So speaks this great historian; and, in truth, is not the fact of God's appearance in human nature the key-stone of the arch, the mysterious knot which binds up all the things of earth, and attaches them to heaven? There is a birth of God in the history of the world, and shall God not be in history? Jesus Christ is the true God in the history of men. The very meanness of his appearance proves it. When man wishes to erect a shade or shelter on the earth, you may expect preparations, materials, scaffolding, workmen, tools, trenches, rubbish. But God, when he is pleased to do it, takes the smallest seed, which a new-born babe could have clasped in its feeble hand, deposits it in the bosom of the earth, and, from this grain, at first imperceptible, produces the immense tree under which the families of the earth recline. To do great things by imperceptible means is the law of God. In Jesus Christ this law receives its most magnificent fulfilment. Of Christianity, which has now taken possession of the portals of nations, which is, at this moment, reigning or wandering over all the tribes of the earth from the rising to the setting sun, and which incredulous philosophy herself is obliged to acknowledge as the spiritual and social law of the world--of this Christianity, (the greatest thing under the vault of heaven, nay, in the boundless immensity of Creation,) what was the commencement? An infant born in the smallest town of the most despised nation of the earth--an infant whose mother had not what the poorest and most wretched female in any one of our cities has, a room for birth--an infant born in a stable and laid in a manger!... There, O God, I behold and I adore Thee! The Reformation knew this law of God, and felt she had a call to accomplish it. The idea that God is in history was often brought forward by the Reformers. In particular, we find it on one occasion expressed by Luther, under one of those grotesque and familiar, yet not undignified figures which he was fond of employing in order to be understood by the people. "The world," said he one day at table among his friends; "the world is a vast and magnificent game at cards, consisting of emperors, kings, and princes. For several ages the pope has beaten the emperors, princes, and kings, who stooped and fell under him. Then our Lord God came and dealt the cards, taking to himself the smallest, [Luther,] and with it has beaten the pope, who beat the kings of the earth.... God used it as his ace. 'He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree,' says Mary." (Luke, i, 52.)