The greatest word in the English language, is not English in its origin, but Hebrew, while its content knows no limitation of language or nationality. From the thundering peaks of Horeb, and the illumined heights of Hermon, Immanuel, God with us, has been spoken to the world, and its meaning for men gathers up the purpose and end of all the exalted incidents and experiences of their history; all its revelation, its struggle for the right, its sacrifice, its overcoming, and its joy.
The voices heard by the prophets of the past, the visions of the seers, the incarnation, the resurrection, the day of Pentecost, the ministry of the saints, the impulses and achievements of moral and religious reform, all have witnessed to the eternal verity that the beginning, mean, and end of all great events is God with us.
In the center of the world's inquiring contentions and culture, Paul on Mars Hill set the splendor and definition of this truth over against the interrogations and enigmas of the centuries. The courts and marts of Athens were embellished with religious monuments and altars so multiplied and so finely chiselled that in their defacement and decay they yet remain the wonders of our time, the teachers of our youth; and this striving after, if haply they might honor, an unknown God, which glorified the art of Greece, and adorned its hilltops with a beauty that is immortal, found no less pathetic and impressive expression in the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile. In all lands and in all time men have dedicated their richest offerings, their noblest endeavor to the traditions or to the hopes of this word, and the most pitiful thing of all history is the tale of their misdirected, and hence unavailing, aspiration. To-day no less vainly and persistently humanity are seeking for that which is ever at hand. Like the little child in the unconsciousness of its sore distress, they have called for one who bore them in his arms. Blindfolded by ignorance or by a prejudice no less pagan than of the Agora, men are crying the light that is ever present, and that would flood their vision. From the slums, the sweat-shop, the sick-room, ay, and from the outcast and degraded, the heart of sin-sick humanity is crying. My God, O my God! and to unveil to these, to His every least child, the Father's saving and eternal presence, is the Christ-ministry to which we are called.
