n extorted; "How
long, O Lord, holy and true, will it be ere He shall come whose right
it is who shall sit on the throne of his father David, and of whose
kingdom there shall be no end? Come forth out of thy royal chambers, O
Prince of all the kings of the earth! Put on the visible robes of thy
imperial majesty; take up that unlimited sceptre which thy Almighty
Father hath bequeathed Thee; for now the voice of thy bride calls Thee,
and all creatures sigh to be renewed." So our great Milton prayed in
more recent days.

We are not drawing on our imagination in describing these true-hearted
watchers for the rising of the Day-star. They are fully indicated in
the Gospel story. There was Simeon, righteous and devout, unto whom it
had been revealed by the Holy Spirit that he should not see death
before he had seen the Lord's Christ; and Anna, the prophetess, who
departed not from the temple, worshipping with fastings and
supplications night and day; and the guileless Nathanael, an Israelite
indeed, who had perhaps already commenced to sit at the foot of the
ladder which bound his fig-tree to the highest heaven; and the peasant
maiden Mary, the descendant of a noble house, though with fallen
fortunes, who, like some vestal virgin, clad in snowy white, watched
through the dark hours beside the flickering flame; and last, but not
least, Zacharias and his wife Elisabeth, "who were both righteous
before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord
blameless."

For us, too, the times are dark. It is as though the shadows were
being thrown far across the fields, and the light were becoming dim.
Let the children of God draw together, to encourage each other in their
holy faith, and to speak of their great hopes; for He who appeared once
to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself shall appear a second time
without sin unto salvation. We are, as the French version puts it,
_burgesses of the skies_, "whence we wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus
Christ, who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may
be conformed to the body of his glory, according to the working whereby
He is able even to subject all things unto Himself."

But this attitude of spirit, which dwells in the unseen and eternal,
which counts on the indwelling of the Son of God by faith, and which
ponders deeply over the sins and sorrows of the world around, is the
temper of mind out of which the greatest deeds are wrought for the