It is always best to keep ourselves under Christian influences.  It is not possible, if you mingle in associations that are positively Christian, not to be made better men or women.  The Christian people with whom you associate may not be always talking their religion, but there is something in the moral atmosphere that will be life to your soul.  You choose out for your most intimate associates eight or ten Christian people.  You mingle in that association; you take their counsel; you are guided by their example, and you live a useful life, and die a happy death, and go to a blessed eternity.  There is no possibility of mistaking it; there is not an exception in all the universe or ages—­not one.

For this reason I wish that Christians engage in more religious conversation.  I do not really think that Christian talk is of so high a type as it used to be.  Some of you can look back to your very early days and remember how the neighbors used to come in and talk by the hour about Christ and heaven and their hopes of the eternal world.  There has a great deal of that gone out of fashion.

I suppose that if ten or fifteen of us should happen to come into a circle to spend the evening, we would talk about the late presidential election, or the recent flurry in Wall street, and about five hundred other things, and perhaps we would not talk any about Jesus Christ and our hopes of heaven.  That is not Christianity; that is heathenism.  Indeed, I have sometimes been amazed to find Christian people actually lacking in subjects of conversation, while the two persons knew each of the other that he was a Christian.

You take two Christian people of this modern day and place them in the same room (I suppose the two men may have no worldly subjects in common).  What are they talking about?  There being no worldly subject common to them, they are in great stress for a subject, and after a long pause Mr. A remarks:  “It is a pleasant evening.”

Again there is a long pause.  These two men, both redeemed by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, heaven above them, hell beneath them, eternity before them, the glorious history of the Church of Jesus Christ behind them, certainly after a while they will converse on the subject of religion.  A few minutes have passed and Mr. B remarks:  “Fine autumn we are having.”

Again there is a profound quiet.  Now, you suppose that their religious feelings have really been dammed back for a little while; the men have been postponing the things of God and eternity that they may approach the subject with more deliberation, and you wonder what useful thing Mr. B will say to Mr. A in conversation.

It is the third time, and perhaps it is the last that these two Christian men will ever meet until they come face to face before the throne of God.  They know it.  The third attempt is now made.  Mr. A says to Mr. B:  “Feels like snow!”

My opinion is, it must have felt more like ice.  Oh, how little real, practical religious conversation there is in this day!  I would to God that we might get back to the old-time Christianity, when men and women came into associations, and felt, “Here I must use all the influence I can for Christ upon that soul, and get all the good I can.  This may be the last opportunity I shall have in this world of interviewing that immortal spirit.”