The era looks differently to different minds, just as the first century after Christ looked differently, according as men looked with faith towards the future, or with regret towards the past.  Some rejoice in the present era as one of progress.  Others lament over it as one of decay.  Some say that we are on the eve of a Reformation, as great and splendid as that of the sixteenth century.  Others say that we are rushing headlong into scepticism and atheism.  Some say that a new era is dawning on humanity; others that the world and the Church are coming to an end, and the last day is at hand.  Both parties may be right, and both may be wrong.  Men have always talked thus at great crises.  They talked thus in the first century, in the fifth, in the eleventh, in the sixteenth.  And then both parties were right, and yet both wrong.  And why not now?  What they meant to say, and what they mean to say now, is what he who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews said for them long ago in far deeper, wider, more accurate words—­that the Lord Christ was shaking the heavens and the earth, that those things which can be shaken may be removed, as things which are made—­cosmogonies, systems, theories, fashions, prejudices, of man’s invention:  while those things which cannot be shaken may remain, because they are eternal, the creation not of man, but of God.

‘Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven.’  Not merely the physical world, and man’s conceptions thereof; but the spiritual world, and man’s conceptions of that likewise.

How have our conceptions of the physical world been shaken of late, with ever-increasing violence!  How simple, and easy, and certain, it all looked to our forefathers!  How complex, how uncertain, it looks to us!  With increased knowledge has come—­not increased doubt—­that I deny; but increased reverence; increased fear of rash assertions, increased awe of facts, as the acted words and thoughts of God.  Once for all, I deny that this age is an irreverent one.  I say that an irreverent age is an age like the Middle Age, in which men dared to fancy that they could and did know all about earth and heaven; and set up their petty cosmogonies, their petty systems of doctrine, as measures of the ways of that God whom the heaven and the heaven of heavens, cannot contain.

It was simple enough, their theory of the universe.  The earth was a flat plain; for did not the earth look flat?  Or if some believed the earth to be a globe, yet the existence of antipodes was an unscriptural heresy.  Above were the heavens:  first the lower heavens in which the stars were fixed and moved; and above them heaven after heaven, each peopled of higher orders, up to that heaven of heavens in which Deity—­and by Him, the Mother of Deity—­were enthroned.