It is very hard to understand how things do happen; and our only comfort is that we really understand nothing. We have in these last years been mesmerised into thinking that we understand a great deal when in reality we understand nothing at all. We camouflage our ignorance by speaking of law--but what is it? Why do like causes produce a like result always? No answer. We used to explain the heavens by gravitation. What is it? No answer. We ushered in the new age of electricity. What is it! Silence! There is no reason, then, for rebelling against the fact that we cannot understand the greatest of all mysteries--the coming of God more fully into the lives of men. All we can hope to do is to realise how natural it is that God should so come to men. As the years pass that thought becomes more and more natural. In other days God was thought of as dwelling far removed from the world. That is not now the great thought regarding God. 'Whatever sort of being God may be,' writes William James, 'He is nevermore that mere external inventor of contrivances intended to manifest His glory in which our great-grandfathers took such satisfaction.' (The conception of our great-grandfathers may have been limited; but it is more important that we should try to be as good men as they were.) This conception of 'an absentee God outside the world watching it go,' has given place to another. The world is now realised as spiritual through and through; the shrine of an indwelling life. God is in the world, has always been in the world, and man's reasoning and loving is but a reflection of his Maker's reason and love. Through all the weary centuries God has been with men, in men, striving with their spirits, never absent from them, the source of all their aspirations, visions, and dreams. If that be so, it is the most natural thing in all history that in the fulness of the time, when the need was greatest, God should come in fuller measure into the lives that He had made. Surely natural that the glows and flashes preceding the dawn should at last break forth into the glory of the sunrise. God, who has been with man from the dawn, guiding and leading, at last in the noontide speaks with the articulate Word, making His purpose clear. If once we realise that there has never been an impassable chasm between God and man, then the incredible becomes credible. For this is not an isolated event; it is rather the beginning of another great stage in man's spiritual evolution by which God comes and dwells more and more in the hearts of men, becoming incarnate in lives risen from the dead; in souls renewed after His image. III