This divine hatching method may be seen, too, in the progress of truth, as it unfolds from stage to stage. Nothing is more common than to see a person holding on to a shell in which truth has dwelt, without realizing that the precious thing he wants has gone on and reëmbodied itself in new and living ways which he fails to follow and comprehend. While he is saying in melancholy tones, “They have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid him,” the living Lord is saying, “Have I been so long time with thee and yet dost thou not know me?” Truth can no more keep a fixed and permanent form than life can. It lives only by hatching out into higher and ever more adequate expressions of itself, and the old forms in which it lived, the old words through which it uttered itself, become empty and hollow because the warm breath of God has raised the inner life, the spiritual reality, to a higher form of expression. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews was very much impressed with this crumbling of old forms and expressions to give place to the new. God spoke, he says, to our fathers in sundered portions and in a variety of manners, but he is speaking to us now by his Son. The things that can be shaken, he writes, are being removed that the things which cannot be shaken may remain. Luther must have felt this shaking process in his day; and when he saw the old forms of religion crumbling, he wrote that great hymn of the Reformation, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” He had found something that could not be shaken. He could stand his ground and face the seen and unseen world in faith, because he knew that the hatching was going on, and the new was being born in higher, truer, and more adequate forms as the old was vanishing. Let us hope that this ancient divine method may still operate in this momentous hour of human history. Never, perhaps, since the fall of Rome, has there been such a world-shaking process affecting every country and all peoples. Immense changes are under way. Nothing will ever be quite the same again. The old is vanishing before our eyes and the new is being born. So much was wrong and outworn, and unjust and inhuman, that the changes must go very far, and they will necessarily involve some breakage. But even now, in this most dynamic period of modern history, that which is to mark permanent progress will come forth, not by a smashing process, but by the hatching of the eggs, by the emergence of the underlying forces of life and the realization of those human hopes and aspirations that have long been held in and suppressed.