There has never been a race that has been without it.  There has never been a generation that has not reached forward and thought there was a higher life, a fuller liberty, to which it could come.  It has been in all the religions which have been not simply fears, but which have been the highest utterances of all the different races in all the different generations of mankind and all the different countries of the world; and there was one especial race in one especial part of the world in whom that aspiration was especially strong.  We will not ask how it came to be there.  There it was in this strange people living on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, and in all its history marked out by the strange peculiarity that it was a spiritual people, that in the midst of all its sins, blunders, and weaknesses it was forever lifting up its soul to God and striving to find Him out.  Very often it blundered strangely and sadly.  Very often it failed to get that for which it was seeking, by the very impetuousness, rashness, and earnestness of search.  But it was always seeking after Him.  And the years rolled by, and by and by in the midst of that great nation there was a little company of men who, accompanying one another from the beginning of their lives, had been searching after this God and trying everywhere if they could find Him.  And one day they heard that down by the river which ran through their country, which was sacred to them from the multitude of old national associations, there was a great teacher come, who was declaring that for which the human soul was forever reaching after, the need of escaping from sin and entering upon and leading a higher life.  This little company went down and met two disciples of John the Baptist, and learned from them everything that they had to teach them.  Their souls were stirred by that which he had to say.  But one day, while he was teaching them, it seemed as if they had come to an end of that which he could teach them.  He looked up, and there upon the hill just above the river there was passing one upon whom the gaze of the fishermen by the river immediately kindled, and he lifted his hand and said, “He is the one who is to teach you now.  You must go after him.  Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”  Great and mysterious words, that filled in that which men had believed in all the records they had read and the thinking they had done before!  And they turned away from John and went after this new teacher and, following to His house, there they abode with Him during that day and the days that followed after.  Little by little, as we read the story of their being with him, we can see them taken into His power, we can see how there was a certain fascination in His presence which laid hold upon them.  It seemed at first to be purely human, to be the way in which one strong man takes possession of his fellow-man and compels him to rely upon him.  It was upon purely human ground.