However, there is nothing in all of this which hinders us from believing with a full heart in the love and grace and care of God, in his holy and redeeming purpose for mankind and for the individual.  It is true that this belief cannot any longer retain its naive and childish form.  It is true that it demands of a man far more of moral force, of ethical and spiritual mastery, of insight and firm will, to sustain the belief in the purpose of God for himself and for all men, when a man believes that he sees and feels God only in and through nature and history, through personal consciousness and the personal consciousness of Jesus.  It is true that it has, apparently, been easier for men to think of God as outside and above his world, and of themselves as separated from their fellows by his special providence.  It is more difficult, through glad and intelligent subjection to all laws of nature and of history, to achieve the education of one’s spirit, to make good one’s inner deliverance from the world, to aid others in the same struggle and to set them on their way to God.  Men grow uncertain within themselves, because they say that traditional religion has apprehended the matter in a different way.  This is true.  It is also misleading.  Whatever miracles Jesus may have performed, no one can say that he performed them to make life easier for himself, to escape the common lot, to avoid struggle, to evade suffering and disgraceful death.  On the contrary, in genuine human self-distrust, but also in genuine heroism, he gave himself to his vocation, accepting all that went therewith, and finished the work of God which he had made his own.  This is the more wonderful because it lay so much nearer to him than it can lie to us, to pray for special evidence of the love of God and to set his faith on the receiving of it.  He had not the conception of the relation of God to nature and history which we have.

We may well view the modern tendency to belief in healings through prayer, suggestion and faith, as an intelligible, an interesting, and in part, a touching manifestation.  Of course there is mingled with it much dense ignorance, some superstition and even deception.  Yet behind such a phenomenon there is meaning.  Men of this mind make earnest with the thought that God cares for them.  Without that thought there is no religion.  They have been taught to find the evidence of God’s love and care in the unusual.  They are quite logical.  It has been a weak point of the traditional belief that men have said that in the time of Christ there were miracles, but since that time, no more.  Why not, if we can only in spirit come near to Christ and God?  They are quite logical also in that they have repudiated modern science.  To be sure, no inconsiderable part of them use the word science continually.