Christianity as Christ taught is the truest philosophy of life ever spoken.  But let us be quite sure when we speak of Christianity that we mean Christ’s Christianity.  Other versions are either caricatures, or exaggerations, or misunderstandings, or shortsighted and surface readings.  For the most part their attainment is hopeless and the results wretched.  But I care not who the person is, or through what vale of tears he has passed, or is about to pass, there is a new life for him along this path.

III.  HOW FRUITS GROW.

Were Rest my subject, there are other things I should wish to say about it, and other kinds of Rest of which I should like to speak.  But that is not my subject.  My theme is that the Christian experiences are not the work of magic, but come under the law of Cause and Effect.  I have chosen Rest only as a single illustration of the working of that principle.  If there were time I might next run over all the Christian experiences in turn, and show the same wide law applies to each; but I think it may serve the better purpose if I leave this further exercise to yourselves.  I know no Bible study that you will find more full of fruit, or which will take you nearer to the ways of God, or make the Christian life itself more solid or more sure.  I shall add only a single other illustration of what I mean, before I close.

Where does Joy come from?  I knew a Sunday scholar whose conception of Joy was that it was a thing made in lumps and kept somewhere in Heaven, and that when people prayed for it, pieces were somehow let down and fitted into their souls.  I am not sure that views as gross and material are not often held by people who ought to be wiser.  In reality, Joy is as much a matter of Cause and Effect as pain.  No one can get Joy by merely asking for it.  It is one of the ripest fruits of the Christian life, and, like all fruits, must be grown.  There is a very clever trick in India called the mango trick.  A seed is put in the ground and covered up, and after diverse incantations a full-blown mango-bush appears within five minutes.  I never met any one who knew how the thing was done, but I never met any one who believed it to be anything else than a conjuring trick.  The world is pretty unanimous now in its belief in the orderliness of Nature.  Men may not know how fruits grow, but they do know that they cannot grow in an hour.  Some lives have not even a stalk on which fruits could hang, even if they did grow in an hour.  Some have never planted one sound seed of Joy in all their lives; and others who may have planted a germ or two have lived so little in sunshine that they never could come to maturity.

Whence, then, is joy?  Christ put His teaching upon this subject into one of the most exquisite of His parables.  I should in any instance have appealed to His teaching here, as in the case of Rest, for I do not wish you to think I am speaking words of my own.  But it so happens that He has dealt with it in words of unusual fullness.