ooking at the anguish and misery of the world at this moment, one is
constrained to confess that the Lord of the world is One who can bring
Himself to look upon, and to bear the responsibility of ruling over, a
terrible amount of pain. But what shall we say of the long ages of pagan
darkness, when men were not _feeling_ after God only, but crying for
Him, shrieking to Him, were maiming their quivering flesh and torturing
their shuddering hearts, because the void only echoed back their own
voices and none could tell them the Divine Name. The time is gone by
when it was possible to look upon the history of heathendom as the
history of one long stern effort to break away from God, to blot out His
name from the universe, and to tear every trace of His image out of the
life of the human world. It is now well understood that the deepest
thing in heathen life and heathen literature was ever the cry after the
living God, and the effort to find Him; the grandest passages in the
religious records of heathendom are the words in which the founders of
the great pagan systems proclaimed what they believed had been made
known to them of His Being and His Will; and the gladdest, in truth the
only joyous, passages in pagan history, are the records of the
generations in which men persuaded themselves that God had at length
visited His world. Soon the gladness vanished, overborne by wrong and
lust. But while it lasted it made the solitary gleam of brightness which
crosses the blackness of the pagan night. The revival of morals, of
manners, and of hopes, which for a few brief generations has followed
the teaching of the great masters whom paganism adores, is the one ray
of heavenly light which shines in the pagan darkness, and bears witness
that there is sunlight, though shining on other spheres. The joy which
filled the hearts of the heathen peoples, when Sakya-Mouni, Zerdusht,
Confucius, or Mahomet, proclaimed at any rate a purer faith, a nobler
idea of life, than the dark, soulless, senseless formulae in which a
tyrannous priesthood had buried the Divine Name, is like some faint and
far-off glow of the joy which leaped from heart to heart like flame when
it was known that God had in very truth visited His people, and that the
King of Glory had taken possession of His earthly throne.

Through this long sad night, lit only by these rare faint gleams, men
had been looking, longing, and moaning for a deliverer; and steadily
settling the whil