IT is sometimes asked why, if the life and teachings of Christ Jesus were divinely inspired and were intended to show to mortals the way of salvation and to bring about the regeneration of mankind, the path which he indicated should have been missed and primitive Christianity have floundered into the bog of misunderstanding so comparatively soon after the termination of the Way-shower's earthly career. Why was this seeming failure permitted; why was the beacon-light allowed to become obscured to a degree which, although not amounting to actual extinction, nevertheless occasioned a dimness which served to accentuate rather than to illumine the all-pervading gloom?
The answer to the foregoing question is suggested by a word in the question itself. However great the seeming, the failure was only a seeming; however dim the light might appear to the short-sighted and the undiscriminating, it was still there and visible to those who looked steadfastly in front of them, refusing to be dazzled by the nearer false lights which sought to eclipse the true or to divert the gaze from it. The glamour occasioned by the pomp and circumstance of materiality in statecraft and religion, the gilt and glitter of elaborate ritual, have made their apparently successful appeal to the unthinking and worldly, but this pseudo-splendor has never succeeded in misleading the few earnest seekers after the truth, whose fidelity has been rewarded by an accession of spiritual discernment which has not only preserved the pure traditions of primitive Christianity from destruction, but has furthered their growth.
Thus, all down the ages, from the time of the Saviour until the present day, successions of faithful followers of the Master have arisen to point out the real Pharos, and to warn mankind against the by-paths of superstition and falsity which lead away from the true understanding of God. True it is that history repeats itself, and just as prior to the coming of Christ Jesus the soil was carefully prepared for the good seed which he was to sow, by a long line of prophets and seers whose concept of God gradually progressed from that of a mere tribal deity, imbued with all the faults inherent in mortals, to that of a divine Providence almost as perfect as the "One altogether lovely" revealed to us by Jesus himself, so ever since the establishment of Christianity have the minds of men been progressively made ready for the restatement of the glorious message which it has been the inestimable boon of this present age to hear.
