If this had been but a pageant enacted for their benefit to dazzle and bewilder them, it would have been a poor and self-conscious affair; but it becomes a scene of portentous mystery, if one thinks of them as being permitted to have a glimpse of the high, urgent, and terrifying things that were going on all the time in the unseen background of the Saviour's mind. The essence of the greatness of the scene is that it was _overheard_. And thus I think that wonder and beauty, those two mighty forces, take on a very different value for us when we can come to realise that they are small hints given us, tiny glimpses conceded to us, of some very great and mysterious thing that is pressingly and speedily proceeding, every day and every hour, in the vast background of life; and we ought to realise that it is not only human life as we see it which is the active, busy, forceful thing; that the world with all its noisy cities, its movements and its bustle, is not a burning point hung in darkness and silence, but that it is just a little fretful affair with infinitely larger, louder, fiercer, stronger powers, working, moving, pressing onwards, thundering in the background; and that the huge forces, laws, activities, behind the world, are not perceived by us any more than we perceive the vast motion of great winds, except in so far as we see the face of the waters rippled by them, or the trees bowed all one way in their passage. It is very easy to be so taken up with the little absorbing businesses, the froth and ripple of life, that we forget what great and secret influences they must be that cause them; we must not forget that we are only like children playing in the nursery of a palace, while in the Council-room beneath us a debate may be going on which is to affect the lives and happiness of thousands of households. And therefore the more that we make up our little beliefs and ideas, as a man folds up a little packet of food which he is to eat on a journey, and think in so doing that we have got a satisfactory explanation of all our aims and problems, the more utterly we are failing to take in the significance of what is happening. We must never allow ourselves to make up our minds, and to get our theories comfortably settled, because then experience is at an end for us, and we shall see no more than we expect to see. We ought rather to be amazed and astonished, day by day, at all the wonderful and beautiful things we encounter, the marvellous hints of loveliness which we see in faces, woods, hills, gardens, all showing some tremendous force at work, often thwarted, often spoiled, but still working, with an infinity of tender patience, to make the world exquisite and fine. There are ugly, coarse, disgusting things at work too--we cannot help seeing that; but even many of them seem to be destroying, in corruption and evil odour, something that ought not to be there, and striving to be clean and pure again.