Another characteristic of drama is a kind of consistency between the beginning and the end, a kind of logical order in which it moves, and this is illustrated in the gospels by the fact which must always be borne in mind, that the task is one of supreme difficulty. The author of the gospels has to tell the story of the Incarnation of God’s son. A story in which there are human and divine actors, in which there is both nature and the supernatural. It requires vast dramatic power. I have suggested, yet I may more definitely repeat it, that the human earth on which you tread is not that of old Palestine, or Galilee, or Jerusalem. It is a real universal, a human earth. There is not a bit of purer realism than the gospels. Take up this story, walk with these men. Down by the lake you find the Gadarene crying among the tombs. You see the stranger landing and healing him. You stand down by the boat and hear the poor man begging Jesus to allow him to go with him. You see these human figures. Look into it a little, and there the man stands where he has stood almost two thousand years, listening to the words of the Master compelling him to go away. The meaning of it you understand, for the case is before you. On this solid human earth, this real human nature, this realistic character which makes you feel the heart beat, and smell the real earth, all is combined with something else, with the supernatural. There have been writers who have carried us into wonderland. We were glad to be there, and we traveled along delighted with the scenery and with the companions created by the imagination. The gospels do not do this. This solid earth beneath your feet is not more real than the heavens that bend over it. Human reality is combined with heavenly, and you are continually going to and fro between the earth and the sky. The natural and the supernatural are so run together that you feel no shock in passing from one to the other. You have men and angels, divine power and human power, associated together. The warp of earth is woven into the woof of heaven until it is one piece of cloth of gold. The gold of the skies is braided into the earthly so perfectly I defy any man to take them apart with consistency or success. This is the beauty and perfection of dramatic success. The divine and the human are blended in Christ so that you are puzzled to tell whether it is a man or a God who speaks and works. The blending of the human about him, in him, through him, all this is an effect utterly beyond human art. The story goes straight home to the human heart. The time will never come when it will not be a dear and sweet old story to the souls that hear it. Edward Eggleston once told me that when he was lecturing in some strange corner of the earth, where culture in the pulpit was comparatively rare, after the lecture one of the men said, “I wish you would come here and preach for us. Our minister preaches the funeral of Jesus Christ twice a Sunday, fifty-two Sundays