“Growth came when, looking your last on them all You turned your eyes inwardly one fine day And cried with a start--what if we so small Be greater and grander the while than they? Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature? In both, of such lower types are we Precisely because of our wider nature; For time, theirs--ours, for eternity. Today’s brief passion limits their range; It seethes with the morrow for us and more. They are perfect--how else? They shall never change. We are faulty--why not? We have time in store.”[5] This slow unveiling of the ideal, of the goal, is, I believe, the divine method of making man, and it makes us feel at once how nearer than near God is and how all the way on and up He is in the very tissue and fabric of our lives--no foreign creator who moulded us out of clay and left us to run, or to run down, like a clock. For centuries man won his slender spiritual victories, cultivated his rugged virtues, sloughed off some marks of ape and tiger and formed habits of altruism under the influence of ideals which the highest personal types of the race revealed. These types of men were focus points, manifesting in some feeble measure the ultimate reality and casting out hints of the line of march. Sometimes they were conscious that they were organs of a larger Life which used them, sometimes they were girded, like Cyrus, for a divine mission, though they knew not Him whom they served. Thus the unbroken revelation of the infinite was slowly made, as the age could bear it--“God spake at sundry times and in divers manners.” Strangely enough the loftiest men of the pre-Christian period were always vaguely or dimly forecasting a diviner life than any ordinary type of man revealed. The human heart was always groping for an unveiling of God which would set the race to living on a new level. This longing rose among the Hebrews to a steady passion which burned brighter as the clouds in their national sky grew blacker. There was a Christ ideal centuries before Christ actually came in the flesh, though this ideal was always deeply tinged and colored by the age which gave it birth. But even so, it lighted the sky of the future and gave many a man heart and hope through long periods of dreary pessimism. When lo, a tilting of the plane, and the ellipse becomes a parabola with infinite stretch of curve!