And this is a Divine revelation, a heavenly system of truth so far beyond human reason, and so intrinsically unrelated to any of our faculties, that it could never have been discovered by man's intelligence, but only preternaturally communicated from without! To Paul, who is alone responsible for the famous scheme, this is the "wisdom hidden from the ages, which none of the princes of this world ever knew"--his peculiar way of describing the superiority of his teaching to that of the Greek masters like Plato and Aristotle. But the civilised world--the _orbis terrarum_ of the nineteenth century--holds with Socrates that the moral law is supreme over gods and men, and believes that Mill and Carlyle are safer guides when they teach, that no less than the best moral emotion discoverable in man may be ascribed to the God of men. "Depend upon it," says the great man of his hero, Frederick the Great, "it is flatly inconceivable that moral emotion could have been put into him by an entity which had none of its own." Meanwhile, if the universe be good at heart, if reason be indeed its soul, the tendencies of modern thought must be leading mankind to some predestined end. The movements known to history as the Renaissance, Reformation and Revolution, accomplished results which must endure to all time; they marked the great stages in humanity's onward march. To-day, when systems and schemes of religion are going to pieces like the dust of the dead, when mystery and miracle are becoming unthinkable things in a world where all is law; when the most imposing pretensions are subjected to so minute and pitiless an analysis; when every dogma of council or creed can be tracked and traced with an unerring precision to root ideas which govern the human mind in its undeveloped stages; to-day, when, in spite of the destructive work being done, a reverence and a true zeal for truth reigns as it never did before in this world's history, when the sense of the responsibility and solemnity of life weighs upon men so profoundly, there must, I say, be some goal towards which humanity is moving, there must be some synthesis which shall reconcile for them their aspirations and their knowledge, some harmony which shall resolve the discordant notes of life--in a word, there must be some Far-off, Divine event Towards which the whole creation moves.