The age of the apostles is not a closed chapter of history, like the departed glory of Athens or the Elizabethan age. God still moves amid His Church.
The Stirring of the Nations.
We have been called to live in this twentieth century amid the most tremendous events—save one—the world has ever known. Let us remind ourselves that before the guns of the Great War rolled their terrible thunder, things had been happening in Asia and the East, and particularly in the Moslem world, which were of hardly less importance than the war itself.
The great nations of Asia awoke, as though shaken from an age-long sleep by some mighty galvanic shock. One after another the customs, traditions, and beliefs of centuries have been cast aside. Everywhere is felt the pulse of new ambitions and the desire to get abreast of the modern peoples of the world. Hence mighty and sweeping movements for education and reform, showing themselves hardly less in Turkey and Egypt than in China and India, in this twentieth century, creating a new desire to learn, a deeper sense of need, a readiness to consider and weigh new propositions, and an altogether new opportunity for preaching the eternal Gospel of life, the only true foundation upon which men and nations can build.
And now we are passing through times such as Britain has never known before. The whole nation is pouring out its best, giving them, as it believes, as sacrifices for the world's freedom and the life of generations to come.
The war will be over some day, and those who survive it and those who come after will not forget their glorious dead. They will realize that these lives were given to redeem Britain's opportunity.
It will lie with the present generation of Britain's schoolboys to see to it that they did not purchase that opportunity in vain. To you for whom this book has been written, and for whom it has been revised in barracks, will come the nobler opportunity of the truly holy war—the rebuilding of the world's waste places, the healing of its sores, the substitution of truth and purity where now there is falsehood and wrong. It is the opportunity of the ages. What can we say of it all but this—'God fulfils Himself in many ways'? It is God, God moving behind and shaping history towards its goal.
'For I doubt not through the ages one
increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widened with
the process of the suns.'
The Call of Christ.
Christ walks to-day upon our streets, He is with us in our homes, He draws near to our great schools, He stands over us as we kneel in prayer, seeking for young knights of His cross, weak enough to lean on His great strength; dependent enough to trust with childlike faith; willing to be made pure enough to see God; true enough to reveal His love to men; brave enough to make a great adventure for His sake; utterly His, that in them for the sake of the great needy Moslem world He may fulfil His word: