Who now-a-days would assert that “miracles do not happen,” when men like Sir Oliver Lodge are laboriously discovering some few of these laws of the Universe which give us these portents and signs? Who dares to sneer at Parthenogenesis or repeat the slander of Celsus about the Mother of God? Men only who have grown rusty in reposing on their past reputations and cannot see that materialism as a philosophy is dead. Day by day fresh evidence of the power of the spirit over matter bursts upon us. A plea for “philosophic doubt” of Professor Huxley’s infallibility is no longer necessary. The very distinction between matter and spirit grows more and more difficult as science develops analytical power. The minds of men are being prepared again to receive that Supreme revelation which told of the wedding of the earth and heaven, the taking of the Manhood into God.
In truth, this is the one principle which can give men guidance in the tangled intricacy of modern life. It is necessary to salvation, now, not hereafter only, to believe rightly the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
For, first of all, men need to be saved from the apathy of despair. They need some hope that there is an answer to the riddle of the Universe. Let them once begin to feel that it may be true that the very God cares for His creatures and has made His love for them manifest by taking to Himself the body, mind and spirit of man, and joining for ever human nature to the Godhead, then through the darkness comes a human voice saying—
“O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in Myself.
Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with Myself to love,
And thou must love Me who have died for thee.”
A man regains his self-respect when once he has escaped from the paralyzing sense that his is only
“a life of nothings nothing worth