198 THE LIGHT OF DAT 



saviours, usually come upon the scene quietly and 

 unknown. They do not even know themselves. 



The remark of Schopenhauer occurred to me in 

 thinking of the advent of Jesus. ^Nothing could be 

 more natural, nothing more in harmony with uni- 

 versal experience, than his coming, and his life as 

 we may read it in the Synoptic Gospels. There was 

 no prodigy, no miracle, no sudden apparition of a 

 superhuman being, clothed in majesty and power, 

 as the popular expectation indicated there would 

 be, but the Messiah came in the natural way as a 

 helpless infant, born of human parents. Instead of 

 a throne, there was a humble cradle in a manger. 



It really enhances our notion of his merit, or if 

 you prefer of his divinity, that he should have been 

 rejected by his race and people, that he should have 

 come from a town of proverbial disrepute, that he 

 should have been meek and lowly through life, a 

 man of sorrows, the friend of the humble and the 

 despised, that his kingdom should not have been of 

 this world ; in fact, that he should in every way have 

 disappointed expectation. 



All this seems in harmony with the course of na- 

 ture and of human life. It agrees with the truest 

 experience. There is a sort of poetic verisimilitude 

 about it. Indeed, if a God were to appear this is 

 probably the way he would come. All greatest things 

 have an humble beginning. The divine is nearer 

 and more common than we are apt to think. The 

 earth itself is a star in the sky, little as we may 

 suspect it. 



