The difference between the present and future state of the man who lives after the flesh and that of the man who lives after the spirit is very sharply marked in many places in Paul’s writings, in words that cannot be easily misunderstood.  He uses such language as this:  “For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die:  but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds [lusts] of the body, ye shall live.”  “To be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.”  “He that soweth to his flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit, shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.”  “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God,”—­which is the new birth,—­“is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

All these quotations are in perfect accord with our Lord’s closing words to the Sermon on the Mount:  “Every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:  ... and it fell:  and great was the fall of it.”

I do not think it is very hard for any one to tell the kind of birth he is of.  As an individual can tell by looking in a glass, if in no other way, whether he is black or white, so the professor of religion, by turning to the Gospel Mirror, can see what kind of a birth he is of.

I sometimes feel sorry when I think that a child has no control over its own natural birth.  If it is born black and into slavery, poor little thing, there it has to remain for life, and bear and suffer all the evils incident to its color and condition.  If one is born with natural deformities which baffle all surgical skill; or with blindness or deafness past all remedy; we can but pity and weep.  True, our sympathies are aroused, and but for such objects probably the very purest and noblest springs in our nature would remain forever sealed with ice.

But, thanks to our God, no such unalterable conditions ever attend man’s spiritual birth.  He himself is a party to the covenant under which every spiritual birth is effected from conception to parturition.  God is one party; and man, in whom the new spiritual birth is to be effected, is the other party.  This I speak in respect to the divine, heavenly birth.  Men are the parties on both sides in all the other births spoken of in the text.  God has nothing to do with them.

The Jews were nearly all born after these ways.  Most of them seem to have been “born of blood.”  “We have Abraham to our father.”  Some were born of the “will of the flesh,” for when the Lord told them the truth “they took up stones to stone him.”  These were included among those to whom he said:  “Ye are of your father the devil.”  The will of the flesh and the will of the devil in spiritual things is one and the same.  Some among them seem to have been “born of the will of man.”  There may have been a good many of this class.  When the Lord was teaching in Jerusalem many asked the question; “Have any of the rulers believed on him?” Such were the children of the rulers, born of their will.