The Universal Man is now coming to be a real being in the individual
   mind.

Mankind, which is one physically and mentally, is one morally and spiritually.  All varieties of man are built upon one ethical type.  The virtues are cosmopolitan.  One human ideal looms above and before all races, though refracted differently in the changing atmospheres of earth.  Within the saints one dream of goodness forms.

Over the seers and sages one vision of the source of human goodness rises.  Through the clouds of earth one Infinite and Eternal Form shapes itself to the wise.  As men rise they meet.  The race-souls are strangely alike.  Socrates and Buddha are brothers.  Humanity is in travail with one Human Ideal and one Divine Image, and these twain are one.  The great Mother sings to herself: 

    But he, the man-child glorious,
      Where tarries he the while? 
    The rainbow shines his harbinger,
      The sunset gleams his smile.

    My boreal lights leap upward,
      Forth right my planets roll,
    And still the man-child is not born,
      The summit of the Whole.

    I travail in pain for him,
      My creatures travail and wait;
    His couriers come by squadrons,
      He comes not to the gate.

Will Humanity come to the birth with her beloved son?  Who that reads the story of the coming of the Hebrew Christ can doubt it?  What miscarriage can befall her who is nursed by Nature and tended by Providence?  What will the Coming Man be like?  We have seen his face break through the flesh for a moment.  On the shoulders of the race will rest the head of Christ.  What shall be said when the morning stars sing together, and all the sons of God shout for joy that MAN is born upon the earth?

   The Holy Ghost hath come upon thee, Humanity, and the power of the
   Highest hath overshadowed thee; therefore also, that holy thing which
   is born of thee, shall be called the SON OF GOD.

This, at least, is my reading of nature and of history in the light of the completed evolution of the Christ.  The normal growth through history of the Ideal Man, is the incarnation of the Divine Man.  The mischievous antithesis between the realms of the natural and the supernatural, that kept the world’s thought from crystallizing around the world’s soul, disappears in an Order which is at once natural in all its processes, and supernatural in its source and plan and energy.

We hold the key to all earth’s problems in the vision of God which, gleaming through nature and through man, dawns in the face of Jesus Christ.  Over Him—­in whom the Human Ideal becomes the Divine Image, and the most perfect dream of human goodness is the revelation of earth’s God—­the Eternal One breaks silence, whispering to our souls: 

   This is my Beloved Son:  Hear Him!

VII.