III. Lastly, the second of my texts suggests--the contrast between the
Undying Light and the lamps that go out.

'For a season ye were willing to rejoice in His light.' There is
nothing in the present condition of the civilised and educated world
more remarkable and more difficult for some people to explain than the
contrast between the relation which Jesus Christ bears to the present
age, and the relation which all other great names in the
past--philosophers, poets, guides of men--bear to it. There is nothing
in the world the least like the vividness, the freshness, the
closeness, of the personal relation which thousands and thousands of
people, with common sense in their heads, bear to that Man who died
nineteen hundred years ago. All others pass, sooner or later, into the
darkness. Thickening mists of oblivion, fold by fold, gather round the
brightest names. But here is Jesus Christ, whom all classes of
thinkers and social reformers have to reckon with to-day, who is a
living power amongst the trivialities of the passing moment, and in
whose words and in the teaching of whose life serious men feel that
there lie undeveloped yet, and certainly not yet put into practice,
principles which are destined to revolutionise society and change the
world. And how does that come?

I am not going to enter upon that question; I only ask you to think of
the contrast between His position, in this generation, to communities
and individuals, and the position of all other great names which lie
in the past. Why, it does not take more than a lifetime such as mine,
for instance, to remember how the great lights that shone seventy
years ago in English thinking and in English literature, have for the
most part gone out, and what we young men thought to be bright
particular stars, this new generation pooh-poohs as mere exhalations