As happy as can be;
For it is just as if he said--
"John, that's the job for thee."
And so in my appointed place,
By God's good grace,
I work, according to his plan,
And would not change with any man.'

To-day, as it has done for the centuries and the years that are so many
that one wearies in counting them, Christmas throws the halo of beauty
over all shepherds abiding in the fields calling on their dogs; over
all toilers in mines and workshops; over all stonebreakers and
street-sweepers; over all mothers and all babes. It proclaims to-day
with a voice whose certainty changes not that the man who serves Mammon
and gains the world while he loses his soul makes a grievous and a
profitless barter.

CHAPTER XII

THE FULNESS OF THE TIME

If there be no will guiding the affairs of men towards a predestined
end, what a meaningless welter it all is! What a record of wars and
feuds, of rising and of perishing empires, of civilisations born and
civilisations overwhelmed: in very truth

'A tale
Told by an idiot: full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.'

There is unity and a new dignity in the tale when one gets up on a hill
and sees it in far perspective. Things did not happen by chance.
There was through it all a purpose at work, welding humanity together
with the cement of blood, throwing down the barriers of race and
language, silencing the sound of tumult and war until at last the song
is heard on the plain of Bethlehem that has sung itself into the hearts
of men, ushering in the dawn of peace and goodwill. In the fulness of
the time the Child was laid in the manger.

I

Every advance of humanity in its upward struggle has sprung from some
divine dissatisfaction. It was the fulness of the time in that the
world, disillusioned and dissatisfied, realised its need. The Greek
found no answer for their moral needs in the pantheon of gods that
filled the heart with the passion for beauty alone. Socrates before
drinking the hemlock advised his disciples to search for another
teacher; but that other could not be found. The only remedy for the
ills of man that they discovered was that he should cut himself loose
from the world--a gospel of suicide. The Roman made a god of power.
But when he had conquered the world, invested it with roads and bridges
and by force had imposed peace on it, then he confronted the awful
mystery of his own personality, and his questioning was b