"Ah me," said Goethe once, "that the yonder is never here." Go deep enough into every wrong and sin and you find at its root this selfishness. So many of us degrade life into a heartless scramble. We fight each other because each man, dissatisfied himself, is convinced that his neighbour is getting more than his share. It may be doubted whether there has ever been a day in the Western world when more people were dominated by the conviction that gain is godliness. So many about us have virtually ceased to put their trust in anything about which they cannot lace their fingers. With them, dreamers about anything else are cranks, and martyrs for anything else are nuisances. And this reacts upon such apology as they have for more serious thinking. We seem in many ways to be returning to the pagan condition when judgment was not feared and spiritual influences were unfelt. In novel, drama, and much that passes for science, we have the monotonous iteration that man is the creature of blind chance under an indifferent sky. But this, thank God, is not the whole story. There is another and brighter side. If we take a very subdued estimate of our modern day and world, I am yet persuaded that never were the saving ideas of the Saviour more potent, never have His high aspirations been more ardently welcomed or more strenuously followed than they are now. Past all human speculations about Christ, men hopelessly divided in creed are yet getting nearer to what He lived believing and died believing. In the weariness of so much of the modern world, and in the hopelessness of its outlook, I see an age ready to receive anew the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I see a temper ready to grasp with fresh earnestness the thoughts of the "Living Lord and Supreme Teacher of our race." Men to-day are dreaming like dreams as shone before the souls of the ancient prophets, and in the visions of men who have wrought for human progress since the first days even until now. Waking dreams of a new and diviner order of society. A state marked by righteousness, peace, and happiness for the whole people; the golden age, when man, knowing what it is in himself he ought to love, loves that in his neighbour as in himself. And Christianity, which came into the world to fulfil these heaven-born dreams, is being openly challenged as never before to substantiate them. In the larger aims of our spiritual ideals the "yonder is never here," nor, indeed, can it be. There must always be above us something better than our best. When we cease to make progress we die, and that, in the language of Scripture, is the second death.