It is simply a great dream that we set before us. It
is something that we imagine, something that comes out of the
imaginations and anticipations of our own hearts, simply stimulated by
the possibilities of the life in which we are living. It would be very
much indeed, if it were only that. It would bear a certain testimony of
itself, if it simply came out of the perpetual dissatisfaction of men's
souls, even if there were no distinct manifestation of that life and no
possibility of entering into it at once with our own personal
consecration, with the resolution of our own wills. But if it were
simply a dream, ultimately it must fade away out of the thoughts of
men. It is impossible that men should keep on, year after year, age
after age, this simple dream of something which does not exist. It would
be like those pictures which the poet has drawn, something which appeals
to nothing in our human nature and stands only as a parable of something
that is a great deal lower than itself. The poet pictures to us in his
imagination those things which do not appeal to our life, because they
find nothing to correspond to their high portraits, to show those
transformations of nature into something that is entirely different and
foreign to itself. If religion be simply the dream that some men hold it
to be, if it simply be the cheating of man's soul with that which has no
reality to correspond to it, then it will be no more than this. Is there
any assurance that is given to us, that is before the soul of man, of
some great new life which it is given for man to seek, without which it
is given for no man to be satisfied? I do not know where any man could
find that assurance absolutely and entirely, unless there had stood
forth before us the person of Him who spoke these words and who
manifested them in His life.
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