re was no room for the cradle in the family life--the babe was shut
out. And so to-day. There is every sign that God must again intervene
and save, or the civilisation we know will be buried with the
civilisations of all the past. The fountain of inspiration, of
cleansing, of righteousness must be opened afresh, and its reviving
waters sent flowing over all the land. Unless God does so come there
is no hope. But all history is the proof that He will so come. We can
hear the rumble of His chariot wheels as He comes. Here and there the
Spirit is moving on the face of the waters. Of old it was shepherds
and fishermen who first received the glad tidings. That fishermen
should be the first to feel the coming outrush of spiritual power in
our day is wholly natural. The glad tidings of Christmas is that God
is ever coming to His own. The duty laid upon us is that we prepare
His way, and make room for Him. It will be a new Edinburgh and a new
Glasgow when the renewing Spirit shall have swept through them. It is
the one hope. In Melrose Abbey there is an old inscription, 'When
Jesus comes the shadows depart.' Some monk who felt the shadows
gathering round him realised Christ as a living presence--and the
shadows were wafted away. And he carved the words. And our shadows
will vanish when He who lay in the manger will come again, in the
fulness of His reviving and quickening Spirit. Then God will again
work marvels in transfigured lives and in nations reborn.

IV

There are some good people to whom the word Revival is anathema. There
have always been such people. 'Their doctrines are most repulsive, and
strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect to their
superiors,' wrote the Duchess of Buckingham to Lady Huntingdon,
regarding the early Methodists. 'It is monstrous to be told that you
have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth.
This is highly insulting, and I wonder that your Ladyship should relish
any sentiment so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.'
Yet it was that same Revival of religion in the days of Wesley and
Whitefield that saved England when the evil days befell in the end of
the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. There is
no nobler figure in all history than that of John Wesley riding over
the whole country, reading as he rode, contesting all England for God,
everywhere wakening the dead. To duchesses and highly refined folk