something else, our whole humanity is too dear to us.  I will cling to this humanity of man, for I do love it, and I will know nothing else.  But when man is bidden to look back into his humanity and see what it means to be a man, that humanity means purity, truthfulness, earnestness, and faithfulness to that God of which humanity is a part, that God which manifested that humanity was a part of it, when the incarnation showed how close the divine and human belonged together—­when man hears that voice, I do not know how he can resist, why he shall not lift himself up and say, “Now I can be a man, and I can be man only as I share in and give my obedience to and enter into communion with the life of God,” and say to Christ, to Christ the revealer of all this, “Here I am, fulfil my manhood.”

And do not you see how immediately this sweeps aside, as one gush of the sunlight sweeps aside the darkness, do not you see how it sweeps aside all the foolish and little things that people are saying?  I say to my friend, “Be a Christian.”  That means to be a full man.  And he says to me, “I have not time to be a Christian.  I have not room.  If my life was not so full.  You don’t know how hard I work from morning to night.  What time is there for me to be a Christian?  What time is there, what room is there for Christianity in such a life as mine?” But does not it come to seem to us so strange, so absurd, if it was not so melancholy, that man should say such a thing as that?  It is as if the engine had said it had no room for the steam.  It is as if the tree had said it had no room for the sap.  It is as if the ocean had said it had no room for the tide.  It is as if the man said that he had no room for his soul.  It is as if life said that it had no time to live, when it is life.  It is not something that is added to life.  It is life.  A man is not living without it.  And for a man to say that “I am so full in life that I have no room for life,” you see immediately to what absurdity it reduces itself.  And how a man knows what he is called upon by God’s voice, speaking to him every hour, speaking to him every moment, speaking to him out of everything, that which the man is called upon to do because it is the man’s only life!  Therefore time, room, that is what time, that is what room is for—­life.  Life is the thing we seek, and man finds it in the fulfilment of his life by Jesus Christ.

Now, until we understand this and take it in its richness, all religion seems, becomes to us such a little thing that it is not religion at all.  You have got to know that religion, the service of Christ, is not something to be taken in in addition to your life; it is your life.  It is not a ribbon that you shall tie in your hat, and go down the street declaring yourself that you have accepted something in addition to the life which your fellow-men are living.  It is something which, taken into your heart, shall glow in every action so that your fellow-men shall