this unrighteousness cannot prevail. That conviction lies very deep in human nature, even apart from God’s revelation in the Psalms and the Gospel. But by this revelation it is given an irrefragable strength, and we grasp with the deepest conviction the assurance of the Psalmist: “Let the floods clap their hands, and let the hills be joyful together before the Lord, for He is come to judge the earth, with righteousness to judge the world, and the people with His truth.” That is the message of Advent, and there never was a time in history when we could grasp it more thankfully with all our hearts and souls. There is something inexpressibly elevating and inspiring in this message of a future judgment and of the final vindication of righteousness, as it enables us to look beyond this present scene of distress and trouble, to realize that all that is passing around us is in reality only part of a far larger and grander scene, and that the events of the hour are but a brief passage in a universal history, which has been carried forward for centuries under God’s hand, and is being worked out under His guidance to a glorious and righteous conclusion. If you allow your gaze and your thoughts to be fixed mainly on your own lives, on the lives of your own generation, or even of our own national history, you may well be distressed and perplexed at the apparent defeat of righteous causes and purposes, at the overthrow of the laborious work of years of peace, at what seems like the destruction of those bonds of human society to which prophets and saints and soldiers and statesmen had devoted their labours and their very lives for generations. So it seemed to Isaiah in his day; so it seemed to Habakkuk when he exclaimed, “that judgment doth never go forth.” So it has seemed to many a devoted servant of God and man, if he trusted only to his own eyes, from generation to generation. Nothing but prophecy, the prophecy of the Old and New Testaments, is, in fact, adequate to the strain thus put upon men and women by these experiences. But only believe, as the prophets assure you, only believe as our Saviour declared, and as His Apostles proclaimed by His commission, that it is but part of one great history, one great universal dispensation, in which God is steadily ensuring, by whatever means may in His Divine wisdom be necessary, the supremacy of righteousness and the overthrow of evil, and you can then live through it, and struggle through it, not merely with the patience, but with the exultation, which marked the Jewish prophets and psalmists. Belgium and Northern France are now passing through the very experiences, to the letter, which Isaiah described in the case of the people of Israel in his day; but Isaiah looked through all these distresses to a time when “the Lord’s House should be established in the top of the mountains and should be exalted above the hills, and all nations should flow into