born, and emerge into the light and air of the world. It would therefore be strictly correct for the botanist or the gardener to say of a seed, that it must pass through successive stages of development, that it must be born again and again before it can perfect its destiny. It is just so with man. Through physical birth he only enters into instinctive, sensual life.

The new-born babe can eat and sleep like any other animal, but he has no thoughts; he does not reason, and he does not love. He gives no evidence of mind. These faculties are latent and unformed as yet; and he must be born again and again before he can enter the manly life of responsibility, of reason, and of will.

But no one of these changes, whether of the plant, the animal, or the merely natural life of man, is the birth referred to in our text, the birth "from above." For these changes do not lift the creature upwards. They are horizontal, rather than ascending developments of life, ending on the same plane whence they begun. The birth from above. belongs to the higher life of man.

Man alone, while he absorbs and repeats all the changes of nature below him; while he reproduces all the births and experiences of the mineral kingdom in his osseous or bony framework, of the vegetable kingdom in his fleshly organism, of the animal kingdom in his nervous structure; — while, I say, man is thus the regal self-hood to which all these kingdoms point, and in which they all melt and fuse, all nature confessing itself resumed and epitomized in man, he has superadded another faculty, which makes him a fit child of God, lifts him into full acknowledgment of the Infinite, and at once expresses all the distance between human history and mere animal growth, between man's eternal progress and nature's eternal immobility, between the starry splendors of human aspiration and the dull, ungenial fires of mere brute community.

Man alone can rise from nature into spiritual life through

the "birth from above." Foldings are wrapped about us, nature within nature, life within life, hiding the ovaries of the noblest spiritual powers, which must yet come forth, and be born, and unfold themselves through the infinite ages. Spiritual capacities have we, through which, when opened, a power which is out of us and about us sends its eternal utterances into our inmost being.

Not more surely does man's sensuous nature open outward and downward, relating itself to all mineral, all vegetable, all animal forms, than a finer faculty opens inward and upward, through which he is brought in contact with God, and receives ceaseless communications from Him. "Not more surely do the organs of sense bring into his ear the sound of waters, or over his brow the breath of breezes, than his spiritual sense admits to his soul the aura of heaven, and the still and awful beatings from the heart of God." There is in human nature, and in that alone, a germ or capacity made, from the beginning, receptive of the Divine Spirit, and opening upwards towards the spiritual world, even as the plant is receptive of the light and the heat of the solar beams, and opens upward towards the sunshine in which it warms and grows. The animal can never know a superior inspiration to that which his nature devolves upon him, as it devolved upon all his progenitors. He is void of spiritual consciousness, incapable of transcending the natural plane, or of preferring an infinite good to a finite one.

But this is the eternal distinction of man, "that the entire sparkling and melodious universe of sense is but the appanage of his nature, is but the furniture of his proper life," while the INMOST of his soul can be vivified by infinite love, and made lustrous with the splendors of God, through the birth that is from above.

The stone, the horse, or the lily which fills the worshipping air with its dazzling sheen, has only a natural existence, essentially finite and perishable. It is a creature of

time and space, outside of all immediate relation to God, of all spiritual lift above the dead level of sense, and never existing by virtue of its inward commerce with infinite Goodness and Truth.

But the opulence of man's nature is such,—it is so veritably grand and august, so filled with inward being, so woven upon the substance of God, that when we throw off nature as we drop our garments from us at night, and all other things find their ending, our distinctive human life only finds its true beginning. This interior life of man is spoken of by Jesus in his Gospel under various names, as "the treasure laid up in heaven, which neither moth nor rust can corrupt;" as the "pearl of great price," to purchase which a man "sold all that he had;" as the "one thing needful;" as the "kingdom of Heaven," or the "kingdom of God." Jesus declared that a man must be "born from above," that is, he must be born into this kingdom, before he can see it, or enter it, or possess it.

And this announcement, like so many other of his teachings, is not the deep and impenetrable mystery that theologians would make it, but the concise presentation of a simple, well-understood, and universal law. It is not even a figurative statement, but a literal fact.

It is the utterance of a great truth in harmony with, and illustrated by, the method and manner in which we gain all our knowledge. Any great division of things, or any large system of truths, is called in common language a kingdom. Thus the three great divisions of natural forms are termed the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. And we sometimes speak of the great kingdoms of the atmosphere, the ether, the electric and magnetic auras, or the denser forms of solids and fluids. We speak of the kingdoms of sound, of light, of odors, of taste, or of touch. On turning from the material world to the mind, we may consider the trades, the arts, the professions, the sciences, each as kingdoms. And rising yet higher, we may in Scripture phrase

term all that superb field of spiritual relations which link us to God in a nearness more profound than to our own bodies, as "the kingdom of God."

Now how do we enter any of these kingdoms? Is it not by being "born" into them? Is it not by having some sense or faculty, corresponding to the kingdom and capable of receiving impressions from it, developed out of the germ state into formation, birth, and life? A man can only enter the kingdom of light through that part of his nature which is fitted to receive impressions from the light, — through the sense of sight, through the organism of the eye. If that sense has never been born into actual formation and life, the man can never enter the kingdom of Light.

Of all that mighty ocean of sunshine which on a long summer day floods the earth miles deep with its solar tides, the blind man has no more sensation than the rock upon our coast of the ocean's tide and surge. He stands without that kingdom, for the sense by which alone he enters it is unborn within him. We can only enter the kingdom of sound, with its boundless and inestimable wealth of human speech and many-voiced harmony, through the sense of hearing, by which sounds reach and impress us. And he in whom that sense is wanting and unborn cannot enter the kingdom of sound. So we enter the kingdom of odors, of taste, and of touch, through the birth and growth of those senses in us which can receive impressions from those kingdoms, and only thus.

The same law applies to the kingdoms of mental truth. The peasant or the clown travels up and down over the surface of the earth; he sees beneath him the steadfast soil, and above his head the mighty westering arch over which the sun is slowly rolling. The same divine handwriting is unrolled before his unobservant eyes that meets the exploring gaze of Liebig, Lyell, or Agassiz. But he cannot enter the wondrous kingdoms of chemical, geological, and astronomical truth. His scientific mind is unborn; he has no faculty formed and

active within him that can commune with this class of truths, and see their varied relations and revelations. He cannot map and measure the blue dome above him. The solid substances of nature will not fly apart at his uninstructed touch, and reveal the secrets of their affinities. Nor will the hardened leaves of the earth's crust yield up to his rude questioning the hoary secrets of geologic history. There is no way for him to enter the varied kingdoms of scientific knowledge, but by the birth and growth of that part of his nature which corresponds to those kingdoms and is fitted to commune with them. The kingdom of God is a spiritual kingdom. It is composed of all those spiritual and celestial influences which form the wealthy bond of angelic union, which are the life-blood of heaven, and which will make man the image and likeness of his Divine Original. He is fitted to possess and enjoy this heavenly inheritance - this kingdom of God - as fully as he is fitted to possess and enjoy the lower kingdoms of matter and of mind. He has spiritual powers within him fitted to receive impressions from the "kingdom of God," as the eye, the ear, the taste, the smell, the touch, are fitted to receive impressions from the kingdom of matter, or as the mental powers are fitted to receive impressions from the varied realms of scientific truths.

And as your senses must first be formed and your scientific faculties be developed before you can enter the respective kingdoms to which they lead, so your spiritual powers must be born, and grow into habitual and controlling use, before you can pass into the kingdom of God. You cannot see it, nor enter it, without being "born from above."

The kingdom of God is not a realm far off in space, to which the event of death shall introduce us. Death only brings us into the spiritual world, and then, if our higher faculties are unborn, we shall still stand outside of God's kingdom, as a man blind from birth may grope painfully over this broad earth in a rayless and endless night, never