is only the perfecting of hinges and bolt that He may enter more impressively and lovingly and entirely; let me learn that every bright taste or fine instinct or noble appetite is a ray of sunlight, not the sun, is the projection into my life of some force above, outside of me, which I can find only by climbing back along the ray that is projected, up to it; let me see all animal life a study and preparation for this final life of man, sensations and perceptions, growing clearer and clearer as we rise in the scale until in man they are fit to convey this knowledge which man alone can have, the knowledge of God; let me see this, and I must be ashamed to make that life a thing of pride which might be the seat of such an exalted and exalting dependence and humility.  I am unwilling that those well-built cisterns which ought to be so full of God should hold nothing but myself, as if one crept into his aqueduct and closed it up where the water came into it from the fountain and lived in it for a house and found it very dry.

We see clearly enough what the change is that is needed.  It is to substitute for self-consciousness as the result of life the ever-abiding consciousness of God.  Do you ask how it shall be done?  Ah, my dear friends, that is the very miracle of the gospel.  I can tell you only this about it, which the Lord has told us all before:  “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”  The kingdom of God, that region of life in which God is the life’s King.  And again:  “If any man love me he will keep my words and my Father will love him and we will come unto him and make our abode with him.”  “We will come to him!” That is what we want, for that is the source of all humility, the coming of God into us, and the condition is love and obedience, the spiritual and the active forms of faith.  That is all we can say.  And that is enough, for in that this at least is clear, that such a conversion is a work that God has undertaken to do for us, that He asks of us nothing but submission to His willing helpfulness, and that being a transformation of life, it may, nay it must, be done while life is in possession, it can be done best when life is in its fullest.  We have not to wait till movement is slow and color is dull.  We are not tempted to make a vacancy and call it piety; but when man’s life is so full that it tempts him daily to self-consciousness and pride, then let him open it wide to the consciousness of God and ennoble it with the full dignity of that humility whose first condition is the presence of God in the soul that He built for His own inhabiting.

There is a condition possible where the life shall flow with God as fully and freely as it ordinarily flows with self, where the greater volume it acquires, it only bears the more of Him; where every joy delights in Him, and every power depends on Him, and the whole man lives in Him and knows it.  It is not a constant effort.  It is the spontaneous direction of the whole nature.  It is the new condition of the Christian who has been exalted from the human pride into the divine humility of life, out of self to God.