Unless all that I have been telling you during the past five weeks is a mere dream; unless the very facts that I have pointed you to are utterly without significance, you ought almost to have thought yourselves into the point to which I fain would lead you now—that we are on the threshold of a new manifestation, and that the mighty Teacher again will appear as man among men. Now, to say that to any people may only make them think: “But why for us?” So might the Jew have questioned when last He came on earth. That a thing so great, so transcendent, and so rare, should come to earth at any particular time, to be measured by only a few years of mortal time—that that should be now seems too strange, too beautiful, to be true. And yet He came before; why not again? If at the birth of the fifth sub-race, why not at the birth of the sixth? Some must be on earth when any such manifestation takes place; some generation of men and women must be born around the coming of a Christ; and there is no valid reason that any one of you can give why this age should not be such a time, and the people of this age the recipients of the new flood of spiritual life. Strange, because it happens seldom, but sure, because it happened at similar crises in the story of the world; and the strangeness of it does not mark it as untrue when you see the signs of the coming all around you, if your eyes should be open to recognise what they mean. For an expectation is spreading everywhere of the coming of some mighty Teacher, and here and there on earth the expectation has taken voice, nay, has even had a human messenger and herald to proclaim it. In Persia such a messenger came in the one who was called the Bāb, who declared the coming of a mighty one, followed by another said to be yet greater than himself, and yet a third, the Abbas Effendi of the present time, certainly a great spiritual teacher, but one who still declares that the mightiest is yet to come, who is to bind together the eastern and the western worlds. Not only along that line has this expectation shown itself, but among the people of Islām in a strange combative form, natural to their fighting races, showing itself, therefore, as leader in battle to be ruler in the future; and through Africa you see it in this expectation of the Mahdi, which has given so much trouble during our own time.