166 Religion, the Sole Solution
The sources of our human ills are chiefly within us, in.
our darksome intellect and enfeebled will. And it is only
the religion of the cross, of divine redemption, of divine
healing and illumination that can lift up fallen and helpless
man, as the good Samaritan lifted up the wronged and
heathen brother by the roadside and restored him gratui-
tously to health and a social place.
Human selfishness is the fruitful source of all the evil,
all the misery, all the injustice that is written on history’s
page, and that enfolds itself in to-day’s tragedy. There is
only one power that can cope with the love of self, and
that power is religion or the love of God. The ancient
Roman Empire, our great counterpart, was saved from
blighting materialism by the knowledge of God, by the love
and fear of Him, the obedience and service of Him, and
the faith and hope and love laid up in His gospel. Our
pride may revolt at this simple message of John, as did the
pride of those Athenian philosophers who listened to
St. Paul on the Hill of Mars, but human pride has often
gone the road of humiliation. In Rome’s golden days Peter
and Paul converted no philosophers, no jurists, no rhet-
oricians of Rome, but in the days of its decay and near
ruin, Augustine and Victorinus came joyfully into the
Church of God as into a sure refuge against the gathering
storm and the falling night.
Whatever change time has wrought in opinions and in
social conditions, whatever the progress that has been made
in scientific knowledge, whatever new machinery, whatever
hitherto unutilized forces have been placed at the disposi-
tion of man, it is still and must forever be true that nothing
but Christian love can give us the power rightly to cheer,
console, strengthen, guide, uplift, illumine, and purify one
another. “He that Ioveth not abideth in death.”