Luke 1:32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give to him the throne of his father David: What a roll of greatness should we have were there tables of marble, or brass, or gold in which were engraven the names of those who in all times and places have attempted to attain mental and spiritual excellence. It is a sad thought that what is called history is only a page from a vast, grand, but lost, volume. Violence and reckless ambition impressed into service all the chroniclers of the past, and that kind of greatness we see in Christ was not often asked to sit for its picture, It was too high for the surrounding kings and their hosts of sycophants. It would require a whole London of Westminster Abbeys to hold the urns of the noble ones whose very names are forgotten. The loss is great to the present, for many minds see a preponderance of evil in our age, and are not sure that our world was planned by benevolence, to which desponding minds an adequate conception of the continuous glory of man would be a welcome inspiration. There has been a succession of minds on the heights, and these have signalled to each other in all the years of man upon our globe. What ones are visible, are only a few wanderers from the mighty herd. Solon and Moses studied at the Egyptian Heliopolis indeed, but of the many thousands of men always studying there, it cannot be possible that the honours were all borne away by a Hebrew and a Greek. At that educational centre, thousands and tens of thousands came and tarried and went while centuries passed along. It must be that the few names that have come to us are only types of a great army which was scattered over the prolific East. Aspasia was not the only intellectual powerful woman of the age of Pericles. She was the one brought into the foreground by her alliance with a powerful king; others having her education and her beauty and power lived and died in a fame that could not cross the gulf of many centuries. Nor was Cleopatra the only Greco-Egyptian woman who could speak and write in all the tongues of the Mediterranean coast, but she was one made historic by the accidents of crowns and vices, leaving us to assume that there were other women, many who equalled her in learning, and passed far above her in all higher worth. Thus history is only a page out of a lost volume. As those who dig in the sands of the Swiss lakes, or in the deserted cave-homes of man and beast, or who explore the ruins of Mycenae, toss out a few implements or a few carved bones or a few jewels worn once by beauty, so history casts up out of the vast sepulchre where the ages sleep traces only of an absent world. (David Swing.) Parallel Verses KJV: He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: |
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