We modernists have often gotten at our faith by a negative process. We do not believe this. We do not believe that. We have given up this incredible idea or that obsolete doctrine.

So we pare down and dim out our faith by negative abstractions until we have left only the ghostly remainder of what was once a great religion.

Then seeing how few our positive convictions are and how little they matter, we grow easy-going about everybody else’s convictions, and end in a mush of general concession.

Then a crisis falls upon the individual soul, upon the family, upon the world at large, where a religion that is going to amount to anything must have deep conviction in it.

“The rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon the rock”—how much we need that!