true life; I enter into a friendship with one who is worthy I should be his friend, and he is mine always.  What is the meaning of this sort of talk that we hear about a faith that they held once, but they have outgrown?  What is the reason of this expectation that seems to have spread itself abroad, of necessity that the boy who had a religion should lose his religion some time or other, and that by and by he should take up a man’s religion somewhere upon the other side of the gulf of infidelity and godlessness, through which he has passed in the mean while?  You expect your boy of ten years old to be religious with a child’s sweet, trusting faith; and you hope that your man of forty and fifty, beaten by the world, is to have found a God who can be his salvation.  But the years between?  What do you think of your young men of fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, and thirty years old?  To have outgrown the boy’s faith, and not to have come to the man’s faith?  That seems almost to be an awful fate and destiny which you expect for them.  But if our faith be this, then there shall be no need, no chance that a man shall outgrow it.  Know Christ with the first conceptions, imperfect and crude, of his boy’s life, and he shall go on knowing more and more of that Christ.  That friend, the Christ he knows at twenty-five, shall be different from the Christ he knew at ten, just exactly as the friend I know at fifty is different from the friend I knew at thirty, twenty years ago; and yet He is the same friend still, forever opening the richness of an ever richer life, filling it with new experiences, with new manifestations of Himself.  Let him drop something which seemed to him to be a part of the religion, but was only a temporary phase or condition of it, going forward with the soul all through the opening stages of life, and at last going forward with the soul into the life where it shall see as all along it has been seen, and know as it has been known.  The old legend was that the clothes of the Israelites, which the Bible said waxed not old upon them in the desert during those forty years, not merely waxed not old those forty years, but grew with their growth, so that the little Hebrew who crossed the Red Sea in his boy’s clothes wore the same clothes when he entered into the Promised Land.  It is the parable of that which comes to the man who has a true Christian faith, a faith which comes in the personal friendship of Christ, a faith which comes not in the belief of certain things about Him, not in the doing slavishly of certain things which it seemed as if it had been said by Him that we must do, but in the personal entrance into His nature in a life for Him, in which He is able to send His life down into us.