you, and making every effort that He could make in consistency with the free will with which He endowed you from the centre of His own life, that you might become His and therefore might become truly yourself?  Through all the years in which you were obstinate and rebellious, through all the years in which you defied Him, nay, through the years in which you denied Him and said that He did not exist, He was with you all the time.  What shall I say to my friend who is an atheist?  Shall I believe that until he comes to a change of his opinions and recognizes that there is indeed a ruling love, a great and fatherly God for all the world, that he has nothing to do with that God?  Shall I believe that God has nothing to do with him until he acknowledges God?  God would be no God to me if He were that, if He left the man absolutely unhelped until the man beat at the doors of His divine helpfulness and said, “I believe in Thee at last.  Now help me.”  And to the atheist there appears the light of the God whom he denies.  Into every soul, just so far and just so fast as it is possible for that soul to receive it, God beats His life and gives His help.  That is what makes a man hopeful of all his fellow-men as he looks around upon them and sees them in all the conditions of their life.

And this could only be if that were true, if that is true, which we are dwelling upon constantly, the absolute naturalness of the Christian life, that it is man’s true life, that it is no foreign region into which some man may be transported and where he lives an alien to all his own essential nature and to all the natural habitudes in which he is intending to exist.  There are two ideas of religion which always have abounded, and our great hope is, our great assurance for the future of the world is, that the true and pure idea of religion some day shall grow and take possession of the life of man.  One idea, held by very earnest people, embodied in very faithful and devoted lives, is the strangeness of religion to the life of man, as if some morning something dropped out of the sky that had had no place upon our earth before, as if there came the summons to man to be something entirely different from what the conditions of his nature prophesied and intended that he should be.  The other idea is that religion comet by the utterance of God from the heavens, but comes up out of the human life of man; that man is essentially and intrinsically religious; that he does not become something else than man when he becomes the servant of Jesus Christ, but then for the first time he becomes man; that religion is not something that is fastened upon the outside of his life, but is the awakening of the truth inside of his life; the Church is but the true fulfilment of human life and society; heaven is but the New Jerusalem that completes all the old Jerusalem and Londons and Bostons that have been here upon our earth.  Man, in the fulfilment of his nature by Jesus Christ, is man—­not to be