early Christians believed that the millennial advent was close; they
heard the warning of the apostle, brief and sharp, "The time is
short." Now suppose that, instead of this, they had seen all the
dreary page of Church history unrolled; suppose that they had known
that after two thousand years the world would have scarcely spelled
out three letters of the meaning of Christianity, where would have
been those gigantic efforts,--that life spent as on the very brink of
eternity, which characterize the days of the early Church,--and which
was after all, only the true life of man in time? It is thus that God
has led on His world. He has conducted it as a father leads his child,
when the path homeward lies over many a dreary league. He suffers him
to beguile the thought of time, by turning aside to pluck now and then
a flower, to chase now a butterfly; the butterfly is crushed, the
flower fades, but the child is so much nearer home, invigorated and
full of health, and scarcely wearied yet.

2. This non-fulfilment of promise fulfils it in a _deeper_ way. The
account we have given already, were it to end there, would be
insufficient to excuse the failure of life's promise; by saying that
it allures us would be really to charge God with deception. Now life
is not deception, but illusion. We distinguish between illusion and
delusion. We may paint wood so as to be taken for stone, iron, or
marble; this is delusion: but you may paint a picture, in which rocks,
trees, and sky are never mistaken for what they seem, yet produce all
the emotion which real rocks, trees, and sky would produce. This is
illusion, and this is the painter's art: never for one moment to
deceive by attempted imitation, but to produce a mental state in which
the feelings are suggested which the natural objects themselves would
create. Let us take an instance drawn from life.