Something more is needed than light.  We need more light and knowledge of our duty; we need vastly more the will-power to do it.  I know how I ought to live; I do not live thus.  What I need is not a teacher, but power to become a son of God.  “I delight in the law of God after the inward man:  but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.  O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out of the body of this death?”

This is the terrible question.  How is it to be answered?  Let us remember our illustration of the change wrought in that panic-stricken army before Winchester by the appearance of Sheridan.  What these men needed was not information.  No plan of battle reported as sure of success by trustworthy and competent witnesses, and forwarded from the greatest leader could have stayed that rout.  What they needed was Sheridan and the magnetic power of his personality.  This is the strange power of all great leaders of men, whether orators, statesmen, or generals.  It is intellect acting on and through intellect, but it is also vastly more; it is will acting on will.  The leader does not merely instruct others, he inspires them, puts himself into them, and makes them heroes like himself.

Now something like this, but vastly grander and deeper, seems to me to have been the work of our Lord.  Read John’s gospel and see how it is interpenetrated with the idea of the new life to be gained by contact with our Lord, and how this forms the foundation of his hope and claim to give men this new life by drawing them to himself.  And Peter says that it was impossible for the Prince of Life to be holden of death, for he was the centre and source from which not only new thoughts and purposes, but new will and life was to stream out into the souls of men.  This power of our Lord may have been miraculous and supernatural in degree; I feel assured that it was not unnatural in kind and mode of action.

And here, young men, pardon a personal word about your preaching.  You will need to preach many sermons of warning against, and denunciation of, sin; many of instruction in duty.  The Bible is a store-house of instruction and men need it, and you must make it clear to them.  All this is good and necessary, but it is not enough.  Learn from the experience of the greatest preacher, perhaps, who ever lived.

Paul, the greatest philosopher of ancient times, came to Athens.  You can well imagine how he had waited and longed for the opportunity to speak in this home of philosophy and intellectual life.  Now he was to speak, not to uncultured barbarians, but to men who could understand and appreciate his best thoughts.  He preached in Athens the grandest sermon, as far as argument is concerned, ever uttered.  I doubt if ever a sermon of Paul’s accomplished less.  He could not even rouse a healthy opposition.  The idea of a new god, Jesus, and a new goddess, the Resurrection, rather tickled the Athenian fancy.  He left them, and, in deep dejection, went down to Corinth.  There he determined to know only “Christ and him crucified,” and thus preaching in material, vicious Corinth he founded a church.