“But they are gone,” I hear some one say, “the old patriarchal days, and you can’t call them back.” I wish there was no such word in the language as “can’t.” It has made more mischief than all the rest of them together. But in the last sifting the world is run by the men who _can_, while those who can’t stand and look on. Who says you cannot do the thing that is right? That is what we are here for. Our business is to make out the right and then go ahead and do it. The Lord has all the time and all the resources that there are, and, if we do our best, we can leave Him to attend to the rest. Can’t! If the Church says to-day that it cannot restore the old faith, that it cannot rekindle the altar fires that have grown cold, it had better go out of the business; it has become an unfaithful steward. But as a matter of fact, it not only can, but nothing is easier. We are fighting wind-mills of the devil’s making. He put them there to frighten us off. In so far as we have lost our grip, it is because we Christians have been untrue to our mission, have failed to discern it. I see in all the social unrest and longings of the day the yearning heart of the world, which doctrine and ceremony and printed prayers have left and ever will leave cold. It is the praying _life_ it cries out for. The very infidel owns the perfect man in our Christ; and he turns upon our faith in anger because he feels that he has been cheated of the love that must be _lived_ by His followers to be felt. Only so can the world be made to see God in man. It was never more impatient for the sight than it is to-day. When the century drew to a close, in common with many others, I looked for a great revival that should sweep over men and set their minds toward the things on high; and, when it did not come, when the new century came in without it, I was disappointed. Until one day there came a letter to me from a friend whom I had known in all the years to be ever busy among His poor, toiling early and late in the Master’s steps; a letter that expressed the same thought, the same disappointment. “When will it ever come,” she wrote. And all at once it flashed through my mind that it had come, so silently, so gently,—even as He Himself came into the world, unheralded except by the angels’ song to the shepherds in the field—that we knew it not until it had passed and become history. What else is the mighty philanthropic movement of the last twenty years that has swayed the minds and hearts of men; that has given us the social settlement; that goes into the byways and the hedges searching for the lost neighbor and compels him to come in? What else is that but a revival of our faith on the lines Christ Himself laid down: binding up the wounds, caring for the sick and the stricken, helping him over the hard places, even paying his rent if he is helpless and poor?