xx The profoundest changes 



and habitually think of fifty years and four hundred 

 years as comparable magnitudes. We do not think 

 of vast historic periods in the same terms as of the 

 periods over which our own memory extends ; we 

 have naturally a vague kind of notion that the 

 historical ages were not only much longer, but almost 

 infinitely longer, than our own remembered lifetime ; 

 and it needs some mental effort to make it appear 

 real, that the period which passed between the ac- 

 cession of our present Queen and her Jubilee, was 

 an eighth of that which has passed since modern 

 history began with the discovery of America. 



But not only is the visibility of historical change 

 no proof of its profundity ; it may be maintained 

 that the opposite is true, and that the profoundest 

 changes are, to contemporaries, the least visible. God 

 revealed Himself to Elijah neither in the storm, nor 

 in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still 

 small voice ; l and when Christ was asked when the 

 Kingdom of God was to appear, He replied, " The 

 Kingdom of God cometh not with observation ; 

 the Kingdom of God is in the midst of you " 

 (already). It is most probably a general law of 

 Providential guidance and of historical progress, 

 that the profoundest and most fruitful changes are 

 wrought in silence, like the growth of the seed. The 

 first conquests of Christianity were made in silence 

 under the protection of the internal peace of the 



1 1 Kings xix. 11 et seq. 

 2 Luke xvii. 20, 21, margin of Revised Version. 



