r more serious thinking. We
seem in many ways to be returning to the pagan condition when judgment
was not feared and spiritual influences were unfelt. In novel, drama,
and much that passes for science, we have the monotonous iteration that
man is the creature of blind chance under an indifferent sky.

But this, thank God, is not the whole story. There is another and
brighter side. If we take a very subdued estimate of our modern day
and world, I am yet persuaded that never were the saving ideas of the
Saviour more potent, never have His high aspirations been more ardently
welcomed or more strenuously followed than they are now.

Past all human speculations about Christ, men hopelessly divided in
creed are yet getting nearer to what He lived believing and died
believing. In the weariness of so much of the modern world, and in the
hopelessness of its outlook, I see an age ready to receive anew the
baptism of the Holy Spirit. I see a temper ready to grasp with fresh
earnestness the thoughts of the "Living Lord and Supreme Teacher of our
race." Men to-day are dreaming like dreams as shone before the souls
of the ancient prophets, and in the visions of men who have wrought for
human progress since the first days even until now. Waking dreams of a
new and diviner order of society. A state marked by righteousness,
peace, and happiness for the whole people; the golden age, when man,
knowing what it is in himself he ought to love, loves that in his
neighbour as in himself.

And Christianity, which came into the world to fulfil these heaven-born
dreams, is being openly challenged as never before to substantiate them.

In the larger aims of our spiritual ideals the "yonder is never here,"
nor, indeed, can it be. There must always be above us something better
than our best. When we cease to make progress we die, and that, in the
language of Scripture, is the second death.

If, therefore, the searching demand of the text confronts us with the
weakness of our nature, we need not wonder and we need not be
discouraged. It is the purpose it has in view. "It discloses an
ideal, and it reveals an end." If in seeking to realize the ideal and
gain the end we are forced to know how insufficient we are in our own
strength--this, I repeat, is the end it seeks to accomplish in us and
for us. Until our life is in Christ linked on to God, we cannot love
our neighbour as we ought, because we have not the higher power to love
o