the brother with whom I have to do in the long course of history, in the
total humanity which has grandly lived. The reason that men do not
believe it is that of course there seems to be to them some strange and
previous presumption with regard to it, something which makes the story
incredible. They say it is the supernatural in it, that it goes beyond
the ordinary experience of man. Ah! it seems also strange to me, the
ordinary experience of man. Who dares to dream that human life has lived
its completest and shown the noblest power of receiving God into itself?
Who dares to think that these few thousand years have exhausted this
majestic and mysterious being that we call man? Who dares to think of
his own life that, in these few thirty, forty, fifty years that he has
lived, he has known and shown all that God can do in and for him? Who
dares to say that it is impossible, that it is improbable, that he who
is the child of God shall receive some newer and closer access to his
father, that there shall come some new revelation which shall be written
not in a book, not upon the skies, not in the history of human kind, not
on the rocks under our feet, but here in our human flesh, that there
shall be an incarnation, that the God who is perpetually trying to
manifest Himself to human kind should find at last, should take at last
the most exquisite, the most sensitive, the most perfect, the most
divine of all material on which to write His message, and in that human
nature show at once what God was and what man is? Until there be some
exhaustive sight of human nature as that, it is in no wise improbable
that there would be that which outgoes our observation, that once in the
long music of our human life the great key-note of humanity shall be
struck, that once in our great groping after the God who made us He
shall seem to draw the veil aside, nay, more than that, shall come and
like the sunlight crowd Himself through every cloud until He takes
possession of our humanity.