for most of us, looks askance at these truths, and when, on the principle that in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is the king, popular novelists become our theological tutors, and when every new publishing season brings out a new conclusive destruction of Christianity, which supersedes last season’s equally complete destruction, it is hard for some of us to keep our flags flying.  The ice round about us will either bring down the temperature, or, if it stimulates us to put more fuel on the fire, perhaps the fire may melt it.  And so the more we feel ourselves encompassed by these temptations, the louder is the call to Christian men to cast themselves back on the central verities, and to draw at first hand from them the inspiration which shall be their safety.  And how is that to be done?  Well, there are many ways by which thoughtful, and cultivated, students may do it.  But may I venture to deal here rather with ways which all Christian people have open before them?  And I am bold to say that the way to be sure of ’the power of God unto salvation’ is to submit ourselves continually to its cleansing and renewing influence.  This certitude, brethren, may be contributed to by books of apologetics, and by other sources of investigation and study which I should be sorry indeed to be supposed in any degree to depreciate.  But the true way to get it is, by deep communion with the living God, to realise the personality of Jesus Christ as present with us, our Friend, our Saviour, our Sanctifier by His Holy Spirit.  Why, Paul’s Gospel was, I was going to say, altogether—­that would be an exaggeration—­but it was to a very large extent simply the generalisation of his own experience.  That is what all of us will find to be the Gospel that we have to preach.  ’We speak that we do know and testify that we have seen.’  And it was because this man could say so assuredly—­because the depths of his own conscience and the witness within him bore testimony to it—­’He loved me and gave Himself for me,’ that he could also say, ’The power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.’  Go down into the depths, brother and friend; cry to Him out of the depths.  Then you will feel His strong, gentle grip lifting you to the heights, and that will give power that nothing else will, and you will be able to say, ’I have heard Him myself, and I know that this is the Christ, the Saviour of the world.’

But there is yet another source of certitude open to us all, and that is the history of the centuries.  Our modern sceptics, attacking the truth of Christianity mostly from the physical side, are strangely blind to the worth of history.  It is a limitation of faculty that besets them in a good many directions, but it does not work anywhere more fatally than it does in their attitude towards the Gospel.  After all, Jesus Christ spoke the ultimate word when He said, ’By their fruits ye shall know them.’  And it is so, because just as what is morally wrong