spiritual progress of humanity. Far from being hostile elements to the
revelation of the Divine Power given in the Bible, they explain, they
extend, they interpret that revelation. As Archdeacon Wilberforce so
finely points out, God is ever the same, "but what men see of Him
changes,--changes without contradiction of the past conceptions."

* * * * *

"It was a definite promise of God that He should unfold, develop,
spiritualize the conceptions of the early Christian faith, revealing
gradually, as men should be able to assimilate them, higher, nobler
views of the nature, character, and purpose of the Eternal Father,"
continued Archdeacon Wilberforce in a memorable sermon preached in
Westminster Abbey, and he added:--

"It is, I suppose, inevitable that timid hearts, rooted in the
traditions of the past, iron-bound in antiquated definitions,
should imagine that the foundations of faith are shaken. They
forget that the Christ told us that when His visible presence was
removed He would speak by His spirit, as He had only delivered the
preliminaries of His full message; that there were truths yet to be
unfolded which men would receive and assimilate as the generations
succeeded one another,--'as the thoughts of men widened with the
progress of the suns.' I have been told by experts that the
astronomers who built those marvels of antiquity, the Pyramids of
the Nile, pierced a slanting shaft through the larger pyramid which
pointed direct to the Pole-star, and that in those days had you
gazed heavenward through the shaft into the Eastern night, the
Pole-star alone would have met your eye. It was in the ages of the
past, it was when the Southern Cross was visible from the British
Isles. Slowly, imperceptibly, the orientation of the planet has
changed. Did you now look up into the midnight sky through the
shaft in the Great Pyramid you would not see the Pole-star; new
brilliant space-worlds would shine down on you. But the heavens
have not altered, and the shaft of the pyramid is not guilty, so to
speak, of unorthodoxy. A new view of the heavens has quietly come,
for the earth's axis has changed its place. Similarly, it is the
work of the spirit of the ascended Jesus to advance the axis of the
Church of God from glory to glory. Conceptions of the Universal
Soul once prom