say; “Is this all in the clouds?  Is there anything I can do in the right way?” If you are in earnest, I shall try to tell you what I should do, if I were in your place, that I might enter into that life and be the free man that we have tried to describe, of whom we believe certain special and definite things.  What are they?  In the first place I would put away my sin.  There is not a man listening to me now who has not some trick of life, some habit that has possession of him, which he knows is a wrong thing.  The very first thing for a man to do is absolutely to set himself against them.  If you are foul, stop being licentious, at least stop doing licentious things.  If you, in any part of your business, are tricky, and unsound, and unjust, cut that off, no matter what it costs you.  There is something clear and definite enough for every man.  It is as clear for every man as the sunlight that smites him in his eyes.  Stop doing the bad thing which you are doing.  It is drawing the bolt away to let whatever mercy may come in come in.  Stop doing your sin.  You can do that if you will.  Stop doing your sin, no matter how mechanical it seems, and then take up your duty, whatever you can do to make the world more bright and good.  Do whatever you can to help every struggling soul, to add new strength to any staggering cause, the poor sick man that is by you, the poor wronged man whom you with your influence might vindicate, the poor boy in your shop that you may set with new hope upon the road of life that is beginning already to look dark to him.  I cannot tell you what it is.  But you know your duty.  No man ever looked for it and did not find it.

And then the third thing—­pray.  Yes, go to the God whom you but dimly see and pray to Him in the darkness, where He seems to sit.  Ask Him, as if He were, that He will give you that which, if He is, must come from Him, can come from Him alone.  Pray anxiously.  Pray passionately, in the simplest of all words, with the simplest of all thoughts.  Pray, the manliest thing that a man can do, the fastening of his life to the eternal, the drinking of his thirsty soul out of the great fountain of life.  And pray distinctly.  Pray upon your knees.  One grows tired sometimes of the free thought, which is yet perfectly true, that a man can pray anywhere and anyhow.  But men have found it good to make the whole system pray.  Kneel down, and the very bending of these obstinate and unused knees of yours will make the soul kneel down in the humility in which it can be exalted in the sight of God.

And then read your Bible.  How cold that sounds!  What, read a book to save my soul?  Read an old story that my life in these new days shall be regenerated and saved?  Yes, do just that, for out of that book, if you read it truly, shall come the divine and human person.  If you can read it with your soul as well as with your eyes, there shall come the Christ there walking in Palestine.  You shall see Him so much greater than the Palestine in which he walks, that at one word of prayer, as you bend over the illuminated page, there shall lift up that body-being of the Christ, and come down through the centuries and be your helper at your side.  So read your Bible.