affled by a
silence in which there was no voice nor any that answered. His gods
became objects of derision. In the gratification of his bodily
cravings he sought to lull the hunger of his soul. At last Rome
presented the dread spectacle of a Nero who was at once 'a priest, an
atheist, and a god.' There is preserved a record which visualises the
awful depths to which that pagan world descended. Nero had murdered
his mother, and he comes back to Rome nervous as to how the people will
receive him. But the citizens poured out to meet him in their
thousands, and rent the welkin with their shouts of welcome--'Hail,
Nero, the god!' If that world was to be saved, it had to be saved
then. If God was ever to intervene in the affairs of men, He had to
intervene then. The extremity of man was God's opportunity. The
Unseen Ruler must either come and deliver a world such as that or
abdicate. The coming of the Child was a necessity.

II

It is very hard to understand how things do happen; and our only
comfort is that we really understand nothing. We have in these last
years been mesmerised into thinking that we understand a great deal
when in reality we understand nothing at all. We camouflage our
ignorance by speaking of law--but what is it? Why do like causes
produce a like result always? No answer. We used to explain the
heavens by gravitation. What is it? No answer. We ushered in the new
age of electricity. What is it! Silence! There is no reason, then,
for rebelling against the fact that we cannot understand the greatest
of all mysteries--the coming of God more fully into the lives of men.
All we can hope to do is to realise how natural it is that God should
so come to men. As the years pass that thought becomes more and more
natural. In other days God was thought of as dwelling far removed from
the world. That is not now the great thought regarding God. 'Whatever
sort of being God may be,' writes William James, 'He is nevermore that
mere external inventor of contrivances intended to manifest His glory
in which our great-grandfathers took such satisfaction.' (The
conception of our great-grandfathers may have been limited; but it is
more important that we should try to be as good men as they were.)
This conception of 'an absentee God outside the world watching it go,'
has given place to another. The world is now realised as spiritual
through and through; the shrine of an indwelling life. God is in