the
world, has always been in the world, and man's reasoning and loving is
but a reflection of his Maker's reason and love. Through all the weary
centuries God has been with men, in men, striving with their spirits,
never absent from them, the source of all their aspirations, visions,
and dreams. If that be so, it is the most natural thing in all history
that in the fulness of the time, when the need was greatest, God should
come in fuller measure into the lives that He had made. Surely natural
that the glows and flashes preceding the dawn should at last break
forth into the glory of the sunrise. God, who has been with man from
the dawn, guiding and leading, at last in the noontide speaks with the
articulate Word, making His purpose clear. If once we realise that
there has never been an impassable chasm between God and man, then the
incredible becomes credible. For this is not an isolated event; it is
rather the beginning of another great stage in man's spiritual
evolution by which God comes and dwells more and more in the hearts of
men, becoming incarnate in lives risen from the dead; in souls renewed
after His image.

III

With us, too, it is the fulness of the time. If God intervenes when
the need is sorest, and when man realises the need--then we can well
cherish the expectation that another manifestation of God is at hand.
Nineteen centuries ago He came to a world whose religion was dead.
With us it is not dead; it is sore stricken. The glow has vanished,
and those who bow down in the house of God in our day do so largely
from force of habit, and not because they believe. Religion to-day
curbs few evils, and is powerless against the selfishness that
sacrifices the well-being of nations on the altars of self-interest.
And, just as in Rome the unrest of soul made the degenerate a prey to
every charlatan and soothsayer that came out of the East, so the
spiritual hunger of our day brings men and women to crystal-gazers and
table-rappers, bowing down before every superstition, however gross.
And if the Rome of the Caesars sought to allay its soul hunger at the
banquets of pleasure, so also with us. Low forms of pleasure have led
the multitudes captive. The London of Charles II. could not hold a
candle to the London or Glasgow of to-day in the way of refinements of
material sensation. The old cry of 'bread and circuses' has given
place to the cry of dancing-halls and doles! In that old world at last
the