So then we stand today confronting a situation that is ominous and
obscure, since the very ideals and devices which we had held were the
last word in progressive evolution have failed at the crisis, and
because we who created them and have worked through them, have failed in
character, and chiefly because we have accepted low ideals and inferior
standards imposed upon us by social elements betrayed and abandoned by a
world that could not aid them or assimilate them since itself had
betrayed the only thing that could give them force, unity and coherency,
that is, a vital and pervasive religious faith.

There are those who hold our case to be desperate, to whom the
disillusionment of peace, after the high optimism engendered by the vast
heroism and the exalted ideals instigated by the war, has brought
nothing but a mood of deep pessimism. The sentiment is perhaps natural,
but it is none the less both irrational and wicked. If it is persisted
in, if it becomes widespread, it may perfectly well justify itself, but
only so. We no longer accept the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination,
we believe, and must highly believe, that our fate is of our own making,
for Christianity has made us the heirs of free-will. What we will that
shall we be, or rather, what we _are_ that shall we will, and if we make
of ourselves what, by the grace of God, we may, then the victory rests
with us. It is true that we are in the last years of a definite period,
on that decline that precedes the opening of a new epoch. Never in
history has any such period overpassed its limit of five hundred years,
and ours, which came to birth in the last half of the fifteenth century,
cannot outlast the present. But these declining years are preceding
those wherein all things are made new, and the next two generations will
see, not alone the passing of what we may call modernism, since it is
our own age, but the prologue of the epoch that is to come. It is for us
to say what this shall be. It is not foreordained; true, if we will it,