self-dissatisfied spirit, that consciousness of internal schism and bondage, that war between the flesh and the spirit so vividly portrayed in the seventh chapter of Romans, begins, and instead of the utterance of the moralist:  “I have kept the everlasting law, give me my dues,” there bursts forth the self-despairing cry of the penitent and the child:  “O wretched man that I am.! who shall deliver me?  Father I have sinned against heaven and before thee.”

When, therefore, the truth and Spirit of God, working in and with the natural conscience, have brought a man to that point where he sees that all his own righteousness is as filthy rags, and that the pure and stainless righteousness of Jehovah must become the possession and the characteristic of his soul, he is prepared to believe the declaration of our text:  “Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.”  The new heart, and the right spirit,—­the change, not in the mere external behavior but, in the very disposition and inclination of the soul,—­excludes every jot and tittle of self-assertion, every particle of proud and stoical manhood.

Such a text as this which we have been considering is well adapted to put us upon the true method of attaining everlasting life.  These few and simple words actually dropped, eighteen hundred years ago, from the lips of that august Being who is now seated upon the throne of heaven, and who knows this very instant the effect which they are producing in the heart of every one who either reads or hears them.  Let us remember that these few and simple words do verily contain the key to everlasting life and glory.  In knowing what they mean, we know, infallibly, the way to heaven.  “I tell you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which we see, and have not seen them:  and to hear those things which we hear, and have not heard them.”  How many a thoughtful pagan, in the centuries that have passed and gone, would in all probability have turned a most attentive ear, had he heard, as we do, from the lips of an unerring Teacher, that a child-like reception of a certain particular truth,—­and that not recondite and metaphysical, but simple as childhood itself, and to be received by a little child’s act,—­would infallibly conduct to the elysium that haunted and tantalized him.

That which hinders us is our pride, our “manhood.”  The act of faith is a child’s act; and a child’s act, though intrinsically the easiest of any, is relatively the most difficult of all.  It implies the surrender of our self-will, our self-love, our proud manhood; and never was a truer remark made than that of Ullmann, that “in no one thing is the strength of a man’s will so manifested, as in his having no will of his own."[4] “Christianity,”—­says Jeremy Taylor,—­“is the easiest and the hardest thing in the world.  It is like a secret in arithmetic; infinitely hard till it be found out by a right operation, and then it is so plain we wonder we did not understand it earlier.”  How hard, how impossible without that Divine grace which makes all such central and revolutionary acts easy and genial to the soul,—­how hard it is to cease from our own works, and really become docile and recipient children, believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, and trusting in Him, simply and solely, for salvation.