known in the language of religion as conviction of sin.  It is the earliest moral crisis of the soul; it is widely felt,—­such is the nature and such the circumstances of men; and, as a man meets it in that hour, as he then begins to form the habit of dealing with his failures sure to come, so runs his life to the end save for some great change.  If then some restoring power enters in, some saving force, whether it be from the memory and words of Christ, or from the example of those lives that were lived in the spirit of that ideal, or from nearer love and more tender affection enforcing the supremacy of duty and the hope of struggle,—­in whatever way that healing comes, it is well; and, just as the man of honest mind has recognized the identity of his virtue with Christ’s rule, and has verified in practice the wisdom of its original statement, so now he knows that this moral recovery, and its method, is what has been known on the lips of saint and sinner as the life of the Spirit in man, and even more specially he cannot discriminate it from what the servants of Christ call the life of Christ in them.  He has become more than a humanitarian through this experience; he is now himself one of those whom in the mass he pities and would help; he has entered into that communion with his kind and kin which is the earthly seal of Christian faith.

“Yet it seems to me a profound error in life to concentrate attention upon the moral experience here described; it is but initial; and, though repeated, it remains only a beginning; as the vast force of nature is put forth through health, and its curative power is an incident and subordinate, so the spiritual energy of life is made manifest, in the main, in the joy of the soul in so far as it has been made whole.  A narrow insistence on the fact of sin distorts life, and saddens it both in one’s own conscience and in his love for others.  Sin is but a part of life, and it is far better to fix our eyes on the measureless good achieved in those lines of human effort which have either never been deflected from right aims, or have been brought back to the paths of advance, which I believe to be the greater part, both in individual lives of noble intention, and in the Christian nations.  Sin loses half its dismaying power, and evil is stripped of its terrors, if one recognizes how far ideal motives enter with controlling influence into personal life, and to what a degree ideal destinies are already incarnate in the spirit of great nations.

“However this may be, I find on examination of man’s common experience these three things, which establish, it seems to me, a direct relation between him and God:  this spontaneous gratitude, this trustful dependence, this noble practice, which is, historically, the Christian life, and is characterized by its distinctive experiences.  They are simple elements:  a faith in God’s being which has not cared further to define the modes of that being; a hope which has not grown to specify even a Resurrection;