THE FULNESS OF THE TIME
If there be no will guiding the affairs of men towards a predestined
end, what a meaningless welter it all is! What a record of wars and
feuds, of rising and of perishing empires, of civilisations born and
civilisations overwhelmed: in very truth
'A tale
Told by an idiot: full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.'
There is unity and a new dignity in the tale when one gets up on a hill
and sees it in far perspective. Things did not happen by chance.
There was through it all a purpose at work, welding humanity together
with the cement of blood, throwing down the barriers of race and
language, silencing the sound of tumult and war until at last the song
is heard on the plain of Bethlehem that has sung itself into the hearts
of men, ushering in the dawn of peace and goodwill. In the fulness of
the time the Child was laid in the manger.
I
Every advance of humanity in its upward struggle has sprung from some
divine dissatisfaction. It was the fulness of the time in that the
world, disillusioned and dissatisfied, realised its need. The Greek
found no answer for their moral needs in the pantheon of gods that
filled the heart with the passion for beauty alone. Socrates before
drinking the hemlock advised his disciples to search for another
teacher; but that other could not be found. The only remedy for the
ills of man that they discovered was that he should cut himself loose
from the world--a gospel of suicide. The Roman made a god of power.
But when he had conquered the world, invested it with roads and bridges
and by force had imposed peace on it, then he confronted the awful
mystery of his own personality, and his questioning was baffled by a
silence in which there was no voice nor any that answered. His gods
became objects of derision. In the gratification of his bodily
cravings he sought to lull the hunger of his soul. At last Rome
presented the dread spectacle of a Nero who was at once 'a priest, an
atheist, and a god.' There is preserved a record which visualises the
awful depths to which that pagan world descended. Nero had murdered
his mother, and he comes back to Rome nervous as to how the people will
receive him. But the citizens poured out to meet him in their
thousands, and rent the welkin with their shouts of welcome--'Hail,
Nero, the god!' If that world was to be saved, it had to be saved
then. If God was ever to intervene in the affairs of men, He had to
intervene then. The extremity of man was God's opportunity. The
Unseen Ruler must either come and deliver a world such as that or
abdicate. The coming of the Child was a necessity.
II
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
With us, too, it is the fulness of the time. If God intervenes when
the need is sorest, and when man realises the need--then we can well
cherish the expectation that another manifestation of God is at hand.
Nineteen centuries ago He came to a world whose religion was dead.
With us it is not dead; it is sore stricken. The glow has vanished,
and those who bow down in the house of God in our day do so largely
from force of habit, and not because they believe. Religion to-day
curbs few evils, and is powerless against the selfishness that
sacrifices the well-being of nations on the altars of self-interest.
And, just as in Rome the unrest of soul made the degenerate a prey to
every charlatan and soothsayer that came out of the East, so the
spiritual hunger of our day brings men and women to crystal-gazers and
table-rappers, bowing down before every superstition, however gross.
And if the Rome of the Caesars sought to allay its soul hunger at the
banquets of pleasure, so also with us. Low forms of pleasure have led
the multitudes captive. The London of Charles II. could not hold a
candle to the London or Glasgow of to-day in the way of refinements of
material sensation. The old cry of 'bread and circuses' has given
place to the cry of dancing-halls and doles! In that old world at last
there was no room for the cradle in the family life--the babe was shut
out. And so to-day. There is every sign that God must again intervene
and save, or the civilisation we know will be buried with the
civilisations of all the past. The fountain of inspiration, of
cleansing, of righteousness must be opened afresh, and its reviving
waters sent flowing over all the land. Unless God does so come there
is no hope. But all history is the proof that He will so come. We can
hear the rumble of His chariot wheels as He comes. Here and there the
Spirit is moving on the face of the waters. Of old it was shepherds
and fishermen who first received the glad tidings. That fishermen
should be the first to feel the coming outrush of spiritual power in
our day is wholly natural. The glad tidings of Christmas is that God
is ever coming to His own. The duty laid upon us is that we prepare
His way, and make room for Him. It will be a new Edinburgh and a new
Glasgow when the renewing Spirit shall have swept through them. It is
the one hope. In Melrose Abbey there is an old inscription, 'When
Jesus comes the shadows depart.' Some monk who felt the shadows
gathering round him realised Christ as a living presence--and the
shadows were wafted away. And he carved the words. And our shadows
will vanish when He who lay in the manger will come again, in the
fulness of His reviving and quickening Spirit. Then God will again
work marvels in transfigured lives and in nations reborn.
IV
There are some good people to whom the word Revival is anathema. There
have always been such people. 'Their doctrines are most repulsive, and
strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect to their
superiors,' wrote the Duchess of Buckingham to Lady Huntingdon,
regarding the early Methodists. 'It is monstrous to be told that you
have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth.
This is highly insulting, and I wonder that your Ladyship should relish
any sentiment so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.'
Yet it was that same Revival of religion in the days of Wesley and
Whitefield that saved England when the evil days befell in the end of
the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. There is
no nobler figure in all history than that of John Wesley riding over
the whole country, reading as he rode, contesting all England for God,
everywhere wakening the dead. To duchesses and highly refined folk
that Revival seemed to be 'repulsive' and 'monstrous.' Religion was
good enough in its own place, but it must not interfere with their
amusements. They wanted their religion well iced. To-day when only
another such outrush of spiritual energy can save a poor sick world,
there is no need to trouble about the mocker. There is only reason to
rejoice that there are manifest stirrings in the depths of human life
which no earthly theory can explain. Often and often on wearied men
there comes the breath of a new life, and armies, long worn out, arise
and snatch redemption out of ruin. The prelude to these triumphs of
the Spirit has always been a sense of expectation springing up
mysteriously out of the depths. That expectation is wholly natural.
We have come through the most awful carnival of blood and tears in the
world's history, and so far there has been no result commensurate with
the sacrifice. The old world is dead and the new tarries while men are
left
'Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,'
If man's extremity be God's opportunity, then, once more, it is the
fulness of the time.