all of science and all the better knowledge of history that we have gained. The new faith should be richer, more vital, than any statement of the past.

Four words suggest this change and enrichment: natural science, for God to-day is more wonderful and nearer because of the world that science has revealed; historical science, for it has made us know how rich Christianity is in its long history, and how wonderful has been the whole story of God's training of our race; the ethical emphasis, for it has been driving out the institutional and ceremonial and making religion vital and appealing; the social emphasis, for it has taken religion from the clouds and made it live among men.

These pages seek to give such a restatement of faith. They seek to meet the difficulties which assail a thoughtful man to-day; to show that modern thought has brought not simply question, but enrichment; to set forth that faith in the speech of to-day; and to set it forth as a working faith, that will meet the needs of real life and grow stronger through its experiences.

There are four classes of readers to whom these words are directed. There are the students of our colleges, who need such a faith not only for their own life, but that they may render the full service for which society looks to them, the leadership which men of faith can give. There are the leaders of the young and of thoughtful folks that are older, pastors and teachers who must meet questions and doubts, and who want to bring to their students or hearers not only safe guidance, but a rich and appealing faith as a summons to life. There are the folks outside the Church, or apart from the stream of religious progress, who think lightly of religion and the Church because they do not know these as they are to-day. Finally, there is the growing number of men and women who want such a vital faith for themselves, a faith that shall interpret the changes that they see, that shall speak their convictions, and that shall meet the needs of the individual life and the demands of the larger social life as it exists to-day.

The substance of these pages has been given in the form of addresses to college students at summer conferences and at various institutions of learning. The style of direct address has been only partly modified. The argument has been put in simple and non-technical form. Readers to whom any of these problems are new, might find it easier and more interesting to begin with chapter three and leave the first two chapters to the end.

HARRIS FRANKLIN RALL

The Iliff School of Theology,

Denver, Colorado

1) Lowell: The Present Crisis.