THE GROWTH OF CHARACTER.

I. Religion as an Enthusiasm.

The first thing that strikes the careful reader of the New Testament is the enthusiastic attitude of its writers. They are as men who have made a great discovery. They go around telling the good news. Their language is one of an entirely new hopefulness and courage in the world. Nothing could daunt it. They were very largely poor people. He whom they called their Master was an obscure Galilean peasant who was crucified. They themselves were persecuted and hunted into the holes and corners of the earth. Cultured people spoke of the new religion as a pestilent superstition. Yet no writings on earth are so full of overflowing life as these ill-written letters and narratives which form our New Testament.

Jesus goes around telling men good news about God and life. He says it is as though the great king had made a wedding feast for men. The joy of it is like the joy of one who is willing to sell all that he has to attain the object of his desire. Paul has the same tone. I counted all that a man usually values, as nothing in comparison with the discovery, he says. “I have found the secret," he writes. "I am pressing on toward the high calling of God." "Now are we the sons of God, and what we shall be passes our thought," writes the author of the First Epistle of John. Here in our letter we read that we are to become "partakers of the divine nature."

Life has obviously become a new thing to these men. What do they tell us about it?

II. Faith is its Beginning.

The first step was the awakening in a man's heart of the confidence that this delight in the better life, and its fine spontaneous impulse, was possible for him. They saw it in Jesus, and he helped them to feel that the new temper which was in him was in them also. With Paul it was the same. He says, "It was God's good pleasure to reveal his Son in me." He made the discovery or came to the conviction that a life like at of Jesus was not only possible, but was the only real human

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life. He carried the message that that was the life which God meant men to live, and that behind it was God's power to develop it in every man who would allow it to open out within him. "Only believe," is his cry. Then will make the experience for yourself of what it means to find the better self getting the upper hand. You will find out by actual trial that what God wills you to be is good and perfect and acceptable. This is religion. Take it on trust at first that, because others have found it so, you can. Then in the new hope go on to find it out yourself.

III. Its Nature is a Limitless Progress.

process of

Its growth

The act of faith is only a beginning. The learning to live as a man may live is a slow one. is like the leaven, says Jesus. After thirty years of it Paul says that he has not in any way fully laid hold of it. He is only pressing on. "What God hath for those that love him hath not entered into the heart of man.'

But every step is a gain. To learn that goodness is not an alien thing imposed under penalty, but only the very finest experience in the world, chosen with joy simply because there is nothing else so good, is a slow matter. Yet it is sure, for it is but the unfolding and maturing of our nature. The delight of growing along the line of our true life is the inspiration of which we have been speaking.

Note some of the points in the progress, as our lesson speaks of them.

IV. Virtue.

This does not mean "be virtuous" in the sense in which we use the word. It is the old Roman idea of the spirit of valor. Cultivate the spirit of valorous courage in your faith. Get into the way of never allowing yourself to take any other attitude toward your own life than that of a man erect, virile, fearless, undaunted. That is half the battle. Let your faith as it grows become a thing about which is the air of manhood growing conscious of itself. This new life is the surest thing in the world. Faith is not a half certainty. It is an attitude which, as it grows, justifies and creates the vital temper of one who is sure of victory in the end.

V. Knowledge.

Here is meant rather personal experience. We begin by taking the possibility of the control of the best in us on trust.

We come after a time to know it for ourselves. Faith ought to grow. The things which lie before us are matters of faith, believed in because those of wider experience have found them so. But the things with which we start become matter of knowledge. We have found them out for ouselves. In proportion to the measure in which we have grown into our true life is our personal certainty of its fine satisfaction and our faith in its further possibilities. Get to know it for yourself, says our lesson. Set about it bravely and confidently. You will grow sure as you go on, and readier to go on eagerly to still finer quality of life and character.

VI. Temperance: Self-mastery.

At first, of course, it is not easy. The life that loves simply what is pleasant and appeals to the senses, that is the slave of its foolish desires and impulses, is not a thing to be outgrown in a moment. We are only children. Manhood is not won by a jump. But the power to let the real man in us quietly control both thought and conduct will surely come if we set our heart on it. Life which drifts here and there, just as inclination moves, is not life at all. The real joy of living is when one has hold of the reins and directs one's course. In time, things outside will lose something of their power. We shall love to be ourselves so much that mere likes and dislikes lose hold, and we become masters of our fate. So to live is life.

VII. Entering the Kingdom.

This process of the unfolding of life to fuller power and finer issues is what the writer calls entering the kingdom, coming to have divine things within us king over all else. He speaks of an "abundant entrance.” It is not mere escape from ill. It is the rich filling out of life with the growing sense of its ever wider range and quality. It is the joy for which we read that Jesus "endured the cross." That is real religion.

THE CITY OF GOD.

AND I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the

first heaven and the first earth are passed away; and the sea is no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God the Almighty, and the Lamb, are the temple thereof. And the city hath no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine upon it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the lamp thereof is the Lamb. And the nations shall walk amidst the light thereof: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory into it. And the gates thereof shall in no wise be shut by day (for there shall be no night there): and they shall bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it. And I heard a great voice out of the throne saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them, and they shall be his peoples, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God: and he shall wipe away every tear from their eyes; and death shall be no more; neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain, any more: the first things are passed away.

REVELATION, chapter twenty-one.

THE CITY OF GOD.

I. The Ideal Society.

Whenever human life has been strong and hope high, men have pictured the ideal future of society in which the evils which now are shall have passed away. In the present imperfect condition of things, there is always so much apparently inevitable misery and wrong that, so long as there is in human nature the desire for something better, such pictures will continue. They are all of them imperfect, for it is given to none to forecast the future; and we cannot even imagine the complex product of human life and thought and society as it unfolds. But they are of value as showing us how continually upward the inexorable trend of human life is, and as a stimulus to build new pictures of the future as inspiration toward the realization of that which shall be higher than they.

Nay, our own happiness is so bound up with the happiness of those among whom we live that it seems impossible for us to attain to the best life for ourselves, except in so far as we can raise the life of all. The religious or life ideal for the individual is only possible in relation to the ever higher life ideal and better organization of the 'community.

II. Paul's Thought of it.

The figure of which he is most fond is that of the body. The body is one, but has many members. These members are different in the work they have to do, but the good of each part is bound up with the good of the whole. No part can live to itself. The good of the whole is attainable only as the result of the good of each of the parts.

As each individual grows into that life of service for which he is best fitted, so the society on the welfare of which he himself depends becomes strong. The aim of life to Paul is for each one to grow up into the realization of the possibilities that are in him through contributing his part toward the building up of the whole. He looks for the day when we "shall all attain unto the measure of the fulness of the stature of Christ." Of the society itself he says that it, "according to the due working