[28] St. Luke. [29] St. Luke. [30] St. Luke. This was no special gift bestowed on them and only on them. God has never, as far as we can see, dealt in special and temporary gifts. He helps us to see those we possess already. What our Lord seems anxious to make clear is the power over evil with which the human being is always endowed. It is probably to be one of our great future discoveries that in no case shall anything do us harm. As yet we scarcely believe it. Only an individual here and there sees that freedom and domination must belong to us. But, if I read the signs of the times aright, the rest of us are slowly coming to the same conclusion. We are less scornful of spiritual power than we were even a few years ago. The cocksure scientific which in its time was not a whit less arrogant than the cocksure ecclesiastical is giving place to a consciousness that man is the master of many things of which he was once supposed to be the slave. In proportion as the wiser among us are able to corroborate that which we simpler ones feel by a sixth or seventh sense, a long step will be taken toward the immunity from suffering which our Lord knew to be ideally our inheritance. XVII Sickness, age, decay, with all the horrors with which we invest our exit from this phase of existence, I take to be a misreading of God's intentions. We shall learn to read better by and by, and have already begun to do so. To this beginning I attribute the improvement which in one way or another has taken place in our general health--an improvement in which science and religion have worked together, often without perceiving the association--and in the prolonging of youth which in countries like the British Empire and the United States is, within thirty or forty years, to be noted easily. Misreading of God's intentions I might compare to that misreading of his parent's intentions which goes on in the mind of every child of six or seven. He sees the happenings in the household, but sees them in a light of his own. Years afterwards, when their real significance comes to him, he smiles at his childish distortions of the obvious. In comparison with what St. Paul calls "mature manhood, the stature of full-grown men in Christ," our present rating might be that of a child of this age. It is no higher. Misreading is all that we are equal to, but it is something to be able to misread. It is a step on the way to reading correctly. Though our impulse to learn works feebly it works restlessly; and a day will surely come when we shall be able to interpret God aright. XVIII Next to sickness I should place poverty as the second of the two great trials we bring upon ourselves.