WE ARE experiencing today a period of discouragement and of growing pessimism. We seem to be slipping backwards in the long march of progress.

Human liberty, democracy, parliamentary government, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, tolerance, faith—these important parts of the world have ceased to exist. Today the tide is running strong for autocracy and dictatorship, for censored speech and writing, for riotous intolerance, for crass materialism.

We have made ourselves masters of the material world. But we have lost the spiritual values which alone give to life its satisfying rewards. The results speak for themselves.

We have brought about a cataclysmic war which has drenched the world in blood. We have generated an economic catastrophe without parallel in history. It is not honest thinking to regard these as visitations of God which we were powerless to prevent.

They are clearly of our own making—the result of a social and economic order which we ourselves have built up, founded on acquisitive instincts and making for social injustice and economic insecurity.

If the social and economic order in which we live is of our own making, surely the road to recovery must be of our own making also. Permanent recovery will never come by chance. Order does not flow out of disorder without directing intelligence. Deep-seated and lasting recovery can come only as the result of conscious effort on the part of those who have the vision and the courage to hew new pathways in a changing civilization.

Humanity is yearning now, as seldom before, for surer foundations on which to build. There is only one way. From widely shifting beliefs and differing faiths we must sift out life’s fundamental values.

Humanity is not now athirst for more inventions and scientific discoveries and improved methods of manufacture. These things will not stop heartaches or broken lives or suicides. What men and women are yearning and hoping for today are spiritual values, such as inner happiness unconquerable by outward circumstances,