But the text applies to ourselves. The days in which our lot is cast are days of doubt and difficulty--days when ancient landmarks are being removed, and the beaten tracks so effaced as almost to be indiscernible. So that we may well stand, like the traveller in the metaphor, to see and ask for the old paths, for the good way, amid the clouds of scepticism and unbelief which gather athwart our pathways; amid the Babel of voices saying “Who will show us the good?” we may say, with the Psalmist, “Lord, lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us.” For what are those ways, those old paths, that good way, but the original revelation of God as our Father in heaven--subsequently manifested in the Person of His Incarnate Son as the Revealer of the Divine will, in the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, acting through the Church as His agent for making His “ways known to the sons of men.” “The history of the race of Adam before the Advent,” says a great statesman,[69] “is the history of a long and varied, but incessant preparation for the Advent;” and the history of the human race since the Advent, it may be added, is but a record of the gradual but sure progress of that kingdom which Christ came to establish upon earth, an earnest of the time when the kingdoms of this world shall have become the kingdoms of God and of His Christ, and He shall reign for ever and ever as King of kings and Lord of lords. And to this, as it seems to me, all historical research as well as scientific discovery points. There are those who to exalt Christianity would represent the world as in total darkness before the Advent. The truer estimate of the Gospels shows us that Christ was in fact the “true Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” The investigation of the records of the past assures us of this fact, confirms us in this belief, proves to us that God never “left Himself without witness,” teaches us that Christ drew as it were into a focus all the truths that men had previously held, only freeing them from error and bringing them into clearer light. “The words,” says a great scholar,[70] “by which God was known in the far-off ages are but mere words; but they bring before us with all the vividness of an event which we witnessed ourselves but yesterday, the ancestors of the whole Aryan race, thousands of years, it may be, before Homer and the Vedas, worshipping an unseen Being under the self-same name, the best, the most exalted name they could find in their vocabulary.” Plutarch wrote ages ago: “If you travel through the whole world, well, you may find cities without walls, without literature, without kings, moneyless, and such as desire no coin; which know not what theatres or public halls or bodily exercise mean; but never was there, nor ever shall be, any one city seen without temple, church, or chapel, without some God or other, which useth no prayers, nor oaths, no prophecies and divinations, no