but
fleeting shadows, that there is nothing to hope for in the future, that
we are all the victims of delusion, tend to elevate and benefit our
downcast race? Will the attempt to worship what has never been made
known, what is simply darkness and mystery, be more successful in
raising men above themselves than the worship of the Righteousness and
the Love which have been made manifest in Christ? Will the attempt to
supplant the worship of Jesus Christ, in Whom was no sin, by the
worship of Humanity at large, of Humanity stained with guilt and crime
as {211} well as illumined here and there with deeds of heroism, of
Humanity sunk to the level of the brutes as well as exalted to the
level of whatever we may suppose to be the highest, seeing that there
is really no higher existence with which to compare it--will this
worship of itself, with all its baseness and imperfection, this turning
of mankind into a Mutual Adoration Society, make Humanity divine? Will
even the assurance that far-distant ages will have new inventions,
fairer laws, more abundant wealth be any deliverance to us from our
burdens, any salvation from our individual sorrow and guilt and shame?
Can we to whom the likeness of Christ has been shown, can we imagine
that any of these efforts to answer the yearning of mankind for
deliverance from the body of this death will prove an efficient
substitute for Him? And if we forsake Him, it must be in one or other
of these directions that we go.

{212}

VI

But the signs of the times are full of hope. In social work at home,
in the progress of missions abroad, in revivals of one kind and
another, in growing reverence for holy things, in a renewed interest in
religion as the most vital of all topics, even in strange spiritual
manifestations not within the Church, we have, amid all that is
discouraging and depressing, indication of the coming kingdom. The
cry, 'Back to Christ,' with all the truth that is in it, is only half a
truth if it does not also mean 'Forward to Christ.' He is before us as
well as behind us, and the Hope of the World is the gathering together
of all things in Him. Should there be, as there has been over and over
again in days gone by, a widespread unbelief, a rejection of His Divine
Revelation, of this we may be sure--it will be only for a time. When
the sceptical physician, in Tennyson's poem, murmured:

'The good Lord Jesus has had his day,'

{213} the believing nurse made