heir thrones, beat time with their scepters: "Hallelujah, for the
Lord God omnipotent reigneth! Hallelujah, the kingdoms of this world
have become the kingdoms of our Lord Jesus Christ!"

"That song of love, now low and far,
Ere long shall swell from star to star;
That light, the breaking day which tips
The golden-spired Apocalypse."

IV. Again, I learn from my subject that events which seem to be most
insignificant may be momentous. Can you imagine anything more
unimportant than the coming of a poor woman from Moab to Judah? Can
you imagine anything more trivial than the fact that this Ruth just
happened to alight--as they say--just happened to alight on that field
of Boaz? Yet all ages, all generations, have an interest in the fact
that she was to become an ancestor of the Lord Jesus Christ, and all
nations and kingdoms must look at that one little incident with a
thrill of unspeakable and eternal satisfaction. So it is in your
history and in mine: events that you thought of no importance at all
have been of very great moment. That casual conversation, that
accidental meeting--you did not think of it again for a long while;
but how it changed all the phase of your life!

It seemed to be of no importance that Jubal invented rude instruments
of music, calling them harp and organ; but they were the introduction
of all the world's minstrelsy; and as you hear the vibration of a
stringed instrument, even after the fingers have been taken away from
it, so all music now of lute and drum and cornet is only the
long-continued strains of Jubal's harp and Jubal's organ. It seemed to
be a matter of very little importance that Tubal Cain learned the uses
of copper and iron; but that rude foundry of ancient days has its echo
in the rattle of Birmingham machinery, and the roar and bang of
factories on the Merrimac.

It seemed to be a matter of no importance that Luther found a Bible in
a monastery; but as he opened that Bible, and the brass-bound lids
fell back, they jarred everything, from the Vatican to the furthest
convent in Germany, and the rustling of the wormed leaves was the
sound of the wings of the angel of the Reformation. It seemed to be a
matter of no importance that a woman, whose name has been forgotten,
dropped a tract in the way of a very bad man by the name of Richard
Baxter. He picked up the tract and read it, and it was the means of
his salvation.

In after-days that man wrote a book called