I believe that a revelation of God is needed for the education of what is highest in man, and for bringing him to the highest point he can reach; and that God has been always revealing Himself in one way or another. But the revelation of every age must be suited to the character of that age. Man must be educated up to it, or he cannot receive it. Our Lord tells his disciples “I have yet many things to say unto you but ye cannot bear them now.”(19) Later generations are taught in this same way. The events related in the Acts, and the labours which came upon the Apostles fitted them by degrees for fresh revelations. If our Lord had declared to St Peter when he first joined him in Galilee that the Gentiles should have as full a share in Him and in the Kingdom as he would have; might not he too have turned away? Or if, as is likely, he had been personally drawn to Christ too powerfully to quit Him, yet such a sudden shock to all his notions might have closed his mind spasmodically against new ideas? For when a man recoils from a view which unsettles him and turns him giddy, he clutches at his supports with iron grip. Many have been made bigots in this way. Our Lord is careful to avoid for the disciples all turmoil of mind; the new seed must be left undisturbed that it may take firm root; so that for our Lord to have disordered all St Peter’s convictions by a premature disclosure, would have been contrary to His ways of acting. An age must be ripe for the truth, and the truth must be ripe for the age for the last to profit by the first. If the theory of gravitation had appeared ten centuries ago, it would have passed unregarded away, for then, nobody thought the outer world worth scrutiny. On the other hand the neo-Platonic philosophy which once moved masses of men has now become so many words. How then is Christ’s revelation to last for all time? It is enabled to do so, because there is _life_ in it and _growth_ along with life; because Christ does not deliver propositions about God which men are passively to receive once for all, but his sayings fall upon the human heart, and are quickened there, some in one generation and some in another: each generation seizes on its proper nutriment, and brings out of His sayings the special lesson it requires. St Paul, to recur to the quotation which is, in fact, the burden of this chapter, speaking of the effect produced by the preaching of the word on the hearers says— “The secrets of his heart are made manifest.”(20)