"The whole creation," wrote Paul, "waits with eager longing for the sons of God to be revealed." It is listening for the sound of a distant pilgrim chorus, the march of a great consecrated brotherhood in Christ, the decisive emergence of a new race, the true sons of God, sealed with the Cross. It is scanning the roads down which that ransomed host, that nobler breed of saints, shall come at destiny's hour to bring history to its fulfilment.
It is a daring, magnificent conception. Are we wrong to see in it a parable of that thrust and counter-thrust of disillusionment and hope upon which we look out to-day, and with which as preachers we have to reckon? When a generation has been robbed of its familiar gods of material security, progress, human self-sufficiency, or when the individual soul has found its conventional religion stolen away by the marauding forces of agnosticism, trouble and despair, then strikes God's hour to break in with His salvation. Must we not say that any weariness, unsettlement or consternation is in the last resort a blessed thing if it makes a man or an age in the mood to welcome God? It is a great thing to be brought right down to the depths, if so be that there at last we strike that bedrock which is the Rock of ages; a great thing that life itself should break up even violently the hard core of our proud self-reliance, if so be that the human spirit may be ready then to cast itself upon its ultimate resource in Jesus Christ.
Therefore I counsel you—let no fog of spiritual
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