ever.

God's Christmas gift is the dignifying of human life, and the opening through the humble pathway of duty a glory that it is beyond our power to conceive.

Thanks be unto God for His unspeak

able gift.

VI

EXPECTATION

"Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh." -St. Matthew 25: 13.

"WHEN the Son of man cometh,"that was an expression familiar to the Jews, and it meant the end of an era, when all the familiar things should pass away; when the sun and the moon and the stars and the earth should be gone,then the Son of man would come. They interpreted it as the last great event in the history of God's dealing with the world. But you and I find it a little difficult to sympathize with their point of view, for living in the twentieth century we are convinced that the sun and the moon and the stars and the earth are

destined to remain for unimaginable ages, therefore we do not quite understand the force of the expression, "the Son of man will come.'

I think that something has taken place in our religious life analogous to that which has taken place in our study of the earth itself. There was a time when in the teaching of geology emphasis was laid upon the cataclysms that had shaken the solid earth, but to-day that has given place to the thought of the slow evolution of the different strata of which the earth is composed. Something of the same sort has come in our religious thought. We have come to think of the coming of the Son of man not as a sudden cataclysm but as a slow process-the diffusion of that spirit of Divine Humanity which was revealed in Jesus Christ. And we think that we have a justification for that thought in the Gospels themselves, for while undoubtedly Matthew and Mark

and Luke, what we call the Synoptic Gospels, are filled with the thought of the final cataclysm, all that has disappeared in the Gospel of John, and there we have the thought of the coming of the Spirit of God instead of the sudden descent of the Son of man through the clouds of heaven. And yet, in our thought of nature we cannot altogether banish the thought of cataclysms. They are continually recurring, hurricanes and tidal-waves and earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, these things occur again and again. In the same way individual life is full of accident and it is when we think of these great catastrophes of nature, and when we think of the accidents that are continually befalling individual men and women, that we are able to put ourselves back as it were into the first century and understand something of the thought in the hearts of the men and women who heard Jesus Christ say:

"Watch, for ye know not when the Son of man cometh."

These words are at once a warning and an inspiration. I do not think the preacher need dwell much upon the warning. I think that work is being done by the daily newspapers. Every day we can read of these accidents which for the individual mean the passing away of the sun and the moon and the stars and the solid earth. For him they may be blotted out in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. The poor strikers at Calumet,-whatever you may think of their agitation, whether you think it was right or wrong has nothing to do with it-they gathered together to forget their grief and poverty and their rage! to enjoy with their children a Christmas tree, and in a moment hundreds of them were trampled to death in a wild and senseless panic. A man and his wife cross this great avenue to dine with friends. When they stood