heaven?  Or are all these emotions empty words to you, things that are spoken in pulpits, but to which you have nothing in your life corresponding?  Oh then, my friend, what am I to say to you?  What but this? no sonship except by that spiritual birth; and if not such sonship, then the spirit of bondage.  If not such sonship, why then, by all the tendencies of your nature, and by all the affinities of your moral being, if you are not holding of heaven, you are holding of hell; if you are not drawing your life, your character, your emotions, your affections, from the sacred well that lies up yonder, you are drawing them from the black one that lies down there.  There are heaven, hell, and the earth that lies between, ever influenced either from above or from below.  You are sons because born again, or slaves and ‘enemies by wicked works.’  It is a grim alternative, but it is a fact.

III.  Thirdly, no spiritual birth without Christ.

We have seen that the sonship which gives power of possessing the inheritance and which comes by spiritual birth, rests upon the giving of life, spiritual life, from God; and unfolds itself in certain holy characters, and affections, and desires, the throbbing of the whole soul in full accord and harmony with the divine character and will.  Well then, it looks very clear that a man cannot make that new life for himself, cannot do it because of the habit of sin, and cannot do it because of the guilt and punishment of sin.  If for sonship there must be a birth again, why, surely, the very symbol might convince you that such a process does not lie within our own power.  There must come down a divine leaven into the mass of human nature, before this new being can be evolved in any one.  There must be a gift of God.  A divine energy must be the source and fountain of all holy and of all Godlike life.  Christ comes, comes to make you and me live again as we never lived before; live possessors of God’s love; live tenanted and ruled by a divine Spirit; live with affections in our hearts which we never could kindle there; live with purposes in our souls which we never could put there.

And I want to urge this thought, that the centre point of the Gospel is this regeneration; because if we understand, as we are too much disposed to do, that the Gospel simply comes to make men live better, to work out a moral reformation,—­why, there is no need for a Gospel at all.  If the change were a simple change of habit and action on the part of men, we could do without a Christ.  If the change simply involved a bracing ourselves up to behave better for the future, we could manage somehow or other about as well as or better than we have managed in the past.  But if redemption be the giving of life from God; and if redemption be the change of position in reference to God’s love and God’s law as well, neither of these two changes can a man effect for himself.  You cannot gather up the spilt water; you cannot any