f the certainty that the world will be better and
brighter some day, that undying expectation is! It is sorrowful and yet
ennobling to think of the persistency of the expectation, and the
disappointment of it.

God forbid that I should say a word to seem to disparage it! Not so. I
say the expectations are of God, and if men give them false shapes, and
scarcely understand them when they utter them, that does not in any
degree make the expectation less noble or less true. But what I wish to
urge is this, that the Christian attitude towards all such hopes should
not be unsympathising. Rather we are bound to say 'yes, it is so, and we
know how.' We are bound to proclaim that it is not any new thing that we
expect, but only the working out of the old. God be thanked that it is
not! The evils are not new, they have been from the beginning; and God
has surely not been so cruel to the world as to leave it till now in the
dark. Our hopes are not set on any new, untried remedy. This bridge
across the Infinite for us is not a frail plank on which no one has yet
walked, and which may crack and break when the timid foot of the first
passenger is on the centre, but it is a tried structure upon which ages
have walked.

Then if I have any hearers who are fancying that the gospel is worn out,
any who are glowing with the anticipation of great new things, who
scarcely know how, but believe that somehow, the ills that have in all
ages cursed humanity are to be exorcised by some new methods of social
organisation or the like--I pray them to ponder this prayer and to
receive its lesson. Do not say, you are but adding one more to the Babel
of opinions which confound us. Not so. We are not arguing for an
opinion, we are proclaiming a fact. We are not ventilating a nostrum, we
are preaching a divine revelation, a divine revealer. We are not setting
forth our notion of the evil, and our idea of what may be a remedy. We
are telling men God's word about both. We are preaching an old, old
truth: not man's opinion, but God's act; not man's device, but Christ's
power. We proclaim that the kingdom of God is nigh you, and while a
Babel, as you say, of private opinions, of passionate complaints, of
despairing cries afflicts the silence, one serene voice rises, 'Come
unto Me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden,' and after that sole
voice rings out the twofold choral anthem--of praise, 'Rejoice, O earth,
for thy King is come'; and of prayer, 'Thy kin