Religion must always be personal; each must respond for himself to his highest inspirations.  A child may confuse the divine voice with that of its parents, through whom the divine message comes; but a day arrives when he learns that God speaks directly to him, perhaps differently from the way in which his parents understand His voice, and he must listen for himself alone.  A Job may take at second-hand the conventional views of God current in his day, and through them have some touch with the Divine; but this will seem mere hearsay when the stress of life compels him to fight his way past the opinions of his most devout friends to a personal vision of God.  Religious experience is hardly worthy the name until one can say, “O God, Thou art my God.”  There is no sphere of life in which a man is so conscious of his isolation as in his dealings with his Highest.  The most serious decisions of his life—­his apprehension of Truth, his obedience to Right, his response to Love—­he must settle for himself.

  Space is but narrow—­east and west—­There
  is not room for two abreast.

“Each one of us shall give account of himself to God.”  In our consciousness of sin, in our penitence, in our faith, others may stimulate and inspire us, may point the way saying, “Behold the Lamb of God,” may go with us in a common confession of guilt and a common aspiration towards the Most High, but we are hardly conscious of their fellowship; it is the living God with whom we personally have to do.

  Points have we all of us within our souls
  Where all stand single.

The Gospel comes as a summons to men one by one.  Christ knocks at each man’s door, offering the most complete personal friendship with him.  Were there but a single child of God astray, the Good Shepherd would adventure His life for him, and there is joy in the presence of the angels over one sinner that repenteth.

The Evangel has always been good news to sinning people who wished to be different.  In Adam Bede Mrs. Poyser says of Mr. Craig, “It was a pity he couldna’ be hatched o’er again, and hatched different.”  The Gospel claims to be the power of God which can make the worst and lowest of men—­an Iago or a Caliban—­into sons of the Most High in the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.

This has seemed incredible to most outsiders.  Celsus in the Second Century, in his attack on Christianity, wrote, “It must be clear to everybody, I should think, that those who are sinners by nature and training, none could change, not even by punishment—­to say nothing of doing it by pity.”  Dickens’ Pecksniff “always said of what was very bad that it was very natural.”  But it has been the glory of the Gospel that it could speak in the past tense of some at least of the sins of its adherents:  “such were some of you.”  Individual regeneration will ever remain a large part of God’s work through His Church.  Unless we can raise the dead in sin to life in Christ, we have lost the quickening Spirit of God; so long as the world lieth in wickedness, every follower of Jesus must go with Him after men one by one, to seek and to save that which was lost.