This then is the truth which Scripture expresses so emphatically when it declares: "The wind bloweth where it listeth and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit." (John iii. 8.) "Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of first fruits of his creatures." (James i. 18.) "We have received, not the spirit of the world but the Spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God." (1 Cor. ii. 12.) "As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, which were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man but of God." (John i. 12, 13.)

And so the Bishops and Fathers of our church. "Holy we cannot be," says Bishop Andrews, "by any habit, moral or acquisite. There is none such in all moral philosophy. As we have our faith by illumination, so have we our holiness by inspiration; receive' both from without. To a habit the Philosophers came and so Christians But that will not serve; they must go further. Our habits acquisite will lift us no further than they did the heathen men; no further than the place where they grow, that is earth and nature. They cannot work beyond their kind (nothing can), nor

may.

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rise higher than their spring. It is not, therefore, · si habitum acquisistis,' but si spiritum recepistis,' that we must go by."-"The condition of man after the fall of Adam," says our Tenth Article," is such that he cannot turn and prepare himself by his own natural strength and good works to faith and calling upon God: wherefore, we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ, preventing us that we may have a good will, and working with us when we have that good will." It is the Holy Ghost," says our Homily for Whitsunday, "and no other thing, that doth quicken the minds of men, stirring up good and godly motions in their hearts, which are agreeable to the will and commandment of God, such as otherwise of their own crooked and perverse nature they should never have. That which is born of the Spirit is spirit. As who should say, Man of his own nature is fleshly and carnal, corrupt and naught, sinful and disobedient to God, without any spark of goodness in him, without any virtuous or godly motion, only given to evil thoughts and wicked deeds. As for the works of the Spirit, the fruits of faith, charitable and godly motions, if he have any at all in him, they proceed only of the Holy Ghost, who is the only worker of our sanctification, and maketh us new men in Christ Jesus." Lord of all power and

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might," we pray in various collects, "who art the author of all godliness-without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy-by whose only inspiration we can think those things that be good-from whom all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed-graft in our hearts the love of thy name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and of thy great mercy keep us in the same, through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

If then such be the Source of the Spiritual Life, we see at once the DIFFICULTIES which this subject must unavoidably present to every superficial thinker. To him who is indifferent to his danger as a sinner alienated from God, and not awake to the absolute necessity of this new life to his salvation, the mysterious inwardness and divinity of its rise in the spirit must ever produce surprise and cavil. He knows not himself and the depths of his own heart and the inveteracy of his disease, and he cannot therefore understand the nature of the remedy that he needs. He thinks and lives in the world of sense, and everything pertaining to the world of spirit must be strange to him. The whole region is to him an untrodden, nay an unimagined one, and it is but natural therefore that he should doubt, and perhaps deride, the report of others as he would a traveller's tale of wonder. Piety is a

spiritual experience; that is, it lies beyond the sphere of sense; and cannot therefore be described or demonstrated under the forms of sense; and consequently we who plead for it, must be prepared to meet objections drawn from such a source with dignified tranquillity. We shall not think to solve them while yet the very ear is wanting by which the solution can be heard, and the heart by which it can be understood; but shall seek rather to address ourselves to the deeper source of all objections,-the indifference and self-ignorance and false security from which they spring. This was the method Jesus took with Nicodemus (John iii. 4-8). When the latter asked him, "How can a man be born when he is old?" he attempts not to answer this "How," till he has pressed upon the conscience of the objector the absolute necessity of the experience itself about which he objects. Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again." All difficulties about the manner of the workings of Religion are but the trifling of an unconcerned mind; but when the necessity of Religion is once felt, when a holy earnestness comes over us, and we heartily desire and seek the thing itself, then are we prepared either to have our

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real perplexities removed, or to learn with humble acquiescence that they are not removable to finite man. And therefore Jesus having re-asserted to Nicodemus the great truth which he began with, and shown the absolute necessity of its experience in every man, from the simple fact that all are born with an earthly nature and cannot therefore possibly be fit for a heavenly state till into that earthly nature has been infused a heavenly one ("he only that is born of the Spirit can be spiritual"); having thus solemnly re-asserted the necessity of the fact, let the manner be intelligible or not; then first recurs to the question of the Jewish Ruler, How can such a change take place, not indeed to answer it but to indicate its unanswerableness; not to unfold the mysteries of the human spirit and of its transition from death to life but to declare that they are far too deep for our perception; for while results of thought present themselves in the consciousness and issue out in the conduct, the causes of thought, and its occasions and its complex associations and its manifold workings, are hidden from the human eye. It is with the spirit that breathes within us even as with the wind that breathes around us,-sensible in its effects but hidden in its source. "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth;