Then we turn to history, the long history of man, and the long history of the Christian religion which goes back, beyond the sublime figure who proclaimed it in Palestine, to the beginnings of the worship of God. We discover those beginnings in the first men who turned their eyes from self to the brother. We look along the ages and cease to be surprised. In his long-drawn education man has but slowly learnt to find God in more and more of his own life and the world. Step by step he has felt his way, led by the spirit given him, to the knowledge of the God and Father of Jesus Christ, the incarnate and redeeming God of all men, the God who comes to indwell all things. Only now, in a new fulness of time, are the teaching of Jesus and the revelation of his life and death finding a new context in new knowledge and reflective thought. Only now are we beginning to see why, if knowledge and reflective thought have so far done their work, it may well be an evil and adulterous generation that seeks for any other signs than those which they and Christ reveal. Just what the earthly presence of the God-revealing Jesus was to that generation—a test of their single-mindedness and will to receive and welcome divine truth—so, when his life and witness meet with a new emphasis in the less but concurrent witness of new knowledge, this generation of religious men is put to the same test. Will they receive new witness to his truth and to God? or will they reject it because it has no likeness to those signs that to their minds are alone fitted to show God? Will they or will they not have humility enough to learn of scientific and philosophic 'builders of Jerusalem' concerning the true methods of God? We cannot tell; that is, of this generation. But we may trust in the prevailing strength of truth. Generations pass, but that endures. And the prophet's word goes on:—'the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.' ------- CHAPTER XII Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna, legato con amore in un volume, cio che per l'universo si squaderna. _Dante._ For the Christian the barrier that finally checks the advance of life is not death but a self-concentrated self. It is freedom misused and lost, freedom turning against the life that has striven to bring it to birth. Perversity builds that barrier and human life cannot pass it or—shall we not say with the Christian?—God cannot pass it. This alone thwarts the divine purpose for man and brings about the 'second' and only true death.