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“Moreover, this basic truth is evident not simply in personal life but in our world situation as a whole.  Many today look at this scene of international  tension and ill will and say, God sits in heaven and does nothing; but some of us see it otherwise.  Gladstone said once, “the task of statesmanship is to discover where God Almighty is going during the next fifty years.” Well, where God Almighty at least wants to go during these next fifty years is not altogether beyond our power to see, for with all the voices, not only idealistic but realistic, through which [God] speaks to us and brings [God’s] potent pressures to bear on us, [God] is saying to the world: Get together; you are fighting against the inevitable when you try to live in isolated alienation on the basis of your old political and imperialistic divisions; your agonies now are due to your stubborn resistance against a divine will stronger than your own, which ordains that there must be one human family, fighting against that you will remain in hell; only when you surrender to that higher will can you find decency and peace.”

by Harry Emerson Fosdick, “Having Faith that Really Works,” Preached in the 1950s and printed in What is Vital in Religion: Sermons on Contemporary Christian Problems

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