say, “Lo, how he lives!  What new life has come into him?” It is that insistence upon the great essentialness of the religious life, it is the insistence that religion is not a lot of things that a man does, but is a new life that a man lives, uttering itself in new actions because it is the new life.  “Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”  So Jesus said to Nicodemus the ruler, Nicodemus the amateur in religions, who came and said, “Perhaps this teacher has something else that I can bind into my catalogue of truths and hold it.”  Jesus looked him in the face and said:  “It is not that, my friend, it is not that; it is to be a new man, it is to be born again.  It is to have the new life, which is the old life, which is the eternal life.  So alone does man enter into the kingdom of God.”  I cannot help believing all the time that if our young men knew this, religion would lift itself up and have a dignity and greatness—­not a thing for weak souls, but a thing for the manliest soul.  Just because of its manliness it is easy.  “Is it easy or is it hard, this religion of yours?” people say to us.  I am sure I do not know the easy and the hard things.  I cannot tell the difference.  What is easier than for a man to breathe?  And yet, have you never seen a breathless man, a man in whom the breathing was almost stopped, a drowning man, an exhausted man? have you never seen, when the breath was put once more to his nostrils and brought down once more into his empty lungs, the struggle with which he came back to it?  It was the hardest thing for him to do, so much harder for him to live than it was for him to die.  But by and by see him on his feet, going about his work, helping his fellow-men, living his life, rejoicing in his days, guarding against his dangers, full of life.  Is life a hard thing for him?  You don’t talk about its being hard or easy any more than you talk about life itself.  The man who lives in God knows no life except the life of God.  Let men know that it is not mere trifling, it is not a thing to be dallied with for an instant, it is not a thing for a man to convince himself by an argument, and then keep as it were locked in a shelf:  it is something that is so deep and serious, so deep and serious that when a man has once tested it there is no more chance of his going out of it than there is of his going out of the friendship and the love which holds him with its perpetual expression, with the continued deeper and deeper manifestation of the way in which the living being belongs to him who has a right to his life.

Now in the few moments that remain I want to take it for granted most seriously, most earnestly, that the men who are listening to me are in earnest, and I want to try to tell them as a brother might tell a brother, as I might tell to you or try to tell to you if sitting before my fireside, I want to try to answer the question which I know is upon your hearts.  “What shall I do about this?” I know you