For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the
manifestation of the sons of God.

Man is in travail with an ideal which rose not in the anthropoid apes,
though it may have risen through them. A finer, larger, nobler man is
growing within the man that is.

The Universal Man is now coming to be a real being in the individual
mind.

Mankind, which is one physically and mentally, is one morally and
spiritually. All varieties of man are built upon one ethical type. The
virtues are cosmopolitan. One human ideal looms above and before all
races, though refracted differently in the changing atmospheres of earth.
Within the saints one dream of goodness forms.

Over the seers and sages one vision of the source of human goodness
rises. Through the clouds of earth one Infinite and Eternal Form shapes
itself to the wise. As men rise they meet. The race-souls are strangely
alike. Socrates and Buddha are brothers. Humanity is in travail with one
Human Ideal and one Divine Image, and these twain are one. The great
Mother sings to herself:

But he, the man-child glorious,
Where tarries he the while?
The rainbow shines his harbinger,
The sunset gleams his smile.

My boreal lights leap upward,
Forth right my planets roll,
And still the man-child is not born,
The summit of the Whole.

I travail in pain for him,
My creatures travail and wait;
His couriers come by squadrons,
He comes not to the gate.

Will Humanity come to the birth with her beloved son? Who that reads the
story of the coming of the Hebrew Christ can doubt it? What miscarriage
can befall her who is nursed by Nature and tended by Providence? What will
the Coming Man be like? We have seen his face break through the flesh for
a moment. On the shoulders of the race will rest the head of Christ. What
shall be said when the morning stars sing together, and all the sons of
God shout for joy that MAN is born upon the earth?

The Holy Ghost hath come upon thee, Humanity, and the power of the
Highest hath overshadowed thee; therefore also, that holy thing which
is born of thee, shall be called the SON OF GOD.

This, at least, is my reading of nature and of history in the light of the
completed evolution of the Christ. The normal growth through history of
the Ideal Man, is the incarnation of the Divine Man. The mischievous
antithesis between the realms of the natural and the s