And the history of Christianity evinces both the necessity and reality of Divine influences.  God the Spirit has actually been present by a special and peculiar agency, in this sinful and hardened world, and hence the heart of flesh and the spread of vital religion.  God the Spirit has actually been absent, so far as concerns his special and peculiar agency, and hence the continuance of the heart of stone, and the decline, and sometimes the extinction of vital religion.  Where the Holy Spirit has been, specially and peculiarly, there the true Church of Christ has been, and where the Holy Spirit has not been, specially and peculiarly, there, the Church of Christ has not been; however carefully, or imposingly, the externals of a church organization may have been maintained.

But there is no stronger, or more effective proof of the need of the presence and agency of the Holy Spirit, than that which is derived from the nature of the case, as it appears in the individual.  Just in proportion as we come to know our own moral condition, and our own moral necessities, shall we see and feel that the origin and growth of holiness within our earthly and alienated souls, without the agency of God the Holy Spirit, is an utter impossibility.  Let us then look into the argument from the nature of the case, and consider this doctrine of a direct Divine operation, in its relations to ourselves personally.  Why, then, does every man need these influences of the Holy Spirit which are so cordially offered in the text?

1.  He needs them, in the first place, in order that he may be convinced of the reality of the eternal world.

There is such a world.  It has as actual an existence as Europe or Asia.  Though not an object for any one of the five senses, the invisible world is as substantial as the great globe itself, and will be standing when the elements shall have been melted with fervent heat, and the heavens are no more.  This eternal world, furthermore, is not only real, but it is filled with realities that are yet more solemn.  God inhabits it.  The judgment-seat of Christ is set up in it.  Heaven is in it.  Hell is in it.  Myriads of myriads of holy and happy spirits are there.  Myriads of sinful and wretched spirits are there.  Nay, this unseen world is the only real world, and the objects in it the only real objects, if we remember that only that which is immutable deserves the name of real.  If we employ the eternal as the measure of real being, then all that is outside of eternity is unreal and a vanity.  This material world acquires impressiveness for man, by virtue of the objects that fill it.  His farm is in it, his houses are upon it, solid mountains rise up from it, great rivers run through it, and the old rolling heavens are bent over it.  But what is the transient reality of these objects, these morning vapors, compared with the everlasting reality of such beings as God and the soul, of such facts